Your type of stupidity is exactly why we've spent decades, trillions and millions dead/injured fucking around in the middle east to achieve fuck all. But please stand to clap for the veteran of the day! And don't forget to go home and vote away their healthcare.
> The American people do not want a war with China. In order to prevent the outbreak of war, the US must deter the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from initiating combat operations against their own neighbors.
It is pretty amazing that this article continuously asserts that Okinawa is a "foreign airbase" - the US has an extremely visible basing presence in south east asia.
This is some old fashioned Cold War military spending arguments. We can not have a fighter plane gap!
The assumption that an air war with China will result in a 1:1 trade of aircraft needs more citations. I’m also not sure they were counting the Navy and Marines airframes in the estimate. I am not sold on the need to buy more military aircraft at the time.
Dwight Eisenhower: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
People forget the context. Eisenhower said all this in the days after Stalin died, hoping to convince the new Soviet leadership to disengage from the arms race. It did not work. And Eisenhower had zero qualms about saying something and smoking something else: the US had about 500 nukes when Eisenhower became president and about 20000 when he stepped down.
The first thing Eisenhower did after taking office was to cut the defense budget. His administration built nukes, besides fitting with the administration's policy of massive retaliation, because nukes are cheaper than conventional weapons, pound for pound.
There is a thesis to be written (if not already existing) on how both Truman and Eisenhower viewed tactical nukes as, well, very large conventional weapons and potentially usable as such on the battlefield, while still viewing strategic nukes as something different.
The thesis would deal with both presidents' military backgrounds affecting their opinions, and how being intimately involved with the discussion of just how much more powerful thermonuclear weapons are than fission weapons affected taking such a nuanced view, an ability that I think has been lost to later generations (I doubt 5% of today's politicians, let alone citizens, can explain the difference between fission and fusion bombs I'd be amazed).
> The first thing Eisenhower did after taking office was to cut the defense budget.
Yes. But aren't you forgetting something? Like the fact that the US was exiting the war in Korea?
> because nukes are cheaper than conventional weapons, pound for pound.
Yes, they are. Pound for pound. But when you get to 20000 nukes, and thousands of megatons, it stops being pound for pound.
> I doubt 5% of today's politicians, let alone citizens, can explain the difference between fission and fusion bombs I'd be amazed.
I think you are right. If they knew, at least a few would realize that the US could downgrade 90% of its nukes from thermonuclear to fission bombs without diminishing their destructive power. The most numerous warhead in the US arsenal is W76-1, with a yield of 90 kT. It is obviously not know how much comes from the fission core, but it's unlikely that the core is smaller than the core of Fat Man, because of the lower limits of the critical mass of plutonium. The efficiency of the core is certainly much higher than the efficiency of the Fat Man, so it would not surprise me if half of the yield of a W76-1 came from the fission core. And since the destructive power of a bomb is ridiculously sublinear, the difference between a 45 kT and a 90 kT bomb is not that high. The US could retain about 300 fusion bombs, and convert the other few thousands into pure fission bombs and it could be able to fulfill whatever nuclear war goals there were to fulfill. And reduce the stockpile stewardship budget. And gain some moral high ground in the process. And, why not, move the world a bit closer to a world without nuclear weapons.
> > The first thing Eisenhower did after taking office was to cut the defense budget.
> Yes. But aren't you forgetting something? Like the fact that the US was exiting the war in Korea?
No. The Eisenhower cut of the defense budget occurred in spring 1953, right after his inauguration. It was not known then that the armistice would occur that summer.
It fascinates me when people deploy "we" in statements like the one in this title, with the implicit premise that the majority of the American people (even if you presume them to be the readership) and the US military share a common identity and common interests. If Vietnam taught us one thing it's that most Americans are little more than cannon fodder to the US military.
Or as the old saying goes... who's "we", white man?
DoD forgot how to make things for pennies, and the institutional wall[1] against commodity is too high and too thick. It'll take a sizeable and strategic US defeat to overturn the applecart.
Best case, we manage to get a few decent drones for $10m a pop, but we still risk getting shanked by a frickin' mob of Chinese crap, because they don't need to go that far to get into theatre. I dig what Anduril's trying[2] to do with Roadrunner, but it's still too damn expensive - the hard kill mechanism still results in a total loss-of-vehicle.
