The U.S. Navy is risking everything on a fatally flawed technology

medium.com/war-is-boring/ ^ | May 29, 2015 | David W. Wise

[LS]

You raise some of the right questions. But one of the answers is not that you mothball your existing high-capability ships. We have for 40 years fought the argument of whether it is better to have a lot of lower tech weapons or fewer higher-tech weapons.

This argument was temporarily settled in about 1981 when the first Trident went into the water. It was SO far advanced that our own asw ships couldn't find it, and we were able to immediately scale back not only the total number of subs needed, but also the range of the new D-5 missile we planned.

At the same time, we found something else: the famous "Tigershark" aircraft that (as I recall) Northrup designed specifically to address the "more but less capable" calls proved a total flop. No other nations would buy it, as they wanted top of the line stuff, and no politician could with good conscience justify sending people off to war in less than the best available.

Now, in WW II, because we came in late, we were behind in tank technology and simply outproduced the Germans by tens of thousands (and the scene in "Fury" where four Shermans take on a Tiger is pretty reflective of the reality on both sides. They had the better tank, but couldn't overcome the numbers). However, our tanks didn't stay behind, and by the end of the war we had substantially caught up. But in airplanes, our P-39 AirCobra sucked, yet was the best fighter the Russians had for two years. We had by 1943 planes that were substantially superior to anything the Germans had in the Mustang, Lightning, and Thunderbolt.

Your point about infrastructure is important, but the Tigershark episode showed that you can't beef up infrastructure by making inferior weapons. There's no cheap way to do it.

[FreeInWV]

Coastal anti-ship batteries, submarines and air superiority can cause area denial to a carrier battle group. During hostilities, some places are just too dangerous to take such a valuable asset.

This infographic gives me pause. The Chinese seem to be banking on some very dangerous strategies.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-27/who-would-win-conflict-south-china-sea-infographic

[reg45]

Taranto was a smaller scale Pearl Harbor.

Two days after Pearl Harbor, the Force Z battleships, Prince of Wales and Repulse, were sunk off the coast of Vietnam by Japanese aircraft. Proving, beyond any doubt, the vulnerability of capital ships to air attack.

[reg45]

Acceleration, absolutely. A knot per hour is a unit of acceleration. I still remember my freshman physics course. One nautical mile ís 1852 metres (~ 2076 feet).

[1010RD]

Van Riper killed 20,000 by using very low tech methods. The kinds of methods available to small or non-state actors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

The article is spot on. The MIC is a revolving door of cronyism and waste.

[1010RD]

The easiest fix is to have Xprizes for all kinds of potential threats. Let honest evaluators who still love America evaluate them. Van Riper (76) isn’t the only objective source.

[1010RD]

Keeping in mind that LS is a historian and not a futurist. ;-]

[1010RD]

During WW2 there were all kinds of procurement and logistical problems in the military supply/procurement system in America. Yet, it was streamlined enough to allow innovation and dynamism, much of it learned directly on the battlefield.

Most recent accounts of battlefield action indicate that the top brass is ignoring the actual experience. That’s politics and money polluting the system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

The Cole attack along with MC 2002 show that an innovative attacker could cripple us and, perhaps given how we now have our third generation America-haters educating American school children about this ‘horrible’ country, break our will to fight or project power.

The system needs to be more transparent and less sclerotic. The MC 2002 cover up should have ended careers, but it didn’t.

[KC Burke]

Interesting article. I think we are going to see an age of small drone carriers that will come along in another five years. The drones are being developed now. We will see the fifth generation fighter in a secondary role once we see that drone technology fully launched.

[nathanbedford]

And the point of this article is that we are getting the worst of all possible worlds, inferior weapons systems at exorbitant costs.

I take your point, inferior grade weapons are rarely the way to go but inexpensive weapons might be. You mentioned the tanks of World War II and the best tank in that era was probably the Russian T 34 not because it outclassed the German Tiger tank but because it was in many ways, besides sheer firepower and armor, superior. One of those ways was ease of maintenance, ease of training, ease of repair, and, of course, cost of manufacture so that they simply swarmed the German tanks. They had wider treads and were better able to cope with Russian snow and mud.

