Makes some sense. Hypersonic missiles change the strategy. Need ships for sure but need other stuff too. I am sure Hegseth and team are all over it.
American Military
- Thread starter TigerGrowls
- Start date
With the advent of relatively cheap loitering precision weapons and hypersonics, Mass as a principle of war, has regained prominence over maneuver at least until defensive measures catch up.
A couple really really expensive but very capable things can be overwhelmed by a large number of inexpensive things. The other factor is that if you only have a few of something eve if very very capable you will be very very hesitant to risk that thing, therefore it will never produce the full value that you expect on the battlefield. We have told ourselves that the "mass" of our precision fires will counter "mass" produced by lots of people or inferior equipment. Well, the bad guys now have precision fires too and in quantity because "good enough" is cheap(er) and easier to produce now.
The other thing that impacts is the likely approach that your enemy has to warfare. Western way of war has long focused on maneuver...seizing key terrain, centers of commerce and transportation or governance. However what you see in Ukraine is Russia has shifted from their initial maneuver based approach and has instead, shifted focus on waging grinding war of attrition. Terrain and maneuver is less important, the focus is on the enemy force and forcing it to engage and suffer losses. They decisive factor in this type of warfare is the ability to generate new forces / weapons and employ them well enough to continue to bleed your enemy until it can no longer sustain the fight.
US experience in the Civil War and to a lesser extent WWI has really made attritional warfare something that is not discussed, or planned for. It is just not the way we want to fight, and not what the American people expect of their military officers. Each individual life matters. But what of China?
A confllict with China will be initially very bloody. Once bloodied it's illogical to expect that a first-rate power such as the US or China for that matter would simply give up. Nope. A very likely outcome is that it would turn into a war of attrition. Are we prepared for that? Doctrinally? What about weapons stockpiles? Ships? Ability to draft mobilize and train manpower? Our industrial base?
The problem is that we high fived ourselves following the breakup of the soviet union and wasted the "peace dividend" and let our high end capabilities age/atrophy over time. We then we focused on "Whack a mole" in the middle east, wich the MIC was too happy to support with a lot of stuff that doesn't really move the needle in a high end fight.
We could have/should have gotten out of Afghanistan probably by 2004 or maybe 2006. Put Dostum or whomever hated the jihadis the most in charge with promise of funding and support if he kept a lid on things as well as promise of a JDAM and us coming back to do a repeat if he could not. Maybe kept Bagram Airbase, maybe not. It would have been much cheaper and we would have saved a lot of americans from death and injury.
Defense contractors are super smart about big-ticket weapon systems. Whether it's the F-35 or an aircraft carrier, they have learned that if they want to make sure their weapon programs stay funded, they build something for that F-35 or aircraft carrier in each state. This can be them as the prime or subcontractors they use.
Very few members of Congress are going to kill a weapons program that will take money and jobs from their state.
Musk is in for a rude awakening if he is going to change that process.
Very few members of Congress are going to kill a weapons program that will take money and jobs from their state.
Musk is in for a rude awakening if he is going to change that process.
Since when is Musk an expert on weapons systems? Also, our weapons have beat the shit out of Russia by proxy for the last few years so not really sure what the issue is?
He's not. Just need them to uncover shit that looks fishy and to find trends and anything that might be actionable.
Beyond that, the Pentagon structure needs to be reviewed. Do we REALLY need all those civilians? What about the military bureaucracy headcount? Can that be harvested for some other puropoes that more directly benefit our ability to fight and win wars. The DoD is the single biggest part of the discretionary budget, by far. Little things will turn into big big numbers.
Russia isn't the competitor that we need to worry about. If the fukking NATO countries would stop freeloading, they could handle russia by themselves underneath our nuclear umbrella. It's a war of attrition with China that we need to be worried about. They play the looooong game and we have bullshitted away a lot of our advantage by playing fukaround in the middle east. for 20+ years. Not saying that we didn't and don't need to be there but not like we did. They have slowly but surely snuk up on us.
That's the dirty little non-secret for major weapons systems purchases. However I think there is cause for optimism that at least maybe the Air Force has finally got their shit together. By all accounts the B-21 program is going great and is coming in at or under budget and on or ahead of schedule. And not a moment too soon.
