Source: Defense News
By David B. Larter
With Russia’s reemergence as a menace in Europe, the U.S. Army has been laying the foundations to fight once again on the continent it defended through most of the 20th century. But if war were to break out tomorrow, the U.S. military could be hard-pressed to move the number of tanks, heavy guns and equipment needed to face off with Russian forces.
And even if the Army could get there in numbers, then the real problems would start: how would the U.S. sustain them?
The U.S. sealift capacity — the ships that would ultimately be used to transport Army equipment from the states to Europe or Asia — is orders of magnitude smaller than it was during World War II. Combine that with the fact that the commercial shipbuilding industry in the U.S. is all but gone, and the U.S. can’t launch the kind of massive buildup of logistics ships it undertook during wartime decades ago.
Among the ships the country has for sealift and logistics forces, the Government Accountability Office has found a steady increase in mission-limiting equipment failures, which raises questions about how many might actually be available if the balloon goes up.
Read more at: https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2018/10/08/the-army-is-preparing-to-fight-in-europe-but-can-it-even-get-there/?utm_campaign=Socialflow+DFN&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com