From the article: "The elevators aren’t the only issue plaguing the ship, which has had problems with two other core systems -- the electromagnetic system to launch planes and the arresting gear to catch them when they land."
So let's see, the only the problem with this aircraft carrier is that it has trouble with airplanes taking off. And landing. And carrying, you know, bombs.
The real scandal isn't that the Ford is having (lots) of problems with it's new technology. That can happen. It's not even that a decision was made to put multiple novel, unproven systems into a major warship.
The biggest scandal is that the US Navy accepted delivery of the Ford and commissioned it when it was non-functional. This should be ending swathes of careers at the top of both the US Navy and Huntington Ingalls Industries.
I still have an HII access card for when I worked on the USS Chosin and USS O'Kane right underneath the Coronado bridge. I was still in the custody of the San Diego sheriff's department at the time. Many of the few hundred of us that worked there were either currently in a halfway house or ex-cons. None of us received any safety training on asbestos, yet we handled a-cloth every single day. We only had rudimentary safety equipment. Some guys would cut asbestos cloth with a hand grinder, sending fluff everywhere. Equipment marked "TOP SECRET" was covered with a simple piece of butcher paper...assuming it hadn't torn or fallen off. It was pretty much a shit show.
The United States government and "unconventional" approaches to labor for building military equipment is not new.
One of the most interesting stories to me is how the Mafia helped break some bones of laborers during WW2 to ensure the USA was victorious. They knew they couldn't operate without a free society.
> the US Navy accepted delivery of the Ford and commissioned it when it was non-functional. This should be ending swathes of careers at the top of both the US Navy and Huntington Ingalls Industries.
It'll be bonuses at Huntington. "Congratulations, you got the Navy to sign off even though it's not complete!"
This sounds a lot like the classical result of politics shoving contracts to private companies who then look how to fulfill them with minimum spending. Gains are privatized and losses socialized — as usual.
The Navy has been hemorrhaging actual engineers for decades now. Most of the real engineering work is done by contractors (hired to build something) and contractors (on site technical staff who don't actually answer to the Navy).
The Navy is left with uniformed personnel and manager bureaucrat types, neither of which have the engineering expertise the organization needs.
There's a problem involved when you don't have a subject matter expert.
consider: here on HN commenters will often deride decisions made "anyone in the field with half a brain should know...".
But if you don't have that requisite someone in the field with half a brain, and when someone who literally makes money from convincing you they are experts tries to sell you...anything, how can you possibly evaluate the truth of their claims?
I saw this in state govt when they would try to hire someone - without programmers on staff, how can you evaluate if someone is a decent programmer? This goes beyond the normal problems of interviewee evaluations - you can get people that can't do fizzbuzz and you'd not be able to tell. Being able to tell the difference between "experienced expert" and "halfway competent but way over their head" isn't even an option.
It's a hard thing for an organization to overcome - as far as I can tell, absent some trusted 3rd party evaluation system (which runs into incentive problems), it requires iterations of staffing and trial by fire to build even this ability to evaluate in house.
> without programmers on staff, how can you evaluate if someone is a decent programmer?
I work in .gov and have heard many variations of that problem. A really common non-solution is to hire a second contractor to oversee the first. In theory that’s not a completely horrible idea but there are relatively few contractors who are certified to do business with the federal government and they usually aren’t trying to make waves, not to mention how job hopping makes for a lot of personal incentives which aren’t aligned with the clients’. Since getting and breaking contracts is so hard — and the big guys will definitely play hardball if you do – it has to be a pretty epic disaster to have real consequences, and that’ll arrive after years of billing very well.
The answer should be having more staff positions at competitive rates so agencies have qualified staff for oversight or simply doing the work but that has been politically untenable for decades.
And this is one of the reasons why you see the revolving door between regulators and private companies. They are both competing for experts.
One can argue about the appearance of impropriety, but when people talk about stopping the revolving door, you’re talking about hurting both the gov’t and private companies because there are a limited number of experts.
For highly-technical regulators, this is definitely true — I’ve wondered what the threshold would be where it’d be cheaper to pay substantially more but with a non-compete banning work with anyone in a related field. There’s a plausible argument that the country would be better off with, say, a really motivated SEC even if you paid their retirees 50% to sit on the beach after they left government service.
In my neck of the woods, there are departments that have to make do with whole teams of low-skill employees because, while a more skilled person could do the work of at least four lower-skill workers, they would also require two lower-skill workers' worth of salary, and you just can't be paying any one person that much money because that would be Government Waste.
In America, it's probably more accurate to blame government labor unions for the preference of more lower skilled workers to fewer higher skilled workers
Unions like to set salaries, because there are more mediocre performers who stand to gain compared to free-market wages than top performers who stand to lose. They don't exactly want a cap, but they greatly desire a floor, and accept it also serving as a cap as an acceptable tradeoff.
Whenever that first part isn't true for a union, then the market pressure is for the top performers to leave the union for free-market wages, until it is.
It was my impression, not supported by much, that unions do like to set a salary for a role rather than letting that be up to the company or negotiated between the company and the individual employee. (Unions featuring superstars, like the Screen Actors Guild, are an obvious exception.)
I think it's an interesting question how a government workers' union would be likely to feel about a hypothetical restructuring that lost 75% of existing jobs while doubling or tripling wages. I tend to suspect that if the union already existed and represented those low-skilled jobs, it would be adamantly against the restructuring.
Doubling wages while not cutting jobs would obviously be fine with the union, but what would the point of that be?
Rarely, but if the union official gets to chose between more people paying dues and fewer people paying dues, which are they going to pick?
We know that Unions don't oppose salary caps, but they oppose differentials in compensation based on job performance. Seems like that amounts to the same thing? Unless you're suggesting we just pay government workers more and see if we get any marginal productivity out of them.
I can follow your hypothetical right up to the point where the union official commits career suicide by trying to piss off every member single member of the union in a single stroke, and no further.
Firstly, that chat doesn't measure popularity, it measures "how justified were they".
Also, I think that a honest reading of that chart would be that there is the Vietnam War (with very low justification), WW2 (with high justification) and then two subgroups: WW1 & Civil War with moderate justification, and Korea, Gulf War 1 and Afghanistan with lower levels, but still significant levels of justification.
Popularity of conflicts du jour and opinion of the military as a valuable enterprise in general are different.
For instance, I joined and served in the military during the second Iraq war despite disapproving of the invasion.
This holds especially for career civil servants, as political winds shift and one may not always agree with the policies of the current government.
One does not serve because the nation is perfect, one serves to strengthen the nation and to have the opportunity to make it better for future generations.
I would, to the best extent possible, educate my children as to what military service actually entailed, and then I would let them make the decision based on their values and life goals.
I'm just suggesting that when the military is actively engaged in operations that many people dislike, that has an impact on the quantity and caliber of people that are interested in being part of it.
Well, the "real" (read: design) engineering work has always been done by contractors. I literally walked out of an interview for the Navy (NSWC Carderock) when I realized that. I went over to General Dynamics and got a job as a mechanical engineer designing nuclear submarines. NASA is the same way, the design work is done by subcontractors. The government agency conducts oversight. So we, the contractors, sent our plans to the Navy for review & approval. Their job was to ensure we didn't screw up and that our plans would meet the contract requirements.
In my experience NAVSEA (the actual Navy side) were all former senior engineers at the subcontractor. They were good engineers and could smell bullshit easily. But that kind of work is very different than the creative side. Some people like being the reviewer better, and the government benefits are generally better, but otherwise I never saw the appeal.
As a former Naval Surface Warfare Center engineer I can't really agree with your assessment. When I was there (2004 - 2010 ) there was a dedicated push to get more engineering talent in the doors. Most of the time it appeared the qualifications to get hired at a contractor was "had pulse" and they desperately needed someone to fix everything that was getting delivered completely non-functional. The deliveries for the 76, and 77 were in a similar state of disarray, and without a team of NSWC engineers onboard for years neither of those boats would have passed sea trials.
Add to that, the Fortune 500 list - for the first time ever, it is not dominated anymore by US Companies. At least that is what I've heard from RT news.
I believe some of this is the slow-burning unintended consequence that political leaders are responsible for.
We've been at "war" for decades burning military dollars on a "cause" that very few Americans believe in, care about, or even understand. You can only wave the flags and shout about patriotism for so long before people stop giving a shit. It obviously becomes very hard for an organization to attract talent when said talent doesn't care about or believe in what the organization is doing.
The military got the best and brightest during WWII because the US was fighting Nazis (oh, sorry, "alt-right European Nationalists") and a foreign enemy who had attacked us on our own soil. For Vietnam, they had to draft because few believed in the cause and what they got where those too powerless to escape the draft (cough, cough, bone spurs). And for... whatever the fuck it is we've been doing in the Middle East since 9/11, the military doesn't even have a draft to potentially snare some better people.
When you have an all-volunteer military in an endless war for no clear purpose, the end result is many people who have nothing better going for them. Should we really be surprised the military is a clusterfuck? If you were competent, why would you want to squander your talents helping the US kill random brown people for no good reason?
>The military got the best and brightest during WWII because the US was fighting Nazis ... and a foreign enemy who had attacked us on our own soil. For Vietnam, they had to draft because few believed in the cause and what they got where those too powerless to escape the draft ...
WWII also had a draft, as did WWI and the Civil War. More people (as a percentage) volunteered for Vietnam than did WWII. That surprised me when I heard it. Americans were pretty gung-ho about enlisting in Vietnam and didn't really sour on it until later in the war. It was during the communism scare, so people fully bought into the Domino Theory at the time. Russia went nuclear, North Korea invaded South, the Iron Curtain went up, Cuban Missle Crisis, McCarthy, Sputnik, and a lot of chest thumping made it a pretty scary time.
I think your general point is valid. It's better to enlist when the country isn't at war, and that hasn't been for what, going on 18 years now? Enlistees nor draftees typically don't decide what features a warship has though.
My grandfather voluntarily enlisted in the air force in WWII because he didn't want to get drafted as a front line soldier with a rifle. So voluntary enlistment doesn't always reflect agreement with the war, it can be a pragmatic decision.
Yup. How many times does this engineering mistake have to be made?
"Let's save time and money by not building a prototype and do our testing of the system on the actual ship itself!"
Whenever someone thinks: let's cut corners on "x" to save money and time, it has always come around to bite me. And now they are far behind schedule, and they ended up having to build a carrier replica at the drydock to do testing anyway.
