Posted on 10/24/2012 2:00:19 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
As much as I hope that Obama’s snarkey comments are a vote loser, I don’t see any sort of sea change (hehe) with respect to Romney’s thinking on the military. I’m a 10+ year vet, much of it spent in the reserves (two post 9-11 tours) with my civilian career in business.
My take on Romney’s military advisers is that they are the types of people that are so wedded to the status quo in the military that they cannot really conceive of a smaller, leaner, military. They won’t see, and Romney consequently won’t see, that there are way too many generals and admirals, that there is way too much tail compared to the fighting tip (tip to tail ratio) and a very entrenched bureaucracy.
I would love to see a president really tackle the cost of the military, especially considering our deficits and debt.
Zero was churlish !
With the technology we now have, big carriers might well become a thing of the past. So, small fast ships that can launch drones will come into play.
Subs will forever stay in service.
OMG....is he 5 years old??
Ships have always been the best way to ship supplies...
Obviously the issue isn't that simple. Numbers re important. Nevertheless, cheap airplanes are going to have less performance than expensive ones. How much difference does that make?
I wrote a paper, presented at a conference of the OPERATIONS RESEARCH SOCIETY OF AMERICA, that showed that if the performance differential between the low-performance and high-performance aircraft was big enough, the cheap airplanes were simply cheap targets. The Air Force that counted on numbers instead of performance would we wiped out with little damage to the opponent. My paper was runner-up for an award. Runner-up only because I intentionally didn't address research & development costs, but only production costs. Still, it indicated the judges found my paper to be of high quality.
The same analysis applies to naval vessels. If their performance is reduced sufficiently to make a big cost reduction, they're simply going to be sitting ducks on the ocean.
The trick is to find the right tradeoff between performance and affordability. Maybe our carriers are "too big to fail." If so, we need to decide whether several smaller carriers in a carrier task group would provide equivalent performance to one big carrier at lower cost.
The important thing to remember, though, is that both numbers and performance matter. As someone has said, the most expensive thing you can have is a second-best Air Force. The same applies to a second-best Navy.
I fear that while we currently see plenty of quality in the troops in these small wars and shrinking units, combined with our advanced tech, that we are also witnessing our military slowly becoming just another branch of government employees.
More and more it is about quality of life issues, day care, pay and benefits, questions about the families and single moms being separated from their kids, and on and on.
As the work towards a 50% female military and generals ranks advances in years to come, the military will be excluding the single men of the warrior class and become more like a big city police department where union quality work conditions, living conditions and benefits and reduced personal risk become the primary goal, and combat is seen as too life endangering and difficult to participate in.
First - let me commend you for your proper “Hear” Hear!” and not the oft misused “Here! Here!”
I am actually blown away by this brilliant revisualization of our military. This alone proves the superior firepower of Romney’s mind.
For the first time in years, I have heard an idea from a politician that is not a compilation of basic conservative concepts or a repackaging of the same. Those ideas are fine, and I am not critical of them - but Romney’s concept here is brilliant in it’s simplicity and counter-current direction (no wonder he was so successful in turnarounds!) - and I am left asking myself, “Why didn’t I think of that?” and “Why haven’t I heard that before?”
This clear explanation of Romney’s philosophy gives me more hope for our country, the deficit and our military all at the same time.
big bump
I was not reflecting on shipping. I meant to reflect on fighting ships. Before one sets to shipping supplies, one must make the area safer for shipping. That is where fighting ships come into play.
That was learned the hard way back in the day.
With drones, we can have cheap airplanes and expensive pilots that don’t have to spend months in some prison camp if they survive at all when the plane gets shot down.
There was a Soviet premier (don’t remember whether it was Stalin or Krushchev) who said in regard to military equipment that “quantity has a quality all its own” or something. And while the Soviets usually didn’t have cutting-edge weaponry, they always had a LOT of it, and they made up for deficiencies in quality by making most of their gear easy to field-service (as one example, I remember reading somewhere that the engine on a MiG-21 could be swapped out in around an hour).
And it probably wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for the US military to embrace this philosophy.
I would like our few F-35’s to be preceded into the battle space by hundreds of lightweight unmanned “cheap” fighters to overwhelm the enemy.
Certainly they are great for transporting our planes to the enemies shores, but they are also great targets. So far with the little wars we have ought the enemy had no way to take these carriers out. That is no longer true with Russia and China, and perhaps Iran if they develop a Nuke.IMO. If we lose a Carrier we lose a major part of our air defense and about 6,000 seaman. I would opt for smaller ships and many of them. take one out and we don't hurt so bad.
Thats why they call it ship
O mocked Romney but didn't answer the basic point. The navy said they needed 313 ships.
>>No one ever asked where we were going to get the cheap pilots to fly those cheap airplanes.
That was then. This is now. Those cheap pilots are sitting in front of X-Boxes with years of experience steering an avatar through intense combat scenarios and processing lots of visual and audial input and making snap decisions.
The “gunfighter” planes need pilots inside, but the missile and bomb throwers can be flown remotely. We still need some heavy air superiority fighters with real pilots for those situations where the enemy air force actually comes up to challenge us. But for the assymetrical warfare of the war against radical islam, drones are doing the job very well.
The Air Force insists on using rated pilots to fly drones, which is silly since a team of enlisted men could fly a squadron of them with a commissioned officer overseeing them and making “official” decisions. You can reduce the number of expensive pilots needed greatly and still deliver the ordnance.
There are underwater drones hunting submarines right now. They’re a little behind aerial drones but don’t expect to see daily reports of their progress.
Yeah, the PC engineers in the pentagon don’t help. But a good part of it is there is no incentive to not spend money and very little training in prudent fiscal expenditures. It results in the spend millions on something you don’t need yet only get issued one pair of boots nonsense that is endemic withing the service.
That’s why I believe Romney won’t see any real results. The generals and admirals will get some new shiny toys. That’s about it.
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