Not every war can be fought from air, there needs to be soldiers on the ground.
In fight against ISIS, the Iraqi amry, Shia Militias, Kurds and others were ground forces while Allies were in Air. In Afghanistan & Gulf War, US forces were on ground.
But in these "conflict", no party is ready to send ground forces, ground forces to stop the air drones, ship drones etc. So the "blockade" will probably continue.
At the heart of this is the fact that America has lost the capability to manufacture anything at scale.
High tech interceptors and missiles and aircraft carriers are great, but with China's help these are outnumbered by three (soon to be four) orders of magnitude.
It's unclear if we can do much other than threaten sanctions and nukes, with not much in between.
What would you manufacture at scale that would open the straits?
If you had an interceptor with a 99% rate of interception (even in such a tight space, and assuming it could intercept underwater as effectively as in air) then if the Iranians fired 50 drones at a ship, they’d have a about a 40% chance of getting at least 1 through (1 - 0.99^50).
So they would likely sink 4 in every 10. No sane insurer let alone captain or crew would take such a risk I think.
This is the issue with interceptors, you need phenomenally high reliability AND very large numbers AND very cheap prices per unit to make them workable.
As it is, I would argue this is a classic example of America trying to solve a POLITICAL problem with MILITARY force. This has never actually succeeded as far as I know. Certainly not on the last few decades.
Whether or not professional military strategists and planners anticipated this shift in carrier-based projection of power in the era of low-cost drones, it is nearly certain that the Commander-in-Chief of the United States military has not. And if the Commander is involved in the either the day-to-day operations or the strategic level of planning, I can’t imagine that whatever reasoning about these shifts in power dynamics has taken place will influence U.S. operations.
An aerial drone capable of materially damaging a modern navy ship costs $1-2M a piece. Anything much cheaper doesn't have the range, survivability, or required warhead to do much more than scratch the paint.
A cheap drone is only useful against soft targets. It is the reason Ukraine is scaling up heavy cruise missile production even though they already have vast numbers of cheap long-range drones. Being "cheap" isn't of much value if it is incapable of doing meaningful damage to the desired target.
The US has been designing and building thousands of anti-ship drones since the 1970s. It isn't like they have no experience with the concept and those drones are far more capable than anything Iran has. The US Navy has assumed drone swarms as a threat model for half a century.
Fly thousands or tens of thousands of $400 drones at the carrier, Chinese light show style, while the carrier uses up all its anti-drone Defense ammunition.
The article is reflecting on the observed reality that US Navy operations in this war are taking Iran’s littoral combat power into account by operating its ships further from the Iranian coast…why can’t you imagine that they are operating this way under Trump?
Commander-In-Chief is not a career military post, it is an elected politician. Your barefaced assertion that he would have professional-level knowledge is resting on one an array of assumptions - that he has an interest in the details, that he respects and listens to professionals, that he has the attention span to read written briefings - that reporting indicated are false.
Brightest minds of US were too focused on displaying ads and making teenagers addicted to tik tokies-like stuff instead of working security, defense, etc
You couldve seen anti militsry industry sentiment on HN for years, which apparently worked for US adversaries, who knows who was behind that propaganda :)
> You couldve seen anti militsry industry sentiment on HN for years, which apparently worked for US adversaries, who knows who was behind that propaganda
I don't get that "Strait" discussion. Where does the Strait begin and end? If somehow the US Navy "opens" the Strait, what stops Iran to attack every ship moving in the direction of the Strait? Where does the "protection zone" start and end?
Iran's deep investment in asymmetric warfare is paying serious dividends. You wouldn't expect a nation that's being bombed day and night, essentially at will, to still hold so many cards. Not only is the US completely incapable of strong-arming the straight open, but the rate of missile and drone attacks out of Iran and its proxies has been accelerating the last few days, as has the rate of successful hits.
The U.S. can't win this war. John Kiriakou did a nice analysis on this on his recent podcasts. "Iran just has to prolong the war and survive it to win". Trump on the other hand needs a decisive win fast, or the economic and political fallout will be too big. As long as Iran can launch cheap drones and keep a small but steady pressure there is just no path out of this for the U.S. except to go home.