Old saying, "Fastest way to build a six inch reflector telescope is to build a four inch telescope first."
That is, learn in the simplest possible context.
Like companies that won't build an MVP or even a non-sellable proof of concept. Finding out a key software library doesn't work three weeks before launch day, for example.
They did build a land version of the EMALs launch system. Here it is launching a F-35. There must have been a design change between when this was built & tested, and when they installed it on the Ford. Which would be the wrong thing to do - always install upgrades/changes in test before production.
Reminds me that the first U.S. ship to ship night naval battles with the Japanese in WWII were tragic (for the U.S.) 'cause the American super-fancy new-tech Mark 14 torpedoes hadn't been properly tested; that would have been "too expensive." So they were just made and deployed - and since defective, didn't trigger.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo
So "this engineering mistake" indeed has to be made ad nauseum, it would seem. As Einstein said, only space and human stupidity are infinite.
back then the US had still a solid industrial base outside of a oligopolic, capitalistic industrial-military-complex which is only interested in making money by milking the government (as opposed to making money in the long-term by supporting a solid, diverse array of industrial ventures)
"“I think when the Navy started off, they had a really good plan,” Paul Francis, of the Government Accountability Office, told the Senate in 2016. “They were going to build two ships, experimental ships.” But in 2005, having assured itself that “optimal manning works,” the Navy decided to skip the experimentation and move straight to construction. From this point on, whenever the Navy tried to study the feasibility of minimal manning, its analysis was colored by the fact that—on these ships, at least—it had to work. Dozens of littoral combat ships were on their way. The Giffords was the 10th to deploy."
Some of the systems might be unique, if not new technology or specifically designed and made for this use case, with the R&D sponsored as part of the project budget.
There might not be a prototype, because the delivered item is the prototype.
Sure, it should be tested before being shipped, but it doesn't help when it ultimately doesn't perform as expected and there is no alternative at hands.
From my conversation with navy folks, unless a scandal sinks an admiral, the organization does not take it seriously, and will not make any institutional changes.
As a yard worker, In some ways I feel sorry for NewportNews Shipyard.
These elevators are designs the Navy brought to them.
Not something they designed.
They built it to spec and it did not work.
Now the blame game.
As someone above noted, The Navy did not even build a land based prototype. Now whose fault is this mess?
I had thought it would be the catapult system that failed.
Instead it is too powerful and they are still tuning it.
They are worried about the stress on the nose gear. Some birds are still restricted in weight last I heard.
Robert Reich's latest video shows what's wrong... too much spending on whiz-bang military toys while cutting Social Security and Medicare. https://youtu.be/BGIJxNPFpAQ
This all seems fine to me, then. They can't get the bombs to the planes, but that's fine because the planes can't take off, which is fine because they couldn't land anyway.
Well, at least the front hasn't fallen off. The LCS-2 had problems like aggressive galvanic corrosion between the aluminum hull and steel propulsion system due to inadaquate isolation. Any small boat owner could have told you that dissimilar metals and salt water are a bad mix unless you use sacrificial anodes and take measures to eliminate current flow. Yet the USN botched it.
I too have knowledge of these issues and they are devastating.
On top of dissimilar metal issues there are also different aluminum grades involved in the construction.
(meaning training+certs needed to work on these for most yards)
So on top of zero survivability in a hostile env they are not going to last 15 years.
Back when I was in, Ronnie wanted a 600 ship navy. Now we have <350 and that is counting these glorified ferrys.
I really thought your comment was going to be a reference to this sketch. “The front fell off” is...not something one expects to be a realistic scenario.
I padded it out with a bit more substance, but the first revision of my comment was just a reference to that sketch. Remembering the sketch reminded me of the LCS-2 hull issue.
After a bit of research I was a little confused. According to my research you can use sink as a sacrificial anode for Al depending on the exact alloy you are using.
Owners of aluminum boats make guests empty their pockets of loose change, because a penny in the bilge of an aluminum boat will punch a hole in the hull. I did make a mistake; has to be an old style copper penny for maximum galvanic corrosion.
It's a fairly lousy material for boats, though people use it anyway.
It's worth noting that problems like this are pretty normal for new weapons systems. Th V-22 Osprey is a good example here: it seemed like a disaster when it came out, but it's now got its kinks worked out and is performing really well.
It also seems to be pretty normal in these cases for the media to report on it as if it's not normal. And worse, to sometimes use language like "can't", implying an unsolvable problem.
In this particular case it appears that two of the elevators are working, and the rest have hit snags due to mismeasurements that can be fixed with some re-welding. Behind schedule, but the tech appears to be fundamentally viable.
If you're interested in big engineering projects and how they work culturally/politically as well as technologically, Richard Whittle's book about the V-22 Osprey is really worth reading.
_The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey_
Thanks for the recommendation! I'm in the midst of a big and culturally/politically challenging engineering project and eager to learn... so much so that I signed up for a library card and checked out the ebook from the LA Public Library!
That library card comes with tons of other benefits too. Free streaming on Kanopy, NYT membership, museum discounts / passes (https://www.lapl.org/explorela).
I think the fear is that we don’t have 20 years to spend on this ship, the F-35, etc.
Eg, fixing the problems with the M16 wasn’t that hard: chrome the chamber and change the training program fixed a lot for very little cost and without too many casualties (you can always pull m14s out of inventory!)
Not so with an aircraft carrier, destroyer (rounds for the Zumwalt will never be made), and maybe the F35 will only occasionally decapitate it’s pilots
You can look at this as an example of how bad things are, or how good things are. For those who don't know, the Zumwalt class of destroyers is equipped with a special 155mm gun that can fire projectiles up to 160 km [1]. This gun can only fire a certain type of rounds that were produced and tested, but they turned out to be much more expensive than initially projected (by a factor of about 25, from $35k to $900k) [2]. The Navy decided to cancel the order, and to pivot [3].
"The Navy announced in February in budget justification documents that it intended to integrate Raytheon’s SM-6 missile and was changing the mission from a land-attack platform to a ship killer.
In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee’s seapower subcommittee, Vice Adm. Bill Merz told senators that the slow development of the AGS prompted the change. [...]
The Navy has moved ahead with a plan to add SM-6 on to Zumwalt, which allows the Navy to engage surface targets and extremely long ranges among other missions.
In August, the Navy shot down a medium-range ballistic missile target with the SM-6, which uses a fragmenting explosion near its target as the kill mechanism."
In Silicon Valley people generally appreciate a good pivot, so some people may appreciate this one too.
The cost for AGS ammunition skyrocketed because the DDG-1000 purchase was truncated to three ships. Had we purchased all 32, the unit cost of the rounds would have been acceptable.
Pretty much every significant DoD acquisition has been like this: late and over-budget. Incidentally, those are features of almost every major software project I'm aware of as well.
Obviously that's not a good pattern, and the DoD should certainly improve its procurement process, but it's not the existential crisis it's made out to be in the media sometimes. The contractors keep working, and the system eventually is in a working state.
I think his issue is that if they cannot deliver the systems that were paid for on time then it puts the Navy into a bind. The Navy stretched too far with the Ford carrier and issues between contractors lead to components not working well together. Yet this is just the latest is screw ups in the Navy.
The problem I have is this so called near balance that has be maintained in budgets between the services. The internal pissing match is what costs us so much as each tries to out do the other, mainly the Navy and Air Force cannot get along.
This day and age concentrating so much wealth in such a vulnerable area as surface ships should have given them pause but the Navy has been wedded to the CV for too long because they are BIG and visible. The Air Force's folly is being stuck on manned air craft to the point they practically buried attempts at unmanned combat roles. The Army? If not to staff the bases around the world is simply a large force with little real mission.
yet the end question is always the same, we know what US dominance in this area is like, the so called world policeman, is it worth the risk finding out what happens when someone else steps in if the US backs off? How would that look?
> ...is it worth the risk finding out what happens when someone else steps in if the US backs off? How would that look?
I think that's right question to ask nowadays. What can we learn by examining the areas of the world where the US is not so clearly dominant? (e.g. Tibet, Ukraine, South China Sea, Sub Saharan Africa)
Can we compare the fate of the people in those places to the fate of people in places where the US is or was clearly dominant? (e.g. Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq, Central America, Okinawa, Philippines)
Is the picture really so clear? Does US dominance guarantee a better outcome for the people in those places? Is it kind of a mixed bag?
Sometimes there's a tendency to recoil in fear when we think of US acquiescence on the global stage, but, what if the changes would be less significant than we imagine?
Pretty sure funnelling some of that money into health and education would be a better deal for the average US family.
American multinationals would however argue more needs to be done to protect their overseas investments and access to markets. Just don't expect them to foot the bill.
"For globalisation to work, America can't be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is. The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonald-Douglas, the designer of the F-15, and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technology is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps." - Thomas Friedman
Rather odd to list Cuba and Vietnam, places where the US directly lost major conflicts, and places where the US is 'clearly' dominant.
Kind of odd to group places there the US 'was' dominant with places where it is, in a discussion of what would happen if US dominance went away.
You seem to have forgotten to mention Japan, South Korea, West Germany, Israel, Taiwan, Kuwait, and basically the rest of the free world under areas where the US is dominant.
What you've really done is point out that places where the US has struggled to maintain dominance are terrible places to live. Which is true. Living under total US dominance as in Canada or Finland or Hawaii is far preferable than any alternative.
If you fairly listed and categorized times and places, it becomes extremely clear that American hegemony is vastly preferable to residents than any non-imaginary alternative.
the US was dominant in Cuba, Vietnam and the Philippines too -- for a while. the people in Cuba were so happy with US dominance that they staged a successful revolution. and US dominance ended up killing, directly or indirectly, a couple million people in Vietnam and Cambodia. even today chemicals left behind by US forces on military bases result in thousands of Vietnamese cancer deaths annually. and the Philippines loved our dominance so much that they decided in 1992 not to renew US naval base leases worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
as for South Korea, Japan and Germany, how much credit can the US really take for their success today? we did not quite wage a war of 100% total annihilation in the 1940s, but US-led allied forces did bomb Japan and Germany pretty heavily in Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Dresden. Japan didn't exactly love being a US occupied territory. that lasted less than ten years.
the people in Japan, Germany and South Korea worked their asses off to get the prosperity they have today. but, ok, sure, the US can take credit for the Marshall plan, and for opening domestic markets to exports from Japan and Germany, and for not stealing West German infrastructure and sending it back to the US (as the Soviets did to East Germany).
