This question gets asked on Quora over and over and over and over and over again. The article makes three main points, that carriers are expensive, vulnerable and useless. All three points are wrong.
Sure, $6 billion looks like a lot of money. But it's a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the Carrier Battle Group. You need a lot of ships to properly protect a carrier.
Sure, in a conflict with a major international power, our carriers won't stick around. But first, 48 hours is a long time in the context of modern conventional warfare. Guerrilla warfare lasts as long as the people involved want it to last, conventional wars are decided in time periods measured in hours. So a carrier battle group isn't particularly vulnerable. Sure, new tech like ASBMs will force us to change tactics, but we're developing new tech too.
Also, nobody is predicting another war with a major international power. The game changer isn't carriers and hasn't been for decades. The game changer is nuclear weapons. If Russia or China decides to target our carriers, the response will have nuclear components. Nuclear weapons are the only things keeping our carriers afloat anyway, if they didn't exist, we'd have scrapped them a long time ago.
So, 48 hours. During this time, each carrier, with it's compliment of an entire fighter-bomber wing, has destroyed much more than its share of enemy military targets. Also, the battle groups don't have to actually see battle in order to be useful. A carrier is essentially a floating air base that we can put pretty much anywhere we want, giving us the global strike capabilities that make it so, if we have to threaten a petty tyrant with utter destruction, he doesn't just laugh us out of the room.
>Sure, $6 billion looks like a lot of money. But it's a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the Carrier Battle Group. You need a lot of ships to properly protect a carrier.
How is that an argument in favor of a carrier not being expensive? If anything, it implies the actual total cost of a carrier is even more than its own cost.
Except Carriers have been used in the Afghanistan and Iraq. While also being used in China to hamper Chinese aggression.
It seems like the ships are getting good use in the current climate. Carriers are the best choice of weapon in an asymmetrical war against terrorists. Terrorists can't target a Carrier Group, but Carrier Groups can bomb them all day, every day nearly perpetually.
>Chinese aggression like stationing their ships in the Philippines and Japan
The same Philipines the US occupied and used as a colony (and neo-colony) and the same Japan where the US nuked civilians and had the country under supervision (it's army) etc. post-war?
Not to mention this is not actually "stationing their ships in the Philippines and Japan" (which the US does all the time, literally, in their harbors), but having disputes over some sea territory.
I've never really understood the line of reasoning that compares one country's possible past misdeeds with another country's possible present misdeeds. I don't think a nation exists with a spotless historical record, the US is obviously not exempt from this criticism, but beyond hoping to acknowledge, learn from, and possibly offer redress for past wrongs, I'm not sure that pointing out historical misdeeds has much to do with discussing the situation at present.
The issue at hand isn't China's possible hostility towards neighboring countries centuries or decades ago but rather their fairly hostile posturing with regards to territorial claims today.
With regards to your second point, from what I've read the Philippines and Japan view China's currently expanding territorial claims to be an aggressive military expansion. I'm not sure the act of US ships being present in the harbors of Japan and the Philippines is analogous to China's military activities in the South China Sea and Western Pacific, particularly as I assume both of those countries have given explicit permission to the US Navy to enter their territorial waters.
Thats extreme. Its not that the US shouldn't have a blue-water navy. Just that it shouldn't have a useless, expensive, dangerous one: which is what it has right now, at least in the case of war.
(I'll concede one thing, carriers are useful in times of non-war: as a policing force and threat to lesser nations ..)
It didn't work in 1971, when Nixon deployed the Enterprise and the rest of Task Force 74 to the Bay of Bengal to intimidate India during the war with Pakistan. All it took was a couple of Soviet submarines to call their bluff.
> Sure, $6 billion looks like a lot of money. But it's a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the Carrier Battle Group. You need a lot of ships to properly protect a carrier
That doesn't make the carrier less expensive, it makes it more expensive.
> If Russia or China decides to target our carriers, the response will have nuclear components.
Are you suggesting that the US will initiate nuclear war?
Regarding your first point, that exact sentiment was addressed in the article under the heading "The future is drones and submarines" (whose thesis is obvious). Selected quoting from there:
The supercarrier requires an exponential and compounding set of very expensive investments. The total acquisition cost of a carrier strike group exceeds $25 billion, an air wing another $10 billion and the annual operating costs of perhaps $1 billion.
...
"Yet, a cruise missile fired from a wide range of lower signature ships costs less than a third of each bomb delivered by a fighter from the deck of a carrier. Nor do these platforms require a carrier’s defensive shield — and they can launch from beyond the range of carrier-based aircraft.
...
A similar shift is occurring now and will displace the modern equivalent of the dashing cavalry officer — the fighter pilot. The knight class never passes willingly — as they take justifiable pride in their acumen and truly believe in their mission. However, the carrier and its air wing cannot be allowed to drive strategy or procurement.
As an outsider, it's hard for me to fully assess these arguments (including from the paragraphs I elided). But they sound rather convincing.
I can think of a couple of counterarguments to both points (and that part of the text in general):
1) one thing that is often overlooked is how hard is to pinpoint the carrier and provide this information to a missile. For a sea-skimming missile horizon is at ~12 miles (20 km); given the distances involved (F-35C has a combat range of about 1k km) and carrier's speed (60 km/h) you will need to provide updates to a missile regarding current carrier's position, which you can't know if you aren't over the horizon for a carrier — in which case you will probably be shot down. This makes the danger of low-cost missile platforms somewhat lower. For a more thorough discussion of the problem see [1].
2) Drones are unusable against sophisticated opponent. First of all, there will be no datalink: space assets will be denied (either jammed or destroyed), direct radio links will be jammed, too. Therefore the drone will need to orient, fight and decide who to kill autonomously, which is problematic both from technical (e.g. autonomous navigation and decision making) and moral (autonomous killing machine, anyone?) standpoints. Therefore, we can't switch human pilots for drones.
Remind me again of the number of successful ship launched cruise missile strikes against capital units
The only successful recent use (and that was an AA picket) is Air lanched Argentinians vs the Royal navy and that required some very ballsy pilots and good luck that the target ship was uplinking and did not have its radar on when she was engaged.
And if the RN had had a full CAV in the south atlantic the Super Etendards would have not got to firing range
The US policy on first-use of nuclear weapons is quite clear. We will use them as an option against another country that is nuclear capable or has weapons of mass destruction (chemical or bio). As a US military war vet do I think we ever would unless faced with overwhelming military odds against us? Nope.
Obama has been doing all within his power (very little due to congress in-fighting) to try and reduce our nuclear stockpile as much as feasible. With 3 seawolf class nuclear missile submarines sneaking around somewhere in the ocean, it is unlikely that anyone no matter how advanced could prevent nuclear retaliation should they pre-empt the US.
That being said, the entire premise of this article is a bit silly, and coming from war is boring, I'm a bit surprised as their stuff is generally spot on. The thing about a full Carrier Strike Group is the blue water ability to project the US air power anywhere in the world. That is what keeps carriers relevant (for now). The new hypersonic glide vehicles might change the game certainly as there isn't really much of any defense against incoming warheads going Mach 10, but those are still a bit out tech-wise.
> The thing about a full Carrier Strike Group is the blue water ability to project the US air power anywhere in the world.
This is why we have carriers and carrier groups. So that we can arrive in your nautical back yard and say "Here we are!" and get noticed. It's all about the high visibility projection of power thousands of miles away.
This was one of the objections about the UK government building the Queen Elizabeth class carriers. You don't need carriers unless you're intending on using them to project your military might into places you're not wanted in a highly visible way.
My takeaway from the article is that carrier vulnerability is increasing from low cost, high range missiles. As the article mentioned, they only need a few hits. Carriers are a big target, and from the sounds of it potential nation-state enemies have adopted anti-carrier naval doctrines based on small signature boats with high damage output.
Carriers seem to be highly effective in uncontested waters, allowing force projection anywhere in the world. The article is saying that carriers are becoming less relevant when contested by a prepared enemy.
Right. The US Navy is solving the currently severe weakness from a swarm of fast attack suicide boats via the Railgun and Laser weapons programs. Trials of both are currently happening for our blue water ocean folks.
That still leaves the vulnerability of the new class of hypersonic anti-ship weapons systems, but I suspect there is something to attempt to counter that as well. The X-51A Waverider and any future versions are a good example of that.
This is all cat and mouse, but I wouldn't be so quick to completely discredit a carrier strike group. Yes the Carrier is a HUGE liability, but the amount of firepower in 1 group is simply mind numbing and taking out the entire group before a sustained counter attack would be near impossible. For reference, the US Navy currently has 10 of these operating globally.
If you recall, during the opening war in Afghanistan, a CSG managed to launch 1 Tomahawk cruise missile every 12 seconds for 48 hours sustained during the opening salvo. That is only a single CSG.
Because we need to anticipate conditions in which communications links and space assets (e.g., GPS and comms links) are unavailable.
UAVs do not yet have the autonomous intelligence to operate on their own, and even if they do, we haven't yet decided to give robots the decision to kill autonomously.
Answer 2 =) we already do, to some degree. E.g., Cruise Missiles have had the ability to navigate on inertial guidance and terrain-following technology for decades, and we use those a lot. But again, a cruise missile can only get programmed for one target, go there, and hit it.
A pilot can go to the target area, notice that the target has moved or new conditions exist (e.g., a bunch of children have been moved in as human shields), or notice that new targets of opportunity have popped up, and immediately take appropriate action.
And, we're back to the autonomous AI tech is not yet that good (and I'm not sure that we want it to get that good).
Re: cruise missile targets, not quite for the targetting. A group of the Tomahawk Block IV missiles can be launched over a target area and loiter for some time with a list of pre-programmed targets or updated live from any other sensor platform (a jet, helo, satellite, etc). Say there are 20 targets and 25 missiles live loitering around an area. When the operator says to strike, 15 of the missiles can strike simultaneously while a few can stay aloft to provide BDA (battle damage assessment for non-military folk) and then go in for the 2 of the 1-2 punch.
The Block IV missiles can also share targets amongst eachother and decide which target to strike (among a list of programmed targets) themselves based on factors such as proximity and other classified bits.
Yes, they have these fantastic capabilities, and they are improving all the time.
That said, note that even your example included live updates via comms/satellite links...
Consider the scenario where comms and orbital assets are unavailable/unreliable.
We still need human pilots. We're working to the day when we won't, but, we're not there yet.
(BTW, I'm all for unmanned, and think the F35 is already obsolete, and that humans are the limiting performance factor in esp. fighter aircraft (e.g., limiting it to 10g accelerations, but we're just not there yet for all scenarios, to answer the GP question as to "why not")
> Are you suggesting that the US will initiate nuclear war?
'The United States has refused to adopt a no-first-use policy, saying that it "reserves the right to use" nuclear weapons first in the case of conflict.'
Nah. If we forgo nukes then you'd see the whole world scrambling to build nukes to protect themselves and our conventional advantage would get nullified. We need them more than other nations do.
We need the posturing, it helps us to not actually have to use them.
Think about it this way. In a gang, typically the strongest and most capable warrior will be the leader. That leader has to be perfectly willing to instill fear in the others and sacrifice one for the harmony of the group if he has to. If he were to tie his own hands behind his back out of some strange sense of fairness, then he's essentially abdicating his role as leader.
The US is heavily invested in peace. We want peace more than just about every nation on the planet. By that I mean we don't just want national security, i.e. no other nations threatening us. We want every nation to be secure, happy, and open for business. We don't want random African nations fighting a war against each other. That's bad for business. France doesn't care if the Congo and Tanzania are fighting an all-out war. We do. So we invest a lot of money in institution-building at the international level.
Organizations like the African Union promote economic peace and unity but it's only possible for them to flourish if the constituent nations feel militarily secure. This is where the US's overwhelming military and nuclear dominance come into play. We have to keep our big stick, ready at hand to Hulk smash anything threatening us, so that everyone else can relax and let the cooler heads prevail.
> Are you suggesting that the US will initiate nuclear war?
Initiating a nuclear war after a nation state starts taking out your aircraft carriers is not entirely unexpected. Nuclear or not, the response would be amazingly serious.
Serious yes, but nuclear, surely not? If the US would use nuclear retaliation after a conventional attack (or more likely, a conventional defense, because nobody sane would attack a US carrier unless it posed an immediate threat) I think that would violate all doctrine on the use of nuclear weapons.
The entire official nuclear policy of every single nuclear power (as far as I'm aware) is that they will only use nuclear weapons in response to a nuclear attack or an existential threat. Officially. I believe Putin stated at some point that he would not consider the use of small tactical nukes to be nuclear escalation (if Russia does it), but I would expect the US to be better than that.
I can't imagine a scenario where our carrier fleet is in imminent danger that doesn't qualify as an existential threat. We haven't faced that since WW2 and Japan did end up on the receiving end of nuclear arms.
US carriers carry over 5,000 sailors, having one taken out would be almost unimaginable (a one time event with more US deaths than the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined).
You might want to step back and just reconsider how riddiculous it sounds. 5000 soldiers over millions of civilians? Really?
Existential threat would be invasion force / bombing run / missile strike coming to continental US territories. Anything else is just "they took our toys"
I don't think you know what "existential threat" means. It means your home country itself is in danger. Losing a single carrier only slightly reduces the US's ability to project force around the globe. But even with all carriers gone (not something that's ever going to happen), it would still be folly to attack the US on its own soil.
> The entire official nuclear policy of every single nuclear power (as far as I'm aware) is that they will only use nuclear weapons in response to a nuclear attack or an existential threat. Officially.
The US has never had such an official doctrine, nor to my knowledge has any of the other major nuclear powers.
Of course the US does which is why it has such a serious policy of preventing nuclear proliferation. Part of these aircraft carrier's jobs is to protect allies so they don't feel the need to acquire nuclear weapons.
Quite the pedantic distinction. Bombing them is enough, except if magically taking out an aircraft carrier is worse behavior than bombing a city or invading a country.
Against a defenseless country looking to surrender that couldn't retaliate. Will be a bit different if it initiates nuclear war against Russia or China.
>Are you suggesting that the US will initiate nuclear war?
Yes, it should be entirely expected in response to such a serious attack, especially since no country would attempt to take out a carrier group outside the context of a much larger war.
