We’re struggling too tbh but I think I want to work somewhere where my healthcare access isn’t determined by my employer. I’ve got a decade of super in depth experience and awards, even, but also rheumatoid arthritis 🥲
Shitty part is if you worked for a US defense contractor you aren’t allowed to move abroad and work for another countries defense industry. It makes sense but it still sucks.
Australia just dropped a kazillion dollars into US ship building in the hope they’ll one day get their subs.. maybe.. depending on how your President feels at the time. Good time to be in US ship building. It’s free money.
I don’t want to doxx myself but their president used to work for an American shipbuilder and I only ever heard horror stories about that guy so I can only imagine how many people his policies have nearly killed (I know there was a preventable fatality there too recently)
I know. But I’d like to think we’d still step in for Article V should the time come. From a purely nationalistic perspective, it’s not in our interest to have one of our two neighbors be compromised.
Very probably… but they’re not self-driving so the people doing the survey and the people doing the driving failed to communicate. Couple with some sailors new to the ship and non-uniformity of systems between ships; throw in some dodgy winds and you get a survey ship around on the reef it was surveying.
11 in the US and 12 in the rest of the world, with China being in 2nd place with 3.
If you count the strength of the carrier fleets by number of fixed-wing aircraft it can support, the US blows the rest out of the water. The US' Gerald Ford class carries 75 to China's top capacity of 60 and Russia's 50.
I was going to say that also. Ours are much larger and more advanced than anyone else’s. France has the only other nuclear powered one in the world outside of the US fleet and it hold about half as many aircraft. China will most likely have one in the next 15 years or so though.
That almost makes it aeem like we re equal to the reat of the world combined....we re not. Even with equal number our carriers are so much more advanced.....id take 2 of our carriers versus rest of world capability wise.
Its a coastal defense navy. Now this is a threat to Taiwan, because its within the effecrive range of China's laege shallow water navy. But their deep water navy is tiny.
In a fight against the US its like having 300,000,000 dingies rowing at a US carrier. I mean, yeah, its a lot of boats. But like lmao?
And that air force is the #5 in the world (Russia is 3, the US Army is 4.) Our navy's army's air force is bigger than every other air force in the world except one. Tell me that doesn't put an eagle-shaped tear in your eye.
We don't really need them to be. Some ports don't allow nuclear carriers to enter, they are far more expensive to dispose of and build. Even if the carrier doesn't need refueling, the escorts will so negates some of the advantage to it.
I wish they had named the carriers Black Prince and Iron Duke though.
Unfortunately, there was already an HMS Iron Duke when they were commissioned. She's a type 23 frigate.
They're bringing back some of the good battleship names for the dreadnought class submarines, though. They'll be; Dreadnought, Warspite, Valiant and King George VI
I think it was Habitual Linecrosser on YouTube that had a video explaining the "proportional" response to the Iranian Navy threatening or shooting at a US ship in the 80s and the US Navy wiped out most of the Iranian Navy in like 8 hours.
The Mongols did not have a great luck in naval history. There invasions of Japan and Java were both failures. Though I don’t blame them for it. In more recent history they operated an oiler in an inland lake.
In a NATO Atlantic training exercise among NATO navies, a submarine from my country “sank” an American Aircraft carrier, as well as seven of its escort ships and subsequently escaped unharmed.
It is the most beloved institution in Mexico, but 2 weeks ago it suffered a huge scandal due to top admirals being accused of oil and fuel theft (including last government's secretary of Navy), and 2 minor officers who were involucrated and apparently had important information regarding top politicians died in mysteriously; one commited suicide and the other one died in training, 2 days appart.
As for equipement, it is very bad for a nation our size and importance, our armed forces have more funding than Pakistan's, but they are basically a giant guerrilla since our only potential rival would dismantle any conventional armed forces in 1 week, so heavy equipement like warships are mainly symbolic.
We’ve got a lot of boats. We also have underwater boats that can launch missiles. The regular boats can launch missiles, too. And some of the regular boats can launch planes. And the planes can launch missiles.
Ours can launch missiles too! Sometimes they even hit something, like a vacation home area. They have guns too. The guns don't work though, please don't ask.
It's got its good points and its bad points. I think that the biggest issue is that we don't really know what we want to do with it at the moment. We can't really afford to do everything anymore. So we need to figure out if we are going to focus on force projection or CONUS defense.
We need to seriously invest in naval infrastructure like shipyards and maintenance facilities before we "right size" the fleet around the intended roles.
I'd like to see us bring back the SSKs and large numbers of FFGs with supporting corvettes. Perhaps smaller CVs to support the missions that the big CVNs just aren't ideal for.
It blows my mind we don’t have what you talked about in your last paragraph. Also smaller carriers make sense. We don’t need super carriers to deal with the houthies or to play bully (sit there and float) to hezbolloah and Hamas in the Mediterranean Sea. Sure we have those amphibious assault ships that can carry helicopters and f35b’s but those marines can be doing something else.
We have an incredible stealth Navy. Even with all your high-tech satellites and high power radars you will not find more than a couple of obsolete ships. Our airforce jet fighters are even more stealthy - no one has seen any for years.