The problem shown by Ukraine was that large, expensive solutions were not effective when cheap weapons were used. The solution, which will take time, is to recreate some of the cheap defensive solutions that used to be available - guns, radar-bearing weaponry, etc. these are quite boring to the high tech industry, who prefer things like lasers, rail guns, etc. but ww ii showed they worked, and I suspect the approach speed of drones is similar to kamikazes.
There are also fewer ships than in the 80’s, and everything costs too much. F-35’s vs. F16 birds, the gripen argument in Canada or Europe. How to get companies and staff to embrace low tech solutions in a rapid mapper.
Perhaps they can remember history and make planes that support ground operations rather than high tech birds. Having more, slower birds with cannons would help with drone warfare. Armour also helps.
And yeah, selling ads vs more interesting tech solutions was a cliche 10+ years ago.
> Zelenskyy also said that Ukraine is willing to share its expertise in unblocking maritime trade routes with the naval drones.
> “We shared our experience with the Black Sea corridor and how it operates. They understand that our Armed Forces have been highly effective in unblocking the Black Sea corridor. We are sharing these details.”
In chapter 11 of All Quiet on the Western Front Paul and his unit find an abandoned food cache in the middle of no mans land. Instead of secreting away the food back to their lines where they will have to share it, they decide to just cook and eat it right then and there. But a spotter plane from the allies sees the smoke and then begins shelling their position. Cue a terrifying, if hilarious, scene where the soldiers try and cook pancakes as shells explode around them. Paul, as the last to leave, takes his pancakes on a plate and dashes out, timing his escape between bursts, and just barely making it back to the German trenches. Its a rare comic scene in an otherwise horrific and very real look at WW1.
The scene in the book is just so familiar to the lines in Ukraine these days, nearly a hundred years later. Instead of spotter planes near the dawn of aviation, we have satellites and drones (similarly quite new in the role). Instead of just shells and fuzing experts, we have FPV drones and much more sophisticated shells. Instead of buddies from the same towns all huddled together in cold muddy holes, we have deracinated units spread far and wide in laying in fear of thermal imaging. This results in a no mans land again, but a dozen kilometers wide instead of a few hundred meters wide, and somehow more psychologically damaging.
My point is that absent any tech that will miraculously be invented and deployed widely in the new few weeks, the Iran war, if it should be a ground one, is going to be just like Ukraine is today, which is somehow a worse version of trench warfare.
Even casual Victoria II players know that WW1 is essentially the final boss of the game. And the 'lesson' of Vicky II is essentialy: Do not fight WW1, it ruins Everything.
To be clear: The US is choosing to fight a worse version of WW1 without even a stated (or likely even known) condition of victory. We're about to send many thousands boys to suffer and die for not 'literally nothing', but actually literally nothing.
Trump already said he was just going to bomb all their infrastructure so the economy of the country couldn't function if they didn't negotiate and then it's just going to be a mass refugee crisis. It would be a mass refugee crisis anyway with a protracted ground invasion, but more Americans would die, so Trump is choosing to get it over with the easy way for America at least if they won't negotiate.
IMHO, This is pretty much the strategy the Khans used in the 13th century when they encountered arrogant Islamist Sultans emboldened with the bravery of their faith who refused to capitulate. They killed all the islamic people in Baghdad and then proceeded to fill all their canals and burn all their books. This decisively ended the Islamic golden age and Europe was able to survive after a very difficult 14th century where it would probably have been easily crushed by Islamists from the East had the Khans not set them back at least a few centuries. Truly one of the big turning points in World History.
Oh yeah, we can't do this to Russia because they have nukes, but the Ukrainians are trying to do it piecemeal.
> Cue a terrifying, if hilarious, scene where the soldiers try and cook pancakes as shells explode around them.
In the 1974 movie The Four Musketeers, Athos needs to find a private place in which to impart some information to d'Artagnan. The musketeers are currently deployed battling some French rebels.
The solution he finds is to place a bet with another soldier that he and his friends will have breakfast inside a fortress that is being bombarded by the rebels. We see a similar comedy scene of five people attempting to cook and eat a meal while under attack. (Athos also struggles to get his information across, since the constant attacks understandably pull a lot of attention.)