Consider that 1) the US doctrine does not forbid first use, and 2) that sinking a carrier and a significant part of its group is tantamount to destroying a small city (the population on the carrier alone is over 6000 people), and 3) that taking out a carrier is taking out effectively 10% of our key naval/air capability. In short, it is an extremely serious action, and would be seen by all as "the gloves coming off".
Anyone contemplating launching an attack to take out one of our carriers/groups should not be the slightest bit surprised to find a few nuclear warheads detonating at over some of their major bases within a few hours of taking out the carrier. Nor would any observer be surprised at such a response.
That said, if an appropriate retaliation could be done without nukes, it probably would be done that way.
But, again, the context is likely to be that of a very rapidly escalating war. . . . .
I still find it unreasonable. Suppose the carrier group is waging war against a country. Planes from the carrier are bombing the country. Would that country not be allowed to defend itself by retaliating against the very forces that attack it?
Any country with the ability to sink the carrier that attacks them, would sink it, and it would be entirely reasonable for them to do so in the interest of defending their sovereignty. Responding to self-defense with nuclear escalation would be utterly unreasonable. And the loss of 6000 people, while tragic, does not justify the use of nuclear weapons either. If it did, we would have had nuclear war long ago.
Sure, the country can defend itself all it wants, but this is war, not Queensbury rules boxing.
So, yeah, if we're pummelling the snot out of some small country (Grenada, Venezuela, ???) and they get off a lucky shot with a missile or torpedo that manages to sink one carrier, then a nuclear response would be unwarranted and unlikely, and we'd just see continued conventional operations by the rest of the fleet.
But that scenario is so unlikely. But we're realistically talking about an all-out attack on a carrier group with ballistic missiles or nuclear subs, possibly with nuclear warheads. This would only be mounted by a Russia or China. Or possibly Iran trying a swarm attack with thousands of small suicide-boats. This would be in the context of a much larger war and operations.
Attacking a carrier group is an undertaking of huge magnitude - a huge escalation in itself, and anyone should expect a serious response from a successful attack. And, keeping open the question of whether that retaliation might be nuclear is also an important deterrent.
The context would certainly determine whether or not it actually goes nuclear. E.g., what other resources can be brought to bear, under what threat is the rest of the fleet? E.g., if it was the Chinese ballistic anti-carrier missiles, and we knew exactly where they were and could target them conventionally, we probably would, but if they threatened the rest of the fleet, and the only way to neutralize them was nukes, ... watch out.
So, overall, I'm not saying it would necessarily be nuclear, but it certainly wouldn't be surprising if it were. And, if it were, I'd expect that it would be seen as not un-reasonable, because if the US follows its own history, we're very reluctant to launch them.
We're specifically not talking about attacking the carrier with nuclear warheads. We're talking about the US initiating nuclear war in response to a conventional attack on a carrier.
And don't underestimate small countries. In an exercise (a long time ago), a Dutch diesel-electric sub "killed" half a dozen US ships, including a carrier. Nuclear subs aren't much of a threat to a carrier (because they're noisy), but diesel-electrics are one of the few weapons that are known to be able to get close enough, because they can be extremely quiet.
Pointing out that the actual cost of a carrier is far higher than $6B (true) is not a point in your favor. The opportunity cost needs to be considered — what could you do with your, um, entire naval budget if you weren't obsessed with building carrier battle groups?
48h hasn't proven to be a long time in any modern war. In fact the evidence is that modern wars are more protracted than 19th and mid-20th century because, owing to the realities of the modern military (it tends to be heavy on capital equipment and low on manpower) you can't really win a war any more, instead you just blow up expensive stuff and then snipe at each other.
Sure, the Taliban refuses to surrender but China, Russia, or North Korea would be easier, right?
Any plausible war will probably involve a period of escalation and a long aftermath. Which 48h do you get? A confrontation off Taiwan or the Spratleys could easily ignite with a US carrier blowing up after being hit by a torpedo or swarm of inexpensive cruise missiles. The way US politics works we'd have lost before the war even started.
And finally, what do our carrier planes blow up while the carrier remains afloat? No-one except us has much that's worthy of their attention.
On the contrary. The USA only has ten carriers deployed right now.
The "Carrier Strike Group" is simply all of the other ships (destroyers, cruisers, etc. etc.) that follow the carrier around.
The Strike Groups will remain without a Carrier. They basically are the US Navy, aside from the subs we have hidden around the world.
Furthermore, all of the other ships are completely useless in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. You can't hit ISIS with a Destroyer. You hit them with Airplanes, carried over by Carriers.
The firepower of a single US Carrier is bigger than the vast majority of land-bases in the world. A US Carrier can also move however. Its probably one of the most potent weapons of the US.
Basically, we have ten moving naval bases, that can be stationed anywhere in the ocean. Each one can go toe-to-toe with the vast, vast majority of land-bases in a particular region and win.
Or we can build another few $500 Million to $5 Billion bases in Afghanistan that we later abandon when we change administrations (Bush had different plans than Obama).
The Carriers are a far better use of money than building actual bases. Despite their high costs.
But cruise missiles do not have nearly the same precision as air support fighters.
An F18 flying over your infantry (or infantry of allied partners) will respond near instantly to a call for assistance. In contrast, that cruise missile may take several minutes before it reaches the target.
Nimitz, Eisenhower, Vinson, Roosevelt, Lincoln, Washington, Stennis, Truman, Reagan, and Bush make 10, with Ford entering commission later this year to make 11.
> In any case, the US doesn't really have that many carriers. I mean, we have more than the rest of the world.
If you count things in the class of what the US calls carriers, the rest of the world has, I believe, 0 (some sources refer to these as "large-deck" carriers.)
If you want to include what the rest of the world has for carriers, you need to go to "medium-deck" carriers, where the US has more (even without counting the large-deck ships) than the rest of the world combined in the form of its amphibious assault ships (LHA/LHD).
Yeah, seventeen Amphibious Assault Ships, because they're cheaper.
But with only Helicopters and V/STOL aircraft... the Supercarrier is actually a better system. Helicopters don't provide the straight immunity or take advantage of modern asymetric warfare: Helicopters can be shot down by enemy rockets.
V/STOL aircraft like the Harrier Jet or F35B are expensive (either in lives: due to the high number of accidents on the Harrier, or costly in specs. IIRC, the F35B doesn't have the same specs as the other fighters). The Supercarrier filled with F18s might be cheaper than an Amphibious Assault Ship filled with V/STOL aircraft.
So from an overall cost perspective, Supercarriers with standard aircraft still remain the best bang for their buck.
> Guerrilla warfare lasts as long as the people involved want it to last, conventional wars are decided in time periods measured in hours.
How do you know that? The only conventional war I know of that was decided in hours was the Six-day war and that was because Israel inflicted a surprise attack on Egypt. Not saying you are wrong, just curious why you think so since the US hasn't been facing an equal adversary in war since WWII.
The difference between conventional war and unconventional war is the overall objective. Conventional war is the destruction of another state's ability to wage war. Once that has been accomplished, if war continues, it's unconventional, because it has to be waged by non-state actors.
States hold war materiel and personnel on military bases, these weapons have long supply chains and generally cannot be hidden. Once you've blown these things up, then the state cannot make war any longer.
With aircraft, missiles, satellites, AWACS, advanced intelligence capabilities, the expected speed of conflicts has gone from days to hours in the last few decades. The US enjoys complete dominance over the rest of the world's militaries. There is no state, no imaginable alliance of states that could withstand a full-scale US military attack. We'd destroy their air forces, naval forces, and any ground forces they could muster within hours.
So long as we refuse to fight an unconventional war, then our troops could just go home. It's because our leaders get cocky and idealistic that we get dragged into ongoing guerrilla conflicts.
It's increasingly likely that Russia or China may fight a war with the US outside their traditional borders. For example in the South China Sea. It would be conceivable that a conflict there would stay "sub-nuclear", as neither nation's home territory is threatened.
>Sure, $6 billion looks like a lot of money. But it's a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the Carrier Battle Group. You need a lot of ships to properly protect a carrier.
You also need a lot of ships to protect all the countries that cry about their neighbors invading them, human rights atrocities and other "emergencies" that take our military all over the world to protect other countries that are fully capable of doing it themselves, but prefer to put our military in harm's way instead.
> If Russia or China decides to target our carriers, the response will have nuclear components.
So if a nuclear superpower effortlessly takes out a US carrier using a few Kalibr missiles, we will nuke them and be utterly destroyed, thereby proving the carrier was not vulnerable? By that definition ("I'll nuke you if you touch it") a block of cheddar cheese is invulnerable.
If ASBMs become available to smaller countries, as they inevitably are, then they will use them against the US to defend themselves. They US won't be able to respond with nuclear weapons in that case as that would be an insane escalation, and thus their ASBMs would be an effective deterrent against our carriers getting close enough for the fighters to be useful.
No, it would just push the battle groups further out to sea, naval ships aren't sitting ducks against ASBMs, they do have defenses such as CIWS. If they keep far enough away then they won't be terribly vulnerable.
Also, the US doesn't just have nuclear weapons to retaliate with. We're perfectly capable of devastating these smaller countries without them.
All conflicts long-term going forward will be won with economic resilience; meaning even if attacked, invaded, controlled, etc. - long-term the attacking force's culture will succumb to economic attrition.
War has always been economic. The ability to win wars is not the ability to inflict losses, but the ability to sustain losses--both economically, and politically.
You might make an argument that for a brief period around modern times, wars were lethal enough that this was not the case. But even during this time period, the ability to inflict damage was largely an economic factor.
As a former Navy F/A-18 pilot, I have strong opinions on this and generally agree with the analysis. A few thoughts:
1. The services are building what the defense contractors want to build more than what the war fighters want. Knew a lot of pilots who didn’t like the F-35 and would have preferred more, cheaper planes specialized for specific roles. This defense contractor capture is a big problem.
2. The services waste these ‘big war’ resources on our insurgency campaigns. F/A-18s were about 10k per flight hour and perform worse than platforms such as the Super Tacono[1] when supporting war fighters on the ground. We spent hundreds of billions more than we needed to on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because when the game starts everyone wants to play to justify their budgets. Programs such as the Super Tacano were shut down to protect and justify the massive expenditure on fighter jets. Funding for different types of wars needs to go through different sources to prevent this enormous waste of money.
3. I’d be for a submersible carrier that could surface to launch and retrieve drones that act as missile trucks for both air-to-air and strike missions. I wouldn’t go all in on unmanned aircraft though, since I would also assume the possibility of totally denied electronic environment where signals are jammed and space assets are unavailable.
4. To force military leaders to focus on the services and not themselves, I’d support a ban on senior level leadership (O-7 and above) from accepting board seats or contractor / full-time positions with defense contractors. Too many leaders make decisions while in service influenced by their personal outcomes when they get out. This behavior reinforces a system that supports the status quo. Senior leaders have great retirement packages and can do things other than maintain an incestuous relationship with the military-industrial complex. Although sometimes other jobs seem to result in more bad behavior such as pressure to look the other way on Theranos and its questionable product.[2, 3] Does look like their board has gotten a bit better with the only remaining military / diplomat being General Mattis. Glad to see Admiral Roughead and Secretary of State Kissinger are no longer there.
>To force military leaders to focus on the services and not themselves, I’d support a ban on senior level leadership (O-7 and above) from accepting board seats or contractor / full-time positions with defense contractors.
That is an excellent idea, though I would extend it to cover any senior government leadership revolving into private sector positions in industries they regulated or for which they awarded contracts. There's clearly a conflict of interest, and nobody is going to starve on a senior official's retirement package.
While I agree with the sentiment, I see it as being too easy to evade. If you can't accept regular employment with BigGunCorp then become a contractor who accepts a lucrative contract from a consultancy working under contract from BigGunCorp. And that's assuming you don't want to hide what you are doing.
Presumably you would know before applying (or at this level, more likely the headhunter should know before approaching). In any case, it's something that would probably be phased in. If you take a position, are reelected, or continue in a position 3 years after the law takes affect, then the the law affects you. It would be interesting to see who jumped to the private sector before it affected them.
Serving your country as an elected official is a privilege, and does not happen by accident. You should know what you are getting into, and you should not consider yourself part of the industry while you are in office.
Serving as a high level employee through advancement (such as the military) means that was your profession. Preventing a military official form joining the board of a defense contractor is causing them to change professions, it is preventing them from changing into a specific profession.
This is specific to government positions because those engender specific abuses of power. There isn't necessarily a parallel in the private sector (I think the closest you can get is government granted monopolies, such as utilities, where customers do not have a freedom of choice).
No, you could do work that wasn't related. Suppose you worked as a buyer for the military, the law would say you can't jump over to people you bought from. But there's no reason you couldn't retire and become a buyer for some other industry.
> To force military leaders to focus on the services and not themselves, I’d support a ban on senior level leadership from accepting board seats or contractor / full-time positions
I'd extend to this to a lot of high ranking government positions, and a lot of other jobs (lobbying, etc).
What if we just said "In order to serve in this position you must give up the right to employment by private corporations for the rest of your life. In return you will be given a significant pension."
Is that a totally naïve idea?
EDIT: I was specifically thinking of positions where the prestige and a very good salary/pension (plus book deals / speaking engagements) would be more than enough to attract many qualified people.
But yes, preventing private employment entirely is probably too aggressive, and it seems difficult to scope restrictions on types of jobs.
So more career politicians? And since their job prospects outside govt are basically nil, you'd have an even higher bar for dismissal based on performance or incompetence. It's already hard enough to cull the govt employee herd... we don't need every little position becoming a lifetime appointment a la supreme court justices.
OP said those of O-7 rank (one-star general) or above. Statutory limits [1] state that there can be no more than ~400 people of rank O-8 or above in the US military. So say 1000 people in active service at O-7 or above.
Do you really think a number like that is significantly influencing the size of the "govt employee herd"? And do you really think the cost of keeping these people employed outweighs the benefits of keeping them away from private positions using their connections for lobbying the government?
