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The second thing is, the USN has deteriorated to the point where we now have just about as many total ships as the country had in 1915...

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Originally posted by enfieldspares:

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The second thing is, the USN has deteriorated to the point where we now have just about as many total ships as the country had in 1915...

But numbers aren't the whole truth.

My friend's son who is a Captain in our (British) Royal Artillery tells me that just one modern battery of the MLR can, apparently, lay down as much of a barrage as was fired by ALL the guns in the opening barrage at El Alamein in 1942.

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The advanced radar systems aboard cruisers and destroyers are in their worst shape ever, according to an independent probe into Navy readiness, raising questions about the surface fleet’s ability to take on its high-profile new mission next year defending Europe from ballistic missiles.

Poor training, impenetrable bureaucracy and cultural resignation have caused a spike in the number of technical problems and a dip in the operational performance of the Aegis system, considered the crown jewel of the U.S. surface force, according to members of a “fleet review panel” tasked with assessing the surface fleet. And if that’s the situation with Aegis — which includes warships’ iconic, hexagonal SPY-1 radar arrays — the panel wondered what that could mean for other, lower-profile equipment.

. . . But the report said Aegis, like the rest of the fleet, has become a victim of personnel cuts and the Navy’s labyrinthine internal organization. Casualty reports are up 41 percent from fiscal 2004, and those requiring technical assistance are up 45 percent. Over the same period, SPY radar performance, as observed by the Board of Inspection and Survey, has steadily worsened for cruisers and destroyers.

The report includes a sample of eight cruisers visited in the past several months by InSurv, whose scores on Aegis readiness form a distinct downward trend. The best performers were Cape St. George and Lake Erie, each of which got the maximum score of 1.0, which earns a rating of “satisfactory”; Cowpens and Chosin, with scores between 0.8 and 1.0, also earned “sat.” The worst were Monterey, Chancellorsville, San Jacinto and Normandy, all of which got grades that would have earned them ratings of “degraded” or “unsat.”