I supposed due to branding and recruitment and legacy issues, this is a non-starter. But I see no need whatsoever to have separately named branches of the US military.
It just gives people a reason to split into groups and compete and fight. They already have overlapping capabilities anyway. Seems like we should just get rid of the names and everyone is a part of the "U.S. Military".
The reason to have separate branches of the military (if you can afford it) is to maintain organizational and doctrinal uniqueness.
Think about it in evolutionary terms. Any hierarchical organization trends towards uniformity, especially one where promotion is conservative. E.g. most pyramidal organizations.
The Marines fundamentally, organizationally, and tactically approach warfare different than the Army. The Army would have been incapable of fighting WWII in the Pacific. It's just not what it's designed to do.
By maintaining five combat branches (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard), you maintain five unique approaches to warfare.
Consequently, when the situation calls for it, you can apply any of those four unique approaches.
Whether or not that's worth the cost of distinct services is debatable, but it's certainly a benefit from the approach.
"The Army would have been incapable of fighting WWII in the Pacific."
You do realize the US Army was extensively involved in the amphibious operations in the Pacific? In the Southwest Pacific, it was almost all US Army in New Guinea/Papua, New Britain, the Admiralty Islands etc. Guadalcanal was the main USMC effort. All of the landings in the Philippines were Army, Okinawa was joint Army/USMC under Army command. Army divisions also fought on Iwo Jima, Tinian, Saipan, etc.
I'm not disparaging any branch of the service, nor diminishing their contributions across the many fronts of WWII.
I am saying that the Army wasn't organizationally crafted around or trained for amphibious assaults against defended beaches.
Those units that did were re-trained, co-mingled with Marine units, and typically under Marine command (e.g. what eventually became V Amphib).
Marine units were built for that mission (i.e. by integrating air assets at a lower level). Army units were not.
And I don't think anyone in service would argue you could transfer a unit to a different branch and expect everything to work normally. Military culture makes corporate culture look easy.
But my original point was that diversity breeds strength. Army perspective may succeed where Marine perspective fails, or vice versa.
You may say you're not disparaging other branches, but you are.
"the Army wasn't organizationally crafted around or trained for amphibious assaults against defended beaches."
So Normandy wasn't defended? Normandy made Peleliu and Tarawa look like a piece of cake.
The Army also developed amphibious doctrine and training on its own with the ATC. It could be argued that Marine doctrine was flawed; Marine units lacked the logistical support for longterm conflicts. Army units did a better job of sustained operations. Amphibious assaults involved more than seizing a beachhead, especially with well entrenched Japanese troops.
And to be clear, Army units weren't "co-mingled" with Marine units, except at corp level. Army units operated in divisions.
Fundamentally, the Army had more troops in the Pacific, did more amphibious landings, arguably against tougher defenses, yet the Corp PR machine would have you think the Marines did it all by themselves. How many people even know the Army fought on Guadalcanal?
My grandfather was a soldier in the Pacific theater in WWII and he was always quick to point out that the Army had many more troops in theater, killed many more enemies, and suffered many more dead than the Marines did. The Army could have still won that theater without the Marines, albeit more slowly. The opposite is not true.
> The Marines fundamentally, organizationally, and tactically approach warfare different than the Army. The Army would have been incapable of fighting WWII in the Pacific. It's just not what it's designed to do.
Arguably. I look at it as equipment vs training vs organization.
The stuff can change, but it's even harder to change the way people think. And almost impossible to reorg and entire organization. And all militaries are very effective at making sure people think and behave in desirable ways -- kind of important when things start exploding around you.
So a response that might be advantageous for pushing across continental Europe isn't optimal for a chaotic beach assault.
You throw a Marine in the former, and they're still going to respond like a Marine.
> Seems like we should just get rid of the names and everyone is a part of the "U.S. Military"
There are some real differences between and within the different single Services (Land, Air and Martitime), many of these differences exist for functional reasons (consider s/w devs, testers and ops). Forcing everyone into the same uniform doesn't make the differences go away. The Canadians tried this and reverted back after several years [0].
It turns out that what's important is to to ensure that operations are commanded Jointly, even if the forces are generated separately. It's also important to ensure jointness in training, e.g. for littoral ops and air/land integration, so that people know what to expect when they come together. Many countries rediscover the need for jointness the hard way, when the different components are forced to integrate during a war.
I don't think the parent was even talking about actually integrating organizations, but just building a shared identity. That starts with a name. A lot of googling showed there is actually a word for that: "United States Armed Forces". I don't remember it being used much in US media. At best in technically correct news articles, but I doubtful to have heard it in movies. Even the word being plural might make it hard for people to identify as such. The Wikipedia page doesn't even list an acronym, with USAF already being taken...
We in germany have a "Bundeswehr". There obviously are separate branches and what not. I'm actually not familiar with the internals, since we from the public usually think of the military as a single entity. Doesn't matter if a trainee dies on a ship, a barrack has problems with nazi tokens or fighter jets colliding and dropping out of the sky during training, each of those events makes me think bad about our military in general (and sadly are not made up).
The Air Force doesn't need to share the Army's motivated esprit d'corps because most of them will sit at a desk or work as mechanics.
> We in germany have a "Bundeswehr". There obviously are separate branches and what not. I'm actually not familiar with the internals, since we from the public usually think of the military as a single entity.
So you're making a point about copying the Bundeswehr but don't actually know how the BW is set up?
Everything you described already exists in the US: the Department of Defense (and, to some degree, NATO). They're the overarching coordinating civilian department that runs the military. But the US military is HUGE and each individual US military service is larger than most other countries combined militaries.
Having some sort of combined bootcamp is nice, but as someone else mentioned, the Canadians already tried that and gave up on the idea. The hyper-fit Marines have a completely different lifestyle than an Airforce mechanic who will fix radars 13 hours a day -- the mechanic can get away with a 6 week "basic" training and then sent off to mechanic school, while the USMC grunt needs to have that discipline worked into them, and there is no way to do that except the hard way.
> The Canadians tried this and reverted back after several years.
From the linked source, this appears to overstate the situation.
> On 16 August 2011 the three environmental commands of the Canadian Armed Forces were renamed to reflect the names of the original historical armed services... The unified command structure of the Canadian Armed Forces was not altered by this change.
The Navy is under-equipped because the Oklahoma Republican operates under the delusion that taxes are unnecessary (Inhofe signed the Norquist pledge) and that in general, private enterprise is _always_ better at things than government enterprise.
This is not the military-industrial complex any more - this is the deliberate bleeding dry of government coffers by using the military as a money extraction machine. It's not feeding itself any more, at this point it's pure value extraction until things collapse.
Yes, and this begs the question... what kind of scenarios are we arming for?
In a modern world of sophisticated international commerce, disrupting commerce seems much more "war" than clash of military forces. Consider what I think of as a military flashpoint - the Strait of Hormuz. Some 25% of the world's oil flows through there, serving the hungry maw of Asian manufacturing superpowers. It's only 21 miles wide at its narrowest point, and much of that isn't navigable. Really, there's a six mile wide path, filled with slow, lumbering, basically defenseless oil tankers. Any and all of them are vulnerable to the thousands of anti-ship missiles that line the shores on both sides, and a single burning oil tanker could close the strait completely. A supersonic anti-ship missile would take just seconds from launch to destroying a tanker.
A shiny new aircraft carrier is supposed to prevent that how, exactly?
Moreover, the ease with which Iran or another power (or non-state entity) could close it makes too much saber-rattling vulnerable to mutual assured destruction. Just how long would our Asian allies and not-really-allies tolerate having their oil cut off so the US could pick a fight with Iran, or Saudi Arabia, or whomever?
Just wanted to point out, no one in their right mind should/would try to use a hypersonic missile for a "short-range" attack.
The missile needs time to maneuver onto a vector to the target, and to accelerate. Once accelerated, it's not going to be drastically changing it's trajectory on anything resembling a "short" timescale, seeing as hypersonic turning radii are measured in miles. Rocket accelerated gliders this goes for doubly to avoid overshot.
It just isn't a practical utilization of the delivery vehicle.
Furthermore, the point of carrier's is air superiority, and force projection. That carrier is a mobile slab of sovereign soil from which all sorts of logistics can be dispatched from.
It's the difference between "I could get bombed today," and pointing at the spec floating on the horizon, and saying "There's where the bomb that would get dropped on me today is," if that makes any sense.
Is that really relevant, though? The point is, Iran can close the Strait anytime it wants. It can easily kill tankers, and there is approximately nothing we can do about it. Carriers don't change that, any more than a tank changes a hostage crisis.
And it's not like we don't have plenty of friendly airbases in easy striking distance, either - in Iraq, Kuwait, Israel, etc. Putting American military response into Iran within minutes of an incident is trivial. What's hard is doing it in a way that completely prevents Iran from closing the Strait. When they have hundreds, maybe thousands of weapons capable of sinking a tanker, hidden all over that coast? They could shut down the Strait for months, even if we applied maximum force.
Again, this is a hostage situation, with 25% of the world's oil (40% of the oil that is shipped internationally) as the hostage.
As an engineer, I think it'd be pretty easy for me to hit a tanker- just bring the missile in low, at an acute angle to the convoy (relatively thick broken line) and you're likely to hit one of them at least.
> A shiny new aircraft carrier is supposed to prevent that how, exactly?
Prevent? More like deter. The question would be do the Iranians think it would be worth the likely counter attack from a carrier battle group or two in order to shutdown the straits.
Better than buying carriers at these prices would be energy independence from the middle east. That's pretty difficult since the east coast of the US is very reliant on middle eastern crude. The refineries there only refine that crude, and there is no way to get the needed fuel there from elsewhere in the US.
Additionally, if the economies of the Far East were to crater due to idiocy on the part of Iran, the US and Europe would likely follow.
Even if the USN decisively won a war with China, the likely outcome would for all practical intents and purposes still resemble a loss. The cost of war between two nuclear super powers is so high that anybody who suggests trying to win one shouldn't be taken seriously.
Every war since the Industrial Age began is a loss for the world in terms of cost. Spending money to make things that blow up other things you spent money to make, often with people inside, is a clear net negative for humanity.