I think so. Government is in increasing need of professionals with skills that are in high demand by industry. They already have a hard time recruiting since pay is capped at the low, low six figures. This would further serve to dissuade talented people from working there.I've
thought about working for the government again, but if I knew I had no choice of private employment again in my career, that would be a no go (you're then essentially giving bueracrats higher up the food chain control of your entire life).
That's not quite the thought process. You look at the pay you earn now, in a non-government job. Then you go to look at the government pay scales. You determine that in order to maintain a similar standard of living as you currently enjoy, you would have to be ranked on the government pay scales equivalently to a general in the armed forces, or a consul in the diplomatic corps, or any of a number of other positions that literally require a lifetime of dedication to advancing a bureaucratic career, and a great deal of specialized experience or political capital.
The "thinking about it" generally lasts about 30 minutes.
The highest-likelihood logical conclusion is that all high-ranking government officials are being richly remunerated through channels that do not pass through the US Treasury or GAO oversight, such that the total value of their office is comparable with a similar position in the private sector. Those that do not can instantly find higher-paying jobs that can effectively monetize their former connections for their new employers.
This is the primary reason why the bureaucracy cannot keep up with technology. By law, they cannot make a competitive employment offer. They are forced to hire through contractors. And contractors, through mutual self-interest, exploit that weakness without mercy.
I was once asked by an Army captain to consider working directly for the government, and it took quite a lot of restraint to bottle up my guffaw and laugh it out later, outside her hearing range. The Feds simply cannot hire me to its own payroll with that hulking slab of a padlock on its wallet. So instead, it pays 4 times the rate I would ordinarily accept instantly to a contractor employer, who offers 0.10 to 0.35 of that to hire people ranging in quality from chairwarming jobsworths to eccentric geniuses.
That's too extreme. You just want to avoid people going to work for companies that they had significant direct relationships with either as regulators or customers.
" The services waste these ‘big war’ resources on our insurgency campaigns. F/A-18s were about 10k per flight hour and perform worse than platforms such as the Super Tacono"
The Tacono example is interesting. You can read about the A29 procured by USSF in 2006 looking for an alternative A10 , cheap and fit for purpose. [0]
It esacpes me at the moment where I read/heard it, but Col Wilkerson, Powells chief of staff (I think) has talked about #4 specifically. Thanks for the comment, fascinating to hear from a pilot on stuff like this.
It can be easy to lose sight of in this new era of America intervening and starting conflicts of our own choice throughout the world, but the U.S. is still 100% committed to total defense of both Taiwan and South Korea. I'm not talking about Afghanistan or Iraq levels of commitment (~100k troops for a few months, 3-4 carrier strike groups), I'm talking full mobilization of the reserves (1 million U.S. troops in uniform), commandeering the entire civil aviation fleet, every Marine, every ship in the Navy, every aircraft in the Air Force heading to the Western Pacific, fighting-to-the-last-man-like-it's-World-War-Two level of commitment.
All decisions on U.S. military force structure, including the number of aircraft carriers in the fleet, flow down from what is required to fight those two conflicts.
>U.S. is still 100% committed to total defense of both Taiwan and South Korea.
US is not committed to defend Taiwan.
US-Taiwan relations act is carefully grafted to avoid commitment. It's not solid defense pact like US has with South Korea or Japan. US position is called strategic ambiguity. US has the freedom to determine how much it want's to assist Taiwan to defend itself.
ps. US don't even have formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan. China is more important to US interests than Taiwan.
Exactly. As far as I remember, I read an article that Taiwan desperately wants to buy new Submarines, but nobody wants to sell. US doesn't have the Know-how to build them, Germany doesn't want to risk relations with China. So, it's either gonna be Japan or Russia.
Taiwan is not going to get F-35's either. They are lucky to get newest F-16 blocks.
Taiwan has lost spy war with China. Their military can't be trusted with secrets. Highest ranking spies include army general (electronic communications and information bureau chief), defense attaché to the United States, vice admiral and presidential aide.
I don't know how effective Taiwanese counterintelligence is, but if we assume that they capture just small percentage of spies, Taiwan is open book for China.
Would that we were also so lucky, rather than lighting trillions on fire for an aircraft that's going to turn out inferior to the 1980s era craft we're already flying.
Opinions about the F-35 vary. I believe the critics undervalue the idea that the F-35 is not supposed to be playing the same game as, say, the F-16. Though about as maneuverable, stealth and avionics make the F-35 superior to the predecessors.
Okay, to reply to the people asking about "No know how". Yes, the US still have a very capable Submarine-fleet, but those Units are from the 1980s. Look at modern diesel-electric Subs, like mainly the german 212A class. Basically a black hole in the water, capable of staying submerged without any noise at all for a month on its fuel-cells, launching a drone submerged or Shooting down ASW-Helicopters, making US-ASW tactics basically obsolete.The now 30 year old precursor of the 212As, the 209, managed to "sink" a Nimitz class carrier in a NATO-Exercise undetected. You are not going to build a ship that is capable of taking on a 212A without any institutonal and tactical knowledge newer than the 50.
We don't build diesel-electrics like they would be probably most interested in. Something like the Russian Kilo class[1] is more in line with their needs than a Los Angeles attack sub or a boomer.
I am hoping that was the intention of the statement; not wanting to build something because of interests doesn't mean the knowledge to build it doesn't exist.
"Don't know how to build" doesn't mean we don't have the theory for building it, but there is a lot of institutional knowledge that comes from having built something several times already.
We haven't built a diesel-electric submarine in decades. Our nuclear subs are top notch, but Taiwan does not want to operate nuclear subs, it's too expensive.
"At the drafting of Article 5 in the late 1940s, there was consensus on the principle of mutual assistance, but fundamental disagreement on the modalities of implementing this commitment.
The European participants wanted to ensure that the United States would automatically come to their assistance should one of the signatories come under attack; the United States did not want to make such a pledge and obtained that this be reflected in the wording of Article 5."
Maybe. But the wording you mention[0] is generally thought to avoid having relatively minor and perhaps disputed border conflicts, such as what we're seeing now between Turkey and Syria, from dragging the entire alliance into the fight. The other members saying, in essence, that the border conflict does not threaten the security of the North Atlantic area.
But it definitely wasn't intended as a loophole to allow the U.S. and Canada to weasel out from participating in a major land war with the Soviet Union. This would have been hard to do in any case, what with having two Army corps permanently deployed in Europe during the Cold War...
[0]In italics:
The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
The deployment of forces in theatre close to a potential aggressor is a deliberate strategic process designed to ensure that the alliance will get involved politically. That is why units have been sent to the Baltic states recently. The American, Canadian or British public might not go to war for Estonia, but they will if that initial attack on Estonia involves casualties on their forward deployed forces.
The thinking is in turn that those troops therefore deter aggression because they act as their nation's guarantee of involvement. A similar principle was seen during the age of gunboat diplomacy, especially with the Pax Britannica.
> Actually those obligations are very carefully worded to allow US to weasel out of it if necessary.
The only reason the US keeps 30 000 troops so close to the DMZ in South Korea, is so that they won't be able to weasel out. Make no mistake, those boys and gals' are there as hostages.
If the DPRK decides to launch an attack, under pretty much any scenario those troops will be engaged in battle within 24h and I doubt that the US public would be okay with leaving them there to fend for themselves.
Absolutely. But (speaking in very broad terms here), the potential conflicts which would involve NATO in Europe today are dwarfed by the requirements for the Western Pacific conflicts. This may not have been the case in, say, 1985, but it is now.
There is a good reason why these all out wars are something of the past. The weaker party will always be tempted to escalate and there is no scenario where you don't end up using nuclear weapons. No one wants that, and I doubt even aggressive countries like Russia or China will take such a gamble.
I can definitely see such scenarios -- one is of course the case where the defending side is winning.
And you may be right about the gamble, hopefully you are -- but this is only true as long as we ourselves stand ready to escalate as well, and the opponents know that. It seems that part of the establishment is beginning to forget this.
No President remains in office indefinitely. Let's not dismiss the threat of an aggressive warmongering President... the potential alone could raise serious tensions.
North Korea is still actualy in a state of War with South Korea and has nuclear weapons. They are expressly committed to incorporating South Korea, a country Anerica has already fought one war to defend, under their control. Similarly China considers Taiwan part of their territory. A commitment to defend either of those has to be total in order to be at all meaningful. The slightest indication of a weakening of resolve would open space for a political and military wedge that would inevitably prize the US and its allies apart.
In contrast, in Europe there is no similar explicit and imminent territorial threat to US allies. Yes Russia makes no bones about their attitude to Ukraine, but Ukraine isn't a NATO member and the US doesn't have as clear a treaty obligation to protect it. The Russian governent are dangerous assholes, but their threat is piecemeal and opportunistic while the claims of China and the DPRK are existential.
Yes and no. France and Great Britain guaranteed Ukraine's territorial integrity, when they agreed to return the ex-soviet nuclear weapons to Russia after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Somehow, they weaseled themselves out.
Well, Russia guaranteed their territorial integrity as well but nobody saw the annexation of Crimea coming. We were caught flat footed and presented with a fait accompli. But in any case I don't think we had any military obligation under the treaty. No such excuse in SE Asia.
Ugh how so? I have a lot of issues with Obama, but just because he believes that a direct military intervention is not the best way to deal with the problem, doesn't mean that he "fist-bumped Putin".
He does see Russian antics as a threat (other than a few delusional paleocons, pretty much everyone does), but just as it was with Soviet Union, Russian greatest weakness today is economic, which is where the pressure is applied. It's not nearly as effective as it could be due to the boneheaded attitudes of a few people, but hopefully that changes soon enough...
Start with WW II up until now. Korean war, Taiwan strait crises, and the re-opening of China. Kissinger is a good story teller and has written many books. The latest is called "World Order". He lived through all of it and was involved in a lot of our foreign policy moves. He's given a few talks at Google, e.g. [1]. There are a lot of other videos of him on Youtube. He answers tough questions about state decisions, including POW's in Vietnam, for which he is often accused of being a war criminal.
The Korean War has technically not achieved a final peace, only reached an armstice [0]. There's been many incidents along the border [1], notably the Axe Murder Incident [2].
The Korean war was a conflict primarily between North Korea and China versus South Korea and the United States. However, a relative was in the CIA at the time and I have the distinct impression from them that the US was also shooting down Russian airplanes, as they were shooting down ours, in the conflict. Should conflict restart, there's no telling who would get involved again.
Taiwan has a complicated history where Japan had gotten China to cede the island in the 19th Century, then tried to leverage it to take over China during WWII, then when WWII was over and the Chinese Civil War went into full swing the losing Republic of China (which had replaced the Qing dynasty) fled millions of people to the island. The ROC government remains there governing Taiwan defacto, but the PRC considers it part of its borders in a dejure fashion. Since recognizing Taiwan as an independent nation would 100% surely anger China, the US has not done so [3]. The disparity between reality and theory has yet to be rectified and resolving it would definitely take armed conflict. This would destabilize the region and threaten a significant amount of the world's shipping [4].
> The disparity between reality and theory has yet to be rectified and resolving it would definitely take armed conflict
I'm not sure anything is definite. Neither side has made any real moves to resolve the conflict, just feints. The rest of the world seems to support easing tensions when they arise rather than exacerbating them.
Historically, neither side has made real moves and no one wants to increase tension precisely because of each side understands their opponent is still highly committed to defending their way of life. The US does not want to attempt to get China to back down because that would just anger them. And the US does not want to lose a possible ally in Taiwan in getting them to back down. China does not want to overtly bully Taiwan because it does not want US relations to degrade. So with diplomacy out, neither side wants to resort to "forceful diplomacy"/"military persuasion"/whatever newspeak. So both sides have, until recently, acted paralyzed in the status quo.
But I disagree with the "just feints" notion in present day. The nine-dash-line strategy means China is no longer acting paralyzed in the region. I'm not qualified to guess whether it is part of a long Taiwan game or something different, but I would assert it certainly is not a feint and not easing tensions.
> But I disagree with the "just feints" notion in present day
Maybe saying "feeling each other out" would be better than "feints". At any rate, that's just my perception. I'm also not qualified to say what's what.
Countries continue to trade with each other, and there are diplomatic ties between the US, China and Russia. They continue to have some common goals, in spite of some differences. I think overall that's a positive thing. I trust our leaders to decide how to deal with various strategies put forth by other countries.
History was pretty interesting and tense at times. So is the present. I believe the ties are better these days among nations than they were 40-70 years ago. Monarchies used to send family members to each other to keep the peace. We try to do the same with diplomacy where possible.
Thankfully not (or only in the way they are 100% committed to bring peace to the middle east, i.e. by providing lip service, vague promises and performing some maneuvers in the general vicinity).
Letting China occupy Taiwan is better for everyone (including the Taiwanese people) than the 3rd World War.
Heh, you're downvoted but I think that's exactly what would happen if China were to decide to annex Taiwan - everyone else would stay out of full scale military conflict.
Sure, they'd do everything else possible, like they did with Russia, but Taiwan would not be worth a war.
That is unlike South Korea and Japan, and in the case of South Korea, it would be China that would not go to full war on North Korea's side. If anything, they'd use that opportunity to get Taiwan back.
This article is one tree in a dark forest. The real problem, which underlies all the issues faced by our government, is the complete reliance on robber-baron contractors who happily enrich themselves at the public trough while working the congress to ensure that the purchasing rules keep them locked in on the path to enrichment forever.
It's good to poke holes in the need for military hardware that costs a unicorn's specious valuation, but it's not the actual problem here.
> Is that really what we need? Advanced weaponry at cheap prices?
That reminds me of the high-school math teacher who brings condoms to the class when he teaches, because he's statistically less likely to contract an STD than if he left his condoms at home. While technically he's making an optimal decision, he should really re-examine his assumptions.
On a purely temporal level: The aircraft carrier became the dominant naval warfare tech in 1942, 74 years ago. 74 years before that was just after the U.S. Civil War. I wonder how many Civil War technologies remained dominant in WWII; probably not much in the navy.
Now that is a very flawed, simplistic comparison. But it makes me wonder if aircraft carriers are obsolete and we just don't know it yet because there hasn't been a naval war since then. And it makes me wonder about other technologies, such as tanks and fighter planes. Many of the technologies used seem to be modernizations of what was used in the last large war, which ended in 1945. Did innovation stop then?
