

How the United States Lost the Naval War of 2015 - DanielBMarkham
http://www.fpri.org/orbis/5401/kraska.navalwar2015.pdf

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gwern
Blah blah blah. 'I'm a Navy shill and let me tell you, China's going to kill
us all within a very implausibly short-time if we don't shovel billions into
cool new ships & weapons. We must eliminate the carrier gap!'

Haven't we heard this story before?

And here I was hoping for an interesting analysis of the Iran wargames and the
dismal results for the carrier groups, but all I got was let's build a bigger
bluewater fleet.

~~~
irrelative
Indeed. It was a Tom Clancy book with a hawkish pitch. Let me know when the
movie adaptation comes out.

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blueben
Because there isn't enough pornography on DVD already...

You know the author of this story was hot and bothered during the entire
writing process. A Christian, no doubt, too. Probably skipped Bible study when
they covered the section that says "Those who delight in violence [God]
abhors".

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sethg
Out of every $100 spent on national defense _worldwide_ , $40–$50 are spent by
the United States. About 30% of the US Federal budget is military spending,
and about 13% is paying interest on money we borrowed for previous military
spending.¹ Any hypothetical war that the US couldn’t win unless it spends
_even more_ coin on military hardware is not a hypothetical war that the US
should be hypothetically fighting in the first place.

¹ [http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-
spendi...](http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending)

~~~
gaius
What the US gets for that money tho' is a vast amount of tech that eventually
ends up with the general public. I have two GPSs on me at the moment. Which is
ridiculous but hey, they're so cheap, why not stick one in every electronic
device?! There's a reason that all that comes out of the US.

The EU as a whole spends about half what the US does on defence and ends up
with about 10% of the capability. Hmm.

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eru
Your first argument would be more interesting, if you could compare it with a
situation where the money remains in civilian hands.

(E.g. during the Second World War a lot of new technology came out of the
military, too. But that was only to expect, since all resources went into the
military.)

~~~
gaius
A good example is the UK. We spend ~200Bn a year on welfare and ~30Bn a year
on defence. Yet the US leads in almost every technological field.

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ahi
Surface navies are useless against competent organized opponents. Carrier
groups are for power projection to scare the natives, little else. During a
$250 million war game in 2002, OPFOR sunk the US fleet in the Persian Gulf.
Sorry I can't find the original:
<http://bassreport.com/forum/rec.boats.t664050.htm>

And another from the War Nerd: [http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-
how-the-carrier...](http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-
carriers-will-die/#more-6954)

He repeats this quote from the US Naval Institute about 10 times in that last
article: "Ships currently have no defense against a ballistic missile attack,"
and points out that ballistic missiles are 50 year old tech.

The solution to defending a surface navy isn't to throw money at it, but to
mothball it.

~~~
sethg
That is a rather glaring flaw in the OP’s argument, innit? “The Chinese could
bring down one of our massive ships with one cheap missile! Therefore we
need... an even larger quantity of massive ships than we have now!”

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hugh_
For those who can't be bothered reading it, the posited scenario goes
something like this:

1\. China torpedoes a US aircraft carrier for no particularly good reason

2\. China claims that the US aircraft carrier exploded all on its own, and
nobody can prove otherwise

3\. The US doesn't bother to retaliate

4\. The US has thus "lost the Naval War of 2015".

Does this scenario strike anyone as especially plausible?

~~~
stcredzero
There would be records of the radar track in the computers of the Aegis
cruisers in the task force. There may well be evidence of the launch captured
by satellites.

ELINT is very powerful, and the US intelligence agencies have been at this
game since before WWII. Their sneakiness boggles the mind! They were using
signals bounced off of the moon to spy on Soviet equipment, and disguised the
whole thing as radio astronomy!

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFSPHfZQpIQ>

If you are going to go up against the US defense establishment, you'd better
be _damned_ sure you know what you're doing.

If I were the US, facing such an asymmetric threat, I'd keep most of my
carrier groups around for the short term as a boondoggle, then come up with my
own novel threat against my opponent's shipping.

(Sub launched cruise missiles, or mines? The advanced 21st century version, of
course.)

~~~
hugh_
_(Sub launched cruise missiles, or mines?)_

Nukes.

If I were the US, I'd simply make it an official matter of policy that any
attack from a nuclear power would result in an immediate nuclear response, the
logic being that once two nuclear powers are at war it's probably going to
turn nuclear eventually, so you might as well make the first strike.

~~~
synnik
Please tell me you are joking.

Some of us spent our entire youth afraid of nuclear annihilation 24/7. We've
been out of that for some time now, but I don't think anyone wants to send the
world back to that point.

~~~
barrkel
Fear of nuclear annihilation is why there hasn't been a war. Nuclear weapons =
peace. Not a happy peace, but infinitely better than either no nukes or a
single side having nukes.

~~~
eru
You know that there were more hot wars during the cold war than we have now?

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ryanwaggoner
Amusing. I enjoyed this part:

 _The incident—could it really be called a ‘‘war’’?—_

Well, when you're making up some hypothetical event in the future, you can
call it anything you want. Kind of weird to question it yourself though.

This whole thing is pretty stupid, though. As a former Navy guy, I find it
pretty hard to believe that the US wouldn't be able to prove that China was
responsible, or that they wouldn't retaliate even if they couldn't prove it.

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HistoryInAction
The references are pretty interesting for this article. I highly recommend the
"Pentagon's Wasting Assets" article by Andrew Bachevich, which talks about
this in a section of it from a less inflammatory perspective (mostly focusing
on the Hormouz and Taiwanese Straits, as well as the 2002 war game mentioned
below)

It's a known thought that since the late 80s, the Chinese Navy has been led by
strategists who follow Mahanian decisive battle theory. It'll be interesting
to see how carrier air groups are integrated into a theory that was adopted in
the turn of the 20th century for a 'big gun'/dreadnought/battleship navy that
was made obsolete by the emergence of naval air power.

Billy Mitchell just keeps winning...

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ynniv
And Iraq has chemical weapons, and Iran is a dangerous nuclear power, blah
blah blah... Isn't $500 billion a year (50% of the federal budget!) enough for
you people?

~~~
markpneyer
The federal budget is significantly more than 1 Trillion USD

~~~
ynniv
Yeah, the numbers change year to year, and the most recent numbers are even
greater. From
[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_United_States_federal_budg...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_United_States_federal_budget)],
I tally ~ $743 billion in defense and veterans affairs. Add a large percentage
of the $220 billion in interest payments. The important question percentage-
wise is whether you include Social Security.

Anyway, the fraction of the budget is really besides the point. We spend an
inordinate amount of money on the military, and there is no viable threats to
defend against. China is the best pick because they spend the second most
money ($85 billion), but can we legitimately think that we'll go to physical
war with such a huge trade partner?

Our military is funded by campfire stories and yellow press.

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javery
Modern Carriers can't fit through the Panama Canal and I am sure they would be
fine going around the tip of South America.

~~~
eru
They are planning to enlarge the Canal. Though I do not know whether it will
be large enough for carriers. (Probably not.)

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johngalt
This is almost the exact scenario of "Debt of Honor" by Tom Clancy. Only it
was a Japanese sub that ambushed a carrier.