The goal of war today is never to "win" in some sense that we should be happy of. It's just to have less massive destruction than the other guy.
France was Germany's largest trading partner before the Great War. The cost was immense, but that didn't stop the war. The Nazis had a great alliance with the Communists in the USSR, but that did not stop them from committing suicide by attacking the USSR.
Parties like the CCP that have no concern for human rights tend to get the countries they control into trajectories that unavoidably lead to conflict. Even countries that, logically speaking, would be much better as allies, or at least cooperating.
I wonder how much of China's arming is as a result of concern of the absurdly oversized US military machine. On the last 60 years, China don't tend to get involved in international conflicts either. Vietnam, Tibet, Korea - that's about it.
And it's making such statements with the artificial islands that they're building, the increasing military spending, the stealing of military secrets by hacking subcontractors, demonstrating their anti-sat missiles, etc. And that's just military. With their new one belt, one road initiative, they're trying to split the world into countries that use all Chinese tech w/Chinese standards, trading with china to build infrastructure by Chinese laborers.
If you were the leader of a country that would find itself in the crosshairs of another that was quite aggressive in the world stage, starting wars unilaterally, what would you do?
If a particular fickle leader were to block the Strait of Malacca, what do you think would happen to China's economy?
See this is the problem with adventurism and brinksmanship. It forces people to do whatever it takes, just as due diligence.
If you were the leader of a country that would find itself in the crosshairs of another that was quite aggressive in the world stage, starting wars unilaterally, what would you do?
I would probably try and cosy up to my immediate neighbours, not antagonise them.
If there were Chinese military bases in Vancouver, Havana, and all across Mexico, with docking rights in Halifax, the United States would not be acting all that much differently from how China is acting today.
Actually, now that I think of it, it would probably act by loudly contemplating the possibility of regime change in its neighbors.
Far less in fact. The US hasn't done most of those things.
Which artificial islands did the US build in eg the Gulf of Mexico to steal all of Mexico's gulf territorial waters? It didn't. Instead, the US has maintained a fair split of the gulf with Mexico, despite being a superpower that could take it all anytime it wants to. The US could take most of the water territory in the Caribbean if it wanted to, any time it wanted to.
Where are the vast number of examples of the US getting its military tech directly - via hacking - from cloning it from the USSR, Russia, Britain, Germany and France. Is that where the US got the F22, by stealing it from Russia? Is that where the US got the B2, by stealing it from France? Is that where the US got its 20 year lead in drone tech (eg Global Hawk 25 years ago), by stealing it all from Germany? Or how about the innovations in carrier technology over decades, that was stolen from which country, Spain? Italy? Japan? None of that happened.
When did the US send a large army of labor into Africa to extract resources there? It didn't. What the US has done for Africa, is push hundreds of billions of dollars in aid into the continent and save millions of lives with programs like PEPFAR. And its cure (thanks Pharmasset) for Hepatitis C will save millions more over time (see: Egypt).
Instead of building islands they bought, leased, and bullied their way to airbases and islands across the world post WW2. Geography meant building was not necessary.
Hacking? Not sure, there was certainly significant US commercial spying in the early post-war years. They licensed many military techs and broke the terms of licensing, often providing nothing whatsoever in return. Just one example: The Miles M54 and Power Jet's engines, which after very little time and development became the Bell X-1. None at all of the promised data and tech was provided in return. There are others, sometimes by even more dubious means.
A large amount of the early US space program relied on "liberated" German technology and staff, from Von Braun downwards. Infiltration of Airbus is ongoing. The only thing preventing the US from "stealing" more is its own technological lead, not some innate moral superiority.
The US involvement in Africa during the Cold War was a complex approach to align the unaligned. CIA in the Congo, for example.
No, the US started a war with the remnants of the Spanish Empire to gain Puerto Rico.
The US stole plenty from England during the Industrial revolution. That much is well known. In fact it was taught to me as an example of patriotism that some engineer immigrated from England after memorizing the schematics of some machine. The name of the engineer I've since forgotten.
What has happened for Africa with all that Western aid? The West wants to "help" the "poor" starving Africans but it seems doubtful that they would actually be happy if Africa became self-determining.
Don't look East to Africa, look Latin America for examples of American imperialism:
The CIA orchestrated the coup in 1954 in Guatemala, under the orders of the United Fruit Company.
The USA aided the 1964 Coup in Brazil to overthrow a left-wing leader who was getting a little too cozy with the communists.
In 1970, the USA engaged in economic warfare against Chile, and assisted in the subsequent coup in 1973, then stood by watching as they started throwing dissidents out of helicopters.
The 1976 Argentine coup was supported and encouraged by the USA, who knew of the plan months before they overthrew the democratically elected government. 20,000 people went missing, raped, tortured, thrown out of planes, having their children stolen from them. The USA was completely complacent in these atrocities.
That's just a few examples of American interference in Latin America. They've meddles in the affairs of practically every single Latin American country.
>Which artificial islands did the US build in eg the Gulf of Mexico to steal all of Mexico's gulf territorial waters? It didn't. Instead, the US has maintained a fair split of the gulf with Mexico, despite being a superpower that could take it all anytime it wants to. The US could take most of the water territory in the Caribbean if it wanted to, any time it wanted to.
This is the case only because Mexico and the rest of Latin America are relatively poor and subservient nations of no threat to the U.S. The Monroe doctrine and its 1904 corollary [1], both precursors to U.S hegemonic domination of the Western Hemisphere, ensured that the cards would fall this way. These policies have have directly resulted in multiple humanitarian disasters the effects of which are still being felt in Latin America to this day [2].
As far as the question of building islands, neither the Russians nor the Chinese are conducting war-games 10,000km from home, inviting Mexico, Cuba and Canada to come sail their warships around the Gulf of Mexico in the name of freedom of navigation. Neither the Russians nor the Chinese are installing advanced radar and missile systems in Canada and Mexico. Neither the Russians nor the Chinese have declared a “pivot to the West”, selling billions of dollars in military hardware to Cuba, Canada, Mexico and the rest of Latin America, proselytizing their political ideologies while doing so. Neither the Russians nor the Chinese have any military bases in America’s backyard that have previously been used as launching grounds for conducting illegal wars. Neither the Russians nor Chinese have ever exerted a policy of containment - an act of political and economic strangulation. America doesn’t have to worry about any of these things, and thus the question of why it has not built artificial islands becomes largely non-applicable.
> Where are the vast number of examples of the US getting its military tech directly - via hacking - from cloning it from the USSR, Russia, Britain, Germany and France. Is that where the US got the F22, by stealing it from Russia? Is that where the US got the B2, by stealing it from France? Is that where the US got its 20 year lead in drone tech (eg Global Hawk 25 years ago), by stealing it all from Germany? Or how about the innovations in carrier technology over decades, that was stolen from which country, Spain? Italy? Japan? None of that happened.
Is it common for a technologically superior nation to steal technology from technologically inferior nations? What could they hope to steal? Nonetheless, there are still a few examples of it happening, as mentioned in the other comments.
> When did the US send a large army of labor into Africa to extract resources there? It didn't. What the US has done for Africa, is push hundreds of billions of dollars in aid into the continent and save millions of lives with programs like PEPFAR. And its cure (thanks Pharmasset) for Hepatitis C will save millions more over time (see: Egypt).
I’m not going to denigrate the contributions of programs such as PEPFAR, as they have undoubtedly improved the lives of millions. This is objectively a good thing in terms of reparations for the destruction the U.S government and corporations have wrought upon the continent for the past few decades [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. We have everything from facilitating coups and assassinations to the backing and arming of genocidal warlords (responsible for the death and suffering of countless millions during endless civil wars). We’ve seen American corporations doing everything from conducting illegal human experimentation [11] to bog-standard corruption [12][13][14][15][16][17][18] and other types of exploitation [19]. We don’t really need to talk about the long-term, multi-generational effects the slave trade had on Africa [20].
If your first line (flooding Africa with labor to extract resources) is referring to China, then you’re wrong: the overwhelming majority of labor employed in Africa by Chinese corporations is local [21][22].
The West has provided hand-me-downs to Africa for decades now, crushing local industries like textiles [23] and suffocating food producers [24]. It has pumped billions of dollars of aid into Africa which has objectively not achieved much more than feed corruption and erode government-taxpayer accountability [25]. No western nation has been willing to lend to “junk” rated African nations anywhere near the amount of capital or provide infrastructure development on the terms the Chinese have.
For the first time in history, a country is willing to come to Africa as an equal partner, signing deals that provide the people with real, tangible benefits like world class airports, highways and high-speed rail systems [26]. No hand-me-downs, no pitiful TV ads begging for a dollar a day on behalf of starving, fly-laden black kids. Just mutually respectful and beneficial business deals. Economic corridors are now opening up between African nations that have never been connected before and brand-new high-capacity ports are doing the same thing for international trade. And before you mention the tired old debt-trap diplomacy trope, it has so far been nothing more than a groundless accusation based on paranoia and sour grapes [27][28][29].
Is this whataboutism? I don't understand your point. The GP said "I wonder how much of China's arming is as a result of concern of the absurdly oversized US military machine."
The point is that the populist alarmism over China is the same as 1984 sheeple being told who to hate by BB.
The US has a few dozen military bases outside US territory but somehow China making moves to expand its influence over its economic sphere is a matter of grave concern. So much of the anti-China rhetoric is the same as the anti-Japan rhetoric from 30 years ago. It's mostly veiled racism and a search for an enemy to hate to solidify the domestic group identity.
China does not have much of an expansionist history, but the Communist Party does. CCP has only controlled China for 70yrs, during which time China lacked the ability to get involved in international conflicts beyond its own borders.
As it becomes a great power it clearly has an agenda of extracting raw materials in Africa, selling manufactured goods across Eurasia and the rest of the world, and linking the supply chain from Africa <-> China <-> Europe more closely. It will likely guard those interests with force once it's able to.
Same as the US. Hard to complain when we've been doing it for 50+ yrs.
What is really scary is the question about how prepared they need to be. Seriously, how many parts come from China? Everyone talks about how they "might" have put kill switches in our hardware etc., but it's a really scary thought we might go to war with them and that this is true.
IIRC Clinton made the change allowing U.S. contractors to get military parts from foreign nations which means they've had 20+ years to infiltrate our equipment. If all they need to do is flip a switch to disable significant portions of the fleet, that puts the U.S. at a severe (understated) disadvantage. Their sabotage doesn't even have to be something major to cause real problems either.