Remember how quickly things changed in around 25 years between WWI and WWII: Tanks, planes, and aircraft carriers, to name a few, either didn't exist or were insignificant in WWI, and WWII ended with bombers dropping nuclear weapons (another platform and strategy still in use today).
Civil War technologies that persisted to WW2 and beyond: the rifle, trench warfare, howitzers, battlefield surgery.
I agree in general with the article (the tl;dr being that carriers are extremely vulnerable to asymmetrically small threats). It omits the reason the U.S. Navy employs them in the first place: force projection.
Without a carrier group, an overseas nation has no credible opportunity to bombard a far away theater, engage in air sorties, land troops, or any other expeditionary action.
Defense of carriers is a problem that must be solved, or the U.S. would have to accept a military stalemate for naval warfare. This has serious strategic, diplomatic, and economic consequences. Many countries' posturing depends on the U.S. Navy's implied or explicit protection.
> Without a carrier group, an overseas nation has no credible opportunity to bombard a far away theater, engage in air sorties, land troops, or any other expeditionary action. ... Defense of carriers is a problem that must be solved, or the U.S. would have to accept a military stalemate for naval warfare.
That might be lacking in vision. The aircraft carrier is the current means, but nations have engaged in overseas expeditionary actions before and without aircraft carriers. Just because the current solution might no longer be available doesn't mean there is no solution.
Arial bombardment is tougher without carriers, of course, but the U.S. bombed Iraq and Afghan targets using planes that took off and landed in the U.S. And the most likely solution there is missiles, which have become exceptionally accurate and which many think will dominate future battlefields.
Finally, whether or not we feel the carriers are essential, if they are ineffective on the battlefield then another solution will need to be found. Necessity is the mother of invention.
> Arial bombardment is tougher without carriers, of course, but the U.S. bombed Iraq and Afghan targets using planes that took off and landed in the U.S.
The B-2 bomber flew from Missouri, bombed the targets, landed on a British island in the Indian Ocean (Diego Garcia) to swap out pilots with the engines still running, then flew home. I'm sure it did aerial refueling along the way too. Basically, the only limit is sleepy pilots with sore butts.
At least one of the times, it visted an airshow along the way WHILE LOADED WITH BOMBS. This was the Air and Sea show, viewed from the beach in Fort Lauderdale, FL. I was there. For such a huge plane, it really is stunningly quiet. Most spectators didn't even notice until the plane was almost in front of the beach.
Here's a B-2 that bombed Libya on a round-trip from Missouri. [1]
Of course, doing it this way requires airborne refueling. Lots of airborne refueling. And if you thought the military paid a lot for jet fuel on the ground, wait until you see the markup for providing it in the air.
In air refueling lets counties drop bombs on the other side of the planet. Aircraft carriers are cheaper but that assumes they are not sitting ducks and we can't find a friendly airfield somewhere.
Airfields are the quintessential sitting ducks: high value targets with have a fixed position that could have coordinates recorded long in advance of any action.
An carrier on the other hand is a thousand foot runway that can move at 56 km/hr.
however, airfields are also vastly cheaper to build and maintain, and if they do get "destroyed" they can be rebuilt or replaced (possibly elsewhere) pretty quickly. in comparison to hitting a multi-billion dollar carrier so hard it's destroyed or taken out of service. In a hot war between China and the US, I'd bet China could rebuild/replace airfields faster than the US can rebuild/replace their carriers.
On a related note, I submit that this very issue is why the US and its allies are so against the Chinese trying to build up those little artificial islands, harbors and airfields, in those disputed waters. Not only does it allow China to project force out to greater ranges, with more overlap, and gives them more options in a shooting war, it also gives them more experience in building them up, and learning how to do it better and faster.
And it sends a signal to all the nations in the region, at least as an implied threat. It tells all the nearby nations, and the US, to think very very carefully about whether they want to get in a shooting war with China, whether over Taiwan or Korea, etc. Because while the US might have some very powerful toys in the theater, very modern and sophisticated, they are also very very expensive, and far from home, unlike the Chinese forces, and can easily be outnumbered. They can be attacked from increasingly shorter ranges, and whatever losses the Chinese do take, their losses will be cheaper and faster to replace than the American losses in theater.
Moving is not a major defense if your easy to find, in modern warfare satellites for example are sitting ducks. As the article points out aircraft carriers are like battleships right before WWII. They have been drastically improved, but are untested vs modern weapons.
So sure, if the enemy can't easily sink all your aircraft carriers then they are a great option. Sadly, I don't think that's anywhere close to proven.
> Moving is not a major defense if your easy to find
Based on practitioners and experts I've read, finding ships is very difficult. The ocean is a huge place; remember there's far more ocean than land area. Imagine if you were told that somewhere in North America there's an object the size of an aircraft carrier, and it's moving around. How hard would it be to find it? The Pacific is much larger (though if there's a war over a contested location, the search area becomes much smaller).
Also, there are not nearly enough resources to watch the whole ocean at once. The U.S. military can't even monitor all of Afghanistan, or even all of contested regions in Afghanistan.
Aircraft carriers use active radar which makes them really easy to find. It's much closer to locating Iowa in the middle of the ocean than a boat. And once you locate one they can't really hide very well.
In-air refueling for intercontinental missions really only works for bombers. Having a fighter jock in-cockpit from the mainland US to Afghanistan is a complete non-starter, in terms of time, fuel cost, and amount of force projected over time or fuel-cost.
The plane:payload ratio for a fighter is deplorably small, relative to a bomber. And you'd be dealing with a pilot that's probably slept like crap en-route, and suffering the consequences of that in terms of reaction speed and cognitive deficits when he gets on-station. Just no.
Yep. I'm saying it's mostly a bad idea, and that we really should have carriers.
That said, the capability ought to exist. Even if never used in war, the mere threat of the capability is beneficial. It's also usable to move aircraft around, for aircraft sales and to move aircraft closer to an expected future battle.
"drone mode" sounds interesting, are there already systems that let planes that otherwise require humans be flown on autopilot to the next airbase? I imagine that would make deployments much easier.
The other issue is tactical air support. Bombers make sense if you are talking about a preplanned target up to 12 hours, or whatever, in advance. If you have to plan an airstrike 12 hours ahead, and you're on the ground getting beat up right now it turns into a big problem.
> Aircraft carriers are cheaper but that assumes they are not sitting ducks and we can't find a friendly airfield somewhere.
This is probably incredibly naïve but wouldn't it help us get a "friendly" airfield if we could say something like "you can allow us to use your airfield or we will move in our ships in N hours anyway". Am I missing something here?
It's not naive at all. The stakes might have to be high before the U.S. engages in that kind of coercion, but even that's not necessarily true and it's hardly unprecedented for the U.S. to throw its weight around. And the U.S. has other means of persuasion such as aid, access to the largest market in the world, the power to facilitate or stop other diplomatic, economic or political priorities, etc. etc.
One announced U.S. strategy in the Pacific is to spread forces widely rather than concentrate them, and to utilize bases of friendly nations (who don't need U.S. coercion these days with the Chinese government coercing them right into America's arms). The U.S. recently made such agreements with Australia, The Philippines, Vietnam, and Singapore, and of course has long-standing bases in Japan and South Korea. Indonesia is almost the only major nation left in the region who isn't on board.
Are you suggesting that it is acceptable to force neutral parties into a war? Or are you trying to negotiate with your enemies for the right to bomb them? I'm not sure I say any reasonable interpretation of that proposal.
It's been done many times. The UK grabbed Iceland in WWII, providing a base for transfer of US aircraft. Germany took a trip through Belgium and got the Swiss to allow trains through.
When things get serious, thoughts like "I would never do such a thing!" are quickly cast aside.
Sort of - the Danish Government in exile was in London and at that time Iceland was still controlled by Denmark. But yes, "Needs Must" as the saying goes.
Air refueling tankers are likely really easy targets to hit and don't scale for large bombing fleets, close air support, or other applications for naval aviation.
Yes, that friendly airfield assumption is one main point of the aircraft carrier.
> I wonder how many Civil War technologies remained dominant in WWII; probably not much in the navy.
The US civil war was not a particularly maritime war, so indeed not much in the navy.
But that war pioneered two interesting logistical elements: first, it was the first war to permit rapid movement of material via rail (a surprising amount of rail was constructed during the war). Second is that it was the first economy vs economy war.
By and large the Europeans ignored the lesson, because they figured the details of what was going on in the US just weren't that interesting (big mistake). WWI was an economy-vs-economy and rail war (one problem is that both sides built rail heads to their fronts, so if they could move forward they couldn't supply their new front while the enemy could). The only European power that paid attention was Russia who therefore chose another rail gauge.
WWII was economy-vs-economy on a global scale: the US poured huge sums (mostly in kind) into the UK & the Soviet Union so Germany had to battle a large economy on both sides. In the Pacific the trigger for Pearl Harbor was the US cutting off Japanese access to raw materials (what are bizarrely called "sanctions" today) in the hope of ending prior Japanese aggression in Korea and Manchuria: again, economic struggle.
Big Napoleonic set piece field battles and ship-of-the-line battles appear to have faded into history, but most of the military spending in the US, Russia and China seems to continue to focus on that obsolete model. These carriers and attack subs aren't that useful in the asymmetric fronts we have today.
By the way another good lesson was the American Revolution, which was mostly won via lobbying/payments in Whitehall. Both sides have conveniently ignored that for their own political reasons :-)
>>But that war pioneered two interesting logistical elements: first, it was the first war to permit rapid movement of material via rail (a surprising amount of rail was constructed during the war). Second is that it was the first economy vs economy war.
By and large the Europeans ignored the lesson, because they figured the details of what was going on in the US just weren't that interesting (big mistake).
Is basically all wrong.
The Crimean war was fought before the American civil war and contained all these modern elements and was in many ways the first WW1 style war.
Before WW1 two majors wars were fought in Europe, the Austro-Prussian war and the Franco-Prussian war which pretty much set the stage for WW1.
The crimean war was indeed quite an industrialized war, used rail, and was a siege war; but personally I don't see it of the same magnitude as the us civil war (but there's no need to have a long argument about in in the HN comments!). I'll just say that the magnitude was _significantly_ lower than USCW and WWI; certainly it was not total war economy-vs-economy -- if best it was one of the first modern technology-vs-technology wars (I assume that was also a factor in the iron/bronze age, and in the colonial wars too).
But to paraphrase Stalin, magnitude has a quality all its own. Which is why I don't consider the brief Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars, while of incredible political significance, to be of great significance in the discussion I raised. Neither mobilized an entire economy much less both sides'.
(Big exception to what I just wrote: they did prove the value of the Prussian General Staff model).
Disclaimer: I do have a degree in European military history, but my scholarship, for what little it might be worth, is over 30 years out of date.
>In the Pacific the trigger for Pearl Harbor was the US cutting off Japanese access to raw materials (what are bizarrely called "sanctions" today) in the hope of ending prior Japanese aggression in Korea and Manchuria: again, economic struggle.
Building on your point about WWII being economy Vs economy and the economic underpinnings of the war in the Pacific, I have a memory of reading a similarly economics-centric analysis of the start of the war in Europe. I do not have a link but from memory Germany had insufficient farmland relative to its population and little access to important resources, especially oil. This set them up to be dependent on their neighbors indefinitely, neighbors who could turn off the food/oil tap at any time. That was not an appealing idea to the Nazis.
Not sure how well accepted that theory is or isn't but it certainly seems to hold a lot more credence than "the war in Europe started because Hitler."
> Not sure how well accepted that theory is or isn't but it certainly seems to hold a lot more credence than "the war in Europe started because Hitler."
I've read a lot of WWII history. Especially focused on the ETO and Germany. In my mind, it seems beyond clear that Hitler was the reason that war broke out, the single prime key motivating force, his desires, his influence, his decisions, his cult of personality, his charisma, his quirks, his obsessions, etc. He existed and acted within a framework of other facts, within a certain context, and there were plenty of others who failed to act against him, enough, early enough, when it would have been more effective. But I've been confident of the "because Hitler" idea for a long time.
If you can point me at a history book or analysis which you think contradicts that, definitely share it with me, I always love to learn different angles. If I were to give you just one that aligns with "because Hitler" I'd recommend Shirer's Rise & Fall.
I haven't read as much on the topic as you, but I've always heard that WWII was effectively a continuation of WWI; the root cause being the punitive measures in the Treaty of Versailles.
I'd therefore assumed that Hitler was just a product of the era and there was a certain inevitability to WWII.
In many ways yes, it was one long war from 1870-1945 that flashed very hot a few times.
I've never been a fan of the "great man" view of history -- easy to teach but barely illustrative -- but there is no question our actions have consequences. The importance of taking the large view is that you can see the larger forces that someone can harness (or that can thwart them). But the claim "if not Julius/Napoleon/Hitler than someone else" is at best hard to prove -- what someone else did would have been quite different. Most likely it would instead have been the usual muddle -- the default state is muddle, with from time to time some demagogue able to weave some strands together and cause general excitement.
This is no different from, say, science. What would Newton have done had he been born 100 years later, or earlier, or 1000 miles east? On the other hand it's easy to see that if he'd not been born we'd have much of the same physics as today.
You're spot on, but it actually didn't start with the Nazis; Hitler just adopted it as part of his foreign policy (I believe he even writes about it in Mein Kampf although I haven't looked it up). The official name for this philosophy is Lebensraum [1] and it's widely recognized as having started in the late 19th century, decades before WWI errupted, when Germany had a growth spurt and started to feel the pain of over population. However, how much Lebensraum had to do with the first war is unclear, since the Princip/Ferdinand situation was the huge spark that started it. That said, there was a whole plan assembled during WWI based on it called Septemberprogramm [2] with the goal of expanding German territory for resources.
I would hope that theory is accepted because it is what actually happened. The Nazis planned to exterminate all of the Slavs and use their land for growing food (Lebensraum and Generalplan Ost), and the Caucasus for oil.