> if it should be a ground one, is going to be just like Ukraine is today
I do not think this is correct. The problem in Ukraine is that anti-air defenses control the skies, so the only accurate long range fires are expensive missiles in short supply.
This seems to not be a problem in Iran. US forces can fly relatively cheap bomb trucks anywhere and drop ordinance on anything. Stealth aircraft and NATO doctrine apparently work.
I'm not advocating for a ground invasion, but there's no reason to believe it would go the way of Ukraine.
Ukrainian war is the way it is because neither side has a decisive advantage in air. There's barely any CAS - there are, however, lightweight drones.
If Iran were to become a major ground war, one of the sides would have air dominance, and we know which one. How that would change things remains to be seen. But it wouldn't be the same exact trench war, that's certain enough.
"When whole squadrons of very long-range aircraft were operating out of bases in the Shetlands, Northern Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland (and, after mid-1943, the Azores), and when the Bay of Biscay could be patrolled all through the night by aircraft equipped with centimetric radar, Leigh Lights, depth charges, acoustic torpedoes, even rockets, Doenitz’s submarines knew no rest." [0]
[0] Kennedy, Paul. Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned The Tide in the Second World War, from the chapter 'How to Get Convoys Safely Across the Atlantic'
And not even British. For example most of the Enigma decryption was the genius work of a Polish man. Britain received the immigration of half the Nobel prices of the world in a couple years as the jews escaped nazism.
In the movie Thirteen Days, JFK mentions a book titled March of Folly by Barbara Tuchmann. I bought the book on that tip and it has an interesting chapter on Vietnam. I don't think adding a chapter on this "special operation" would even be worth it as it would just be repetitive.
The United States primary strategy against China, in the event of war around Taiwan or nearby, is the same:
China's coast is mostly enclosed by the 'First Island Chain', which extends from Japan to Taiwan, through the Philippines and Borneo (look up a map and the situation will be very clear). Imagine strings of islands along the US coasts controlled by Chinese allies and with Chinese and allied forces training intensively there.
The American plan is to keep the Chinese navy trapped (or under assault) along its own coast by putting Marines (and Army soldiers too, I think) on the islands with anti-ship missiles.
The northern tip of the Philippines is as close to Taiwan as the Chinese mainland is; the US and Philippines are conducting an essentially endless series of military exercises and the US is placing some of its most advanced missiles there.
tumpy was/is/might be going to china in a week or so, and there is pretty much no way that can happen while WWIII is launching, and/or things are going mega bad for the marines, as there is no way they are not going find themselves in a real fight.
all those islands are owned and operated by the irainian military, who in fact have complete long range artilery superiority,and every square inch dialed in, dont see how it could be done except with a full and total invasion of the wholecountry, which would likely go worse and would require a much much larger force than the one on hand, but tumpy is crazy, so who knows
>The era of carrier-dominated airpower is fading, as cheap, unmanned anti-ship weapons reshape naval warfare, whether US planners are ready for it or not.
is not really backed up by reality. Pretty much the whole US operation so far, destroying much of Iran's military and leadership was done from US carriers. If anything it demonstrates how powerful they are.
Also straits being closed to shipping by whatever power controls the shores is not a new thing. The Bosphophorous has been closed on and off by the Ottomans or Turks since 1453 and the allies couldn't break through in WW1. They can send raiding ships, use canons, artillery, naval mines etc. You don't need the new tech.
>destroying much of Iran's military and leadership was done from US carriers. If anything it demonstrates how powerful they are.
When you have a hammer that costs billions of dollars in budget you tend to find excuses to use it lest you lose that budget. Imagine if their were no carriers. US airpower just takes off from gulf state airbases and same thing happens to iran.
Unless the US is fighting an air battle in the middle of the ocean, they can probably get by without carriers.
I am very angry with Trump. He owes all of us money here.
The sooner the guy is gone, the better. Some folks compared
Trump to Lyndon B. Johnson, but as a lame duck from the get
go. I think Trump in his own category - a new label of
criminal and stupid. I want my money "back".
