Does America really need projection power in this day and age?

Because the free food is during FAMINES. That means they can;t get there own food. The are emergency situations where they need food or hundreds of thousands would die.

Which doesn't mean people can't do anything else besides giving them food when there's a famine...

Anyway, since this is getting off-topic-y, I'm just adding that the US does seem to pick its wars according to its own interests; I don't think one could justify north american projection on purely moral grounds (or even in moral grounds at all). It also has a history of helping or disturbing latin american political systems whithout caring too much for how the civillians live... Which of course generates a lot of distrust. So not only US pseudo-imperialism costs a lot, it also usually starts a kind of distrust, usually even when they're trying to "help".

@ Joesolo

That's how the idea is sold to you so you accept the food dumping. In reality, that's not actually what is happening at all. Famines occur because the food production is unable to reach the people due to logistical issues. So the problem is getting people on the ground, plus vehicles, to buy up and transport local food to people. That's why money is more useful than raw food.

A lot of times, Americans spend so much time believing in the fallacy of free food, it actually ironically ends up being not free. A lot of American food "aid" is sold to people at prices that under-cut local farmers.

Tell that to the people who wold have no food due to it being washed away by floods other wise. Whos feeding you this garbage anyway? Do you live in Iran?

You're focusing on the short-term, again.

This is all off-topic, anyhow.

Yea, really.

Anyhow, force projection helps with Humanitarian missions. Carriers can bring tons of supplies in, and can carry helicopters that can deliver it with out needing a landing pad, or just using planes to para-drop the supplies. Foward bases can also be used for similar purposes, and supplies already nearby can be sent quickly.

Sounds like a waste of money to me. A lot of humanitarian missions are done without military, using carrier fleets and forward bases for such seems awfully wasteful way to do it.

Im just saying It's an additional use. The main point of them is military, but they can be used for humanitarian missions. And seeing as few organisations have ships capable of carry massive amounts of aid quickly, as well as delivering them, I'd think that even if there was never a thread of attack from anyone (Or Thing), we would still have a few aircraft carriers and hospital ships for these missions.

edited 11th Nov '11 10:51:34 AM by Joesolo

^ This. Ask yourself this, how many more thousands of lives would have died in the Haiti quake or the Sumatra tsunami had the US Navy not been in the region to help?

You might as well be throwing pebbles at an aircraft carrier for all the good throwing aircraft carriers against legitimate alien invaders would do.

We don't need eleven nuclear-powered supercarriers for humanitarian aid, either.

Yeah we do. We totally do.

Then raise taxes on the rich to pay for it and stop trying to shaft the middle class and poor for your neoconservative nonsense.

Can't have your cake and eat it too. The next war we wage will not be by the rich and at the expense of the poor. It's getting fucking old.

@ Tom

How many more would have died? I'm not sure because everybody deployed frigates to help, not carriers. US used carriers instead because that's what you have. Solving problems with a hammer because that's all you have. It can be shown that frigates are much more cost-effective in aid work.

@ Joesolo

As for China's nuclear arsenal, what I was showing is what the USA can do to maintain nuclear deterrence. You don't need 8000 nukes. You can just have enough to level Russia and then be done. Nobody is feeding me any garbage and I don't live in Iran. I don't know where you get your concepts from like "tell that to people who have no food", except China is now a net contributor to the world food programme, they've ended starvation a decade ago. But no, that can't possibly happen in commie-land. No everyone must be starving, have a jackboot in their face, the sky is always grey, they go to sleep listening to only propaganda and instead of going to school, do military drills. Honestly, what picture of China do YOU have? When natural disasters happen there, they deploy their whole military help within the hour and even send in paratroopers to regions where the roads have been blocked. What did the State/Federal government do when Hurricane Katrina hit?

edited 11th Nov '11 11:04:26 AM by breadloaf

FEMA = Find Every Mexican Available.

Those carriers can run search and rescue flight ops 24 hours a day with multiple helicopters and search aircraft. A frigate carries what 1 chopper if it's lucky?

Remember the USS John C Stennis was in Haiti not 24 hours after the quake and was running thousands of search and rescue and medevac ops. Had they not been there, a lot more people would have died.

Frigates are only an efficient mode of rescue ops after a major disaster like that if you can magically teleport 30 of them with their choppers anywhere on a moment's notice.

