People have posted about the supply chain stuff but there is another part to this.
Life on an AC is so fucking brutal…
It is 12-16 hours on and 8 hours off-ish… Your hours of off-ish is being stuck in a room with dozens of other sailors. Your space is a bunk about the size of a coffin and three drawers. So the off is just another state of brutality.
The 12-16 hours on is constant work of moving heavy things from here to there, the whole time there is an airport over your head or doing that on the flight line.
Your clothes never really dry out.
Your skin is chaffed and hurts a lot.
The air always smells like some form of exhaust.
There is no privacy.
When you take a shit, at least three other people are aware of you taking a shit.
You see an AC is not meant to be deployed this long. The Navy knows this. The fucked up, abusive ass, class system based fucked up Navy knows you don’t have an AC out this long.
Who does the Navy have to answer to now?
So a lot of people are saying supply chain or logistics without really explaining well. So I’ll give it a try.
It is impossible to overstate how important supply lines are to fighting a war. Each branch of the military has a whole arm of their organization dedicated to getting supplies to where they are needed. In any given war this means setting up regular purchases of supplies, bases to aggregate those supplies, routes with bases for each leg of the journey of those supplies, and bases at the destination of those supplies. With dedicated protection for all those parts of the journey. Which still has to get from the in-theater supply hub to the front.
Ideally for a carrier group you would use massive supply ships in a daisy chain to maintain a continuous flow of supplies. The supply hub isnt supposed to be close enough to come under enemy fire, and helicopters are relatively short range and not suitable for this purpose.
So the problem is that iran has shown that with drones it can hit big slow ships in the gulf, and regionally can hit anywhere with balistic missiles and drones. So they damaged or destroyed most us regional bases, hitting the main supply hub.
What to do about that? Well they could set up another regional hub, but that would probably get hit too. They can use a base far enough away to not get hit, but that means relying on more big slow ships to maintain the steady flow, but they would need protection, except ts hard to say what protection can be given against suicide drones.
This is would be a huge headache or any career general with a lifetime of experience. What they have is a drunk tv personality who surrounds himself with sycophants, and who’s taking orders from a geriatric child with dementia.
Add to this the longevity of the deployment. Most world militaries are very timid at exerting their big expensive assets at full strength unless its an actual war because that wears them out really fast. America is the only country that does this regularly. In other words, the deployment time for a carrier group is pretty well set in stone with some wiggle room. They know how long they can keep it up at full activity.
It’s not even a matter of supplies, its a giant steel city floating on salt water firing jets into the sky shooting down potential threats when it cant evade them. This is a structure under stress that can’t be fixed with a few nuts and bolts. There are parts that can only be overhauled at a port that have probably run long overdue.
The personnel problem is oddly the smallest. They could rotate people easily on the supply ships, if the whole shitshow werent run by such huge assholes.
Well put.
Ballpark numbers: USS Abraham Lincoln has about 5,000 people on board. And it is part of a larger carrier strike group that totals maybe 7,500 personnel. You need a long, strong global supply chain to serve that many people for months on end as they travel halfway around the world. Iran has apparently broken the chain in some key places.
Mental health is a separate problem. The Abraham Lincoln’s planned 6-month deployment is now at almost 9 months and counting, with no publicly announced return date. Wikipedia says the ship has only stopped at port twice in that time. So the sailors on board have been stuck in close quarters, away from their homes or loved ones, getting shot at in a war zone, for 3 months longer than expected, and with only two brief breaks. It’s not hard to understand that they might be exhausted and strained. Multiple sailors have tried to jump overboard and at least one sailor actually did it without being stopped. That’s not a supply chain problem; it’s a top-down organizational fiasco.
With that username I have to ask if you are prior service Navy? And I agree with your assessment, it’s a leadership issue.
No military background here. But through family and friends I have had a lot of interactions with military folks, and I’m loosely interested in military stuff.
My username is due to living near water my whole life, and enjoying being in and around it. I love fishing, paddling, swimming, skipping stones from shore, watching osprey catch fish, all of it.
Honestly top 5 onomatopoeia
Like the old saying. Armchair generals talk strategy (and maybe testosterone levels). Real generals talk logistics (and maybe if their troops fuck).
Iran severely damaged all of the US military bases in the middle east, the Trump administration just can’t admit how bad it is.
This is it. Any “rescue” operation would give away that bases in the region-- or at least the base that’s supposed to supply the Lincoln-- are no longer capable of normal operations.
Now that it’s exposed, it’s all doubling down on pride, while sailors suffer needlessly and are mocked for it.
