Perpetual Defense Thread (Defense & non-commercial Space Nerds ITT)

[Locke]

This writeup makes it pretty clear that the strikes were launched from Iran, purely out of range considerations. And it also points out that guarding oil production facilities in the Saudi heartland, far from any border, is not a job given to elite Saudi forces. That said, it's still pretty damn... interesting... that these low-tech weapons were so effective, especially the little delta wing suicide drones. Have drones finally gone from nuisance to credible threat?

So they weren't detected as they crossed the heavily trafficked Persian Gulf and successfully evaded detection by the US Navy's 5th Fleet despite total lack of cover. That's the story, right?

It is very hard to detects small objects flying very low.


Several of the missiles were flying so low they crashed, though those appear to have been fired from Iraq.

It's plauaible that the missiles flew so low there are many more that crashed inland or in to the sea that aren't accounted for.

 

[Locke]

Missile swarms and drone swarms are a VERY new and recent thing and the US has been playing catch-up in the area of short range defenses.

They've had at least 18 years to figure this shit out.

Red, commanded by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, adopted an asymmetric strategy, in particular, using old methods to evade Blue's sophisticated electronic surveillance network. Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to front-line troops and World-War-II-style light signals to launch airplanes without radio communications.

Red received an ultimatum from Blue, essentially a surrender document, demanding a response within 24 hours. Thus warned of Blue's approach, Red used a fleet of small boats to determine the position of Blue's fleet by the second day of the exercise. In a preemptive strike, Red launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles that overwhelmed the Blue forces' electronic sensors and destroyed sixteen warships. This included one aircraft carrier, ten cruisers and five of six amphibious ships. An equivalent success in a real conflict would have resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 service personnel. Soon after the cruise missile offensive, another significant portion of Blue's navy was "sunk" by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue's inability to detect them as well as expected.

I certainly hope they knew about it and would have been able to respond had the attack been against themselves. If not, I'd like to know where my $20T investment over the past 18 years has gone.

Read the exact details of the attack, he exploited a poorly coded war game more than anything else.

He had motorcycle couriers... that traveled at the speed of light.

He had hundreds of cruise missiles... launched from dingies and row boats.

But yeah, the big ships are big targets. Which is why the US prefers to start wars with stealth aircraft and cruise missiles blowing up anything that can fire back.

 

[Locke]

Haven't doctrinal changes long been driven by feasibility?

Historically, doctrine was mainly driven by influental individuals or events successfully challenging current military orthodoxy. Politics and facts on the ground in other words, not feasibility analysis conducted without the benefit of hindsight.

This is especially true in a context where there is much money to be made by maintaining stasis and little -- the cynic might add 'important' -- blood spent or endangered by it.

Even that isn't enough at times.

During the war in the pacific the Japanese kicked the Commonwealth and American fleets across half of the pacific with their carrier fleets, but were still building battleships. It is one of the oddest bits about the war in the Pacific, both sides were using their carriers to huge effect, but there was still a bunch of holdouts insisting that any day now the Big Guns will corner the carrier, crush them and then everyone will write off carriers as a temporary oddity.

Organizational inertia is as real a thing as physical inertia, and far more powerful. Physical inertia is limited by the laws of physics, organizational inertia is only limited by human stubbornness and stupidity.

 

[Locke]

I'm trying to imagine the headlines if France had canceled a deal with a US defense contractor after it had ballooned to twice the quoted price.

 

[Locke]

Those large bombers have intercontinental range?

Or could they go from Russia to however close they’d need to get to the US to launch nuclear weapons?

Because they seem like sitting ducks, easily intercepted.

Modern bombers are cruise missile launchers most of the time. They're huge jetliner sized aircraft that aren't worth risking unless you're the USA and you own the airspace completely and totally.

Their use in a real full scale nuclear war is pretty questionable these days. Missile Silos and submarines are the main focus as no one has any real defense against them. And in the case of submarines you don't even know where they are at any given time.

 

[Locke]

Yeah, modern air warfare isn’t Top Gun dogfights, it’s sitting at max range lobbing missiles at each other.

Which is why the US is obsessed with stealth.

A lot of combat comes down to who shoots first. If you can pick up the guy and fire a missile before he knows you're there you are probably, but not always, going to win the fight.

And why "but they can still detect craft with X technology" doesn't mean as much as people think it does. Yeah, maybe they can use cameras or xray or whatever to detect and aircraft if it gets super close, but that is still a huge advantage.

Its also why despite Russia and China claiming they have radar or whatever tech that can totally negate stealth they've been trying to design stealth aircraft for decades.

 

[Locke]

Instead of tons of batteries you have an entire segment of the boat inaccessible because of a very big nuke reactor. Diesels are limited, but I don't think they're as limited as you make them out to be. The Dutch boats during the cold war were very successful at monitoring/espionage of soviet vessel movements in the arctic ocean and Mediterranean. Whether through luck, stupidity or bravery, a Dutch Walrus class submarine scored a "kill" on a US aircraft carrier and large portion of it's escorts in an exercise in 1999 (https://naviesworldwide.com/navy-ne...alrus-torpedoed-an-american-aircraft-carrier/).
Don't count out diesel subs just because it's old tech. They're still extremely quiet and capable when they need to be.

TL;DR - Diesel = short range, very quiet. Nuclear = unlimited range, noisier.

The limitation is range. If you want to patrol a couple of places near where you have ports, then diesel subs are the best choice.

If you want to project power more than a few days from your ports, then nuclear is the best choice.

The Baltic Sea and North Atlantic (so is the Mediterranean) area is a great place for them because there are a ton of friendly ports, for nato and fiends, and any traffic has to go through specific choke points.

This lets diesel boats sit on the bottom, making no noise until the target comes near by and they engage. That isn't an option if your operating theater is an entire ocean.