The former goal failed thanks to the Soviets putting up a good fight, the huge size of Russia, and bad weather. The latter because Hitler really wanted to defeat the Soviets at a city named after Stalin instead of just driving past it. He wasted his entire invasion force (~800,000 casualties) when the Soviets encircled and destroyed it.
The Soviet commander in charge of the defense of Stalingrad, Zhukov, escaped Stalin's purges because he was stationed in the middle of nowhere, and soundly defeated the Japanese in Mongolia when they tried to invade in 1939. Japan gave up it's plans to invade the USSR for resources (permanently, as communicated by the spy Sorge, which allowed USSR to transfer all of their soldiers to the European front), and instead invade European colonies instead, which directly led to Pearl Harbor.
Germany's interest in certain land masses was based in oil, but that was only one of a suite of rationales. Given the basic nature of the Nazis as a group, it's not likely that was the only reason.
WRT Japan, this was called an embargo in response to the Rape of Nanking.
Ship-of-the-line has faded, but fleet-in-being was invented(?) around battle of Jutland and has remained important aspect to stifle the enemy from maritime trade.
Another good counter argument is that there were lots of wars between the US Civil War and World War II between first-class opponents of relatively similar capabilities, including both of those conflicts, World War I, the Franco-Prussian and Russo-Japanese wars. Since World War II, only arguably has the Korean War pitted two relatively equal foes against each other, and even then China had a huge advantage in manpower while the UN forces had a huge technological advantage.
If the NBA was dissolved and Golden State periodically faced college teams, 75 years from now they would probably still have a small-ball 3-point-shooting lineup. That's the state of military doctrine today. Outright defeating a nearly-equal opponent is impossible in the nuclear age, so the only remaining problem is how to curb-stomp much weaker opponents as humanely as possible.
Also in between the time period you mention, and arguably still true today is the varying tactics that are used in war even with opponents of equal numbers of forces/capabilities on paper. If one side couldn't sufficiently protect its population (economy), that could be used to coerce an end on favorable terms to the other side.
>Outright defeating a nearly-equal opponent is impossible in the nuclear age, so the only remaining problem is how to curb-stomp much weaker opponents as humanely as possible.
I think this is true as of today, but I don't know if this will remain true in the future because people will still seek out the ability to apply asymmetric means on another all else being equal, in ways that would probably be hard to combat.
However, such would depend on how one defines what such outright defeat would look like and I posit that the closer that one defines that with something that doesn't look like what usually is conjured up in minds when war is brought up, the more successful one is probably going to be (assuming one would want wage war to achieve some ends and is open to the option of winning such without leaving any trail of bodies in the wake).
Not a question for you, but for everyone who's interested, but what would outright defeat look like in the cyber-warfare today and tomorrow as the domain considered to be cyberspace continually expands to compose how we relate with one another and the world, where there will be economic incentive to place nanomachines in living organisms (things that "we" are doing now in research labs) that can communicate/execute complex logic manifested in the behavior of said organisms orders of magnitude faster than humans can even perceive (and have a really hard time even finding/observing now with the most expensive of equipment)?
> : The aircraft carrier became the dominant naval warfare tech in 1942, 74 years ago. 74 years before that was just after the U.S. Civil War. I wonder how many Civil War technologies remained dominant in WWII; probably not much in the navy.
Fighter planes are that old too. And machine guns, and grenades, and even night vision goggles. But the aircraft carrier of today is very different from the aircraft carriers of WW2, and so is the rest of that equipment. Except the grenade.
The M2 50-calibre machine gun is still very heavily used by the US Army and the US Navy and is a WW II-era design. In fact, I think a lot of the M2 currently in use were manufactured during WW II.
Carriers are obsolete, but very few nations can field the weaponry needed to kill one reliably.
> And it makes me wonder about other technologies, such as tanks
In the current, more urban, modern war, tanks were actually demonstrated to be pretty useless. I once spoke to a veteran of the Iraq war who mentioned the thousands of tanks in country sitting useless because they couldn't really be used in a city. Turrets too long, too slow, too easy to disable, big slow moving metal boxes.
The military tried to use Bradleys instead, but they were also far too slow and prone to ambush. Thousands also sat mostly unused.
The workhorse for years was the so called "uparmored" Humvee (HMMWV), a beast totally unsuited to its task, but just about fast enough, and just about able to be A-Team MacGuyvered into a suitable urban assault rig.
The "big armor" was the Stryker, which was designed to be armored, armed and fast. But by the end of the war was surrounded in anti-RPG cages so wide they could barely fit down a major road. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/Stryker_...
However, all of these were fairly useless against IEDs and nobody quite knows what the next workhorse armored vehicle is going to be, but I believe they're probably going to be something out of the MRAP program.
The Humvee is being replaced by 2 or 3 purpose built vehicles.
Important to this is that all of the vehicles are built using lessons learned during a very long, mostly urban war. The next time a war starts out in vast open plains, the tanks will probably come into their own again, but to be honest, lots of their mission has been taken over by a variety of flying platforms that can deliver payload more reliably and at less risk.
>But it makes me wonder if aircraft carriers are obsolete
It is not quite the same as being obsolete but I suspect that they are far more vulnerable than we realize. Every day missiles get both technically better (faster, longer range, harder to detect) but also cheaper making it more affordable for someone to acquire ever larger stockpiles of them for deployment en masse.
Meanwhile developing countermeasures that can deal with barrages of incoming missiles that are getting progressively more numerous and faster seems like a very difficult, expensive proposition.
> it makes me wonder if aircraft carriers are obsolete and we just don't know it yet because there hasn't been a naval war since then.
Aircraft carriers probably made the difference in the Falklands war.
> Tanks, planes, and aircraft carriers, to name a few, either didn't exist or were insignificant in WWI
Tanks played a critical role in the closing years of WWI. Planes were significant (though for reconnaissance rather than attack).
> WWII ended with bombers dropping nuclear weapons (another platform and strategy still in use today).
Bombers dropping nuclear weapons is barely a strategy that exists today. Some countries retain the capability because if you already have a heavy bomber and a nuclear warhead it doesn't cost a whole lot to make them compatible with each other, but the only serious delivery mechanisms for nuclear weapons are missiles.
>the only serious delivery mechanisms for nuclear weapons are missiles.
And merchant ships docked in your enemy's ports. And trucks.
And terrorists.
WWIII will start as a cyberwar. Western systems of all kinds are insanely vulnerable to cyberattack.
You may not be able to force a Western country to surrender by bringing down its banking and civilian comms systems, but you can certainly make it much less able to fight any other kind of war.
True - although I've also seen soldiers claim that full-size carriers would have been much more useful, and perhaps that the invasion would not have happened if Britain had still been operating the Ark Royal.
(Most immediately the sinking of HMS Sheffield might have gone quite differently if the British had been capable of operating fixed-wing AWACS)
I agree that aircraft carriers, tanks, and fighter planes are obsolete in some sense. They fit badly with todays conflicts.
Thankfully many engineers don't want to work with innovation in this space. We don't have the global notion in society of competing for resources required for survival against other nations anymore, which would have been a strong motivator in the past.
The theory of international relations still maintain that diplomacy between nations is essentially anarchy. The reason why the seven seas are so peaceful today is that the top dog (U.S.) has been favorable to free trade.
The reason why regular citizen doesn't have that "global notion of society competing for resources" is twofold: A free trade works. B pax Americana related propaganda has been broadcasted for what, 7 decades now.
During the Falklands war, we didn't have very good naval SAMs worth tuppence - the obsolete Sea Slug, and the then-modern Sea Dart, which still wasn't all that good: 40 mile range, can't hit anything below 30 metres altitude, such as sea-skimming missiles, or even low-flying aircraft.
We now have Aster 30, which has a range of 120 miles, and can hit supersonic sea-skimmers, ballistic missiles, anything you like.
Those ranges are still much shorter than the ~500 mile combat radius of a Sea Harrier or an F-35B, admittedly. But since destroyers are a third the price of a carrier, you can have several and spread them out.
Have to go back about another 100 years before the American Civil War for military useage of submarines.
Also, rifled bullets/artillery shells, breech loading rifles, cartriges and semi automatic (repeating) rifles first came in mass use during the American Civil War. Trench/defensive warfare was also adopted towards the end of the war for some of the major seiges (Petersburg for example).
There's other examples I could list, but I would say it's an understatement to say that the only direct use of 18th to 19th Century weaponary we still use to day is subs.
Trench warfare well pre-dates the US civil war. They were used at least as far back as the War of the Spanish Succession (1700s). The Maori also used trenches when fighting against the British, two decades before the US civil war.
Vauban [0] designed his first handbook for trench warfare after the Siege of Maastricht in 1673. Prior to that, siege mining and sapping had been used by Rome and Warring States China since about the 4th century BCE. This also marked the first purported use of poison gas in warfare, when the tunnels were intentionally filled with smoke.
The problem is that the same massive range of area denial weapons and cruise missiles also puts fixed assets such as airstrips and bases as far as Guam in jeopardy of attack. Thus there is the problem of how do you get platforms capable of delivering payloads onto your adversary.
Carrier's are efficient at that. Unlike fixed bases, they're far more difficult to track and hit. They can launch a large number of aircraft which can hit a larger number of targets with stand off munitions. Drones can be used to delivery, although it is worth noting that most modern cruise missiles effectively are drones themselves with a several hundred pound warhead.
The author completely ignores China's increasingly sophisticated anti-submarine underwater listening network. Just how stealthy are our submarines in comparison to the detection capability of a potential adversary? Furthermore how long with a submarine stay hidden after launching a cruise missile attack? If we're to assume that the range places it within the sphere of A2/AD then it would be just as vulnerable as a surface ship after attacking.
Which then begs the question of how do you deliver payloads? You could opt to instead rely on munitions which can be launched for farther away, but such munitions certainly would be more costly. I would think that the optimal solution in respect to limited resources would be some mix of long range munitions to counter area denial capability followed by the deployment of shorter ranged assets.
But that's just my 5cent as an enthusiast who doesn't actually have any professional experience in the matter. Although from what I read about the author, it appears we're on similar footing in that regard.
》 The author completely ignores China's increasingly sophisticated anti-submarine underwater listening network. Just how stealthy are our submarines in comparison to the detection capability of a potential adversary?
Our nuclear submarines would probably be easily tracked with their "listening network" (I don't know anything about it) but diesel-electric submarines, which seem to be making a resurgence although not with the pro-nuclear forces in the navy, are far quieter and harder to detect. Combine that with the sound matting being develop for next gen subs and/or titanium hulls like Russia used to make, and you've got a very formidable submarine capable of high speed travel which will be very hard to detect with passive or active sonar.
Passive, maybe, but active? I'm skeptical that there's any submarine in the world which can avoid active sonar. Further more the difference between a nuclear and diesel electric submarine's noise level would likely quickly be overcome by the resulting low frequency noises produced by the propeller at high speeds.
For example the Russian Alfas class were so loud when they were going top speed that US listening posts across the atlantic could hear them.
Diesels are used only when the ship recharges batteries. When the sub is underwater, they can run very silently and be completely silent when they stop.
Nuclear subs generate noise and vibration from the steam turbines, pipes etc. that can't be completely eliminated.
> When the sub is underwater, they can run very silently and be completely silent when they stop.
True, but diesel boats normally run on the surface, and on diesel, because battery life is limited; they generally submerge only to run an attack or to escape an attacker (or briefly at dawn, in case there's an unpleasant surprise out there that wasn't picked up). That's why nuclear submarines were once referred to as the first true submarines, as opposed to mere submersibles.
Modern air independent propulsion equipped diesel electric submarines have underwater endurance for several weeks. Even if they sprint full speed non-stop they could stay submerged several days.
Another uninformed article from warisboring. At least in this one they don't laughably assert the first ever air attack on a battleship happened at Pearl Harbor.
Unless I'm Googling the wrong David W. Wise, the author has never been in uniform and has no actual expertise in naval affairs. Most of the points in the article are regurgitations of dubious headlines ("CBG Never Detects Chinese Sub!"), and x vs y comparisons that don't make sense in isolation.
There is, though, a valid question buried in all the war nerd theorizing - what is it, exactly, Americans want their navy to do? Do we still expect to be able to fight a two front war against well armed adversaries? Now that the cold war is over, does it make sense to have alliances in Asia that require large force projection?
>Yes, even more now that China is likely to become a 'peer' threat.
Eh... why? In 1950, with the Soviets bankrolling rebel groups and invasions all over the world you could make the argument countries needed alliances to counterbalance the threat. But today... is it really unreasonable to expect wealthy countries like Japan and Korea to see to their own defense?
While I agree at some point China is likely to be just as strong, militarily, as the US, I don't see a compelling US interest in using warships to defend, say, Japan's claim to groups of uninhabited islands in the middle of the South China Sea.
To paraphrase Pournelle, I'm happy to be a friend of freedom everywhere, but a guarantor only of my own.
The problem is that if you don't guarantee the freedom of Taiwan and, more importantly, Japan, those countries may decide that the safer thing to do is to switch sides rather than fight alone. Then you are not facing a peer threat, you are facing a coalition that can plausibly threaten to cut off your naval access in the Western Pacific.
Switch to what side? If we're not at war with China, what does it even mean for Taiwan to "switch sides"? More fundamentally, if we don't have declared interests in the South China Sea area, why would we even consider going to war with China. Let them deal with the Norks.
In terms of access to the Western Pacific, all the sorts of threats faced by a US fleet would be faced by a Chinese fleet attempting to operate outside the range of Chinese land-based aircraft. The least useful role for carriers is anti-surface warfare, and if the goal is just to keep the sea lanes open we don't need them. A dozen modern submarines could play hell with any country's ability to maintain trading routes.
That is a bit naive. You may think countries don't "switch sides" but take a look at Europe after 1989. East Germany joined West Germany and look what happened to Russian influence over Poland and the Baltic States.
If Japan and Taiwan allowed China to base its navy or air force on their territory, the US navy would effectively be pushed back to Hawaii. If China chose to threaten Vietnam, South Korea, Australia.. there would not be much we could do about it.
>If Japan and Taiwan allowed China to base its navy or air force on their territory, the US navy would effectively be pushed back to Hawaii.
