Juicy details of US military power

That whoever translated this from Russian to English for you needs to go back to school.

 

Oh then it was the Russians who had the coup in Ukraine, and paid the minority Anglophobes to protest and overthrow the legitimate Western leaning government...it was not the other way around?

I guess then the Russians are the ones, and not the British who have been threatening cargo planes in international waters? Thanks for the information, what would us naive posters do without you

 

Have you been flying those cargo planes again?
Tut tut.

 

I was on the carrier so I know better than you. I was an ABF. I know about the tank placement. We store fuel in 187 of them. I had to sound them.

Their missiles are called carrier killer for a reason.

 

The point was that the tens of billions of dollars on a carrier group is a waste of money as every ship in that group can be sunk at pennies on the dollar.

And this is very good point indeed. We are bankrupting ourselves in a fruitless endeavor, on a desperate and hopeless illusion of overwhelming superiority and the lie that there is a good return on investment.

This is history repeating itself. Almost every major military-economic empire fell or went into major decline on the basis of the same fantasy, denial and ignorance.

The unbroken rule of history is that the costs of projecting power increase with time as technology spreads.

Brit's had the gatling gun (overwhelming superiority). With one gunship they could pretty much take over an entire African nation fighting back with sticks and stones.

The spread of technology can not be contained. Over time, that African nation got the gatling gun. Sure the Brits could still win the day due to military superiority but, the costs increased. (think of storming a hill with machine gun turrets). One gunship was no longer enough. You now have to send an entire armada and you will take heavy casualties.

The cost of projecting power increases with time.

Sure the aegis system and phalanx might get lucky and take out a few incoming missiles but, against hundreds of modern anti ship missiles ? Forget it.

Regardless - we can not attack the Russian homeland because of the nuclear threat. This makes having large numbers of aircraft carriers even more useless. Who are these carriers going to attack ? Pissant little countries ... OK but, we do not need 10 carrier groups to do that .

And even attacking these little countries now has a massively negative ROI.

What is the point of having hundreds of military bases in Europe ? Who are we defending Germany or France against ?

1 Trillion/year (not including interest) is current Total Military Spending - on income of roughly 3 Trillion.

We are borrowing roughly 2 Billion per day to maintain our spending.

 

Anti-ship missiles are usually launched from other aircraft, from other airbases and aircraft carriers. To combat an aircraft carrier, you need another aircraft carrier, or an airbase launch aircraft.

The only exception of is China with DF-21 and DF-26, the only antiship ballistic missiles in the world. The biggest problem is their accuracy with a ballistic weapon.

 

Best. Post. Ever.

 

The cost of the newest aircraft carrier, the Gerald Ford, is $13 billion just for that one ship.

 

What a waste

 

The M-109 self propelled howitzer, I remember them well. They have been providing artillery support for the grunts since the Vietnam War.

But during the Clinton adminstration of over downsizing the military the Marine Corps had all of their self propelled 155 mm and 8" howitzers and their 175 mm guns taken away from them along with an entire rifle regiment (9th Marines aka Walking Dead) in violation of the National Security Act. Some President's ignore the law, some more than others.

The Marine Corps no longer have the M-109 in it's arsenal but the U.S. Army does.

The M-109 is probably the most successful self propelled pop gun ever to go to war.

 

I don't think you have a lot of bases in France.

You aren't so much as defending Germany from any one, as much as you are defending everyone from Germany.

 

So.. your point is that it's completely pointless to have a navy?.. Sure, go tell that to the pentagon, see what they think about it.

You don't seem to understand the role of navies, or of combined arms.. There is no single ultimate weapon, there are just different weapons with different roles. Every weapon has a weakness and a strenght, each has an optimal role, and each a counter.. To suggest that ships are useless because another weapon can destroy them, completely misses the crucial point that navies are in turn a perfect countrer to something else. Militaries work well when they have many kinds of weapons which give them many options to counter different problems. You can't solve all problems using just missiles, and you can't solve all by using only ships.

The role of e.g. an aircraft carrier is not to counter missiles. You might as well conclude that tanks are worthless because they can be beaten by helicopters, and they in turn are worthless because they are beaten by rpg's, who are beaten by riflemen, who are again beaten by tanks.. and so on, and suddenly you have reached the (obviously flawed) conclusion that militaries as a whole are worthless. But as I've said, you miss the point: they are supposed to work together to support eachother.

 

Paladin was supposed to be replaced by the far superior Crusader in the 1990s but that program was canceled.

 

IIRC lots of that was development costs.

 

If NATO is so weak compared to Russia, why the fuss? We weak Americans can never stand up to the "glorious unstoppable Russian weapons". Why is Putin so concerned about NATO? We are not forcing nations to join NATO, they join themselves.