Diesel subs are probably going to be phased out in the long run by things like the Manta Ray (https://www.defensenews.com/unmanne...nta-ray-underwater-drone-passes-at-sea-tests/), which do the same thing, but with the advantage of not having to deal with the fragile meat bags inside that need things like "oxygen".

 

[Locke]

What shipyard in the US is capable of building 30k-40k ton warships that isn't already committed to turning out aircraft carriers?

IIRC there is only one, its the Newport News Shipyards.

They're currently booked until ~2040.

Obviously you can expand or build another but, that just slaps a few billion extra in cost on.

I personally think it would be a good idea to not have a single point of failure and bottleneck on things that have decades+ lead times, but the US hasn't been willing to invest in its defense industrial base in a long time.

We're really seeing the result of all the cost cutting during GWOT coming home. A huge part of the way they stopped the budgets from exploding was to cancel pretty much every modernization project that wasn't the F-35 or Ford class.

It seems dumb now in a post Ukraine War world, but for a long time the brass, congress and industry all thought the days of big power wars were over.

Some pundits have coined the term "gwot brainrot" to describe how the defense complex kinda forgot the basic stuff of industrialized warfare in favor of pipe dreams of elite super operator light infantry fighting terrorism.

 

[Locke]

It really started when the capitalist class offshored production to chase profit and weaken organized labor.

Not really? For starters defense is mandated by law to be manufactured in the US.

It started when US companies refused to make capital investment in "boring" industrial equipment in the 50s because the rest of the world's industrial base had been destroyed. They thought the good times would last forever.

Specific to shipbuilding this was aided by protectionist tariffs.This formed a cycle where the answer to problems in the shipbuilding industry was to go to daddy (Congress) and ask for more protectionism instead of doing more investment. Eventually it hit a critical mass where the US shipyards can't compete because they're using fifty year old equipment and the major players are using cutting edge stuff. The reason why US shipyards keep getting bids from SK or Japanese companies is because really, all that is needed a few billion in capital investment and they can be productive again, but the shipyards themselves don't have that money. But no one wants to sell US industry to foreign companies. But no one wants to invest in them either.

It also is as much about mid century racism than anything else, there was a real belief that only the US had the know how to do X. Well, it turns out you can train people from anywhere to do basic tasks in a few years and then a decade or two later you have professionals with new techniques and ideas that surpass the places unwilling to invest.

Lack of investment got worse during the corporate raiding epidemic of the 60s-80s and its legacy continues to today. Companies do not want to invest in big industrial equipment because being asset rich but cash poor makes you an attractive company for a takeover and stripping of assets, meaning if they do invest it is the bare minimum required.

You can still see this dynamic in action Northrup spun off HI shipyards specifically because they didn't want to spend billions modernizing the facility and carrying all that on their books when they wanted to invest in their higher margin business units. Even being the single shipyard that is the focal point of the US's entire Naval and Defense Industrial policies with tight Congressional oversight didn't provide Northrup with enough protection.

 

[Locke]

For awhile, USA companies did try to learn from Japan manufacturing from 6 Sigma, Leans, Kaizen, etc. However, It seems USA companies rarely learn the right lesson (or the Japan companies are not the good example anyways). A lot of the 6 Sigma ends up focus too much on cutting the size of the workforce and end up make everything worse (reduce the trust between management and workers, impact to the quality due to corner cutting, etc.).

US companies like methodologies and systems in part, I think, because they don't require capital investment.

Change your buzzwords, shift your job titles and suddenly you're going to be more productive... right?

I saw similar things in software development all the time:
"We're adapting a CI/CD mindset!"
"so we're going to invest in buying or building the tools necessary for automated testing and deployment, right?"
"No, we have releases now instead of patches"

 

[Locke]

Where would NNS expand to though? They already have buildings "outside of the gate" and you'd either need to encroach on the largest coal export terminal in the US and/or Newport News Marine Terminal, which is one of only two ports on the East Coast that can handle New Panamax ships, for more waterfront space because the James River Bridge is a hard stop in the other direction. I mean, I guess NNS could buy out and demolish the units on West Ave. to connect VASCIC to the rest of the shipyard but then who knows how long it would take to figure the red tape to do that, get the land ready and then build out whatever warehouses, workshops and whatever is actually needed there? If you're going to suggest that they build another dry dock in that area, there isn't enough space for that.


Getting another nuclear rated shipyard¹ that can build Ford-class carriers or even Virginia-class or Columbia-class submarines would would not be cheap, easy or fast even with NAVSEA08 not having nearly as many regulatory roadblocks as the NRC would bring to the table.

¹Yes, I know that Hanwha is supposedly going to build VCS in Philly, but I don't think it will be nearly as fast as the USN wants due to needing to get Hanwha Philly Shipyard up to snuff to deal with naval nuclear propulsion information and technologies.

I do not think expanding is likely, if only for the reason that the battleships won't be built.

I was trying to point out the difficulty in expanding at all, with enough money they could expand somewhere, but it would be truly stupid amount of money to do it.

Purely on a wish basis and not at all tethered to reality if I were supreme emperor of shipbuilding in the United States I would build a second full facility on the Pacific coast.

 

[Locke]

I'm probably being cynical here, but the phrase "Why do we need all these support troops?" keeps popping into my head.

If you want to cut the military budget (because it's free money; the Cold War is over haven't you heard?), but not lose "front line" units, cutting the logistics and maintenance corps and outsourcing the maintenance to contractors probably sounds attractive.

Plus the manufacturer said they'd lower the up-front unit cost if we sign up for a maintenance contract...

In the mid 2000s "headcount" was a primary metric for everything. Government and business.

As a result you kept your headcount low by outsourcing everything you could. To contractors who charged twice the cost of an in house employee.