But we are turning into a new era and one might question whether it is wise to absorb the lessons of World War II for the 21st century. In warfare, technology is always overturning the conventional wisdom. Now it is the turn of aircraft carriers to face that fate which they had earlier imposed on battleships. We are now in an age of lasers, satellites, drones, missiles and, above all, nuclear weapons. The role of aircraft carriers is obviously going to be reduced to something similar to the role gunboats played for Victorian Britain, effective to maintain peace on the beat against Third World players but too vulnerable to risk against world-class antagonists like China.

So this brings the cost-benefit equation into play. And it brings it into play at a time when America is no longer the greatest economy on earth, our potential adversary now is, our string of alliances look more like tripwires than allies, our domestic economy might well be going into recession after seven years of muddle, and our politics, to put it generously, are in disarray. We have no obvious national security strategy, no effective implementation of policy anywhere, and no prospect of acquiring these things before January 2017 at the earliest.

Meanwhile China gets richer and we get poorer, more divided and more vulnerable. There is no national sense of urgency and no national sense of a need to reform our defense strategy or our budget sheet. These are the circumstances under which we have to rethink how our wars shall be fought, financed, and won. Whom can we trust to make these decisions, Barack Obama? John Boehner and Mitch McConnell? Who will decide if and when we are going to gradually abandon aircraft carrier technology for satellites, lasers and cyber attacks?

We are, the only question is when and if we will have the right stuff?

[combat_boots]

A few years ago, I had a conversation with a die-hard Leftist. I explained the 18% military budget figure. He had to go research it himself.

He never said a word about the military budget vs. social budget again.

[LS]

We built far more Sherman's in 4 years than the Russians built T34s, and provided Russia with by one account 85% of the heavy tanks outside Moscow in winter 41-42.

I am not persuaded that carriers are battleships. Whatever you can do with lasers and rockets, carrier-based aircraft only extend and improve those weapons' range. Again, you cite China, but China and India are building carriers.

You must separate America's problems from Chin's supposed progress. I think China is on the brink of a substantial turning point, and regardless of which direction they go they inevitably will take a serious step backward. If they continue to liberalize, they will face a natural period of adjustment (still going on in Russia after 25 years). This period is where a society learns to practice Christianity and common law. But if they don't, they face the inevitable stagnation of the Soviet-style perestroika. Then there is the third alternative, a population expecting greater freedom, not getting it, and revolting. We can get into what all this means for America's debt, but in any case it is more a burden on them than us.

[LS]

True. I am reminded that the handful of people who thought the submarine was the inevitable successor to the battleship were as wrong as those who thought the battleship would not be surpassed.

One thing the sub advocates ignored was the critical element of the visual in power projection. Drones, lasers, subs, no matter how scary, are still "out there" and not associated with an actual presence. That's why in tense situations we send a carrier and not a Tomahawk-laden SSN.

[bert]

-—— I think China is on the brink of a substantial turning point,-——

The current Forbes lists the worlds 2000 largest companies. If you read the list, you will see a large number of Chinese companies. It can be argued that the point has been turned.

Alibaba went public and was the largest IPO in history. People here like to post about Chicoms, failing to note that there has been big change and there are now lots of Chicaps.

You raise the interesting point that post turning point there will be some natural adjustment. I’ll chew on that real possibility.

You mentioned Russia. The Russians blew it. They lack the initiative and drive present in China. The turning point there was collapse. Russia may never recover in spite of Putin’s best efforts.

[bert]

----- we must ask the question whether we can afford them.-----

We need them to protect the really important ships

[nathanbedford]

Yes China is building carriers, China is building land carriers as well in the Spratly Islands. But the fact of building carriers without more does not tell us much. Like any weapons system it must be in furtherance of a strategy which is to be implemented in pursuit of a policy. Even a cursory glance at our posture around the world, and that not incidentally includes China and adjoining seas, reveals that we have no policy and we have no strategy.