 

You aren't forcing nations to join, but you certainly are convincing some to leave.

You are signing up the wrong people mate.
Now I have to hope Trump gets elected and dumps NATO so we can start again.

Go Donald.
NATO is done from my perspective. The sooner we can get out of it the better.
It's more likely to get us into WW3 than it is to get us out of it.

Defence pacts have to be very select with their membership. 28 is too many.
Get it down to 5 please. In fact lets not have a defence pact at all. Lets just do intelligence sharing and alliances of convenience on a bi-lateral level.

Or... just withdraw from Europe and we can ally with Russia instead.

Vote Trump please. Your foreign policy stinks.

 

Because NATO is not weak....America is not weak....Russia possesses no "unstoppable weapons"...and Putin is frightened to death that his former allies freely choose to belong to a US headed military pact.

 

Exactly. What the purpose of the navy after all? Us knows this too. Thata why it's protocol for the escort to sacrifice themselves to shield the carrier. All the other ships are fodder because what matters most is the carriers ability to carry the fighter jets. They act like mini air bases. And that's important, because a fighter jet is not like a balistic missile. They cant match their range. So you would still need a platform to launch them from if you want to stage an attack. But that's the thing.

But as explained, few dozen missiles would do the trick of sinking a carrier real quick.



Let's presume that a massive armada of 100 ships went to invade russia. Do you think that such an attack would succeed? Of course not. You can launch like 5 missiles per ship just to make sure that everything is destroyed. S400 and s350s will make sure that nothing will get through the airspace. Their specifications are quite frightening.

Russia even has this one missile that are launched in swarms of 4 or 8. The first races up to a very, very high altitude and acts like a brain. It will prioritize the targets from highest to lowest and it directs the whole swarm to the highest priority target. When it's destroyed, all the remaining missiles will seek out the next priority target. If the swarm leader is somehow destroyed, another will race up and take its place.

Well that one is a little old I'm sure they have something much better now. Especially with their new killer AI software that can be programmed into any robotic platform. A ship. A jet. A tank. This is why russia built their armatas and pakt50s with the capability to integrate this system easily.

Program this AI into a swarm of carrier killer missiles. That would be something wouldn't it? Such a modification would be easy. Give the missile few more sensors and replace the built in computer with one that can enable the AI to operate the various controlled surfaces on the missile.

Navy is reliant to stage an attack on a power much weaken than you.


China is leading the game in anti ship missiles now

 

Remember back in 2011 when NATO decided to go to war and most the the NATO countries told the frogs to go eat frog legs so France and the Brits decided to go it alone and they ran out of bombs ?

Putin sure noticed it.

Why not use bombs that don't go bang said the frogs to the limeys. We'll just tell everyone we have gone politically correct and Obama will like us for going PC.

France Dropping Concrete Bombs In Libya -> http://www.defensetech.org/2011/04/29/france-using-concrete-bombs-in-libya/

 

How will NATO start WWIII? You seriously think NATO will attack Russia?

 

You have to find a carrier battle group in order to sink it.

And as the U.S. proved against the Soviets back in 1981, satellites even those launched for the express purpose of tracking ships cannot track U.S. carriers if the U.S. ships are taking countermeasures.

Recon satellites have very limited capabilities against mobile targets.

 

This is not the 1980s. You cannot compare the technical capabilities of satellitea in the 80s to the satellites today.

You can have a satelite being manually controlled from the ground. That person would get a live feed and track what ever he wishes and relay to coordinates of the object he is tracking to the defense force. Quite easy with today's tech right?

 

Russia has no antiship ballistic missiles. All their anti-ship capabilities are either from AshM sea skimming missiles, . Which require an airplane to deliver it to be effective. So it will be a battle between fighter jets....exactly what a aircraft carrier is for.

Spy satellites are usually very limited in spy detection. They can orbit out of field of view(remember a very narrow zoom, while orbiting) and has trouble seeing through clouds. That is why Militaries still use recon planes.

 

No isn't. Satellites follow steady, predictable paths that even a kid with a calculator can determine where they will be at any one time.

Sure, there are a handful of satellites with onboard fuel and thrusters which can manuever to a very limited degree. But they can't do this often enough to alter their ability to track mobile targets.

And while satellites have improved over the last 30 years, so have countermeasures. All the technological advances in the world won't change the fact that satellites follow predictable paths and that their onboard radar tracking systems can be spoofed.

People have this idea that modern satellites are like "Star Trek" where all you have to say is "scan the surface" and in seconds the science officer can find something on the surface of a planet.

In real life, satellites have a pretty narrow field of vision that narrows more and more in proportion to the area they have to focus on

 

They placed a shield on Russian boarders so who knows exactly.