Nah, the Russians and anyone they’ve shared the tech with could easily sink a carrier or any other surface ship with hypersonic anti-ship missiles[1]. That’s assuming they don’t just ram into another ship on accident. The US Navy is in a very bad place now and the next war that isn’t just picking on some totally helpless country will show it.
The Naval Gazing blog has a four-part series called "Why the Carriers Are Not Doomed" in which he makes the case: "Claims that US carriers are very vulnerable to missile attack, and will be sunk immediately in any upcoming war, are quite common. They’re also wrong. The carriers are surprisingly survivable, and the prowess of missiles is usually grossly exaggerated."
I don't have the expertise to fully evaluate the arguments, but it's worth a read before you fully swallow the "carriers are pointless because of anti-ship missiles" line.
This guy seems to be under the impression that carriers can manueuver quickly enough to dodge and/or outrun submarines and/or the torpedoes they launch.
Torpedoes are not that much faster than
their targets. The Yu-6 is capable of
65 kts in attack mode, but the range figure
is for cruise mode, which doesn’t have an
associated speed. Even a 65 kt torpedo is
only about twice as fast as a carrier, and
the sound of the torpedo being fired is
enough to alert any ship with a live sonar
operator. This means that the target ship
is likely to be running away...
Not sure how credible that is.
My guess is that sinking a US carrier would be treated as justification for opening a bottle of tactical nuclear whoopass. If so, that probably constitutes more meaningful deterrence than sonar arrays, Aegis defenses, ASROCs, and so on.
why did you only quote that part of the paragraph? here's the rest:
> Torpedoes are not that much faster than their targets. The Yu-6 is capable of 65 kts in attack mode, but the range figure is for cruise mode, which doesn’t have an associated speed. Even a 65 kt torpedo is only about twice as fast as a carrier, and the sound of the torpedo being fired is enough to alert any ship with a live sonar operator.7 This means that the target ship is likely to be running away, and the submarine has to close to within half of the effective range before launch. Furthermore, the target and its escorts are likely to counterattack, forcing the submarine to evade and cut the torpedo’s wires. A torpedo has limited space for sonar, and without guidance updates from the launching submarine, it can be evaded. All of this is likely to limit submarines to launch ranges of 8 nm or less.
he's saying that the effective range for the torpedo is much shorter for a moving target, forcing the sub to get dangerously close. then after being detected, the sub would have to disengage and stop guiding the torpedo, at which point it could possibly be evaded.
I was addressing just the issue of speed. The torperdoes aren't intended against carriers really. The carrier groups are supposed to be attacked by something like submarine launched self organizing packs of antiship supersonic missiles like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-800_Oniks. An attack submarine like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasen-class_submarine carries 32 missiles and can launch 8 per salvo (the VLS launchers are revolver type, so the delay between salvos is very short) from 100km distance in the low-altitude sea-skimming mode. Such an attack would present serious challenge to the carrier group defenses. It is basically machine against machine - automated CIWS vs. the missiles incoming at 2.5Mach (and the new generation of hypersonic missiles is coming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrahMos), and humans have no role in such engagement.
the basic claim that effective range is halved or more against a target moving half as fast as you seems to make sense. I have no idea to what extent torpedoes need guidance from the launcher.
An obvious counter example is Aircraft carriers need to refuel for their aircraft regularly and can’t travel quickly during this process. Nor can they accelerate quickly if caught in such a situation.
Further, to be useful aircraft carriers need to stay near their targets and a few subs acting in concert can lie in it’s probable path. Think one sub every ~30 miles in a line sweeping slowly and they can close the trap.
On top of that subs can also launch missiles not just torpedo’s.
> On top of that subs can also launch missiles not just torpedo’s.
From the blog post:
"Or can they avoid this by using missiles? Unfortunately, this is not likely to be a healthy choice. At best, an SSN might be able to fire 18 missiles in a single salvo. Even with the benefit of popping up close to the target (which requires going through a lot of those same defenses they’re trying to avoid), this is unlikely to be enough. Launching missiles is extremely noisy, and Aegis is set up to take cues from sonar. The missiles will likely be shot down, and the patch of sea the submarine launched from is not going to be a safe place."
Limits like 18 missiles are very easy to change in a war. Firing 100 vs 18 does not involve some huge leaps in technology, just a different focus.
Subs are extremely dangerous places or be in a war and should expect heavy casualties. However, from a military standpoint if the sub is destroyed after taking out an aircraft carrier that’s a major win.
Several ways around CIWS. Simply having enough missiles in the air works, but you can also do things like add armor or even forgo high explosive payloads relying instead on kinetic energy.
Aircraft carriers are huge targets and it's the weapon systems you don't know about that are the largest risks.
No, I don't, but I'm pretty sure a carrier that's presumably not already "running away" can't hit the gas and accelerate meaningfully when it detects an enemy torpedo launch less than an hour away.
Intuitively, evasive maneuvers don't seem to be a useful tool in a carrier's defensive arsenal, but I'd be interested in hearing otherwise.
At the moment I can't find how long it takes them to step on the gas, maybe that's classified or something, but it's pretty clear they can at least turn around quickly once they're going fast. Of course, deck operations,etc might delay such maneuvers.
My guess? If modern warships can't maneuver effectively against traditional torpedoes, Russia would not have spent the money developing supercavitating torpedoes.
Step on the gas? They never stop moving! By constantly moving, the airplanes have 30 knots less to accelerate to reach flight speed and 30 knots less to deaccelerate when landing. They're also nuclear powered so it's not like that extra energy actually costs you much.
That looks impressive, but costs a lot of speed. It’s mostly useful for an aircraft carrier to hide behind another ship rather than directly avoiding torpedoes in open water.
As to acceleration they are something like 2.5 HP to the long ton. So picture a 5 HP car on ice.
There are scenarios where simply being able to stop quickly is evasive. If the torpedo has a 50 km range and the submarine captain assumes it takes you a 1 km to stop, the submarine could attack from 51 km away. When your target is slow to decelerate or change course, you have a greater effective range when attacking from from the front.
All forms of acceleration (be it speeding up, slowing down, or turning) will modify the effective range of enemy torpedoes as a function of launch position relative to the ship.
Consider even a ship moving at a constant speed and heading. If you draw a line around the ship to represent the maximum range of a constant speed torpedo aimed at the ship, that line won't be circular. If you abstract away water drag and assume submarines can move as fast as carriers, then the line would be circular. But in reality drag on the torpedo means that sub can't simply match speeds with the carrier and expect the speeds of the torpedo and the sub to add up. The torpedoe's top speed is relative to the stationary water, not to its launching submarine.
The way I read it, that concerns an attack by a single submarine. So what if there are a dozen or more enemy submarine. Is taking out a carrier for 2 or 3 subs a meaningful war exchange?
A dozen submarines would be an enormous group: China and Russia each only have about a dozen nuclear attack submarines, and non-nuclear submarines don't have the undersea range to get close to a carrier battle group undetected. It would be a huge gamble to throw them all in one attack.
The other problem is that the submarines would have no way to communicate without giving away their position. It would be very difficult to execute any sort of coordinated operation.
Carriers can move at about the same speed as submarines. And when transiting at high speed, submarines are very noisy and thus easy to detect. So if the carrier is operating in the open ocean it's tough for a submarine to get into firing position.
If the carrier is constrained to operate in a restricted area then the submarine has a much better chance of sneaking up undetected. Carriers are frequently "sunk" in exercises like that.
>My guess is that sinking a US carrier would be treated as justification for opening a bottle of tactical nuclear whoopass.
A problem appears when you don't know who sank the CV. I think the possibility for such a scenario exists with submarines and torpedoes. The US can't exactly nuke someone based on circumstantial evidence.
Combine that with disinformation campaigns by less-friendly nations and it's difficult to tell what the populace would think.
And those weren't countries that people held in high regard nor did they run disinformation campaigns in the US. I really don't believe that the US could nuke someone as a first strike without there being overwhelming public evidence to give cause. The US populace probably wouldn't approve regardless who's in charge.
I would be surprised if signal intelligence was unable to discern who the guilty party was in this case even in the absence of hard data from the incident itself. I find it hard to believe any entity capable and willing of initiating such an attack could keep it quiet for long.
I imagine that's one thing that sonar technology does guarantee. They'll have exquisitely-detailed acoustical profiles for everything in the water that's bigger than a tuna.
The author is certainly correct in saying that as soon as a missile or a torpedo gets fired, the stealth game is over. There won't be any question about who did the deed.
But there are delayed weapons and it's also possible to use weapons that other nations use. Even if the military thinks that know who did it doesn't mean the people will believe it, especially when there are disinformation campaigns. You can't fight a war if your own population doesn't support you/it. A hostile nation doesn't have to be able to do this completely undetected, they simply have to create enough doubt.
> could easily sink a carrier or any other surface ship with hypersonic anti-ship missiles
There is a tradeoff between speed and maneuverability. Ballistic missiles are hypersonic, for example, and have almost zero post-launch maneuverability. Cruise missiles are subsonic, but have a tremendous amount of maneuverability.
Low-speed projectiles are vulnerable to jamming and shipboard defenses. High-speed projectiles are vulnerable to targets leaving the strike zone.
Anyone claiming a carrier strike group can "easily" be sunk misunderstands not only anti-ship missile technology but also the strategic role of carrier systems. (The ships hold back at a safe distance from which they monitor for incoming projectiles. Planes and missiles do the close-range work.)
The Russians can't force project for shit. They struggle with Syria and that's practically their next door neighbor. Their surface fleet in particular is abysmal and has been since... basically forever.
Rather than actually shooting at each other, America and Russia seem to compete to sell weapon systems to other countries, or to prevent the other from doing so. Two competing but symbiotic MICs whose mere existence serves to justify the existence of the other, creating an opportunity for profit across the board.
The above commenter has exaggerated, but large aircraft carriers are indeed regarded as increasingly vulnerable to high-speed missiles. E.g., from [1]:
"More controversially, the navy remains wedded to new aircraft carriers, but at $13 billion each they are arguably more an outdated symbol of twentieth-century power than an effective weapon system for a future in which they will be increasingly vulnerable to attack by high-speed, maneuverable missiles that can be bought for a minuscule fraction of what a carrier costs."