[1] I.e., quivering mass of overpaid box checkers getting salaried as Analyst IIIs.
[2] There's some whispers, too, that Anduril isn't actually able to operationalize any of their widgets at any sort of scale, but I don't have any inside eyes on this. I DO see, though, that their fab capacity is . . not amazing.
There will be no return of US Air Power until the MIC makes robust, cheap effective planes instead of expensive boondoggles that are hangar queens.
In History, the Germans relied on low-numbers of high technology planes during WW2. They were swamped by thousands of cheaper 'good enough' planes mass-produced by the US and the Soviets.
The US persists on making the same mistake now as the Germans did in the 1940s.
Not a military expert, but that this article doesn't contain the word "drone" at all makes me think it is more relevant to a bygone era than the present.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 75.4 ms ] threadWhen you are robbed, just don't forget to say that you are against robberies - this will totally work
The assumption that an air war with China will result in a 1:1 trade of aircraft needs more citations. I’m also not sure they were counting the Navy and Marines airframes in the estimate. I am not sold on the need to buy more military aircraft at the time.
People forget the context. Eisenhower said all this in the days after Stalin died, hoping to convince the new Soviet leadership to disengage from the arms race. It did not work. And Eisenhower had zero qualms about saying something and smoking something else: the US had about 500 nukes when Eisenhower became president and about 20000 when he stepped down.
There is a thesis to be written (if not already existing) on how both Truman and Eisenhower viewed tactical nukes as, well, very large conventional weapons and potentially usable as such on the battlefield, while still viewing strategic nukes as something different.
The thesis would deal with both presidents' military backgrounds affecting their opinions, and how being intimately involved with the discussion of just how much more powerful thermonuclear weapons are than fission weapons affected taking such a nuanced view, an ability that I think has been lost to later generations (I doubt 5% of today's politicians, let alone citizens, can explain the difference between fission and fusion bombs I'd be amazed).
Yes. But aren't you forgetting something? Like the fact that the US was exiting the war in Korea?
> because nukes are cheaper than conventional weapons, pound for pound.
Yes, they are. Pound for pound. But when you get to 20000 nukes, and thousands of megatons, it stops being pound for pound.
> I doubt 5% of today's politicians, let alone citizens, can explain the difference between fission and fusion bombs I'd be amazed.
I think you are right. If they knew, at least a few would realize that the US could downgrade 90% of its nukes from thermonuclear to fission bombs without diminishing their destructive power. The most numerous warhead in the US arsenal is W76-1, with a yield of 90 kT. It is obviously not know how much comes from the fission core, but it's unlikely that the core is smaller than the core of Fat Man, because of the lower limits of the critical mass of plutonium. The efficiency of the core is certainly much higher than the efficiency of the Fat Man, so it would not surprise me if half of the yield of a W76-1 came from the fission core. And since the destructive power of a bomb is ridiculously sublinear, the difference between a 45 kT and a 90 kT bomb is not that high. The US could retain about 300 fusion bombs, and convert the other few thousands into pure fission bombs and it could be able to fulfill whatever nuclear war goals there were to fulfill. And reduce the stockpile stewardship budget. And gain some moral high ground in the process. And, why not, move the world a bit closer to a world without nuclear weapons.
> Yes. But aren't you forgetting something? Like the fact that the US was exiting the war in Korea?
No. The Eisenhower cut of the defense budget occurred in spring 1953, right after his inauguration. It was not known then that the armistice would occur that summer.
Or as the old saying goes... who's "we", white man?
Why would China not win this arms race?
Best case, we manage to get a few decent drones for $10m a pop, but we still risk getting shanked by a frickin' mob of Chinese crap, because they don't need to go that far to get into theatre. I dig what Anduril's trying[2] to do with Roadrunner, but it's still too damn expensive - the hard kill mechanism still results in a total loss-of-vehicle.
[1] I.e., quivering mass of overpaid box checkers getting salaried as Analyst IIIs.
[2] There's some whispers, too, that Anduril isn't actually able to operationalize any of their widgets at any sort of scale, but I don't have any inside eyes on this. I DO see, though, that their fab capacity is . . not amazing.
In History, the Germans relied on low-numbers of high technology planes during WW2. They were swamped by thousands of cheaper 'good enough' planes mass-produced by the US and the Soviets.
The US persists on making the same mistake now as the Germans did in the 1940s.