This version of the "end of the power of the aircraft carrier" sounds like it will play out a lot like the end of the tank, the end of the helicopter, etc. Yeah, it's not going to have the same untouchable power it used to. But it's not going to stop being useful or go away either.
94 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 90.3 ms ] threadIn fight against ISIS, the Iraqi amry, Shia Militias, Kurds and others were ground forces while Allies were in Air. In Afghanistan & Gulf War, US forces were on ground.
But in these "conflict", no party is ready to send ground forces, ground forces to stop the air drones, ship drones etc. So the "blockade" will probably continue.
High tech interceptors and missiles and aircraft carriers are great, but with China's help these are outnumbered by three (soon to be four) orders of magnitude.
It's unclear if we can do much other than threaten sanctions and nukes, with not much in between.
If you had an interceptor with a 99% rate of interception (even in such a tight space, and assuming it could intercept underwater as effectively as in air) then if the Iranians fired 50 drones at a ship, they’d have a about a 40% chance of getting at least 1 through (1 - 0.99^50).
So they would likely sink 4 in every 10. No sane insurer let alone captain or crew would take such a risk I think.
This is the issue with interceptors, you need phenomenally high reliability AND very large numbers AND very cheap prices per unit to make them workable.
As it is, I would argue this is a classic example of America trying to solve a POLITICAL problem with MILITARY force. This has never actually succeeded as far as I know. Certainly not on the last few decades.
A cheap drone is only useful against soft targets. It is the reason Ukraine is scaling up heavy cruise missile production even though they already have vast numbers of cheap long-range drones. Being "cheap" isn't of much value if it is incapable of doing meaningful damage to the desired target.
The US has been designing and building thousands of anti-ship drones since the 1970s. It isn't like they have no experience with the concept and those drones are far more capable than anything Iran has. The US Navy has assumed drone swarms as a threat model for half a century.
Then fly in the high explosives.
You couldve seen anti militsry industry sentiment on HN for years, which apparently worked for US adversaries, who knows who was behind that propaganda :)
Inb4: im from eu
People are just making the obvious choice most of the time. Why risk your business success unnecessarily?
Me.
2nd Epstein war.
There are also fewer ships than in the 80’s, and everything costs too much. F-35’s vs. F16 birds, the gripen argument in Canada or Europe. How to get companies and staff to embrace low tech solutions in a rapid mapper.
Perhaps they can remember history and make planes that support ground operations rather than high tech birds. Having more, slower birds with cannons would help with drone warfare. Armour also helps.
And yeah, selling ads vs more interesting tech solutions was a cliche 10+ years ago.
> Zelenskyy also said that Ukraine is willing to share its expertise in unblocking maritime trade routes with the naval drones.
> “We shared our experience with the Black Sea corridor and how it operates. They understand that our Armed Forces have been highly effective in unblocking the Black Sea corridor. We are sharing these details.”
The scene in the book is just so familiar to the lines in Ukraine these days, nearly a hundred years later. Instead of spotter planes near the dawn of aviation, we have satellites and drones (similarly quite new in the role). Instead of just shells and fuzing experts, we have FPV drones and much more sophisticated shells. Instead of buddies from the same towns all huddled together in cold muddy holes, we have deracinated units spread far and wide in laying in fear of thermal imaging. This results in a no mans land again, but a dozen kilometers wide instead of a few hundred meters wide, and somehow more psychologically damaging.
My point is that absent any tech that will miraculously be invented and deployed widely in the new few weeks, the Iran war, if it should be a ground one, is going to be just like Ukraine is today, which is somehow a worse version of trench warfare.
Even casual Victoria II players know that WW1 is essentially the final boss of the game. And the 'lesson' of Vicky II is essentialy: Do not fight WW1, it ruins Everything.
To be clear: The US is choosing to fight a worse version of WW1 without even a stated (or likely even known) condition of victory. We're about to send many thousands boys to suffer and die for not 'literally nothing', but actually literally nothing.
