Posted on 12/01/2016 6:13:01 AM PST by Kaslin
Good points. The coming fight b/w China and Taiwan will be epic, no doubt. Once China finishes their ARG they will contend even more for Taiwan. Fun days ahead for those two. Japan might even get involved...
I would like to see drones with rail guns, they would be sizeable and thus targetable. But the combat multiplier would be undeniable.
Epic is definitely the correct word for that. Unless China can talk them back into the fold. Or maybe the authorities use Taiwan as their bogeyman, to keep their peasants focused on other things than government corruption.
If you use the correct type of capacitors and a large drone, a single shot railgun could be emplaced on existing frames.
As for the Chinese ARG, the planes, they currently use, J-25 or J-15, are a little too large for the elevators. Their time to recover and relaunch is abysmal. And it will stay so until they get a tighter airframe.
http://www.jeffhead.com/liaoning-toland-qual.htm
25 Megawatts requires an awful lot of capacitors...
The term “insurgency” encompasses such a fight. Of course, the Iraq conflict also included Iraqi Army “bitter enders” and “foreign fighters” eager to fight Americans. Instead of say, going to Ohio to carry out attacks on civilians in the US homeland, the latter went to nearby Baghdad to attack American troops.
Put simply, Iraqis want their own country. There has been no shortage of Iraqis willing to snipe at foreign troops and plant IEDs to get us out.
While I have no affinity for Iraq or its people, if Americans did that here we’d call them “patriots”.
The seeds of this failure were sown years before when, after Vietnam, the US Army abandoned the study of counter-insurgency warfare. Similarly, the related police, intel, and civil affairs units and capabilities needed for occupation were eliminated or moved deep into reserve units. We thus arrived in Iraq with an army that would achieve a stunning victory over Saddam but was then poised to bungle the ensuing occupation. Meanwhile, Saddam and his key leaders had long prepared to contest the American occupation.
As it was, instead of a precipitate withdrawal, the Bush administration and the US Army doubled down and put David Petraeus in charge with a mandate to apply classic counter-insurgency doctrines and practices. At painful cost, it worked well enough to stand up an elected Iraqi government.
As for Iraqis wanting their own country, that near universal truism misses the larger point that Iraq is a deeply split country. The Kurds mostly want an independent Kurdistan, while the Sunnis and Shiites hate each other but want sectarian rule over as much of Iraq and each other as they can control.
Yes, Iraqis want their own country -- but they are close to civil war over whose country it will be. The US is fortunate to no longer be on the ground supporting the current Iraqi government and acting as praetorian guard to a pack of corrupt Iraqi politicians mostly under the thumb of Iran. I think that the prospect of a functioning Iraqi democracy is an illusion.
Meanwhile, Iraq's neighbors stir the conflict as a proxy war for control of the country's oil wealth and a chapter in the centuries long struggle between Sunni and Shia and between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Thus Saudi money and volunteers bolster Sunni militia and ISIS, while Iran's cash, militias, and weapons aim to control most of Iraq and to support Assad.
With this larger perspective, the US take down of Saddam and near failed occupation were but short chapters in a large book of woe, with new chapters being written at a furious pace.
Just how much energy will a drone be able to generate?
And what terminal effect would that have on a WARSHIP.
Better a conventional munition on a drone or a kamikazee drone.
Carriers are critical as we can not depend on land bases outside CONUS.
I served on LHD6, Bon Homme Richard, 13th MEU. MEU’s carry highly specialized assault units that can’t exist on any other platforms. Their mission requires them to be offshore with a 15 minute combat readiness.
The entire problem at Benghazi would have never happened if the two MEU’s available weren’t committed to the embassies in Cairo and the Sudan.
Currently the workup to those deployments allows no more than two effective MEU’s at a time in the Middle East. We need a third.
“Most Iraqis welcomed Americans as liberators when we first arrived”
That isn’t true; remember the guy hammering the toppled Saddam statue? IIRC, it was later revealed that he was a Kurd who was brought there to do that.
Whatever the various factions in Iraq wanted, Saddam kept it functioning as a relatively stable country until we toppled him. Imagine foreign governments using pictures of crying Hillary supporters as rationale for invading the US - to give them the country they want.
“Satellites, GPS, and the ability to hit targets plus or minus a few feet from thousands of miles away means that the US needs to look at new ways to project force across the oceans. A carrier is a huge target in an era in which a rowboat can be targeted.”
This sounds like the reasoning for removing guns from fights in the Vietnam era. “We have guided missiles! Who needs a gun.”
We rudely learned the error of that thinking. It is a lot easier to put a gun back on a plane than to build carriers if you have none left.
Multiple systems and methods provide options and alternatives.
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