"they will be increasingly vulnerable to attack by high-speed, maneuverable missiles that can be bought for a minuscule fraction of what a carrier costs."
Except that assertion is far from proven. Missiles of that type have been around since the 70s and 80s, and the Navy was planning for it then. They are a threat, yes. But they're not assuredly effective. Finding the carrier and then delivering a missile that has the range, sensor coverage, lethality, is not a trivial problem to solve, and there's trade-offs in every area.
Discussing all of this in context is not easy, which is why this article is a nice one. Places like the NYtimes and others, while great in many areas, consistently seem to oversimplify defense issues. That's not to say that the threat from missiles to carries is one to be disregarded. But it needs to be understood that the defense against a carrier is not an easy one either. And while anti-ship missiles is a logical direction as far as cost vs. effectiveness, success is far from guaranteed.
That completely ignores their logistical utility. There are cheaper alternatives to aircraft carriers if you want to attack something but if you need a cargo plane to land near enemy territory for resupply then you either need an ally who provides you access to their airbase or you need an aircraft carrier.
Nonetheless, it seems the US Navy is still fighting the last war. Carriers are extremely vulnerable to missiles. I think fast missile boats and land based launchers probably make large warships obsolete. Tough to say for sure since that hasn't happened, but it seems likely to me.
Killing a carrier isn't like a video game where you see a carrier on screen and issue a launch command. Killing a carrier involves a chain of events; break anyone of the links and the carrier is safe.
First you have to locate the carrier. Easy to do in peacetime, in war time much more difficult. If you want to kill it with a ballistic missile, you need to locate it within a few square kilometers. This means either a radar location, or a satellite overhead.
Radar is problematic because it has to deal with the curvature of the earth. This is typically solved by using airborne radar. Well, carriers and their airgroups are very well versed in both detecting this surveillance and killing it. Either with aircraft, with SAMs, or with cruise missiles that target that airfields of the surveillance (ISR) aircraft.
So say that you somehow manage to get a location fix on a carrier battle group. Now you have to prep your missiles for launch which takes time. Let's say 30-60 min. The carrier can steam at over 30 knots, so now your targeting data is out of date. Again, not like push button warfare. Your ballistic missile now has to find the carrier in a roughly 1000 sq mile area. Fine, missiles are relatively cheap. So you just target each square mile with a missile and hope its internal radar can pick out the CVN.
So you launch 1000 missiles, and just like in Battleship, one of your missiles manages to be in the right spot. Now it has to deal with the SAMs protecting the CVN. Aegis is pretty good these days, so you've got to make it past them. That'll be tough. Then you have to make it past the ESSM missiles, as well as the ECM jamming suite of every ship in the carrier group. Fine, you have robust electronics.
BOOM! You've hit. But it turns out that your radar on the warhead was small, with insufficient processing power to discriminate between a carrier (especially with all the jamming going on) and an escort ship. You've sunk an LCS, or a refueler (they're big and have a big radar image), or maybe even an Arleigh Burke DDG or Tico cruiser. Sucks for those crewmates, but that's their job. Protect the carrier.
And what has this failed attack cost you? Well, ballistic missiles are cheap compared to a CVN, but not that cheap. Say $5M a piece since it makes the math easier (though the DF-21 and DF-26 will cost much much more). 1000 missiles is $5B, plus the cost of all the ISR assets used to locate the CVN.
Now if hypersonic missiles start to take off (pun intended) and become deployable weapon systems, it will make things more difficult. But that's still in the future.
>> Now you have to prep your missiles for launch which takes time. Let's say 30-60 min.
China's DF-21D and DF-26 are solid-fueled and fired from mobile launchers. In a deliberate carrier-hunting attack the sensor-shooter killchain is also likely to be streamlined, even taking into the account that the Chinese still suck at Command & Control. Overall preptime and killchain delay should be negligible (<30 minutes for the Chinese).
>>> So you just target each square mile with a missile and hope its internal radar can pick out the CVN.
No. These long-range anti-carrier missiles have an almost vertical terminal trajectory and are looking down from high altitude. AN AESA's fast scanning should be able to find and fix a target with a signature as gigantic as a carrier's over a 30km-radius circle without too much difficulty. I haven't crunched the numbers on this personally, but I'll add it to my list of "radar scenarios to do the math on"...
>>>But it turns out that your radar on the warhead was small, with insufficient processing power
The DF-21 and DF-26 are both about 1.4m meters in diameter. You can stuff an AESA as good as any on a fighter into a nosecone that large.
>>>Aegis is pretty good these days.......Then you have to make it past the ESSM missiles.
Even in controlled tests we don't have that great of a pK (probability of kill aka "intercept") against high-speed ballistic missiles. The ships need to use SM-2s and SM-3s. 1x Tico + 2x Arleigh Burke are packing about 300VLS total, and that has to include Harpoons and Tomahawks. Let's assume ~250 SM-2/3s for air and missile defense. It's customary to launch 2 missiles per incoming threat (again, due to that low pK we've demonstrated) but that is still enough to stop 100 incoming (probably bigger than any realistic incoming salvo anyway). Assuming you can LAUNCH the SM-2s fast enough. Each ship would need to fire off 80+ missiles in probably 30 seconds, and I think there is a practical limit for how quickly you can fire from VLS (due to the exhausts and whatnot). It's probably something like 1-2 missiles per second, from non-adjacent cells.
>>>> Say $5M a piece since it makes the math easier (though the DF-21 and DF-26 will cost much much more). 1000 missiles is $5B, plus the cost of all the ISR assets used to locate the CVN.
I've seen estimates of $10-20M for DF-21/26.
-200(don't need 1000) x $20M = $400M
-3 x $100M(??) surveillance sats = $300M
-Sinking the centerpiece of your opponent's Navy, exploiting their Critical Vulnerability to defeat their Center of Gravity, AND achieve major Information Operation success (PR victory)? Priceless.
Warheads on the DF-21/26 aren't the same size as the missile diameter, especially if they're using MARV. So sensor size will drop. And the missiles won't have that much maneuverability.
Plus you're forgetting about SM6. This will eat these for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Assuming that the DF21 can even burn through the ECM that will be blasting it.
And it'll take more than one direct hit to kill a CVN. An 1100lb warhead will be similar in effect to a Harpoon. You might get lucky and have a mission kill, but if you fire 200+ missiles at a CVN you better kill it.
And if we go to war with the PRC, we won't be using one CVN. We'll be surging 2-3 CVBGs, and they'll run out of missiles. I also think that it's more likely that the PRC will be using nuclear warheads on the DF-26 in a purely defensive posture. The idea of them using as conventional weapons is too risky.
>>>>Warheads on the DF-21/26 aren't the same size as the missile diameter
For some reason finding physical radar dimensions is not easy. Even if the warhead is ~1m to the DF-21/26's 1.4m, that's still enough to stuff in one of these: [1] one of the most powerful A2A radars ever. [2]&[3] are <60cm diameter. [3] is known Chinese tech, and is therefore most within the realm of feasibility for employment.
>>>And the missiles won't have that much maneuverability
They shouldn't need much, just enough to turn a near-miss into a full miss (assuming a frag detonation and not a more difficult kinetic kill anyway). Topol-Ms are rumored to have evasive maneuver capabilities, to establish precedent.
>>>>Plus you're forgetting about SM6. This will eat these for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Nah I just lumped them in with the SM2/3. Regardless of the actual SAM used you're going to shoot 2 of them per incoming contact. The SM6 tests listed on the Wiki all used 2 missiles per MRBM target.[6]
>>>Assuming that the DF21 can even burn through the ECM that will be blasting it.
Ummmmm, pointing insanely powerful radio emissions into the upper atmosphere in an attempt to blind a ballistic missile is a great way to broadcast your position. If anything, might be a good idea to configure several DF-21s for passive direction finding. Not sure if the DF-21s have any kind of datalink, the speeds and atmospheric conditions will make that difficult, but P-700 Granit missiles have a networked cooperative capability and those things are decades old.
>>>>An 1100lb warhead will be similar in effect to a Harpoon.
A Harpoon has a <500lb warhead [4]. 1100lbs is closer to a Tomahawk. For reference, the P-700's warhead (and it's definitely considered "carrier killer" ordnance) is ~1600lbs.
>>>You might get lucky and have a mission kill
A 500kg warhead with a vertical attack profile, if it hits, is practically a guaranteed mission kill. The CVN will lose catapults or an elevator at the least, and suffer a gigantic detonation inside its hangar at worst. Either way it's a PR victory and its entire air wing is no longer contributing to the fight.
>>>>>And if we go to war with the PRC, we won't be using one CVN. We'll be surging 2-3 CVBGs, and they'll run out of missiles.
If they run out of anti-carrier ballistic missiles they'll send drone-converted 3rd-generation aircraft, which is a great way to burn up our anti-air ordnance.[5] If anything they'll use those FIRST to exhaust our defenses, then fire the DF-21/26s, then follow up with a land-based strike package to finish the task force off. China's land-based strike aircraft all outrange the combat radius of carrier aircraft + ordnance by a significant margin. We'll run out of ordnance within the Nine Dash Line / First Island Chain before China does.
Oh, not that I ever expect a 100-missile DF-21 salvo anyway. I don't think they have anywhere near that many launchers, and our best bet would be Tomahawk strikes from submarines against the launchers early in the war.
FYI: I've spent ~5 years in the west Pacific Theater, 3 of those at a Corps-level combined arms headquarters that regularly wargames ahem a "peer fight" against a fictional country with a ballooning blue water navy and an authoritarian government, if you catch my meaning. I've spent a LOT of time reading exercise AARs, intel updates, and threat briefs from the past ten years on this problem set, courtesy of the ///SECRET Intelink portal. But I'm arguing entirely from open-source info here.
For maneuverability of the warheads, I was focusing more on them being able to adjust to a shifting target location, not avoiding SAMs. I don't think decoys and other countermeasures to ABM defences are currently relevant to non-ICBM platforms for the near future.
I think that the bigger issue with protecting the CVBGs isn't DF-21/26 but that lack of missile magazine depth and reloading. We can't even fill most of the VLS we have now, and as you mentioned, it'd be pretty simple to degrade our AD with threats that require a response but aren't as dangerous. And since replenishment at sea for VLS is not currently practiced, ships would have to cycle through Yokosuka (assuming it's still a functioning base after whatever the PLAN does) for reloads.
