A DDG is 509 feet long with a 66-foot beam. It weighs 9,300 tons and takes approximately four years to build.

Repairing the Fleet

It took years during the interwar period for the various Navy Bureaus and shipyards to believe that a repair ship or tender could provide any service of consequence beyond minor repairs. Actual combat and sailor ingenuity proved otherwise. In December, 1942, the predecessor to Service Squadron Ten fitted USS New Orleans (CA 32) with a temporary bow made of coconut logs after her bow was blown off at the Battle of Tassafaronga, enabling her to make the transit, stern first, to Sydney, Australia for further repairs.

Naval battles mean hurt ships and sailors. “Ships had their bows blown off, their sterns blasted away, huge holes torn in their hulls by torpedoes whose explosions created a chaos that had to be seen at the time to be fully realized.” The closer the help, the better off the ship and crew were—the Houston never would have made it to Pearl Harbor, nor would hundreds of other ships and their crews no matter how heroic their efforts. Service Squadron Ten enabled the Fleet to keep the Japanese from realizing operational gains from damaging U.S. ships.

For Service Squadron Ten, floating drydocks, repair ships, tenders, crane barges, and a myriad of other assets allowed them to make major repairs to battle damaged ships. Service Squadron Ten made similar repairs throughout the war, and floating drydocks were critical in restoring ships to seaworthy and operative conditions. Their drydocks could easily dock an aircraft carrier or battleship. In February 1945, for example, the repair work of the squadron “varied from such big jobs as rebuilding 60 feet of flight deck on the carrier Randolph in 18 days and new bows on blasted ships, to replacing guns and electrical equipment. In that month 52 vessels were repaired in floating drydocks.”

Becoming Truly Expeditionary

From late 1943 on, the Fleet remained at sea conducting prompt and sustained combat operations. The planning for the campaign required the Navy to consider more than just keeping the Fleet supplied with food, fuel, and ammunition. Ships needed deep maintenance that could not be deferred, Marine companies needed replacements, carriers needed replacement planes and pilots, and sailors needed to rotate back to the states—all without the Fleet returning to Pearl Harbor. How did they do it?

Service Squadron Ten had carried the theme of mobile basing beyond its original conclusions: the Squadron was the Great Western Base. The myriad of repair ships, tenders, oilers, concrete barges, tugs, and other small boats rendered extensive land bases unnecessary. The squadron simply moved with the Fleet, recalling the remnants of its rearmost bases forward. Escort carriers, usually remembered today for their heroic stand off Samar Island in October 1944 or hunting U-boats in the Atlantic, provided many of the third-order services that the Fleet needed to maintain sustained operations.

21st Century Service Squadrons

Today’s fleet train will be woefully inadequate in wartime. Two aging submarine tenders, both at risk in Guam, a few floating drydocks, two hospital ships, and the small combat logistics force are all that is available to service a battle force of nearly 300 ships. With most maintenance done ashore in contractor facilities, sailors have lost the ability to conduct the deep maintenance and repair that their predecessors did as a matter of course.

​​In December 2021, President Biden warned President Vladimir Putin of Russia that any incursion into Ukrainian territory would entail “economic consequences like none he has ever seen.” America and its European allies followed through on this threat with the largest scale economic sanctions effort in recent history.

One year later, the Russian economy has weathered the shock much better than expected.

In March 2022, the Institute of International Finance forecast that the Russian economy would contract by 15 percent by year’s end. Yet, over the last year, the Russian economy appears to have shrunk by a considerably lower amount, slightly more than 3 percent. In its most recent outlook, the International Monetary Fund expects the Russian economy to see a very small recovery of 0.3 percent in 2023. Meanwhile, it expects the European Union to expand by a mere 0.7 percent and British G.D.P. to fall by 0.6 percent.

Why has the Russian economy proven relatively resilient under sanctions? The limited efficacy of the sanctions is due to Russia’s policy response, its size, its commercial position and the importance of nonaligned countries in the world economy.

A quick crisis-fighting response can blunt the short-term impact of sanctions. Through capital controls and aggressive interest rate hikes, the Russian central bank avoided a catastrophic financial crisis in the spring of 2022. The government’s remaining financial reserves will provide a cushion for some time to come. The slightly underwhelming results are not for lack of trying. By any metric, the Western sanctions of the last year have been impressive in their speed and sweep. Within days of the invasion, the Russian central bank saw $300 billion in foreign assets frozen. In the following weeks and months, Western governments moved to block all foreign investment; disconnected three quarters of the Russian financial sector from the SWIFT payments network; blocked exports of high-tech components; blocked flights, shipping, maintenance and insurance services to Russia; and weaned themselves off Russian energy.

A year ago, expectations of economic Armageddon were widespread. The International Energy Agency warned that sanctions on the Kremlin’s oil exports would unleash “the biggest supply crisis in decades.” But last month, the four-week average of Russia’s crude export volumes were at their highest level since June.

Certainly, 2022 was a bad year for ordinary Russians. But both the financial crises of 1998 and 2008 and the 2020 pandemic recession caused worse contractions in real GDP growth than the sanctions imposed over the past year — measures once touted as an economic “nuclear option.”

The last year has demonstrated that against a Group of 20 economy, the United States and Europe alone are no longer capable of mounting sanctions regimes with overwhelming consequences. Historical experience suggests that larger targets are better able to withstand sanctions pressure, both because they have more internal resources to draw on and because they are more difficult to sever fully from the world economy.

While Russian trade with the West has collapsed, its commercial exchanges with Asian, Middle Eastern, Latin American and African states have expanded. As the world recovers from the pandemic and adjusts to the shock of the war, Russia’s commodity exports are too appealing to shun entirely. The lure of cheap raw materials from Russia is spurring sanctions avoidance on a previously unseen scale.

A global “dark fleet” of uninsured and hard-to-trace tankers roams the oceans to deliver Russian oil to buyers everywhere. Commodity traders once based in Switzerland have decamped to the Emirates to deal in cargoes of Russian oil, gas, coal, fertilizer and grain. Turkey has become a major conduit for global businesses looking to sell to Russia, as long truck convoys snake through the mountain passes of the Caucasus. Indian refineriesand Singaporean oil storage firms are making hefty profits buying discounted Russian oil and selling it worldwide.

Through a host of intermediaries, Western-made microchipscontinue to end up in Russian helicopters and cruise missiles. Small countries like Armenia and Kyrgyzstan are busy entrepôts for smartphones, washing machines and other consumer goods being shipped to Russia. Compared with prewar patterns, this new trade alignment is less efficient, costlier and more prone to interruption. It has, nevertheless, enabled Russian imports to recover to their prewar levels.

Which is in more acute trouble, a $1.8 trillion economy that has contracted by 3 percent, or a $200-billion economy that has lost one third of its G.D.P.? What the West needs to focus on above all is lasting assistance to Ukraine. While military aid has understandably been paramount in recent debates, the long-term challenge is to move the Ukrainian economy onto a path of full integration with the West. In the meantime, it must be shored up to prevent collapse. This task cannot wait until the war is over.

The economic strengthening of Ukraine will require very large investments in infrastructure, industry and agriculture. It also demands massive assistance in the realms of education, health care, social services and the creation of competent institutions. It took the European Union 30 years and trillions of euros in structural economic support to get its Eastern European member states to their current level of development. A similar challenge awaits the West if it wants to help build a prosperous, free and democratic Ukraine