When did they do away with the Sixth Fleet having a Carrier Air group always in the Mediterranean? We use to rotate with the Forestall, the Kittyhawk and Kennedy, spending six months there at a time. And this rotation was going on for years before I joined the Navy. We were capable of handling any threat that popped up - like Libya, Lebanon, and this was still during the Cold War with the Soviets.
Now we have to move ships from other parts of the World to respond.
This guy is utterly clueless and got dragged into this by the Europeans. Daffy has been an ally of his mentor Wright and odds are put money into electing the little dweeb. He beat around the Bush until the French (for God’s sade) stepped up and took action. They still haven’t decided exactly what they want from all this.
Rush has been on fire with this folly. Hilarious, brutally truthful and right on target his damn gold and even the NFL have been totally on the back burner.
BTW my elder boy left the Navy a year ago. He was a nuke on the USS Ohio.
When did they do away with the Sixth Fleet having a Carrier Air group always in the Mediterranean? We use to rotate with the Forestall, the Kittyhawk and Kennedy, spending six months there at a time. And this rotation was going on for years before I joined the Navy. We were capable of handling any threat that popped up - like Libya, Lebanon, and this was still during the Cold War with the Soviets.
We don't have enough decks to support that kind of rotation cycle anymore.
Navy tries to operate on a 3-1 deployment ratio: three carriers needed to keep one deployed. There's the deployed deck, the deck that's prepping for/transiting to deployment and then the deck that's returning/standing down from deployment.
From the 1970s until recently the US had at least 12 decks, meaning that it could support 4 concurrent deployment (for the brief time that we had 5 decks in the early 1990s we could support 5.
The US now has 10 decks (plus an 11th that's in RCOH - nuclear refueling). Additionally, the USN no longer has a dedicated training deck (Forrestal was the last designated one, for the time Kennedy was designated as a "reserve" carrier she filled the role, although she deployed as well) - so hauling out aviator candidates to become carrier qualified is built into schedules.
That's three decks deployed, unless there's a surge. You can see where the carriers are (slightly delayed) at Global Security
here. From the looks of it, we have a LOT of decks out now. Lincon, Vinson and Enterprise are doing their deployments. Reagan was on her way out to relieve Lincoln but is now caught up in the Japan disaster relief. GW just deployed too (not mentioned on GlobalSecurity), also for disaster relief. But since she's homeported in Japan she doesn't have far to go.