And since we have relatively shortlegged "interceptors" for the CVNs, with shortlegged AAMs (as currently deployed), I wouldn't be surprised if the PLAN decides that ALCMs still have tremendous value. Hell, we don't even deploy with full airwings these days.
At least the PLAN is pretty far behind in subs. For now.
And where are your fast missile boats and land-based launchers going to get the real-time targeting data they need to hit anything? The ocean is a big place, missile seekers have narrow views, and reconnaissance satellites are increasingly vulnerable.
That's a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of carriers today and going forward. They're not primarily for fighting a war with China or Russia.
The reason China is building them and looking to add more in the coming years, is for the same reason the US has them. China knows the US could sink a carrier and yet they're building them anyway. Why?
It's about global force projection. The point isn't to set them up in front of China or Russia as convenient targets and let them get sunk. You mostly want to use carriers directly against weaker adversaries. A war with China or Russia that involves sinking a US carrier, would be the start of WW3, and millions of people would probably die. Carriers getting sunk is not a primary concern at all in that scenario (it's down the list, with nuclear war jumping to the top).
You're touching on something unspoken but very present in the modern US military machine. It's great for wrecking anyone who isn't on the short list of China, Russia, the EU, Japan and maybe India. Every other nation could see their infrastructure and military devastated within a month, with little they could do to stop it. (See Libya for one example.)
But the American people aren't being sold a military that can act as the international equivalent of mafia leg-breakers. We're told, again and again, that we are paying for a military that is "the best" and that can, if needed, stand up to our global peers and near-peers and win. There's a disconnect between rhetoric and expenditures on the one hand, and demonstrated performance, capabilities, and operational plans on the other hand.
That seems like a huge problem to me. At the least, it's a massive fraud being perpetrated on the American public. And at worst, it might lead to a terrible conflict as decision-makers operate with very inaccurate assessments of what our military is really capable of.
I think a few other posters have touched on this, but: IMO there is no such thing as preparing for an extended physical war with China, Russia, or (worst case) current allies such as the EU. Any war of serious consequence between large nuclear powers is game over for both. Even if one "wins," they'll be left in such a state of devastation that every other country left on the planet will handily surpass them, if there's even a habitable planet afterwards.
I'd be surprised if our lawmakers, who mostly grew up in the era of MAD (mutually assured destruction) with the USSR, aren't aware of this. That's in part why there's such a focus on preventing unfriendly countries such as Iran from developing nuclear weapons... And it's why Iran wants them so badly: a large enough nuclear arsenal is a free pass from the "leg-breakers" you describe, because — one hopes — no one would be mad enough to start a war of MAD.
Currently, the military is still extremely useful in projecting force and securing access to important trade routes and resources. Threat of nuclear weapons isn't a good fit there, because you'd immediately destroy whatever you were trying to retain access to. Most of the global superpowers are thus locked in a giant Mexican standoff, where their militaries need to remain powerful enough to at least project the ability to fight and win small battles (and are stuck in an arms race against each other on that front), but can't reasonably expect to be able to topple each other — only gain relative advantage in the global economy via a long, slow game of securing access to better resources, trade agreements, or capital, and subtly undermining or attempting to destabilize each other via psychological warfare (election interference), economic warfare (tariffs, IP theft, etc), or hacking.
Plenty of people, in their right minds, will enlist in the United States military.
The issue is getting all the types of people- engineers, designers, etc. on board with designing and building stuff that can kill people and also get them on board with: physical training, and military life.
German Engineering Yields New Warship That Isn’t Fit for Sea
> ”There’s a whole generation of German engineers who haven’t worked on a major defense project,” said Mr. Mölling, the defense expert. “It’s not that they lost this skill; they never learned it.”
I can't build a little software app without going over schedule by approximately double, if I'm lucky. And if I get it wrong the consequence is my boss looks sad. These guys are building one of the largest most complex gizmos in human history. And if they get it wrong sailors die. So personally I'll cut them a little slack.
So it's probably a good thing that I'm not their project manager.
I'll cut them this slack: They don't need the Ford. If it never works right, it was wasteful, and embarrassing, and, sure, they really could have used it. But they don't need it the way we needed, say, the Essex class carriers in World War II.
The time to experiment with new stuff is precisely when you don't have to have something that works. So throwing all the new razzle-dazzle techniques into one ship, letting them be ironed out or rejected... that's actually not all that crazy.
The USA built 4 to 6 carriers and their fleet per year during WW2 [1] [2]. They were complex gizmos too back at the time. Ok, the whole county was fully committed to that so it could be an unfair comparison but it shows the difference between wanting to ship a product that works on a tight schedule and trying to build the dream project. Plenty of examples on the history of IT.
I have a theory that on the rise of a civilization soon after comes the rise of career bureaucrats who proceed to strangle the civilization and this has been going on since at least the Sumerians.
The question Ive been wondering is not whether the Ford is a total dud, but were its changes even reasonable? or were they just tacked on as some misplaced future-chasing value-add.
For example, the electromagnetic launcher. Why have a launcher at all? the USSR's Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier solved the aircraft launching problem ages ago and for far cheaper. just slope the deck.
and Magnetic elevators? why? was there a specific concern or reason behind using magnets instead of tried-and-true cables? why were we redesigning doors and hatches when the old ones ostensibly performed fine?
STOBAR[1] carriers like the Kuznetsov are vastly less capable than CATOBAR[2] carriers, they're the budget option. Using a ramp rather than a catapult means that the types of aircraft you can operate are more limited and the weapons and fuel loads they can actually get into the air with are significantly reduced.
As for the new systems in the Ford class. The EMALS system replaces conventional steam powered catapults because it can be more finely tuned to individual aircraft types. This means less stress on airframes which translates to longer operational lifespans. It also allows for easier launching of a wider variety of aircraft weights.
In the case of both the catapult and the elevators, the new systems are mechanically much simpler than the old ones leading to reduced operating costs.
All of the changes mentioned exist for a good reason, the issue is that they weren't implemented competently.
People are gonna say "how hard is it to send a marine down there with a grease gun" or "how hard is it to R&R a major system every 20yr"
Wartime operations beat the shit out of things. Stopping a system so some marine with a grease gun can do preventive maintenance is a low priority and gets skipped when you have to go from bombing dirt farmers one day to fighting a peer the next. Systems like this is what you get when you're expected to be running a decade long low intensity conflict yet still be ready for a peer adversary.
Ski ramp carriers are a prime example of penny wise and dollar foolish. Actual capabilities are a tiny fraction of a real carrier and costs are only slightly less.
They can't launch aircraft with heavy fuel loads. US Navy carriers always put up an aerial tanker during flight operations so that other aircraft can refuel in an emergency. One fighter in the Kuznetsov air wing crashed because it simply ran out of fuel.
Ski ramp carriers are also incapable of handling larger aircraft like the E-2 Hawkeye. Without AWACS capability the carrier is essentially operating blind.
I don't know enough about the elevators to comment there, but with regards to the Admiral Kuznetsov, ski-jump runways aren't a silver bullet. Ski-jumps cause the planes to leave the runway slower and at a higher angle of attack. Certain types of aircraft can recover from that just fine but it limits both in the type of aircraft that can use the runway and the payload they can carry.
The US already has a mix of different carrier types such as the LHDs that can operate F-35Bs. Those don't have ski jumps, but they make only a marginal difference anyway. So what are you proposing exactly?
The F-35B has very limited range and payload so it can't do much compared to a real carrier air wing.
> Why have a launcher at all? the USSR's Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier solved the aircraft launching problem ages ago and for far cheaper. just slope the deck.
Catapults permit heavier payloads, higher takeoff rates, aircraft that wouldn't be able to take off under their own power from such a short runway, and a number of other major benefits.
One of the key tools of the 9/11 attacks were box cutters.
It's said the Russians influenced - and are still influencing (per Mueller) - our elections and (said) democratic processes with a few buckets of cash and some well placed internet misinformation.
The threat of a cyber-attacked is very real.
And we're still building multi-billion-dollar 20th century-minded war ships???
> And we're still building multi-billion-dollar 20th century-minded war ships???
That's the thing that gets me. If the US is going to buy naval ships, at least get ones with a real purpose.
The ships that are good against 3rd world nations are something like patrol boats. Cheap, small, fast boats with a shallow draft.
The ships that are good against 1st world nations are submarines. Everything else will get sunk by ballistic missiles. One of the side effects of the second space race is that the knowledge to build medium range ballistic missiles is becoming increasingly more common.
To a certain extent, it doesn't matter what the US builds; the last time it's been challenged militarily was the Korean War. It doesn't matter... until it does. And at that point, it'll be too late.
Sounds like the same problem Germans had during WW2: weapons are too advanced and as a result very easy to fuck up when they see action, expensive to make, and impossible to repair. Same with planes: all that nice anti-radar coating loses effectiveness after a just few combat sorties.
Military gear needs to be simple as a shovel, and not require a PhD to operate and repair. It also needs to be cheap and easy to manufacture (for some definition of "cheap" and "easy", given that this is an aircraft carrier), so you could make more of it if needed, reasonably quickly. None of the stuff the US military industrial complex has been producing for the past several decades fits this description even remotely.
What was wrong with the older, tried and true systems? Sure, they were slower, but nobody else in the world has anything that comes close anyway, and won't have it in the foreseeable future.
Russia has an interesting solution. With much equiptment design an advanced model and a simplified monkey model.
The monkey model is used for 1) export (to avoid sharing tech) and 2) so they have a verison they can manufacture quickly and cheaply in war. This under the theory wars tend to be won very quickly, or via attrition. So if both sides fail to blitz each other, Russia is well placed to churn out machinery fast for the attrition component.
For the same reason they stack their army with officers (or used to) giving them the ability to bring in civilians and split officers into multiple groups if they want to ramp up man-power fast.
The JSF (F-35) program began in 1993, the first flight was in 2000, the first time in combat was in 2018, and they're currently shaking out production bugs on the few hundred which have been built. They're slated to be operational until 2070.
The article seems to claim the issue is with fabrication tolerances. Two issues come to mind.
1) How to fabricate to those tolerances reliably? (Robots come to mind).
2) How easy is it to operate these shafts in a degraded capacity if there is physical damage to the vessel during operations?
The first issue probably should be solved by improving automated construction tech. The second issue... these things need to operate well under worst case load scenarios, not just right out of the dry-dock... and it sounds like they can't even get the ideal scenario working.