The Chinese on the other hand equally obviously do have a policy and a strategy in furtherance of that policy. The policy is reminiscent of Japan's when it contrived the greater Southeast Asia Co- Prosperity Sphere out of their obsession to obtain raw materials in the run-up to Pearl Harbor. That policy is understandable in view of the mouths they have to feed. The most important part of that policy, however, beyond their weapons building, beyond their spying, beyond their cloning of our weapons and our domestic products, is there mercantilist economic strategy.

At a time when the nation is debating TPP it is appropriate to consider that the Chinese have prospered mightily with their mercantilist approach and America has sunk deeper and deeper into debt and recession by trading our heritage for a mess of porridge. We get our cheap televisions and they get nuclear carriers. We lose our superpower status stack up mountains of debt and they go from success to success.

I am not unfamiliar with the arguments advanced by Milton Friedman and the libertarians when they say, we got a good deal, we send them pieces of paper called dollars and they send us televisions. Nor am I ignorant of the facts we are entering the third great revolution after agriculture and industry, the digital revolution will no doubt change warfare just as it has changed our social habits. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that massive manufacturing of the type that characterized World War II when we sent tanks to Russia will no longer be a key factor in national security.

With all that said, however, we will be the worst fools if we proceed on the assumption that the Chinese will slip and fall. One must always presume that the enemy will do the right thing. So far, mercantilism has worked wonders in Asia (Japan even included) and it shows no immediate signs of ending in China. Jimmy Rogers says he hopes for recession in China so he can buy more of China.

So for China to be building aircraft carriers and land carriers must not be judged except in pari materia with their strategy. An inferior carrier force by the Chinese which can inflict or can potentially inflict damage to our carrier groups changes the balance of power. The Chinese just Won that round.

I am embarrassed to echo Donald Trump but he is absolutely correct in his assessment of the Chinese and the need to defend ourselves against their brand of economic warfare. Second, we have got to get our fiscal house in order and that means dealing with entitlements and that will surely not happen short of some sort of Black Swan event. The odds are against us because the trend lines are clear but there is no event on the horizon that will cause the American people to pull up their socks and behave like their grandparents behaved in the depression and in World War II.

As of now Chinese morale and faith in their government is surprisingly high according the latest surveys. The American people believe, quite rightly, that we are a nation in decline. The history of declining empires is not a smooth ride rather it is decline until a catastrophic collapse. We are approaching the cliff while the music plays on.

[Gen.Blather]

Hillary Clinton said, “Some of my best ideas are in-articulable.” What she was talking about was feelings, not ideas. You can’t substitute feelings for ideas, strategy or policy. Yet Obama has done just that. His speeches are full of statements like, “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” They must strike an emotional, feeling chord with some of the audience but they are otherwise meaningless. Thus the nation is cast adrift with no direction but disaster. Even if we survive Obama the mechanisms and voters he put in place will haunt any recovery effort for generations.

[LS]

I don't simply wait on an enemy to make a mistake, but neither do I carry on like they are infallible or invincible.

Likewise, mercantilist Spain and France got their clocks cleaned by an increasingly free-trade England. I'll stay with the free traders.

[LS]

Ah, but the Russians had a very important advantage over the Chinese, namely centuries of Christianity. So what they lacked in one area, they gained in another. Neither country has a history of common law (BIG drawback). Neither has a history of private property rights (BIG drawback).

I attended a Hillsdale College symposium several years ago and even then an expert on China was saying it had some enormous internal structural issues.

The crisis will come when the Chicoms have to actually bow to private property rights and Christianity. If they do, watch out. But without a history of common law, it could take 100 years for those rights to sink in (we had 150 years of "benign neglect" to work it out).

[bert]

In Russia, Vodka is preferred to communion wine and Mother Russia is feeble

in China, old men are dying and the young folk taking over have a different view on life.

After the girls get Daisey Mae’s, you can’t keep them down on the commune