Yes, and...? If they're happy with China guaranteeing their security, then I don't see the big problem. As to the other countries... how is this my problem? Did we help Vietnam the last time China invaded in 1979? Is first-world island nation Australia incapable of defending itself?
> If they're happy with China guaranteeing their security, then I don't see the big problem
China does not guarantee their security or offer to, and they wouldn't be happy with it. In contrast, the U.S. has treaties to defend them, on which they heavily rely and which have maintained peace in the region for over 50 years.
> While I agree at some point China is likely to be just as strong, militarily, as the US, I don't see a compelling US interest in using warships to defend, say, Japan's claim to groups of uninhabited islands in the middle of the South China Sea.
I think we both know that we are re-enacting the classic debate between isolationists and those who want to be more engaged. I think your questions are important - the U.S. shouldn't follow these policies out of inertia - but I think there are very good answers:
* Japan and S. Korea can't protect themselves against China. They can today, but not in 10-20 years, and geopolitics moves very slowly: What happens now determines the outcomes in 10 years and 100 years. As one example, what happened way back in the 1940s and 50s determines those future outcomes: That's why the U.S. now has bases in S. Korea, Japan, and all the Pacific islands. 19th century events may figure even larger: The U.S. became a Pacific power, and China's encounters with the West resulted in a semi-independent city in China's south (Hong Kong), in much of China's current distrust of the West, in the rise of Communism in China, allowed Japan and Korea to become major independent powers (instead of weak tributary states to China), resulted in Russia having more southern Pacific ports, etc. etc.
* It's widely believed that if the U.S. doesn't guarantee security in the western Pacific, chaos and war will break out. The nations there don't trust each other at all, but they (sufficiently) trust the U.S. and they trust U.S. power to maintain order. If they become concerned they are trapped in an anarchic environment with enemies, with their existence at stake and no means of restoring order, they will arm up and attack before they are attacked, etc. Not only would that cost millions upon millions of lives and trillions of dollars, but in the heart of the world's biggest and fastest-growing economic region it would create a world-wide economic calamity.
* Finally, it costs much less to influence events abroad than to live in a Chinese-dominated world. If China belligerence isn't stopped there, it could easily spread further, and then rolling it back would be almost impossible. In addition, Americans and the West are accustomed to living in a world where they write the rules and establish the norms - so accustomed, many Americans don't even realize it. Living in a world led or dominated by a Communist dictatorship would be a very unhappy experience.
> To paraphrase Pournelle, I'm happy to be a friend of freedom everywhere, but a guarantor only of my own.
Personally, I don't like this statement at all. Everyone believes in freedom for themselves; IMHO, the word hardly means anything in that context. Freedom, to be meaningful, almost necessarily means freedom for others.
(And I'd add that if everyone else had that attitude then nobody would have freedom. The U.S. wouldn't be able to make it on its own; if it doesn't help others, then nobody will help it.)
Historically China has fought wars over its borders, there is no obvious reason why they should switch to a US style expeditionary military with world wide ambitions. That the contested islands are uninhabited in that well populated part of the world should tell you enough about the conflict: it is a local squabble over potential resources, decide it in an international court all parties can agree on and stop using it as a reason to wave your carrier dicks around.
Chinese nationalism is based on its historical heritage more than anything else, and certainly is not likely to invade Iraq over rumours of WMD any of these days, nor trash Panama city after breaking up with a Noriega equivalent.
> decide it in an international court all parties can agree on
An international court is about to rule on a dispute between the Philippines and China. China has said ahead of time that it will ignore the court's ruling and furthermore, AFAIK, will accept no outside authority. They insist it's only between them and the Philippines - a 'negotiation' that the Chinese can dominate through sheer power and coercion.
> there is no obvious reason why they should switch to a US style expeditionary military with world wide ambitions.
There are many obvious reasons: China has global interests and therefore needs global power, and desires to be the world's dominant power. Regardless of the reasoning, it's already happening:
* China has become highly aggressive and is threatening many of its neighbors and their territories, including Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, India, and South Korea (indirectly via their ally in North Korea). They also threaten the United States and other nations from Europe to Africa to Australia with retaliation if China's wishes aren't complied with.
* China already is building military infrastructure from Djibouti in the Horn of Africa to the Indian Ocean (the 'String of Pearls' bases) to the South China Sea.
* China is building economic infrastructure (which can have as much influence as military) throughout Eurasia (Silk Road), Africa, and even the Americas.
>Historically China has fought wars over its borders, there is no obvious reason why they should switch to a US style expeditionary military with world wide ambitions.
Historically China has been too weak to do anything but fight over its borders. There's nothing special about the Chinese character that would lead one to be comfortable assuming China won't become expansionist when it has the capability.
You're right, expansionism is not specific to Chinese character, nor is it specific to westerners. It's a human quality.
Everyone wants to be safe at home. People want friendly neighbors. If neighbors declare themselves as enemies, you prepare for a fight. Diplomacy is useful. Nations can become friends by seeking common objectives.
America wasn't born as 50 states, the EU was recently formed, Russia has grown and shrunk and grown, and the same goes for China. The same metaphor works for your home or your body. Be good to various parts of it and the whole will be more capable. You can remove a gangrenous foot, or do your best to care for your body. Everyone dies. Life is a journey.
What the US wants to be able to do is clear. Prevent an invasion of Taiwan and cut off China's naval trade in a conventional war. Since the US is never going to fight a land war with China, they need to be able to impose a blockade. Otherwise, what can the US really threaten to do in a conventional war?
Seems to me, all the countries capable of taking out US carriers are powerful enough that if a war actually broke out, it's the sort of end of the world scenario where losing a few boats will be the least of our worries. When the nukes start flying, who cares how many knights each side had?
The carriers are for suppressing the parts of the world who are incapable of threatening them. Most of the military is completely irrelevant if there's ever another world scale conflict.
Ah, but there's the rub. If you have nukes and your opponent has nukes, and your opponent tells you they will use their nukes if you use yours, when do you use your nukes?
Probably to prevent core territorial incursion to the extent it would dissolve you as a viable entity. But to protect / secure the South China Sea? To win a proxy war in the Middle East? Where's the line?
Because it's certainly not "as soon as hostilities break out."
If there ever was a major war between civilized nuclear powers, and it didn't immediately go nuclear, we might end up with a weird sort of gentleman's agreement where it's accepted to fire nukes into your own country (at invading enemy forces) but not at another country.
I can see that being an evolutionarily stable strategy.
I would think that a cold war situation is far more likely. No reason to use nukes in your own territory, many very good reasons to not use nukes at all. So long as the early warning systems (i.e. satellites) are still in place we will probably assume that the other side would rather avoid irradiating their own territory and prefer other aggressive tactics.
My extremely boiled down version of the MAD calculus was that one was only required to use nuclear weapons if one's capability to use sufficient nuclear weapons at some future point in time were being lost.
Hence the Cuban missile crisis being such a big deal.
Fascinating analysis, that the authors sort of rebuffed at one point. Carriers are there to project power.
China may have catamaran missile boats and Sovremmry destroyers, but guess what? Those ships won't be operating far from Chinese coastal waters. Those "obsolete" carrier battle groups can operate virtually anywhere on the coast of any ocean. And they'll be able to deploy whatever mix of manned and unmanned aircraft they need to.
Sunk by who how and with what? everything you said is pure speculation armchair analysis. Carriers project power. end of story. If Russia had carriers and we didn't they would be on the east coast projecting-their-power.
Were carriers truly obsolete then why is china rapidly building it's own? It already has been building forward operating bases in the South China sea. Why invest in building a new class of ship which they have only recently operated if it was already obsolete.
It’s not hard to come up with quotes from the Chinese showing how much this carrier has to do with national pride instead of military usefulness:
“Building aircraft carriers is a symbol of an important nation. It is very necessary,” the China Daily paper quoted Admiral Hu Yanlin as saying earlier this month. “China has the capability to build aircraft carriers and should do so,” he said.
If you’re used to reading through DoD propaganda, no matter what country it’s coming from, you see what the admiral is saying here. Here’s my loose translation of what Admiral Hu is getting at: “We don’t actually need a carrier, but it’s part of being one of the big boys so we have to do it, like paying for your kid’s wedding. So we’ll turn out a few of them, but we’re only going to do it when it’s cheap and doesn’t interfere with production of real weapons like the DF-21.”
They may say that, but I cannot fathom building a fully functioning carrier to be cheap by any measure. Chinese planners cannot possible expect for their artificial islands to last long in a conflict. They would be very vulnerable targets for cruise missile strikes from the Philippines, or Vietnam. So long as air power will play a significant part in warfare platforms to bring airpower where ever needed too will play a part.
Note that there is one Chinese carrier in use[0] and it was actually purchased to use as a floating casino[1] for ~$20M (plus refit costs of course). We aren't talking Ford class money here. I do believe they are building more, but it isn't exactly clear how sophisticated they are. There are many theories that they are just building them to make the US and India waste money on building their own.
So long as air power will play a significant part in warfare platforms to bring airpower where ever needed too will play a part.
If we are talking about a potential South China Sea conflict, then it's all in range of Chinese planes flying off Hainan.
If we are talking more broadly, then I think you'll find that the Chinese idea of world power does not involve force projection the way the US understands it.
One would note that India spent $2.3 Billion on INS Vikramaditya[1], which was also an ex-Soviet aircraft carrier, of roughly similar vintage. It was fitted out though, so the comparison isn't entirely fair.
As I understand it, back in the 80s US carriers were regularly destroyed in joint naval exercises with Australia by diesel submarines (inexpensive ones of the kind owned by all of our enemies). They're very quiet when running on batteries. The US navy would respond by changing the "rules" so that the ships were not considered sunk — I imagine in much the same way that the Japanese navy brass changed the rules after cadets sank their fleet in wargames played in their preparations for Midway.
Putting so many eggs in one basket is scary at the best of times, but the US carrier fleet is the worst of all worlds — hugely symbolic and stupendous sunk cost (no pun intended). Not only are they ridiculously expensive in and of themselves, virtually everything else in the Navy (and thanks to the F35, the air Force) is constrained by its role being defined in terms of how it functions as part of a carrier task force.
This isn't just a navy problem, it's a defense and foreign policy problem, and a fiscal disaster.
Supercarriers are good value for money compared to fighter jets or submarines.
The three new Ford class carriers will cost around $30 billion total. Compared to the estimated 1 trillion spent on the F-35 that's peanuts. Virginia class attack subs are 2.6 billion each, and the US navy wants 50 of them.
> Supercarriers are good value for money compared to fighter jets
Good value? You're comparing the cost of Tennis rackets to tennis balls, which is irrelevant. We either buy both, or neither.
As for your arithmetic regarding carriers and subs, that flies in the face of the article. The Ford is now (2015 at time of writing) at $14.5B, and is late. To expect that the Navy delivers 3 of those, for just $15B more.... not realistic.
The value of the subs is that they are not vulnerable.
According to the article.
Former US Navy submarine officer here. It is very difficult to attack/destroy a submarine. And it's pretty easy for submarines to attack/kill surface fleets. That's why I've been similarly skeptical of the Navy's heavy reliance / budget for carriers & carrier groups.
>Supercarriers are good value for money compared to fighter jets or submarines.
Good value compared to the F-35 perhaps, but not submarines. With China prioritizing carrier killer hypersonic and ballistic anti-ship missiles, if there's ever another war in the Pacific it will be a submarine war and "skimmers" (surface fleets) will go the way of the battleship in WWII.
I think you mean to say that the three new Ford class carriers will cost in the neighborhood of $30 billion each. See [0], specifically page 19, 'Cost Summary - CVN 78'. In FY 2000 dollars, a total of $27.725 billion (thousand million) has been spent on the CVN 78. This includes, research, design, testing, evaluation, and salaries for contractors. This does not include the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS, the replacement for the steam catapults found on other US carriers) or the Advanced Arresting Gear (a replacement for the Mark 7 arresting gear).
CVN 78 (USS Gerald R. Ford) is on track to be about $40 billion. The SAR is optimistic in saying that cost savings will be seen on CVN 79 and CVN 80 due to knowledge gained during the construction of CVN 78.
Also it is not correct to say that there has been 1 trillion spent on the F-35 program because spent is past tense. There has not been 1 trillion spent. Rather, according to the latest Selected Acquisition Report, the costs to date (including funding allocations for some production lots still to be made) is about $81 billion (See page 29, 'PB 2017 Total - Prior' figures. Another ~$18 billion has been spent on the development and procurement of the F-135 engine. Another $6 billion or so was spent on the now-cancelled F-136 engine.
What will be in the neighborhood of $1 trillion is the estimated total lifetime cost of the F-35 at program completion (when the F-35 is retired and all aircraft have been decommissioned and disposed of in some way).
Yes! If it's worth it to build planes, it's worth it to build a carrier, and if a carrier is going to be built, there's no point unless there are planes also. Planes and carriers go hand in hand.
"In 2002, the U.S. Navy held a large simulated war game, the Millennium Challenge, to test scenarios of attacks on the fleet by a hypothetical Gulf state [...]. The leader of the red team employed brilliant asymmetric tactics resulting in 16 U.S. ships, including two supercarriers, going to the bottom in a very short span of time. The Navy stopped the war game, prohibited the red team from using these tactics and then reran the exercise declaring victory on the second day."
This reads like something out of Yossarian's diary..
It seems the only reason there isn't a war on between the superpowers is that it's economically more beneficial to not have one at the moment. Hundreds of billions of dollars are pumped into outmoded solutions, but at least we don't have to sink the ships so that the contractors can sell more of them -- the government happily keeps buying more. The bankers' loans, the unions' workers and the lobbyists' friends are all humming along finely.
My prediction for the Ford carrier program is that it will be cancelled and replaced with...
Even bigger carrier. Significantly bigger.
China can bomb shit out of Guam airstrips. Or from submarines any airstrip that stays stationary. U.S. can in near future do everything a 100 gigagram Ford carrier can do with 45Gg America class carrier. With the exception that Ford will have triple the planes, triple the cost, triple the price and about double the range of planes aboard. In near future you can do almost everything with three Americas than with single Ford, with almost exactly the same $/kg of ordnance delivered. This happens because V-22 osprey and F35B have short takeoff and landing while having incredible capability. Ford will rely on F35C, V-22 and super hornet. The hornet being mostly stopgap measure.
