And the point of this article is that we are getting the worst of all possible worlds, inferior weapons systems at exorbitant costs.
I take your point, inferior grade weapons are rarely the way to go but inexpensive weapons might be. You mentioned the tanks of World War II and the best tank in that era was probably the Russian T 34 not because it outclassed the German Tiger tank but because it was in many ways, besides sheer firepower and armor, superior. One of those ways was ease of maintenance, ease of training, ease of repair, and, of course, cost of manufacture so that they simply swarmed the German tanks. They had wider treads and were better able to cope with Russian snow and mud.
But we are turning into a new era and one might question whether it is wise to absorb the lessons of World War II for the 21st century. In warfare, technology is always overturning the conventional wisdom. Now it is the turn of aircraft carriers to face that fate which they had earlier imposed on battleships. We are now in an age of lasers, satellites, drones, missiles and, above all, nuclear weapons. The role of aircraft carriers is obviously going to be reduced to something similar to the role gunboats played for Victorian Britain, effective to maintain peace on the beat against Third World players but too vulnerable to risk against world-class antagonists like China.
So this brings the cost-benefit equation into play. And it brings it into play at a time when America is no longer the greatest economy on earth, our potential adversary now is, our string of alliances look more like tripwires than allies, our domestic economy might well be going into recession after seven years of muddle, and our politics, to put it generously, are in disarray. We have no obvious national security strategy, no effective implementation of policy anywhere, and no prospect of acquiring these things before January 2017 at the earliest.
Meanwhile China gets richer and we get poorer, more divided and more vulnerable. There is no national sense of urgency and no national sense of a need to reform our defense strategy or our budget sheet. These are the circumstances under which we have to rethink how our wars shall be fought, financed, and won. Whom can we trust to make these decisions, Barack Obama? John Boehner and Mitch McConnell? Who will decide if and when we are going to gradually abandon aircraft carrier technology for satellites, lasers and cyber attacks?
We are, the only question is when and if we will have the right stuff?
At one point in World War II the United States was launching one Kaiser ship everyday. They were plodding, rolling, slow, ungainly tubs but they were ubiquitous. In those days the United States had manufacturing infrastructure starting with mining running through manufacture of steel and final manufacturing and all with the logistical delivery system in place to make it happen. Hence it was possible for Henry Kaiser to launch a ship day.
Today, it is not the United States but the Republic of China which has the vertical infrastructure with which to manufacture a multitude of ships. Their ships need not be substantially inferior to ours, like their jets the Chinese will soon become capable of turning out satisfactory warships, no doubt cloned in many respects, but they will have the advantage of having multiple shipyards in which to build them while the United States will be reduced to a couple of shipyards.
I fear that we are debating the wrong issue. Misplaced allocation of precious resources for the defense of the nation is the result of a dysfunctional political operation in Washington. There is no reason to believe that defense lobbyists have any less influence over our elected representatives than do domestic lobbyists. We should think that we are defending ourselves not with taxpayer dollars but with borrowers' dollars. That means that we are running out of the infrastructure, not just the manufacturing and distribution infrastructure, but the financial infrastructure to support superpower defense operations. Our ability to borrow into infinity is illusory.
Let me hasten to add that the military budget has been cut by sequester and we have seen that politics have made those cuts politically less unpalatable but not militarily logical. Even in spite of those cuts we still maintain a military budget far in excess of our rivals. Politics will make further cuts inevitable. If politics alone does not do so, the implacable laws of economics will.
The single best thing we can do to preserve our security is to get our fiscal house in order so that we can maintain the world's foremost defense capacity. The problem is the Democrats will sellout the country to get their hands on defense money and the Republicans have sold out long ago on just about every issue. There is nowhere to turn. The defense establishment, like entitlements, is out of control making decisions based on politics or rather than readiness.
That which cannot go on, the sage said, will not go on and the American ability to borrow its way into tomorrow will end tomorrow or the day after. Our greatest danger is not the rise of Isis, nor the brazen aggression of Putin, not even the far more sinister plans of the Chinese, the major threat to the security of the United States is fiscal irresponsibility.
The author asks, how vulnerable will these carriers be in 50 years? I ask, never mind the carriers what sort of country will we have in 50 years?
