Word salad ninjas strike your covert operation
Good news, simple freedom loving folks of the US of A. Fox News has confirmed that the Navy is building a “mothership for Special Operations Forces in the Middle East”.
In case anybody wants to know any indepth information Fox News has this to say:
A market survey posted by the Military Sealift Command in December asked that ship be able to support mine counter measures.
Sea mines are a concern in the Strait of Hormuz should Iran make good on its threats to close the vital oil passage way, an official told Fox News.The ship could be ready in four to five months time, officials said.
The U.S. Special Operations Command has sought a transportable floating base for several years, The Washington Post reports.The ‘mothership’ would reportedly help expand the range of commando squads operating from small speedboats in remote coastal areas, The Washington Post reports.
Or, more simply, a group of reporters heard some buzz words and had nothing else to file with their editors this weekend. It would appear that, for those of us without our head up and locked in our ass, that the Navy is going to turn the Ponce over to Special Operations type gigs. I’m unsure where the market surveys fit in.
By all means, please attempt to deceiver that mess of a report. Sarcastic mockery to the idiots who wrote this turd is clearly encouraged.
Update:
More exciting news! According to Haaretz the Navy is going to turn one of its ageing “Battleships” into a “mother ship”. Along with most of the rest of you I foolishly thought that the last battleship had been retired with the Missouri. I guess they’ve been hiding one.
Category: Politics
The explanation is simple, NSOM. They’ll open one of the Iowa museum ships for special “deployment tours”, where civilians can pay money to deploy to the gulf.
As far as the whole “transportable floating base” thing… gator freighters already fit that bill, don’t they?
Do you know WHY it’s being tasked to provide “Mine Countermeasures”? Because under Clinton, the Navy was forced to phase out most of it’s capabilities in that area. We really don’t have much more right now than sending helos out to look for floating mines and/or ocean-going tugs with sailors on the bow and mast armed with M-14’s. That’s how far we’ve fallen.
Under Bush, BIG NAVY, the top leadership guys, invested heavily in the “Diversity Enterprise”, and gold-plated luxury programs like DDG-1ooo and LCS. Both are budget killers with none of the fighting ability of smaller-sized platforms in foreign navies.
We’re also looking at losing all of the amphibious capabilities we have, forcing our Marines to go ashore via aviation assets. Of course, once they get there, naval gunfire support will be pretty much non-existent too, meaning that the Marines will have to depend on their own gunships, Harriers, and F-18’s.
Our whole Navy shipbuilding and acquisition system is broken beyond repair and needs to be replaced and rebuilt from the ground up. Our Navy leadership has failed in it’s core mission of developing a powerful and flexible Navy that can improvise, adapt, and overcome. Instead, we have a full-on diversity program that looks to replace merit and skills with race/ethnic/gender quotas.
Our Navy won’t be able to do zip if it comes to a big-time conflict, but at least we’ll go down with the rainbow jack snapping proudly from the mast as we slip beneath the waves.
I’m Army so I may need a little explanation on Navy terminology. What exactly is the task and purpose of a “mothership”? Does it give birth to little navy seals?
I believe the doctrinal term they are looking for is Command and Control Ship, but I may be wrong.
The whole “battleship” thing is a mis-translation that “newspeople” refuse to correct. In English it’s “warship,” of course. In Russian, for example” the word(s) for warship is “boevoj korabl'” and if you look up “boevoj” you are probably going to see “battle” as the first word. Of course, most people have no idea about how navies classify their warships, so battleship sounds good to them….
The may have wanted to substitute “flotilla of warships” or “flotilla leader” for “that the ship will be transformed into a flotilla to be used by Navy SEALs.” A flotilla is more than one ship, dumbasses….
Daniel, the mothership concept has been around for a while. The concept is to have a large vessel that can provide support for the “Ford Navy” that everyone in their right mind should be thinking about when it comes to low-intensity AOR’s. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Riverine_Force
This, and the “new bunker buster bomb” we have for Iran, sounds like the Pentagon leaked some information yesterday to let Iran know something is cookin’.
“By all means, please attempt to deceiver that mess of a report. Sarcastic mockery to the idiots who wrote this turd is clearly encouraged.” Despite some hyperbole there NSOM, I see nothing remiss in the article.
#2″Do you know WHY it’s being tasked to provide “Mine Countermeasures”?” Tim if this was just mines then I could understand, but this is supposed to have an emphasis on Special Operations. I still fail to see why Marines in a MEU augmented by some mine clearence capabilities or small off shore outposts manned by Marines could do much the same. The strait is less then twenty miles.
Something was similiar was done with refurbished oil-riggs in the 80s during the Iran/Iraq war, that SEALs used as a jump off point. So this is not entirely without modern precedent, even though I’d image a MEU already has many of these overlapping capabilities. There was an actual war in the 80s and we didn’t covert a ship.
I think NSOM has more worry about what direction this is going and how this effects the USMC’s core mission. I would concur with him. Alright for all you Department of the Navy types tell me where I might have errored.
One final point, I image small fast boats don’t have to be based on a SOC ship. Again the strait is small.
“Beam me up to the mothership,Scotty, there’s no intelligent life down here.”
Hmmm… where’s Duff and The News of The World to show us “The Mothership?”
I thought Area 51 was land-locked.
According to this article, I might be on track. They’re mulling over saving a gator frieghter from the breakers’ yard, and sending it to the gulf.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503543_162-57367813-503543/report-pentagon-plans-floating-military-base-in-mideast/
no dude, it’s totally going to be like Water World. That’s the whole point don’t you see. When Global Warming hits and all the world sinks under water, the Ponse will rule the seas.
I may have been a REMF Office, but once that ship arrives wound’t every know its the Supa Dupa Sekrit Ship.
Then again it may have a lining of that light reflective material to makes it look like a cruise liner, or an island. Ninja like. Slide on in and pretend to be a pod of whales just hanging out.
Even better you can put a sign on it that says DON’T LOOK WE AREN’T HERE. I see this working.
Hide in plain sight.
do you mean deceiver or decipher?
Why isn’t Diego Garcia used as a “mothership”?
@14 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Garcia
That’s why.
1800nm is a pretty long way to provide support to the Ford Navy…