If we're talking about it in terms of efficiency of humanitarian aid, flat-deck landing ships and escort/fleet carriers would be more useful and less costly for such a purpose than supercarriers, and if anything would be better militarily by removing the extreme consolidation of American naval forces that supercarrier strategic theory has caused...

@ Tom

Well search helicopters are good, but more important is equipment and aid goods. Haiti is suffering from lack of supplies not lack of search teams. Most people have to be found by hand anyway and not by helicopter.

Right now they are getting hurt by cholera outbreaks, which means shipping lots of clean drinking water and medicine into the region.

Projection power sorta helps but having aid-frigates on stand-by at the expected rate of disasters is more cost-effective, allowing the US to spend more money on things that are more useful. For instance, instead of maintaining a bunch of fighterjets on the carriers, which is what they normally have, you have a bunch of lower-cost frigates and you could have simply built Haiti a functional water treatment plant, staff it permanently and then there would have been no cholera outbreak, thus saving thousands of lives.

edited 11th Nov '11 11:20:56 AM by breadloaf

Is idiotic planning and you know it. Never plan for the "expected rate".

Seriously, there is no way you can prove a carrier is not useful or that small ships are moreso. A carrier at sea is on call 24/7 able to respond anywhere in its vicinity. Frigates are usually port-bound since they are usually diesel powered meaning very limited fuel. A group of frigates cannot stay on station at sea for months at a time. A carrier can.

Worse, those frigates won't have the right facilities to do the job a carrier can for humanitarian missions. Carriers are big and able to hold a lot of people for medevac reasons both with its onboard medical facilities and room to shelter folks. Frigates are space intensive and all free space is at a premium per ship.

In extremely local conditions (e.g. an act of God earthquake hits New York City) a group of frigates might be more cost effective in the short run. But in the long run nothing can beat the big ships and their force projection capabilities in cost.

So use fleet and escort carriers.

We do not need 11 nuclear-powered supercarriers for humanitarian missions, unless you can come up with a way to pay for them that isn't "cut medical benefits/welfare for everyone in the US and tax the middle class and poor out the nose while the rich hide all their money in tax shelters from a rate that's tiny as it is."

Really? Because Canadian frigates are aiding countries within a day or a few days whenever disaster strikes around the world.

And what problem do you have with the expected rate? That's how we calculate insurance rates, unless you think insurance companies are incapable of averaging out disaster costs. You have an actuarial scientist calculate what the expected rate of disaster is in each region of the world and look at your financial capacity and then make a choice of how much you want to do.

It's a poor metric when gauging probabilities of certain events like earthquakes. Take the Tohoku quake this past spring, the expected rate of such events is 100-700 years depending on region. Due to insufficient/inaccurate historical/geological records in most seismically active areas we can't use that as a metric for planning earthquake responses. What might be appropriate for a 7.0 quake won't be for an 8.0 or a 9.0.

It Gets Worse when you realize a lot of such events are completely unpredictable in interval. That 100-700 years for Tohoku? That's an educated average and a rather poor one at that. Some regions have been noted on that interval scale for being due or overdue for such an event. Among them, Cascadia/US Pacific Northwest, Mexican Riviera, Eastern Caribbean, Northern Andes, and several regions of the South and Western Pacific Ocean. Any one of them could go off tomorrow and the "expected rate" won't help a damn thing if one or more of them goes off in short interval from another. (Which can happen, 1963 and 1964 had a very abnormally high rate of megaquakes like Tohoku.)

Okay fine, but that's rather tangential to the whole thing, it's not like 11 supercarrier fleets does anything for that. If you wanted to constantly be able to handle such large disasters, then you have to pay the taxes for it and having a larger frigate to carrier ratio is still superior in cost-effectiveness.

Still not really. That carrier can make up for many frigates. (It gets better to note that carriers rarely operate alone, so frigates are usually with them anyways.)

The 11 carriers is useful for that because it provides for flexibility to do that. We don't station all 11 in the Atlantic or Pacific. At best we'll have 4 or 5 of them at sea and the rest doing rotations elsewhere or in port. Because of that, they are spread out and able to respond to local conditions and events provided it's not a military threat greater than a carrier battlegroup. We can also do a lot of Gunboat Diplomacy with those carriers to ensure fewer wars happen.

And why would those hypothetical wars be our business or our problem?

Once again, how will you pay for these carrier fleets?

Yes exactly, the entire point of this discussion is the fact that America is bleeding money like crazy, so you if you want your 11 super carriers, pay a higher tax rate, otherwise stop suggesting it.