Category: US Navy

Conflict in Asia…

Tyler Cowen has a blog post about non-negligible chances for a major conflict in Asia as a result of China’s new geopolitical power here. Graham Allison has a similar take in his op ed piece from today’s FT, behind their firewall.

The really big questions are:

Is this risk being priced adequately into markets? Cowen thinks no.

Is such a conflict inevitable as the geopolitical power balance changes? Allison thinks no.

Influenced by these concerns are questions about what the future US Navy will look like. There seem to be two camps. One, the Area-Denialists, see the Super-carrier going the way of the battleship, as new Chinese anti-ship ballistic missile capabilities come on line. The other, let’s call them the Mahanists, see maintaining and modernizing the carrier fleet (11 of them!) as critical to maintaining world trade stability.

The new Ford class super-carriers cost $9B a piece.

DOD budget, the macro picture: steep descent

Thomas Ricks at Foreign Policy here. Hat tip Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Beast blog.

This is important for several reasons:

1) My guess is that in any prioritization, support for basic research (what’s termed 6-1 in DOD parlance) will be cut the earliest and the most…

2) With the US still involved in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s easy to imagine that the USN carrier groups would be cut back, which has enormous implications for the protection of global trade (there is no comparable blue water navy).

3) I can’t see how the US would be willing to project boots on the ground, under pretty much any scenario short of complete mobilization. That will be part of the geopolitical calculus of every other nation and non-state actor around the globe.