Lack Of Clue Casualty
Glenn Reynolds reports a comment from Regime Change Iran:
ARE THINGS INVOLVING SYRIA coming to a head? Here’s a report that there are 3 carrier groups heading for the region.
Well, if things in Syria are coming to a head, it’s not supported by the information presented by Regime Change Iran.
This is like an earlier link he mentioned, where Big Things Were Going To Happen based on a single data point of information.
Here’s my last rant on this–it warns to not extrapolate a curve from one data point.
Here’s the irritating point. The Regime Change guys and Chester may have a good conclusion–but the data they use to get there ain’t sufficient.
Here are some questions to think about when you hear this kind of report.
- Has the person reporting the movement thought about these movements before? Would they know what a truly anomalous ship movement would be?
- How does this movement fit over time? Could there be turnover of strike groups?
- Ships move all over a theater. What is really interesting is when deployment dates change–a strike group changing theaters for a long time, leaving home early, or staying longer than the magical 180 days. These would mean that someone has actually thought of something rather than a random sampling of force laydown.
A few months back, someone who never knew the Navy was deployed a lot got several blogs in a tizzy because A HUGE PERCENTAGE OF THE NAVY WAS DEPLOYED!!!!11!
Guess what–they always are. Look at the trends over time to see the changes before you speculate. Ships deploy for about six months, usually, and regions have a certain level of presence that includes time to turn over to the new guy.
One great example–when China threatened Taiwan with a big ol’ missile exercise back in 1996, the Navy response was swift and in a short time there were a lot of naval assets parked off Taiwan. This is an example of a short term theater response to a crisis.
So what would you have seen in that case?
- Carrier battle groups converging on spots they normally didn’t.
- Port visits cancelled (that’s an international negotiation, so there’s a cost).
- Ship crews getting liberty cancelled.
- Reports of ships going places they normally don’t, or many more in one spot than usual.
- If you’re an intel weenie, increased chatter and activity. It’s like Domino’s pizza orders going to the White House–stuff like that may indicate something’s going on.
If I were the theater commander I would probably think about moving my assets closer to a hot spot, especially if the civilian leadership would like to Send A Message.
But a simple report of “carriers converging”, by itself, means nothing–it’s noise. It needs other data to give you information you can then use to speculate.
Perhaps the good Professor could use this the next time he links to an Exciting Report.
Update: The 1996 Taiwan case is especially good because it was short term and merely vectored some of what was in theater to a single spot. The tsunami response is similar–that’s why we deploy, because over time we have interesting things happen in the world that could use some Navy-Marine Corps presence. You’d see even more anomalous data pop up if we were massing military assets for Something Big.
7 Responses to “Lack Of Clue Casualty”
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March 22nd, 2005 at 9:01 am
good to remind people, but, there’s no reason to assume these moves where consciously planned some time ago to happen at this
moment – after the Iraq elections. sharon’s recent moves, palestinian elections, etc. etc. This is a well thought out strategy to uproot dictatorship in the mid-east. If they didn’t have contingency plans to move threatening force into place at just this moment, they weren’t thinking very clearly. I believe this has all been set-up years ago…at least at the moment the iraq election date (a specific date that Bush was in no way going to postpone, if you recall ).
March 22nd, 2005 at 10:00 am
Well, sort of. I agree that we’ve got a general direction in our grand strategy. However, I know carrier strike group movements weren’t set up years ago, because the world changes too quickly for that level of planning, and we are trying to shift how we deploy (from IDTC to FRP–any deployment plans made in early 2003 are OBE, overcome by events). I know that nobody on the worker bee level of the Navy was tailoring his deployment training to react to Lebanese protests, for instance. In this one I can speak with a little authority because I recently finished a deployment workup and prior to that was privy to some of the high level planning. We don’t think in those terms when we do that–we think in terms of “FUTZCom wants a 1.3 ESG presence and how do we provide it when SNARFCom wants 6.0, and the CNO mandated this extra stand down requirement?”
What we do in Navy is provide forces to the theater commander, who then moves assets around to where he thinks they need to go (with occasional rudder orders from D.C.). That’s why moving carriers around in a theater is such a common event. Usually it’s not so much “contingency plans to move threatening force into place at just this moment” as it is “have assets available and in range to respond to whatever comes up”.
So what I read from that one data point at Real Clear Politics, combined with a quick look at who’s been in theater recently, is that we’re within the normal range of deployment assets post-SurgeEx, and one strike group is turning over or being a little closer to the nearest hot spot. If EUCOM or CENTCOM does a short fused exercise with a particular country that wasn’t there before, then maybe a political signal is being made.
Then again, maybe the four star blew that country off when a ship broke last time they tried to do an exercise and he’s just making up the obligation. (Seen that happen at a dinner party–next day, the boat’s got new places to go…)
March 22nd, 2005 at 10:45 am
You may very well be right that there is no near-term strategic purpose being served by these movements, but the presence of three carrier groups in the region will certainly have an effect on diplomatic efforts there, whether intended or not.
March 22nd, 2005 at 10:59 am
I completely agree that having force there is intended to advance our regional interests. And it’s a theater commander’s intent to advance a strategic purpose, long or short term, with an asset movement. The guys over at RCI may even have the correct conclusion!
However, the single report of “three carriers in the region”, without any context of where they normally are, or how many are usually there, isn’t sufficient to provide a sufficient basis for the RCI post’s conclusion.
Thanks for pointing out an unclear spot in my writing.
March 22nd, 2005 at 4:57 pm
Like last year during Summer Pulse ’04, when we had seven carriers out at once! Back then, both the right and left sides of the blogosphere thought it meant we were going to invade China, without even considering that one of the carriers was the Reagan, doing a change of homeport without even an air wing aboard.
March 24th, 2005 at 2:57 pm
The other side of this story is the mention of the 100,000 troops in Iraq. As if they could suddenly turn into an army invading Iran or Syria.
My understanding is that the logisitics just don’t work out. The mix of troops is wrong for an invasion, they’re too busy in Iraq, and the logistic base for invasion isn’t there.
And, according to some reports, the US is short of aircraft-delivered weapons too, The smart bombs dropped on Iraq, a couple of years ago, haven’t been fully replaced. Spare parts, all the stuff you need to fight a war: stocks are low.
On the other hand, a carrier air wing can still be a deterrent. Not “We will invade”, but “We will protext our friends”. It doesn’t have to be a fully-loaded strike/invasion capacity to tip the balance for what somebody else intends.
March 24th, 2005 at 9:54 pm
I think you hit it right on the nose. Big things turn slowly!