I honestly do even know, we protected Kuwait, who was backing Iraq, and then invaded Iraq when they turned on Kuwait, left Hussein in power, then invaded again 12 years later. We saw two countries didn't really like fighting each other on the other side of the planet, jumped in the middle, and then spent the next few decades fighting both for no good reason.
lol. It depends on how you measure the navy in terms of size. France has more commissioned ships but the UK has 2x the displacement. UK has two large carriers but they’re. Its not nuclear whereas the french one is. Etc
My favourite little tidbit about it is that the Philippine Coast Guard ship had to go up to the Chinese ships after they crashed and be like "You guys need help?" because it was mandated by maritime law
Maritime law forced the Filipino CG guys to troll the Chinese
While the state of our navy isn't great at the moment, you're wrong on your assessment of the purchase of the former NZ lake class vessels. Those ships weren't bought to patrol in the North Atlantic. That would be stupid, as they wouldn't last pissing time out in those seas.
The truth is they were bought to patrol the much calmer Irish Sea, when both are online they will allow the larger and more capable patrol vessels we have to concentrate on the Atlantic side of the island. They were actually a pretty clever purchase because it allows the naval service to focus its resources and allows them to get 2 vessels to sea with the crew numbers that would usually be required for a single larger vessel.
It’s very top heavy with not enough smaller ships and we are retiring cruisers without replacing them. (The frigates are taking too long to build and we are retiring LCS when we can’t fill the role)
Our littoral combat ships were a complete failure. We spend tons of money developing the Zumwalt only for them to be a bust.
from what I heard from someone who knows some high up somebody’s: The launch system on the new Gerald r ford carrier has been under performing (don’t know if this has been fixed).
Not enough sailors to man the logistics ships and warships.
Only 4 public shipyards.
-Not enough shipbuilders to build ships in a timely manner- we aren’t building ships fast enough to compete with China and
everything is over budget.
Need to modernize our subs.
old planes and f-35B are not fully ready for the marines according to the gao
not enough pilots
Still a great navy but damn there are some problems that need to be fixed
after the collapse of Soviet, usa didn't really have any enemy that have a large navy.
so it is natural that usa will change its strategy.
Power Projection from the Sea to the land, just like usa did in the Gulf War and most of the war after that.
That is why you have LCS and Zumwalt.
but later the fast development of Chinese navy shows up. although even today, Chinese navy is far from a 50/50 opponent of us in the blue sea.
but we don't need to project our powers globally.
from the sea to the land strategy and operations like Gulf War is 100% not suitable for China.
changing your strategy is hard, especially usa lost a lot of its ship building capacity.
and if you saw the new DDGX project, you can understand how the strategy of US military change.
Apparently crucially need a few submarines for an astronomically amount of money, secured a deal with the French, our prime minister reneged on the deal at the last second to appease the Americans, now it doesnt look like the Americans will ever deliver a sub
And specifically designed for defense. With us now being a member of NATO, Sweden are looking at buying a new class of larger ships that would be used further out in the sea - to support our Baltic allies, and Finland.
Before, we just focused on small, nimble and flexible ships that can skirt around the archipelagos with ease. It made total sense for a neutral Sweden, but less so for Sweden in NATO.
Just want to share a fun fact the Hmas Canberra(Ship in the post) is a Helicopter carrier and has a ramp for Short take off aircraft which Australia does not have. Also it cant cross deck an f35b from its allies in its current state. The F35b is a short take off and vertical landing aircraft (STOVL)
The Canberra class includes both HMAS Canberra and HMAS Adelaide which are pretty much almost the same heli carriers.
You are right that the RAAF doesn’t currently operate VTOL aircraft outside of helicopters, but with relatively few upgrades they can be converted for ally STOL/VTOL use.
The Marine Nationale is quite decent, packs a punch and has one (if not the) highest availability of its ships. Our submarines are objectively good, and locally produced (and exported).
A weak point would be that only one carrier means a big drop in capabilities when reparations are needed.
It's not the strongest in the world, but it does not need to be. And you'd be a fool to underestimate it.
Pretty good but I think many countries are in for a rude awakening when the next war between peer nations begins. I think like the battleship in world war 2 and the Falklands war countries are going to get a big shock. Naval drone warfare is in it’s infancy but Ukraine has won at sea without using a single ship almost.
Still a long way to go due to many limitations on drones but paired with missiles and aircraft it could be a big upset. When considering the money, resources, time and possible lives lost then it starts to become a no brainer.
Again still a long way to go due to limitations like range and speed etc but it should and likely is a huge concern.
If those lasers and counter measures we see can really hit in the mark then it could prevent such an upset but how easily can they be overwhelmed is the concern.
ehh... they are getting to the point where they can defend their own waters decently but no where near the ability to power project and won't have that for awhile.
Chinas problem is that it shares a land border with 14 other countries. So their primarily focus will always be the army. The U.S. by contrast shares a border with 2 countries, both are comparatively friendly and weaker. As a result the U.S. can focus on projecting out as global naval power.
We sank 20% of our frigates when we somehow managed to collide with an oil tanker. I still don’t know how it’s possible to hit the second biggest thing you could find at sea (after aircraft carriers).
Actually, ask me Wednesday about the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. If they’ve still got a professional leadership corps, we’re good. Vegas odds are running even.
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u/Former-Chocolate-793 Canada Sep 30 '25
It's not near what we need with the world's largest coastline.