Posted on 03/21/2019 3:31:52 AM PDT by Kaslin
Nations famously tend to always try to fight the last war, and what America is preparing to do today with the newly assertive China is no exception. The problem is our last war was against primitive religious fanatics in the Middle East and China is an emerging superpower with approaching-peer level conventional capabilities and an actual strategy for contesting the United States in all the potential battlespaces – land, sea, air, space and cyber. America is simply not ready for the Pacific war to come. We’re likely to lose.
In Desert Storm, Saddam Hussein was dumb enough to choose to face a U.S. military that was ready to fight its last war. That last war was the Cold War, where the Americans were prepared to fight a Soviet-equipped conscript army using Soviet tactics. And Saddam, genius that he was, decided to face America and its allies with a Soviet-equipped conscript army using Soviet tactics, except fractionally as effective as the Russians. It went poorly. I know – I was there at the VII Corps main command post as his entire army was annihilated in 100 hours.
Chances are that the Chinese will not choose to fight our strengths. In fact, those chances total approximately 100%.
It’s called “asymmetrical warfare” in English. What it’s called in Chinese I have no idea, but Sun Tzu wrote about it. Don’t fight the enemy’s strength; fight his weakness. Strike where he is not. Spread confusion about your intentions; force him to lash out. It’s all there in The Art of War; it’s just not clear anyone forming our current American military strategy has read it. Maybe they would if we labeled it “Third World” literature and said checking it out would check a diversity box for promotion.
We seem intent on fighting not the enemy we face but the enemy we want to face. This is a rookie mistake. And we’ve built our strategy around that error. Take aircraft carriers. I have a sentimental attachment to those potent floating fortresses – the Schlichters are usually Navy officers and I’m the random green sheep who went Army. There was a picture of my dad’s carrier (the U.S.S. Lake Champlain) hanging in my house as a kid. I love them – but in 2019 they’re a trap.
We’re hanging our whole maritime strategy in the Pacific Ocean around a few of these big, super-expensive iron airfields. If a carrier battle group (a carrier rolls with a posse like an old school rapper) gets within aircraft flight range of an enemy, then the enemy will have a bad day. So, what’s the super-obvious counter to our carrier strategy? Well, how about a bunch of relatively cheap missiles with a longer range than the carrier’s aircraft? And – surprise – what are the Chinese doing? Building a bunch of hypersonic and ballistic anti-ship missiles to pummel our flattops long before the F-35s and F-18s can reach the Chinese mainland. We know this because the Chinese are telling us they intend to do it, with the intent of neutering our combat power and breaking our will to fight by causing thousands of casualties in one fell swoop.
The vulnerability of our carriers is no surprise; the Navy has been warned about it for years. There are a number of ideas out there to address the issue, but the Navy resists. One good one is to replace the limited numbers of (again) super-expensive, short-range manned aircraft with a bunch more long range drones. Except that means the Naval aviation community would have to admit the Top Gun era is in the past, and that’s too hard. So they buy a bunch of pricy, shiny manned fighters that can’t get the job done.
Another mistake is over-prioritizing quality over quantity, which is the same mistake the Nazis made with their tanks. The Wehrmacht had the greatest tanks in the world – all top notch. Really good tanks. Tank-to-tank, they were the best – the dreaded Tiger had an 11.5-to-1 kill ratio. The Americans and Russians had merely decent tanks, just multiples more of them. Quantity has a quality all its own. Right now, America has something like 280 ships. We’ll have about 326 by 2023. That’s to cover the entire world. We had 6,768 ships when WWII ended in August 1945
>Of course, it would also be nice if the Navy would emphasize seamanship and basic skills again so that it could keep its super-expensive ships from running into other vessels. The U.S.S. Fitzgerald collision not only killed some of our precious sailors, but took out a key weapons platform – 1/280th of our entire fleet! – because its officers failed again and again and because key systems on the ship were out of commission.
This is inexcusable, but it is being excused. The focus of our military has shifted from victory to satisfying the whims of politicians. Here’s a troubling thought – if you go to one of the service branches’ War Colleges and poll the faculty and students about America’s greatest strategic threat, as many as 50% of the respondents will tell you it is “climate change.” That’s not an exaggeration. Our military is supposed to be dealing with the Chinese military and its brain trust is obsessing about the weather in 100 years.