> 2) How easy is it to operate these shafts in a degraded capacity if there is physical damage to the vessel during operations?
This is my concern as well. I fear poor uptime during busy operations, and in a real shooting war, for it to end up in drydock after its first or second engagement.
I'm curious to know the military history regarding the relationship between (a) how much a country faces an existential threat vs. (b) the attributes of their weapon designs.
You're thinking assembly line robots. I'm thinking more general purpose machines that are designed to move independently and automatically adjust themselves to the correct position relative to a design and perform the task. Alternatively, at least something that a set of humans can move in to place, bolt on, and have it do the above.
Right - Part complexity is a big reason and so is volume. We're building carriers at a rate of 1 ship every 3 to 4 years. There's just no value proposition for automation on a lot of these parts.
No problem here really. It's best to debug the ship while it is already being used - issues come up more frequently. It's not a dangerous time in the U.S. history now - probably, safest time ever (no real enemies left since 1992 and nothing to fight for since the U.S. achieved oil independence recently). It's the best to do it in exactly the way it's done - spend another 5 years debugging the ship while it's being used in some sort of reduced capability mode, then another year to retrofit all fixes to the 2nd ship of class, and it will still be okay.
People who see delays in major weapon programs as catastrophic, forget that the potential adversaries either protracted their equivalents for decades, or cancelled them altogether. F-22 looked like a mad dash to arrive to the 5th generation fighter ahead of Soviet Union, in 1991. It's been developed, all of them are built, fully learned by their crews and already start to age, and Russian 5th generation is still nowhere on the horizon - their abortion sort of project has even been discarded by the Indians as not matching their minimal requirements, and is in limbo since then. It's more or less the same with all similar projects.
> no real enemies left since 1992 and nothing to fight for since the U.S. achieved oil independence recently
There is one big enemy on the horizon: China, which gets ever more and more aggressive. That trade war may very well escalate in a real war, with the Chinese holding an absurd amount of leverage since the US doesn't have much manufacturing at home any more.
In addition, there is Africa - which is the only market that hasn't been saturated already and only needs a bit of kickstarting. China has seen this and massively invested, and they will sell to Africa and grow on that, not the US.
What's the problem with that? How does rich and prosperous China threaten U.S. security? If anything, destitute and hopeless one does - they would have nothing to lose and would push through some radical agenda for the rulers to stay in power. If China becomes richer and more influential, there is nothing bad for the U.S. in that. World isn't zero-sum.
Soviet Union was dangerous because it pushed through Communist ideas which threatened to uproot everything the Western world stands upon, starting with family and religion. China isn't going to do any of that shit, they are a super-pragmatic nation and they don't believe into any "ideas" themselves for that matter.
If their way of government threatens Western democracy i'm more on the side of them rather than Western democracy: i strongly believe that market capitalism is incompatible with (universal) electoral democracy and for them to coexist, you have to turn one of them, or both, into fakes. It's time for West to get back republican model of government back to it's roots when only responsible, tax-paying immovable properly/production asset owners voted. If Chinese pressure will nudge them to do it sooner, good for them!
That a superpower that basically shits on human rights has no one to tell them to fuck off?
> If China becomes richer and more influential, there is nothing bad for the U.S. in that.
It is, because (actually right now) China holds leverage over the US. They ban exports to the US, the US economy grinds to a halt.
> Soviet Union was dangerous because it pushed through Communist ideas which threatened to uproot everything the Western world stands upon, starting with family and religion.
What's the problem with communism, per se? And communism has nothing against families.
> China isn't going to do any of that shit, they are a super-pragmatic nation and they don't believe into any "ideas" themselves for that matter.
Looks like a perfect ship for peacekeeping operations: you can't start a war with a carrier that can't launch/land jet fighters or bring bombs from the storage facility below the deck.Perfect.
As always, this boils down to three main things that have been valid since day one of the humanity: stupidity, corruption and negligence.
It's useful to remember, when we end up with incredibly expensive and totally ineffective weapons systems, that our military budget is more than double that of the next highest-spending nation, that it's about 3/4 of our federal discretionary spending, and the 3rd largest category of federal expenditure overall, at roughly 692 Billion dollars. We spend more on social security and health care, but far less on Veterans, Transportation, Food & Agriculture, Education, International Affairs, Housing, Energy, Science, and Labor.
> I keep seeing stories like this coming from US, why?
The availability heuristic [1] plays a role, given the (reasonably) increased media attention given to failures over successes. The F-22 [2] is an amazing plane. The X-37 program challenges the line between plane and spacecraft. The V-22 [4] and V-280 [5] are similarly successful programs.
The A10 was designed to swiss cheese just enough Russian tanks and to buy the time for C5s (designed to transport main battle tanks) full of M1s (meant to kill Russian tanks) to make it to France before the Russians could steamroll Germany.
The F117 was designed to slip past and strike infiltrate Russian air defense systems so our bombers could make it to the target.
All the weapons systems of the cold war era were built to fight a specific peer adversary first and needed to fit into that portfolio. Capability to handle other tasks was pursued (especially during and after Vietnam) but at the end of the day systems had to be able to fit into a strategy in which we fight the Russians or if not they had to have some other specific and narrowly tailored purpose (e.g. AC130).
Right now the armed forces are in this weird state where they have to be able to handle anything from some rowdy poppy farmers to WW3 in no particular order of priority and that manifests itself as poorly thought out feature bloat.
While the C5A has the ability to carry a single M1, it's not really intended for ferrying armored vehicles that large. REFORGER relied largely on both pre-positioned stocks of arms as well as merchant vessels to carry the heavy gear.
You're right. Air is a terrible way to move tanks around because you have to do it one at a time. Being able to do it in a pinch is very important. It won't be cheap or without risk (which you care about for exercises) but when there's T72s pouring through the Fulda gap you pull out all the stops because you don't get a do-over.
You could say in some degree that not only the military needs a purpose. The deteriorating of infrastructure, the lack of vision of politicians, the increasing inequality are probably all the result of a lacking of a purpose.
>make it to France before the Russians could steamroll Germany.
Wat. France left NATO in 1966, there would be no C5s landing in France with anything.
The A10 was in fact intended to offset the Soviet Union's vast advantage in numbers, but there was no believable scenario in the 1980s in which the Soviets would have failed to force the Fulda Gap with armor within 48 hours ... absent use of tactical nukes. This is why the German people were extremely unhappy about the presence of Pershings in West Germany, because the only way to prevent the Russians from overrunning West Germany was to nuke West Germany.
France left the joint military structure in 1966, it was still bound by the military alliance. It would be ridiculous to think they would honour the alliance, but refuse to allow American planes to land in France in the event of war.
One big factor is that defense contractors have been consolidating.
With fewer and fewer contractors that they can go to, and a revolving door where the people approving purchases today get plushy jobs tomorrow with the company that they approved, the incentives are to approve giant projects for lots of money that require a lot of integration, and turn a blind eye towards failure. The result is that we are spending more, but getting less for our money.
> The result is that we are spending more, but getting less for our money.
You're getting jobs in electoral districts somewhere in the outback, which means that the politicians passing the funds in the first place get to keep re-elected.
Cut the shitshow off its lifeline and suddenly you have a lot of representatives with a riled up suddenly job-less workforce.
I wonder why the military doesn't add "it works or else you don't get paid" clauses in these lucrative contracts they award? The vendor can't say no to that without admitting their products suck. especially since our nation may actually need one of these things to work in order to survive. 99% of the time they're expense toys. Until that one time they're not.
>I wonder why the military doesn't add "it works or else you don't get paid" clauses in these lucrative contracts they award?
Any general or admiral who pushed hard for strict performance-based deliverables in procurement contracts would never get a cushy job at a defence contractor after retiring from the military.
Well, if that happens, then the vendor just inflates the cost of other things you're buying from them. If you don't like that, what are you going to do, go to another vendor? There aren't very many of them left now, only 2 usually.
Overpriced weapon system syndrome predates 9/11 by quite a lot.
IMHO it's a peacetime problem. There's no enemy to fight today, so the motivation to finish the system ASAP and start pumping copies out the door goes away. In fact these protracted construction delays can be seen as a minor cost savings, since if they actually delivered what they promised the military would have to maintain hundreds of vehicles that are really only useful in a war that is not likely to happen soon.
People say the US is fighting the last war, and that's maybe more true than they think. The Cold War was won mostly by convincing the Soviets to outspend on military hardware by spending huge sums on our own military hardware. But then the Soviet Union collapsed and the US failed to draw down production to true peacetime levels and we're stuck with a military that is way too big and too expensive to just keep the peace.
I see no indication that that ship can only operate the F35B. It's designed for VSTOL aircraft, so it doesn't have catapults like American carriers. This isn't new for the UK: they previously had carriers that only used the Harrier, another VSTOL jet.
This new ship can surely use the Harrier, but of course the Harrier is pretty old at this point compared to the F35B, but if they needed to, they could go back to it. Or if someone built a different VSTOL jet, they could use that too. Maybe they could also buy some V-22s from the US.
Building a carrier that only operates VSTOL aircraft is not an unreasonable thing to do. The US does it too, with their "amphibious assault ships" run by the Marines: these are basically mini aircraft carriers that are just like this ship in your link, and operate only VSTOL (F35B, V-22 Osprey) aircraft and helicopters. If it's good enough for the US Marines with their ships like this one[1], why is it a problem for the Brits?
AFAIK the ramp precludes anything other than rotary wing AEW, or at least it precludes the E-2 in particular. That seems like a bigger deal than which models of jump jet can be used. An E-2 can be flown an hour or two longer but twice as high as a Merlin HM2. At 4.5 km up the horizon is 241 km away. At 10.6 km it's 367 km. Translated to area covered up to the horizon, that's 18,000 km^2 vs 42,000 km^2.
So because it has a ramp, the HMS Queen Elizabeth has less than half the AEW coverage.
There is actually no way to go back to the Harrier. Production was shut down years ago, the industrial base is long gone, and the UK sold off everything they had. There are no other V/STOL tactical aircraft in the development pipeline. The F-35B will be the only available choice for decades to come.
The US has loads of carriers though - the UK will only have two and to have a direct link between the design of the carrier and a particular design of aircraft seems particularly risky.
So let's see, the only the problem with this aircraft carrier is that it has trouble with airplanes taking off. And landing. And carrying, you know, bombs.