From: "John Beamish" 

How realistic is the assessment of the Sunburn and its strategic/tactical use?


http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7147.htm

10/26/04 "ICH" -- Last July, they dubbed it operation Summer
Pulse: a simultaneous mustering of US Naval forces, world wide, that was
unprecedented. According to the Navy, it was the first exercise of its new
Fleet Response Plan (FRP), the purpose of which was to enable the Navy to
respond quickly to an international crisis. The Navy wanted to show its
increased force readiness, that is, its capacity to rapidly move combat
power to any global hot spot. Never in the history of the US Navy had so
many carrier battle groups been involved in a single operation. Even the US
fleet massed in the Gulf and eastern Mediterranean during operation Desert
Storm in 1991, and in the recent invasion of Iraq, never exceeded six
battle groups. But last July and August there were seven of them on the
move, each battle group consisting of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier with
its full complement of 7-8 supporting ships, and 70 or more assorted
aircraft. Most of the activity, according to various reports, was in the
Pacific, where the fleet participated in joint exercises with the Taiwanese
navy.

[snip]

� �Nonsense!� � you are probably thinking. That� �s impossible. How could a
few picayune destroyers threaten the US Pacific fleet?� �

Here is where the story thickens: Summer Pulse amounted to a tacit
acknowledgement, obvious to anyone paying attention, that the United States
has been eclipsed in an important area of military technology, and that
this qualitative edge is now being wielded by others, including the
Chinese; because those otherwise very ordinary destroyers were, in fact,
launching platforms for Russian-made 3M-82 Moskit anti-ship cruise missiles
(NATO designation: SS-N-22 Sunburn), a weapon for which the US Navy
currently has no defense. Here I am not suggesting that the US status of
lone world Superpower has been surpassed. I am simply saying that a new
global balance of power is emerging, in which other individual states may,
on occasion, achieve � �an asymmetric advantage� � over the US. And this,
in my view, explains the immense scale of Summer Pulse. The US show last
summer of overwhelming strength was calculated to send a message.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5