But Ford is still limited to planes less than 30 tons and less than 1700km range. Something that could launch C130 super hercules (70 ton weight, 3800km range) safely, would make super-duper-giga-hyper-carrier look like worthwhile investment. The weight of Ford is not the main problem, but it's not long enough.
Now you could replace significant portion of Guam with floating airstrips. You could dominate entire northern pacific with single carrier with it's organic refueling.
The alternative for hypersupercarriers would be America class + some flying boats acting as refuelers, gunships and transports. That would be more robust way to do things, as you are putting your eggs to more baskets. But it's also something that China and India and Brazil can somewhat easily replicate to lesser degree. (They don't get V-22, but anyhow.) So for reasons of military industrial complex and to appear unachievable military power(Trump?), U.S. will make something huge before Ford program runs its course.
TIL they measure the weight of aircraft carriers in grams. Is it to make them seem bigger yet less expensive? So what's the typical cost per gram of a modern aircraft carrier? How about its range in centimeters on one load of nuclear fuel?
100 000 tons = 100 000 thousand kilograms = 100 000 thousand thousand grams. You have three different ways to say "thousand" there, one nested. Which seems bit overcomplicated compared to Gg.
The 100Gg is huge, 45Gg is WWII huge, 10Gg is interwar "treaty maximum". 4Gg is what USN currently regards "seaworthy", 2Gg is biggest things that sailed with sails and anything less than 1Gg is no longer ship but a "boat" in modern standards. Convenient?
103300 long tons => 1.049576e+11 grams according to Google.
At a cost of $4.5bn (Wikipedia) that gives you about 4.3¢/g if I'm not mistaken.
Same article says the range is "unlimited; 20-25 years" but doesn't qualify that with speeds. Although if it could sustain 35mph for 20 years, I make that approximately 987bn cm range.
This is not correct. Maybe it was real thing from cold war era. In any case, it has not been true for a long time.
Conventional missile artillery is today's reality. The idea that detecting launch of multiple MRBM's or IRBM would be automatically assumed to be nuclear strike is absurd. US knows that China's second artillery has wast range of conventionally armed ballistic missiles and they are part of their conventional military strategy. Russia has batteries of Iskander-M missiles directed towards Europe. Large air-defense missiles like Patriot, S-300, SM-3 can also be mistaken as ballistic missiles during the launch.
Terminology: Ballistic missile is general term referring to a missile that follows a ballistic trajectory. There are several different classes of BM's (Ballistic Missiles) and they can be easily distinguished from each other by following their trajectory little bit (there are battlefield-range, short-range, medium-range, intermediate-range and intercontinental BMs).
When people talk of ship killing ballistic missiles they are talking about China's Domgfeng arsenal. Dongfeng missiles are giants compared to any of the SAMs or missle artillery you mentioned.
More specially DF-21D. China uses different versions of DF-21 missile as medium-range ballistic missile with large payload, for conventional precision ground attack, anti-satellite weapons delivery, ballistic missile defense and for nuclear strike.
DF-21 is medium-range ballistic missile.
The new DF-26 is even bigger (intermediate-range ballistic missile) and can reach Guam with conventional warhead.
Aren't there radars around to distinguish between missiles headed for space and ones headed for Baltimore, based on the early part of their trajectory? Presumably those radars could also distinguish between missiles headed for Baltimore and ones headed for a mostly-empty area of the Pacific.
You might get the nuclear launch keys put into someone's hands, but I doubt anyone would assume a nuclear attack by default. There are all sorts of munitions hurled around that could, potentially, be nukes.
the chinese are working on the DF-ZF, a hypersonic glide vehicle... it could search for the supercarrier when it nears the carrier group, and maneuver itself into position to hit it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WU-14
The DF-31 can hit California from China. So if this works, they could keep a supercarrier out of the pacific ocean with enough of these (assuming they can get an approximate location).
Its not just the CAV its the whole support structure you have to attack / get past - you would have to disable the picket ships and CAP as well and then hit the target which in its self has plenty of Point Defense.
The article seems to be saying America's military isn't powerful enough. Is that really a problem for anyone, even America? I thought most of their military was just a byproduct of the military industrial complex and not actually needed for anything.
Other than nuclear powered subs, aren't carriers the only US naval vessels in service that are nuclear powered? And therefore the only vessel able to power the US navy's future rail gun? [1]
I was also under the impression that once full spec rail guns are mounted on US carriers it vastly increases the carrier's durability in combat and expands its combat role. The 32MJ version has a range of 220 miles and uses non-explosive ordinance, meaning less chance of secondary explosions due to on-board fires during combat. Also very hard to detect or deploy countermeasures against a hunk of metal flying really fast (5600mph muzzle velocity apparently), containing no explosives or electronics.
So carriers are currently giant, slow-moving targets that need to be protected by a flotilla of other ships in order to achieve force-projection. With rail guns, they become highly durable and versatile ships capable of ship-to-ship combat, air defence, point defence, long-range land bombardment, being a mobile air strip etc.
They just need a ship with sufficient electrical generation to run one. The new DDG-1000 (USS Zumwalt) likely has this, with twin 35 MW generators.
I'm not sure the rail gun has a sufficient rate of fire for use as a missile defense weapon. It'll more likely be used for short bombardment and anti-ship fire. I doubt that rail gun projectiles have sufficient penetration into water to be useful for torpedo defense, but it's probably something they've modeled.
As for rate of fire, I guess it's partially a function of how big your power-plant it, how many rail guns you have and how quickly you can recharge the capacitors (or rotate in fully charged ones).
"Currently the only US Navy ships that can produce enough electrical power to get desired performance are the Zumwalt-class destroyers; they can generate 78 megawatts of power, more than is necessary to power a railgun. Engineers are working to derive technologies developed for the DDG-1000 series ships into a battery system so other warships can operate a railgun.[54] Most current destroyers can spare only nine megawatts of additional electricity, while it would require 25 megawatts to propel a projectile to the desired maximum range [55] (i.e. to launch 32MJ projectiles at a rate of 10 shots per minute). Even if current ships, such as the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, can be upgraded with enough electrical power to operate a railgun, the space taken up on the ships by the integration of an additional weapon system may force the removal of existing weapon systems to make room available."
Funny, I was just wondering about this while having a shower. Could rail gun ordinance be used under-water, say, to take out a sub?
It seems like you'd face the same problems as you would with in-air ordinance, just to a greater degree (e.g. friction). The objective might be slightly simpler though: rather than delivering maximum kinetic energy to the target you instead just want to punch a hole through it. That change in objective might simplify the design of the 'underwater rail gun' ordinance: just use some nice heavy ferromagnetic metal, shape it to reduce drag and pierce armour (i.e. make it pointy) and maybe coat it in teflon?
I dunno, not really a physics or weapons nerd here. I just like magnets :)
EDIT: just to clarify, I'm thinking of torpedo defence in the context of 'destroy the sub before it gets within range'.
Hmm. There might be enough kinetic energy imparted into the ocean surface to replace depth charges, and thus damage submarines via concussion. I dunno. Maybe.
I was under the impression that large carrier fleet was championed by the Navy ages ago because they didn't want to take second place to the Air Force's Strategic Air Command. This was especially true after WW2 as the Navy was so very large and influential.
They don't have a place in a war with another super power but the greater point here is missed. No one and nothing has a place should another war break out among the super powers. that is a no win game.
So where do they fit it. In projecting power when lower tier countries act up, when threats to shipping lanes are caused.
Do they need 11? Certainly not but this is all a dick wagging contest among the branches of the US military which compete more than they cooperate exaggerating the true cost of the military. My view, totally off the cuff, six is all they need.
If you want to replace carriers, you need to look at each role they're playing and see what works to fill that role.
Air-to-air: Fighters based half a world away don't do much good if you need someone to shoot enemy planes down right now. Carriers are still useful for this in many situations.
Air-to-sea: I think this is where the article makes its best point as missiles and smaller craft make it much harder to keep these safe.
Air-to-ground (strategic): Land based bombers and drones work as well or better if you have your targets planned out 12-hours in advance. Putting a carrier there in this case may be a waste of resources.
Air-to-ground (tactical): Having this awesome air force half a world away is kind of useless when you're getting beat up on the ground right now. Drones may be able to take up the slack on this, depending on what the enemy has to counter it, but carriers are still good for this role.
So basically, if you are unchallenged at sea, but have to fight against an enemy with aircraft nearby, like Iraq, or you need air support because you're fighting someone who is able to do alot of hit and run tactics, like Afghanistan, then carriers are useful. If you're fighting against another country with a huge navy, or you have some place with a friendly airbase nearby that's relatively safe, you might not need them.
Considering the types of wars we've been fighting lately in the U.S., we can probably do with fewer carriers, but still need a fair number.
Wars are won by the countries that have the largest manufacturing capacity. This is what happened in World War 2 - the American and Russian manufacturing capacity overwhelmed that of the Germans and Japanese.
That was true in the WW2. Access to energy being another big factor. Germany and Japan were essentially cut off from oil.
There will never be major conflict between nuclear powers where decisive victory is possible. There can only be limited regional conflicts that are won or lost. If the stakes become higher than that, it will be tie or everybody loses.
The idea that US, Russia or China could surrender is not reality.
The military's job is to make people we fight want to stop fighting. That's it.
If you keep strategy simple and easy-to-understand, you can stay on mission.
Unfortunately, that's not where we're at. The military is used for all sorts of things -- famine relief, nation-building, geo-political force projection, and so on. This is the problem with aircraft carriers. They might be lead weights in the event of an actual shooting war with a major superpower, but right now we're using them for mobile airports. And mobile airports are useful for all kinds of things.
If you get rid of the mobile airport, then what's going to take their place? Who's going to show the flag in the Taiwan Strait or the Persian Gulf? Who's going to support some U.N. humanitarian mission that's urgent, remote, and requires CAPs?
The more capability you develop, the more you can't imagine doing without that capability. So our floating airports are here to stay -- until somebody sinks them.
Which means we have to support both those and figure out how to do our actual job, which is making people we fight want to stop fighting.
We see this same pattern of behavior in platform after platform. When you get to a certain rank at the Pentagon, you feel it's "your time" to bring a big change to the services. And that means big bucks, big capabilities, and so forth. Nobody wants to be -- or gets rewarded for being -- a wise and crafty caretaker of an ever-shrinking pile of money. (Yes, I'm sure there's lip service paid to all of this. I'm simply making an observation as an outsider watching DoD for several decades.)
Quick tempo lethal aerial force projection is going to have to be submersible. Otherwise hypersonic missiles make mincemeat out of your task force. No matter what kind of radar-controlled gun you have, you ain't stopping something coming in from directly overhead at Mach 10. The kinetic energy alone is sufficient here. Got a lot of other thoughts on this, but on some topics on the net I've learned to keep my mouth shut :)
ADD: No matter what, Congress needs to re-sort out DoD. We need one service for police force work, nation-building, and humanitarian aid. Another force for space. One for cyber. Then leave the other ones alone. I might would peel off strategic missiles from the Air Force because strategic missiles have nothing directly to do with flying around.
Re-split the money. Then reduce senior staff by 20-40%.
> The military's job is to make people we fight want to stop fighting. That's it.
> Unfortunately, that's not where we're at. The military is used for all sorts of things -- famine relief, nation-building, geo-political force projection, and so on.
I'll give you famine relief, but geo-political force projection is the same thing you said was the entire goal of the military. A military that can make people who fight you regret it is the same military that sends the message "if you fight us, you'll regret it".
It's not logically necessary that we use the military for nation-building the way it is for force projection, but if we're going to do nation-building the military is the appropriate group to do it.
I'll give you famine relief, but geo-political force projection is the same thing you said was the entire goal of the military. A military that can make people who fight you regret it is the same military that sends the message "if you fight us, you'll regret it".
I do not agree with this, and it's important to understand why I do not think it's the case.
"You're going to regret it" does not the end of a war make. We have already reached the point where, for cases of conflict involving all but a few nations, we can make them regret it. Fairly easily. Yet we see the use of actual force happen more and more. Why? Because my proposed definition of the military was not to hurt people or make them regret picking a fight It was to make them stop fighting.
I used to think the military was for blowing up things and killing people. As it turns out, you can do a helluva lot of blowing stuff up and killing people and you've got just as much of a conflict as when you started. War is not an equation to be solved by some new McNamara. It is also not a spectacle meant for some foreign national command authority. Yes, it might work that way in a very few large cases, but we know that in every case the goal is to get them to stop fighting.
We are buying very expensive hardware for edge cases. These edge cases might occur. But even then, we should look at other ways of winning instead of out-spending and out-producing the other guy. We're trying to build too many expensive systems that do too many things. I don't even want to think of what force readiness looks like in some areas. As one general put it many years ago in a similar situation, we're destroying the artillery in order to have troops able to do civilian police work. What if we need the artillery? The USMC D2D ratio is heading south. F-35 is a Charlie Foxtrot. I could go on. If you stand back and look at it objectively? It ain't good.
Pinker is arguing big picture, and what he says is true, but when I say "we see the use of actual force happen more and more" I mean the number of times the use of force is made as a decision is increasing, not that the overall force used is increasing. If I had said that, it would be false. I did not say that.
I can't believe nobody commented yet on how like a TIE fighter the "unmanned underwater vehicle during a Navy demonstration" looks. US truly is evolving into the Empire ;]
The US outspends the next top 20 countries in defense spending combined. But I'm thinking this figure is wrong. If it costs the US $20 billion to build a super carrier, what would the same thing cost for China (which doesn't have to deal with high pension costs and labor?) Probably $5 billion or less.
And if these other countries are spending their money on more effective weapons, where does that leave the US?
US defense doctrine mostly revolves around massive surprise first strikes on countries with limited ability to retaliate. Aircraft carriers are OK at this, if you want to, eg, bomb the crap out of Uruguay and don't have basing or transit rights nearby. That doesn't eliminate their vulnerabilities or the cost/benefit ratio, but having a few is handy if you're running a global empire.
I don't think this describes US defense doctrine. America has not launched a massive surprise first strike in a very long time (if ever). Iraq and Afghanistan knew the invasion was coming a long way off.