IMHO, This is pretty much the strategy the Khans used in the 13th century when they encountered arrogant Islamist Sultans emboldened with the bravery of their faith who refused to capitulate. They killed all the islamic people in Baghdad and then proceeded to fill all their canals and burn all their books. This decisively ended the Islamic golden age and Europe was able to survive after a very difficult 14th century where it would probably have been easily crushed by Islamists from the East had the Khans not set them back at least a few centuries. Truly one of the big turning points in World History.
Oh yeah, we can't do this to Russia because they have nukes, but the Ukrainians are trying to do it piecemeal.
In the 1974 movie The Four Musketeers, Athos needs to find a private place in which to impart some information to d'Artagnan. The musketeers are currently deployed battling some French rebels.
The solution he finds is to place a bet with another soldier that he and his friends will have breakfast inside a fortress that is being bombarded by the rebels. We see a similar comedy scene of five people attempting to cook and eat a meal while under attack. (Athos also struggles to get his information across, since the constant attacks understandably pull a lot of attention.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aezX4lxCaCw
I do not think this is correct. The problem in Ukraine is that anti-air defenses control the skies, so the only accurate long range fires are expensive missiles in short supply.
This seems to not be a problem in Iran. US forces can fly relatively cheap bomb trucks anywhere and drop ordinance on anything. Stealth aircraft and NATO doctrine apparently work.
I'm not advocating for a ground invasion, but there's no reason to believe it would go the way of Ukraine.
Ukraine must defend itself against an authoritarian Russia where nobody can publicly complain about what's happening.
This is not the case in the US, unless they go full dictatorship.
If Iran were to become a major ground war, one of the sides would have air dominance, and we know which one. How that would change things remains to be seen. But it wouldn't be the same exact trench war, that's certain enough.
Sounds like typical US revisionist history.
They developed ASDIC? HF/DF? Hedgehog? Even the depth charge?
No, that was all the British.
I would say technological development plus the Enigma decrypts were the biggest factor.
"When whole squadrons of very long-range aircraft were operating out of bases in the Shetlands, Northern Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland (and, after mid-1943, the Azores), and when the Bay of Biscay could be patrolled all through the night by aircraft equipped with centimetric radar, Leigh Lights, depth charges, acoustic torpedoes, even rockets, Doenitz’s submarines knew no rest." [0]
[0] Kennedy, Paul. Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned The Tide in the Second World War, from the chapter 'How to Get Convoys Safely Across the Atlantic'
And not even British. For example most of the Enigma decryption was the genius work of a Polish man. Britain received the immigration of half the Nobel prices of the world in a couple years as the jews escaped nazism.
And only when significant losses mounted did they decide to send some escorts.
[reads article]
Yep, got it in one!
China's coast is mostly enclosed by the 'First Island Chain', which extends from Japan to Taiwan, through the Philippines and Borneo (look up a map and the situation will be very clear). Imagine strings of islands along the US coasts controlled by Chinese allies and with Chinese and allied forces training intensively there.
The American plan is to keep the Chinese navy trapped (or under assault) along its own coast by putting Marines (and Army soldiers too, I think) on the islands with anti-ship missiles.
The northern tip of the Philippines is as close to Taiwan as the Chinese mainland is; the US and Philippines are conducting an essentially endless series of military exercises and the US is placing some of its most advanced missiles there.
is not really backed up by reality. Pretty much the whole US operation so far, destroying much of Iran's military and leadership was done from US carriers. If anything it demonstrates how powerful they are.
Also straits being closed to shipping by whatever power controls the shores is not a new thing. The Bosphophorous has been closed on and off by the Ottomans or Turks since 1453 and the allies couldn't break through in WW1. They can send raiding ships, use canons, artillery, naval mines etc. You don't need the new tech.
When you have a hammer that costs billions of dollars in budget you tend to find excuses to use it lest you lose that budget. Imagine if their were no carriers. US airpower just takes off from gulf state airbases and same thing happens to iran.
Unless the US is fighting an air battle in the middle of the ocean, they can probably get by without carriers.
The sooner the guy is gone, the better. Some folks compared Trump to Lyndon B. Johnson, but as a lame duck from the get go. I think Trump in his own category - a new label of criminal and stupid. I want my money "back".