The news is always filled with news about the Department of War's singular failure to acquire new weapon systems and this is generally perceived as some kind of dismal failure on the part of military men turned bureaucrat but I would like to take the position opposite and state for the record that this is a rare sign of uncommon intelligence (yes, yes, work with me here) on the part of a a metastasized bureaucracy completely overrun with idiots and other HR types. If shares a kind of instinctive cunning.
Back between the wars there were still those who pined for the biplane and swore off the monoplane for all their obvious flaws (not enough wings, doncha know) and they were the ones who bought hundreds of Brewster Buffaloes even as the war powers were building huge fleets of thoroughly capable modern fighters. The other bad fish in that setting though were the bomber types who bought into the insanity of Douhet and Billy Mitchell and the whole bomb them to oblivion types who thought the bomber was the only key to victory.
The beauty of a world war that last 6 years is it gives plenty of time to see the use of the follies that were permitted between the wars and the ones that actually worked. What were the follies? The Treaty cruisers were worse than useless. The strategic bomber was a complete non-starter and wasted resources on a scale not seen until Somalis took up residence in Minnesota. The complete entire surface fleet that Doenitz and Hitler built was a complete waste of time, money and manpower.
How does this apply to us in the here and now who some pundits think are in dire need of building military hardware right now to take the place of existing battle tested and approved hardware? Excellent question. What set this off was reading last night that yet another ship type has slipped through the butter challenged fingers of the Naval Sea Systems Command and gone to wreck and ruin on the shores of Lake Superior and Mordor the Pentagon.
What was this ship that seemed so blindingly necessary to the surface ship partisans in the House of Navy? It was yet another cheapo flash European design that was going to sport a single little gun, a handful of little missiles, next to no range at all because that's the way the Mediterranean Sea works as do the Baltic and Black Seas, the Narrow Seas, and the North Sea. Home is just over the horizon, not 5,000 miles away. This was kind of like the Australian design for a ship that moves quickly but does nothing.
The ship was a stupid design for a warship operating from our coasts. It had no credible weapon systems and no credible defense against drones and was in short nothing but a European version of the Little Crappy Ship that we already built scores of and then scrapped as fast as they came off the ways. We don't need warships right now and for those who bleat about fighting the next war with what you have when it starts there is great truth in that old saying but history shows that absent total maritime superiority there is no role in war for the United States overseas. This will save us countless lives and endless ships if some other country with a huge navy decides to invade us.
One of Biden's bashful attempts at exhibiting our Maritime Dominance was spending 4 months trying and failing to build ONE PIER on the far side of the Mediterranean and that was pointless, stupid, futile, a mankiller and a full blown demonstration of how low our estate has fallen. WE cannot reinforce Europe without spending even longer getting our act together and don't let the Phony War in Ukraine fool you. The Blitzkrieg is alive and well and makes its home in Russia and White Russia. OTGH I'm one of those who doesn't think even madmen would attack Europe today. Everybody knows not to bother an enemy when he is committing suicide and that describes what's left of Europe today.
The lame game of acquisition also gets plastered onto the Army for its repeated failures to launch replacements and follow-on major weapon systems upgrades to its existing M1, M2, and M3 fleets and I know why that is and I'm pretty sure that the savvier Army types also know. It boils down to a total lack of conviction that the Army and Defense industry could actually design, build and field better systems. Those 3 things for all the horrible things Air Force colonels said about them are about the peak of battlefield development in today's environment and probably not at all suited for a full drone war level of self defense. Nothing we can design, build and field will be able to cope with the full spectrum of drones until we move into messing around so heavily with the spectrum that it turns into the new weapon of mass destruction.
Nothing today is shielded against EMP. Who is out there designing truly devastating EMP weapons? Are coherent light weapons ever going to be effective in the war environment? How many modern drone weapons rely on electrical generation and how long do they last without it? How much would it cost to build a sensor package to sniff out unburned hydrocarbons and attack the source of every single one of them? Think of the market for new cars and tractors!
This looks like one of those times in history where the weapon shops take a pause to let the engineers catch up. It is much like the era that ended the castle's role in defense, the era that ended the entire art of siege warfare, the era that ended the notion of positional warfare, and the end of the mercenary era (condottieri).
Now is not the time to build the interim weapon systems that cost every bit as much as real weapons and prove useless when the real weapons come back on line. It's not like we are at war, likely to be at war or likely to be attacked. This will also give our sharper designers some time to watch others evolve the new weapons, their control systems and their tactics. This would be applicable to US and perhaps no others but we survived 150 years without getting involved in every single damned war around the planet and likely can go another 150 if we try. It's not like we care or we would have sent our armies to fight for peace in Africa or Central Asia.
You will know the change is here when you do see coherent light weapons that work like weapons or when everything in the radius of an EMP burst fails or when something like the drones of the Diamond Age put in an appearance.
No comments:
Post a Comment