The Chinese are going to continue dumping exponentially more carbon than America into the air and preparing to take us down while we focus on this kind of frivolous nonsense. Did you know the Chinese are pillaging our tech here in America, while our intelligence community’s incompetence led to our spy networks in China being rolled up? Probably not – these are one-day stories because the elite in DC and the media are busy trying to push the guy who won the last election out of office.
Here’s how the Chinese win. First, they take out our satellites. You know the GPS location service on your phone? Satellites, which are easy to hit. Say “bye-bye” to much of the ability of our precision weapons to find their targets. Also up for destruction are the communications satellites we rely on to coordinate our operations. And then there is the Chinese cyberattack, not only on our military systems but on systems here at home that control civilian power, water and other logistics. A U.S military with no comms and no computers is essentially the Post Office with worse service. An America with a ruined internet is Somalia.
Then they hit our land bases on Guam, Okinawa and elsewhere with a blizzard of missiles, knocking them out and annihilating our aircraft on the ground. Maybe we could respond with B-2s flying from the continental United States. We have 19 whole combat-capable aircraft, assuming a 100% operational readiness rate, which is just not a thing. We might even take out a few missile batteries on the Chinese coast. We won’t know the difference though. As for our carriers, if they come to play, they are likely going to get sunk, and if they stay out of the fight, they are merely useless – assuming quiet diesel subs do not find and sink them.
This is not a surprise. We play wargames against the Chinese all the time, and we lose.
Much of this seems to be picking on the Navy, but that’s only because the Navy would take the lead in a fight against the Chinses in the Pacific. The other branches have similar issues with strategy, leadership and equipment. So, what is the answer? The answer may well be to reframe the question – instead of determining our objectives and then failing to provide the capabilities to achieve them, maybe we need to decide what capabilities we are willing to provide and form our strategic objectives to meet those realities. Moreover, we need to get it through our heads that no one is going to be as dumb as Saddam was and conveniently fight us the way we want to be fought. We need a complete strategic mindset revolution, one that moves from a few super-expensive systems to many affordable ones. We need to say good-bye to legacies of the 20th century, like mostly manned combat aircraft and a few huge carrier battle groups. We need to prepare to defeat the enemy we actually face, not the enemy we want to face.
Yeah I think that’s correct - there might be some sort of skirmish over something so Xi Jinping can consolidate power more, but nothing major - just too many risks.
But I was just mentioning what Bill Clinton did for the Chinese in the 1990s, not postulating what actions might happen in the present day.
>>If it were necessary for the Chinese masses to eat grass for a century in order to destroy the USA, do you doubt that the Politburo would hesitate?<<
The commies in China are in between a rock and a hard place. They do not want dissent nor the masses rising up. They’ve put down rebellion before with a strong arm, but get the masses struggling for basics and their control could become threatened.
That was caused by a "mole" who was eventually caught, but after the damage had been done......The Chinese government had been systematically picking off American spies in China, dismantling a network that had taken the C.I.A. years to build. A mole hunt was underway, and the former officer, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, was the prime suspect....Lee, 53, was arrested in January 2018 when he arrived in the U.S. on a flight from Hong Kong.
A secret FBI–CIA task force investigating the case concluded that the Chinese government penetrated the CIA's method of clandestine communication with its spies, NBC News first reported in January. The Chinese used that knowledge to arrest and execute at least 20 CIA informants
Is there anyone left that really does it any more? Since the Soviet threat basically disappeared almost 30 years ago. Honest question.
My concern on this is high due to the lack of a fixed-wing carrier-based ASW platform. Unless we’re dropping torpedoes from Hornets now, or something else I’ve missed. That capability seemed crucial to me during the Cold War era.
Helos are the primary ASW torpedo delivery system.
And there’s a pretty fundamental range / speed issue there compared to fixed wing.
I’m going to misuse the Treadhead list here since this is a good thread on an important military topic.
They have a decent on station time. S-3s are better for sure.
Does SEATO still exist?