Helicopters are very limited on weight and range. They cost thousands (maybe tens of thousands if they’re military) per hour to operate. A carrier has thousands of sailors on it.
You just couldn’t carry enough stuff to them in a reasonable amount of time.
How many beans do you think they could fit in one of those bad boys?
There’s about 400 beans in a one-pound can, and a blackhawk has an internal cargo limit of 2600lbs. It could alternatively carry a 9,000lb load via sling.
That’s either 1,040,000 or 3.6M beans
Of course, some of that is going to be in packaging, and the average dried bean is about half the size of a ready-to-eat bean. I’m guessing you could make it between 4-10 million beans depending on how you want to optimize
…is there a ‘They did the Math’ around these parts?
We may never find out. The cost-to-bean ratio is far too high.
Hello mate it’s an aircraft carrier, they could use planes.
The place is also surrounded by ships, that’s kinda the whole point.
I suspect the reason is due to logistical regulations and internal control. You can’t just order things, it has to percolate through a massive bureaucracy.
Nearly a decade of everyone competent being systematically removed to facilitate the eventual coup will do that
Iran destroyed our supply chains. We can’t.
I don’t doubt you couldn’t. We could easily send resupply ships from abroad. I am continually amazed at how bad even smart people are at seeing through bullshit.
Thing about supply chains in war, they gotta be close by. We can’t be continually flying and air dropping supplies out there because the cost is too much. I am pretty sure there is also nowhere around to land and refuel your aircraft so you wouldn’t be making it back either.
We have ships, load them with supplies and sail them there.
Obviously you can’t resupply an aircraft carrier group with aircraft, it’s too dumb to respond to I would have thought. As is this argument that we can’t resupply by ships, of which we have plenty by the way, more than all the other nations of the world combined last I heard 25 years back as a matter of fact.
Okay but that takes time. So if you weren’t already doing that, starting immediately still means the Lincoln is sitting there unsupplied until your ships get there. If I recall, most of our bases there were there were landlocked before they became piles of ash.
It has been 6 months. We also have allies in Europe, and frenemies all over we could resupply from.
You are one of those people that gives the authorities the benefit of the doubt. Despite, you know, things.
I hope there are no allies in Europe willing to help the ones who started a pointless war that has fucked up global economy and killed lots of innocent people.
The allies in Europe want no part of Trump’s insanity, so we are not helping.
Sorry my friend, Donald got the US into this mess, he has to get you out. He keeps saying he’s a genius, so it shouldn’t be too hard.
There are plenty of countries that would help western europe isn’t the only game in town, and if it was we could send ships from US territory.
I am just speaking to the logistics not the morality here. I don’t want to say I’m rooting for Iran, but I am not rooting for Operation Epstein’s Fury here I can assure you.
We will not be exiting this conflict, it’s a forever war, despite ceasefires, Israel will reach across borders to kill every time they need a domestic political boost. Until the Epstein blackmail is exposed, and or the perpetrators removed from power, the Iran War is a forever war.
I’m not giving the authorities the benefit of the doubt. I am listening to the fucken sailors trying to throw themselves overboard.
?
Because the people we have in power are incomptent fascist fucking tools that are incapable of greatness.
Helicopters no, but they could send supply ships, we have a larger navy than every other navy in the world combined last I heard, (25 years ago or so, idk China has a lot more tonnage now,) so it’s not like we don’t have the capability to sail from wherever.
It’s a war zone. Logistics win wars because this is difficult.
The USN has literal fleets of underway replenishment ships. It’s a concept they pioneered and essentially perfected, and it’s been done for decades. Logistics is hard, but the pentagon used to be world-beatingly good at it. Turns out that when you have absolute fuckwits running the show, they can ruin the whole logistical pipeline pretty fucking quick, though.
Look at you giving the USG the benefit of he doubt. Logistics were handled in WWII, yet this much smaller conflict cannot be handled?
Get your heads out of the asses of the establishment, of both parties if you accept their excuses and projections of blame. We have all the wrong people in charge, it’s a lack of will and incentives, not a lack of capability that has led to this shit show.
Let’s just say this: if they really cared they could resupply Lincoln. Where there’s a will there’s a way.
Range, I’d guess. From what I’ve read, the base they’re using to resupply is more than 2,000 miles away. I don’t think helicopters fly that far without refueling.
I think that Iran (or at least one of ally) successfully strike the base that resupply the Lincoln. So yeah they could bring some helicopters but it takes time.