United States Navy is a former featured article candidate. Please view the links under Article milestones below to see why the nomination failed. For older candidates, please check the archive.
This article is within the scope of WikiProject United States, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of topics relating to the United States of America on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the ongoing discussions.
This talk page is automatically archived by MiszaBot I. Any threads with no replies in 180 days may be automatically moved. Sections without timestamps are not archived.
On the article List of current ships of the United States Navy (which keeps a fairly accurate count), the Navy has 236 commissioned ships, with another 17 ex-commissioned in reserve (for a total of 253), with another 180 non-commissioned. The Navy uses the term "Deployable Battle Force"[1], and at one time, that referred to said commissioned ships. They have since changed their definition for this to include some non-commissioned ships (even unarmed ones!), and over-night, that total jumped by several dozen (they even count hospital ships in this 'new math'??). This was recently discussed in this article from; Defense News.
I realize we need to follow reliable sources, (especially the US Navy, when we're writing about... the US Navy). That said, I like to have this change in accounting doctrine clarified, especially in the lead, which presently states the Navy has a "Deployable Battle Force of 275 ships". I'd like to suggest we simply add to that sentence; "...of which, 236 [or 253] are commissioned...". Anyone object to this? - theWOLFchild 07:56, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
The article text has only stated the ships as being 'in service' here the past coupel of years. I just added 'deployable' after the 275 ships number in the text to match how the Navy describes them. There should be more ships that are commissioned that are home-based and do not deploy. -Fnlayson (talk) 13:43, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
Hey, why not? They commission buildings for Pete's sake... - theWOLFchild 16:16, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
Seriously? - (btw, I already reverted, so you should leave my edit in place while it's discussed - wp:brd) On this page, it was just "Navy", then "Blue-water navy" for quite some time (pretty much the life of the article), until someone changed it to this "multi-" term just this past xmas. Either "Navy" (which I believe was intended for that infobox value) or "Blue-water navy" (which is the highest level of naval capability, and basically encompasses blue and green and even brown water access) are both more appropriate and simply better. Is "multi-water" even a real term? Do you have a reliable source to support it? It appears to be a made-up word, which as we know is not permitted by wp:or.
I just checked the wp articles for the top 20 navies of the world (by tonnage), and a majority of them have the "type" simply as "navy", while a few others have either "blue water" or "green water", depending on size and/or capability. (note: it does appear that in the last 2 days, an ip editor has changed 2 of them to "multi-", with no edit summary, cite or talk page support.) That seems to be the case here, as well. - theWOLFchild 15:41, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
I did not add the multi-water term in the first place. Before your post here, nobody has tried to explain the changes to "Blue-water navy". It'd be better to just change is back to "navy" since it is not just a blue-water navy. -Fnlayson (talk) 15:54, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
If you want to change this page to just "Navy", that's fine with me. (I would be happy to see all these pages use simply "Navy".) I've brought this issue to the Wiki-Project Ships talk page. Cheers. - theWOLFchild 16:11, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
Ah, it's all fine with me. I didn't realize Blue-water essentially covers most everything. Thanks for explaining. -Fnlayson (talk) 16:24, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
Just to comment on this; some literature refer to the USN as a global blue-water navy, that is to say, a blue-water navy able to project considerable power on several large bodies of water simultaneously. It is used to distinguish the USN from lesser blue-water navies (think Royal Navy or the Marine Nationale) that are limited to projecting power to a single theater. With the decades long decline of the Royal Navy and the collapse of the Soviet Union, only the USN remains capable of projecting significant maritime power to multiple theaters. So I believe the inclusion of the "multi-" term back in March was somebody's rather overly simplistic interpretation of a global blue-water navy (i.e one that spans the globe, "multi-water" etc). Cheers. Antiochus the Great (talk) 18:44, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
Since the only thing under equipment is ships, can we remove the heading for equipment and promote everything under it up a level so under "surface vessels" cruisers, destroyers, frigates and littoral combat ships become sub-sub headings that are viable in the Contents box for people to quickly find? Name Omitted (talk) 14:56, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
.jpg){kind=small}