“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you” - Lev Bronstein
The Book of Revelation says that a 200 Million Man Army will come from the East. Most all Bible Prophesy experts believe that to be mainly Chinese. They most all also believe the coming Rapture of the saints of Christ Jesus will severely shred America of its very best people and leave this nation seriously deplete in all sectors of this Republic. That would leave America wide as open for invasion from either the Chinese and Ruskies. So, any war with them now would not allow them to attack Israel then. I am sure that our Boomers would launch thousands of war heads towards China big cities and military targets even if they wipe our nations off the map. China may know where our fixed bases are and our cities, but they do not know where the Boomers are. I am also sure that we could pick up movement by China for such a large attack. They have fixed missiles there to attack, but not the Boomers. I think the Rapture destroys America the most. That should do it before an attack.
And then you wind up with an ice-axe planted in your skull.
They dont want to go to war. But they want us to know they can.
Did it ever really exist?
Not when push came to shove!
It existed to take our money, like most of them do!
The “space command” was not an afterthought .......
Precisely. That is the whole point.
Did you know that when a bumblebee beats his wings in the Amazon rainforest it makes it snow in Afghanistan?
Jim Noble has asked the relevant question in reply #67, would an American president initiate a nuclear holocaust if one or more of our carriers were sunk? A brilliant question because it transforms the discussion away from the increasingly myopic tactics of anti submarine warfare to considerations of the whole raison d'être for draining the treasury to maintain aircraft carriers. Why do we maintain these carriers at such immense expense?
To enable the United States as a superpower to contain China and control the sea lanes. Jim Noble answers his own question, I believe correctly, no president is going to initiate the destruction of the world as we know it because we lose a carrier, especially, I would add, under circumstances which we cannot prove to a skeptical public reasonably terrified of nuclear war whodunnit. If nothing else we learned that lesson after the invasion of Iraq.
There would be no public support to kill billions of people and there would be a moral imperative that invokes a final, conclusive, negative answer. That is quite a different proposition from keeping the Chinese guessing about whether we would in fact blow up the world over one carrier. We kept the Russians guessing for decades about whether we would blow up the world if they penetrated the Fulda gap. But technology changes perceptions as it changes the world.
Every time the Chinese bumblebees beat their wings and place another high-speed rocket on a gunship it causes it to rain angst in the Pentagon. Every time the Chinese advance their whizbang weapons capable of knocking out a carrier whether from undersea or outer space, the equation changes, and the Chinese know it.
The Chinese can read our commitment and they are not ignorant of American domestic politics. As time goes by they will no doubt recognize that the left has ever tightening tentacles on our military options. That reality means the carriers become a liability rather than an instrument of superpower world policy unless it is directed against third-party countries who have limited lethal capabilities. The carriers become as detrimental to our national security as a standing Army of 12 million individuals that we maintained in World War II. They become a target rather than an instrument of victory.
The Chinese might well be asking, are we better off leaving the American carriers alone to impoverish America and divert defense funds from where they might be effective?
So strategy, of course, involves "probability, statistics and risk management" but at an infinitely higher level, with infinitely more what ifs and infinitely more risks. We do not hire a commander-in-chief to be an expert in anti-submarine warfare, we expect him to pursue American national interests, keep us out of war if possible especially with the world second economy and most populous nation, win wars which are unavoidable or absolutely necessary, and, above all, keep us the hell out of nuclear war. He operates at an infinitely higher level in and infinitely higher stakes "game" than at submarine tactics.
When a commander-in-chief risk sending a super carrier into harms way he must weigh the risks and probabilities against the purpose of the mission. On the one hand we have a gunboat showing the flag and on the other hand we have nuclear destruction.
You can weigh the risks as long as your line of sight is this side of the horizon but when you are deciding the fate of nations you must lift your gaze.
I'm paraphrasing, but a FReeper wiser than I once posted...
"When the Chinese build a weapons system, they build a weapons system that works."
"When America builds a weapons system, they need to make sure that the team building it is properly diverse, well-balanced with both male and female engineers, and that none of the female engineers has the perception that they've been harassed and that they're perfectly safe. The system, and all companies involved in the process of building it, must be environmentally sustainable and eco-conscious. It must be cost-effective, but also take into consideration any budget requirements added on local, state, and national political levels. If built in a union-friendly shop, that adds an entirely new level of complexity."
"Oh, and the weapons system also needs to work."
Oh, ho, China's half-way there,
Oh, ho, we're livin' on a prayer!
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