Lex at Neptunus Lex ("The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy!") wonders what I was wondering.
(The difference is that he knows how to reason his way to an answer on this one.)
Money quote(s):
"That was the question that once used to spring unbidden to presidential lips when an international crises bubbled up. It wasn’t that the sheer destructive power of the carrier’s air wing and her escorts were immediately put to use, so much as the weight of all that firepower rested heavily on tempestuous brows: An aircraft carrier strike group tends to alter the calculus.
So it’s with interest we read in Bill Gertz’ Inside the Ring that, with Libya burning and the tyrant starting to gradually throttle the nascent rebellion that President Obama has not shifted anyone anywhere"
It's a ship after all. It's supposed to move, to keep moving, so moving it around isn't going to hurt anything and, as a precaution ahead of time, can likely save days when hours will count.
"(F)or 9 months of the year anyway, given our rotational capabilities with only 11 big decks, the Mediterranean is less a destination than a throughway.
Once she’s already forward deployed, it’s an almost trivial thing to shift a carrier between the 5th and 6th fleet OPCON lines. Doing so can send a message. So can not doing so: The tyrant who our president has said “has to go”? Has a free hand.
The rebels who stood against him? None of our concern.
If we really cared about the humanitarian element of this crisis, we’d come right out and say that. Having the rebels know that there is no NATO or “international community” cavalry coming to the rescue might save a lot of lives in the long run by suppressing false hopes."
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