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Cleveland Daily Banner—Tuesday, January 5, 2016—5
Medicare is changing:
What’s new for beneficiaries
U.S. Pacific Fleet shrinks
even as China is growing
more aggressive in area
PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii (AP)
— When the U.S. wanted to
show the world it didn’t recognize what it called China’s
“excessive” territorial claims in
disputed waters of the South
China Sea this fall, it sent a warship near one of Beijing’s newly
built artificial reefs.
The move came amid a debate
about whether the U.S. has
enough ships to meet challenges
posed by a fast-growing, increasingly assertive Chinese navy that
is unsettling some of its neighbors. In its latest move, China
announced last week that it
would build its second aircraft
carrier, this one with domestic
technology.
The Navy and its regional
component, the U.S. Pacific
Fleet, both have fewer ships now
than in the mid-1990s. Navy
officials say vastly improved
technology on those vessels outweighs any disadvantage from a
drop in numbers.
Questions about whether the
Pacific Fleet has enough
resources are more of a reflection of regional anxieties than
the Navy’s actual capability, said
its commander, Adm. Scott
Swift.
Even if the entire fleet was in
the South China Sea, he said,
he’d still get asked whether the
U.S. was bringing more forces.
“It’s this sense of angst that I
hear from those in the region,
driven by the uncertainty and
the rhetoric and, you know, the
challenges that the region is facing right now,” Swift said. “But
I’m very comfortable with the
resources I have.”
An expert at the Australian
Strategic Policy Institute think
tank said the issue in peacetime
is whether there are enough
American vessels to reassure
friends and allies and demonstrate U.S. capacity to use power
when it needs to.
In wartime, it comes down to
whether enough platforms survive missile strikes to carry on
their work, Peter Jennings said.
“I think this is emerging as a
serious long-term problem,” he
said.
The Pacific Fleet currently has
182 vessels, including combat
ships like aircraft carriers as
well as auxiliary and logistics
vessels, said spokesman Cmdr.
Clay Doss. That compares to 192
nearly two decades ago.
Around the world, the Navy
has 272 ships usable in combat
or to support ships in combat,
nearly 20 percent less than
1998. The current total includes
10 aircraft carriers.
Swift said he would rather
have the Navy he has today —
and its advanced technology —
than the Navy of two decades
ago.
He pointed to the USS
Benfold, a guided missile
destroyer upgraded with new
ballistic missile defenses, as well
as three new stealth destroyers,
the DDG-1000, in the pipeline,
as examples.
One consequence of a smaller
fleet has been more time at sea.
Retired Adm. Zap Zlatoper, who
commanded Pacific Fleet in the
1990s, said six-month deployments used to be “sacrosanct” as
anything longer made it harder
for the Navy to retain sailors.
Ships now deploy for an average of seven to nine months,
though the Navy plans to lower
this to seven.
Ship conditions have also suffered. The USS Essex left an
exercise with Australia early in
2011 and skipped another with
Thailand the following year
because it developed mechanical
problems after delaying maintenance to stay at sea.
Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at
the Center for Strategic and
Budgetary Assessments, a
Washington think tank, said
these are signs the status quo is
unsustainable.
In a November report, Clark
outlined alternatives: build more
ships, though this would require
money Congress may not give
the Navy or deploy less, though
the Pentagon has been reluctant
to accept less of an overseas
presence.
The other choices: keep more
ships at overseas bases where
they would be closer to where
they operate or mix up how
ships deploy, for example by
sending fewer escorts with an
aircraft carrier which would free
some ships to operate separately.
China’s People’s Liberation
Army Navy has more than 300
surface ships, submarines,
amphibious ships and patrol
craft,
according
to
the
Pentagon’s Asia-Pacific Maritime
Security Strategy report released
in August.
China’s coast guard and other
maritime law enforcement fleet,
meanwhile, has upward of 200
ships — m