To me, US defense doctrine relies on 1) massive logistical power projection capability to counter any terrorism threat (real or perceived) anywhere on the globe, and 2) large conventional forces to counterbalance other large geopolitical rivals (Russia, China).
"Surprise" is relative; "blitzkrieg" (or "shock and awe") might be more apt. Iraq I, Iraq II, Afghanistan, Grenada, Panama all fit the pattern. Kosovo doesn't as much, but then again there were other considerations there (eg, not pissing off Russia too much).
You're right on the higher-level strategy, but operationally it relies heavily on immediately killing off all C&C, air defense, air force, etc. in the first few hours so you can then bomb with impunity.
I thought the big problem for the US Navy in terms of spending spinning out of control was related to the Zumwalt class destroyers. Started out with a plan of 32 ships, then down to seven and now three.
I think one of the biggest strengths of U.S. military has been ability to pour money in R&D without wasting it to unneeded projects. This happens via embarrassing cancellations, but anyhow it seems to work to some degree. Now U.S. can pretty much rely on having the newest tech on all fronts, while everybody else is scrambling to have fleeting glory of adequate gear fielded.
Carriers are great against Iraq and Libya. Against Russia or China they might well be useless.
Against an able opponent, there are only two kinds of ships.
Submarines and targets!
http://www.johntreed.net/sittingducks.html
It's mostly about radar masts. If you wish to shoot down enemy missiles with your missiles, you better do it early than late. Now to have some early warning, that antenna needs to be relatively high to get significant area inside your radar horizon.
Trying to build ever-larger aircraft carriers is like vertically scaling using mainframes. The number of uses for these seems to be dwindling, and it's becoming harder to justify the cost and complexity of maintaining this expensive and uncommon hardware.
Compare with horizontal scaling, which in this case translates to large numbers of individually-capable units acting in coordination.
It's just too damn hard and expensive trying to protect a single valuable target against an ever-increasing number of threats.
Do you have any evidence of whatsoever or do you think there's a conspiracy behind everything? I know the author and he doesn't strike me as someone on China's or Russia's payroll.
Well, an article so one-sided, incomplete and inaccurate can only be called propaganda. I don't like evangelists. By the way, propaganda is much better when the author has no idea he's on anyone's payroll. Of course I have no evidence of anything but I'm just stating the obvious here.
Terrible analysis. This is especially funny: Mitchell sank a captured German battleship to prove a point. Except what point are your proving when you destroy a captured ship?
Prevailing wisdom at the time was that airplanes were toys that could not in any way, shape, or form put enough explosives on target to do anything more than scratch the paint.
Indeed, it's a mistake, but the solution isn't military, it's political; to ensure its safety, the US must promote disarmament on a global scale, with Russia and China, but including itself.
My understanding is building ships is our jobs programs. Thought that all 50 states had a role in building one ship in the end.
Isn't that what war is all about? Boys and testosterone? It's that simple. Boys and toys. Someday we will advance as a society beyond that, but who knows when that will be.
Guess one can say, "hey we need this to advance our science, war is the big experimental space."
Don't really seeing Elon Musk doing much war planning. He does seem to be getting us to Mars just fine.
The amount of $$$s spend building one ship could probably build a heck of a lot of hosptials and universities, all around the world, but guess that would be just kind of boring.
There are still many people in my Brooklyn 'hood that can't read and write. Think that would be a far better mission, AKA Education. But just my opinion. Maybe we can do both?
> Boys and testosterone? It's that simple. Boys and toys
That's impressively sexist. Why are you referring to men as boys, if not for derogatory purposes based solely on their sex? I see that in public forums extremely frequently now, and it's only ever done as a belligerent insult.
> Isn't that what war is all about? Boys and testosterone? It's that simple. Boys and toys.
I have to assume that you aren't even half seriously suggesting this. What about all the war that happened during the majority of man's existence, when the "toy" was a sharp stick? Sure you had the odd technological mismatch at the onset of ${metal} age, but the majority of the time both sides had the same rocks and sticks.
Elon Musk is a prime example of boys and toys. Granted, they are toys with more peacetime applications, but don't kid yourself, it's still a testosterone-fueled dick measuring contest. Witness the puerile "mine is bigger" feud with Jeff Bezos/Blue Origin.
> Soviet Adm. Sergei Gorchakov reportedly held the view that the U.S. had made a strategic miscalculation by relying on large and increasingly vulnerable aircraft carriers ... In a 1982 congressional hearing, legislators asked him how long American carriers would survive in an actual war. Rickover’s response? “Forty-eight hours,” he said.
True. But these carriers are just large jobs programs which also let us bomb poor countries here and there. And of course they look cool as hell.
If anyone attacks our carriers in large numbers they'll also be the target of our nuclear missiles. So in a way our conventional weapons have to just look cool on paper and be usable against 3rd world countries (that is why A-10 is still in use even though Russian tanks have long stopped being vulnerable to them. But groups of farmers with AK-47s are still blown to bits easily).
If Chinese or Russians launch their ballistic anti-ship missiles at these carriers, soon they'll be seen ballistic missiles flying at their mainland, coming from some place in Nebraska probably.
The Russians don't have ballistic anti-ship missiles. There's only one model in the world so far, and it's Chinese.
It's large, expensive, and incredibly complicated, so they don't have many. It relies on a trio of satellites that can be compromised in various ways, and can be destroyed on the ground. It can also be shot down by the SM-3, which is pretty widely deployed by now.
I do not believe the US would respond to conventional missiles with nuclear missiles. For one thing, there wouldn't be any need - we could do a whole lot of damage to China with aircraft and cruise missiles, so there wouldn't be any need, and why invite a Chinese nuclear response? That would be suicidal.
Russian tanks are still vulnerable to the A-10. If we just want to attack "groups of farmers with AK-47s" there are much more efficient solutions, like Embraer's Super Tucano II, for example.
> It's large, expensive, and incredibly complicated, so they don't have many.
From the article: "Navy Capt. Henry Hendrix estimated China could produce 1,227 DF-21D ballistic anti-ship missiles for the cost of a single U.S. carrier."
> It relies on a trio of satellites that can be compromised in various ways...
You can say that about every weapon system in the world. If China built thousands of these, there's no way you're taking out all of them in a preemptive strike.
> It can also be shot down by the SM-3, which is pretty widely deployed by now.
Again, China can build thousands. An entire carrier battlegroup is going to have at most a few hundred SM-3s.
>From the article: "Navy Capt. Henry Hendrix estimated China could produce 1,227 DF-21D ballistic anti-ship missiles for the cost of a single U.S. carrier."
Not as quickly as the US is improving its ability to knock them out. We have literally thousands of missiles that can take out satellites in LEO, and more every day. And that doesn't take into account things like jamming and lasers which could disable a satellite without blowing it up.
>You can say that about every weapon system in the world. If China built thousands of these, there's no way you're taking out all of them in a preemptive strike.
That's not how it works in real life - you don't have to take them all out. You only have to take out enough that between manufacturing defects, design failures, ECM, control systems degradation, antimissile systems, smoke, chaff, and more exotic stuff like lasers and rail guns, the remaining missiles don't hit a carrier. And remember, these are conventional missiles - they have to actually hit the carrier, which is not an easy thing to do. It's not like lobbing a nuke and calling it a hit if it lands within fifty miles of the target.
>Again, China can build thousands. An entire carrier battlegroup is going to have at most a few hundred SM-3s.
Again, so what? You're comparing a deployed carrier group today with a Chinese arsenal at some future date following a huge production spree they don't seem particularly interested in undertaking.
Saying you can build x missiles for every carrier is a meaningless statistic - it assumes a reasonable response from the US would be to build more carriers instead of upgrading the defenses of the carriers (or, more accurately, the carrier battle groups) we already have.
> The Russians don't have ballistic anti-ship missiles. There's only one model in the world so far, and it's Chinese.
So not true. There are ballistic anti-ship missiles, surprise the article specifically mentions it. A
Russians have sea skimming missiles. Let's not get hung up on the word "ballistic", it doesn't matter what missile is used, the point is it will easy to take out a large ship. Some of the sea skimming missiles can be launched by aircraft, so that extends their range.
> I do not believe the US would respond to conventional missiles with nuclear missiles.
Once whole carriers are starting to be taken down, it will be pretty close to that.
> we could do a whole lot of damage to China with aircraft and cruise missiles
If we do a lot of damage to China, what do you think they are doing to do, sit there and look beweldwered. At that point they'll be launching everything.
> Russian tanks are still vulnerable to the A-10
If they are sitting there doing nothing I am sure they are. But they probably have AA systems around.
>So not true. There are ballistic anti-ship missiles, surprise the article specifically mentions it. A
Heh. Normally when I write something that's shaping up to be incoherent, I delete it before posting.
>Russians have sea skimming missiles. Let's not get hung up on the word "ballistic", it doesn't matter what missile is used, the point is it will easy to take out a large ship. Some of the sea skimming missiles can be launched by aircraft, so that extends their range.
I only got "hung up" on the word "ballistic" because that's the type of missile you mentioned. That made the most sense of your post, since conventional anti-ship ballistic missiles are a new threat and relatively difficult to deal with. Yes, many countries have cruise missiles, from Russia to China to France to India to others. And yes, we know how to shoot down cruise missiles. Could we successfully defend a CBG in real life against a massed cruise missile attack? Yes and no. Depends entirely on the scenario.
>Once whole carriers are starting to be taken down, it will be pretty close to that.
"Pretty close"? What does that mean?
>If we do a lot of damage to China, what do you think they are doing to do, sit there and look beweldwered. At that point they'll be launching everything.
Again, what does that mean? Certainly we will respond with nukes if the Chinese nuke the US or US naval assets. Other than that there are plenty of things in China they'd rather not have us destroy that we'd probably go about destroying if they attacked our navy.
What do you imagine would happen if the Three Gorges Dam were (relatively easily) destroyed? Is there anything China could hope to accomplish in a war that would be worth a catastrophe of that magnitude?
>If they are sitting there doing nothing I am sure they are. But they probably have AA systems around.
Which is true of any aircraft, and it's why destroying AA is the first phase of any air war. But that's not the point. There are reasons to think the A-10 should be retired, but the inability to destroy tanks (any tanks, not just Russian tanks) isn't one of them.
> If Chinese or Russians launch their ballistic anti-ship missiles at these carriers, soon they'll be seen ballistic missiles flying at their mainland, coming from some place in Nebraska probably.
I mean, sure, but if they're going to be destroyed quickly anyway (as you admit), then why are spending so much money on them?
As I pointed out it is a jobs program, they look cool, and they let us "project power". Meaning we park it by Afghanistan and launch fighters to bomb stuff on the ground. Or go and "indimidate" the Chinese in their disputed naval territories.
Not that we don't already have enough bases around the world, but it is nice to have a floating base.
Jobs programs is not a joke. If you know anyone from a town with a military contractor facilities or a large base, those bring money into local economy. Congresspeople will go to great legths to ensure military buys more of whatever brings in jobs and cash back where they are from.
Here is an example: http://www.military.com/daily-news/2016/02/11/ohio-wins-agai... nobody needs more tanks, they are just hadning that over to Lima, Ohio so people there have jobs. Yeah we want to be able to maintain the tanks and all but that is just the official spin and justification. If they can do it for tanks, you be they do it for other, bigger toys.
> If they can do it for tanks, you be they do it for other, bigger toys.
I get that, but why does the jobs program need to be specifically aircraft carriers? Why can't the jobs programs be drones or cruise missiles or stealth submarines or missile ships? Those are all pretty sweet, and won't makes us look as bad if they're quickly sunk in an engagement.
> I get that, but why does the jobs program need to be specifically aircraft carriers? Why can't the jobs programs be drones or cruise missiles...
Different colors of money, for starters[1]: DoD cannot procure drones or cruise missiles with funds congressionally appropriated for Navy shipbuilding and conversion. Doing so would be a violation of the federal Misappropriation Act[2]. Furthermore, shipbuilding has a 5-year obligation window vs. 3 years for every other procurement activity[3].
> ...or stealth submarines or missile ships?
From a defense strategic perspective, levels of consideration are far more complicated than you might imagine[4]. The concept of a defense ACAT <any_level> program explicitly publicized as a "jobs program" is mindblowingly corrupt. I didn't interpret the article referenced by the parent as being about building more tanks without an inherent need for them. I read it as acknowledging that the cost associated with sustaining a niche industrial infrastructure with a steep learning curve to ensure military readiness--as seemingly high as it may be--is still far less than the alternative of closing the doors of "the only tank manufacturer in the U.S." to save for the now at the risk of not being able to ramp up domestic production if the strategic need ever arose in the future--the consequences of the latter being irrepairable. On a related note, it may surprise some to learn that there are literally hundreds of reserve cargo ships loaded with things like HMMWVs and spit-shine-new M1 tanks strategically scattered across the world, sitting idle and ready...and yes, they're regularly serviced.
Sure, $6 billion looks like a lot of money. But it's a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the Carrier Battle Group. You need a lot of ships to properly protect a carrier.
Sure, in a conflict with a major international power, our carriers won't stick around. But first, 48 hours is a long time in the context of modern conventional warfare. Guerrilla warfare lasts as long as the people involved want it to last, conventional wars are decided in time periods measured in hours. So a carrier battle group isn't particularly vulnerable. Sure, new tech like ASBMs will force us to change tactics, but we're developing new tech too.
Also, nobody is predicting another war with a major international power. The game changer isn't carriers and hasn't been for decades. The game changer is nuclear weapons. If Russia or China decides to target our carriers, the response will have nuclear components. Nuclear weapons are the only things keeping our carriers afloat anyway, if they didn't exist, we'd have scrapped them a long time ago.
So, 48 hours. During this time, each carrier, with it's compliment of an entire fighter-bomber wing, has destroyed much more than its share of enemy military targets. Also, the battle groups don't have to actually see battle in order to be useful. A carrier is essentially a floating air base that we can put pretty much anywhere we want, giving us the global strike capabilities that make it so, if we have to threaten a petty tyrant with utter destruction, he doesn't just laugh us out of the room.