When US operators don't have a huge air superiority advantage, they usually just fold lmao.
https://twitter.com/TelegraphWorld/status/1455637159453601797
When US operators don't have a huge air superiority advantage, they usually just fold lmao.
https://twitter.com/TelegraphWorld/status/1455637159453601797
read this great book called "dreadnought" about the role of naval buildup from the battle of trafalgar leading up to wwi (i may be getting details wrong here), and stuff like this always reminds me of it
after trafalgar, the british were basically unchallenged rulers of the sea and after that there was a long period of the major powers not fucking with each other at sea. it was also a period where there was a lot of technological development of warships, both in propulsion, hull armour, and gunnery - and outside of things like the monitor/merrimack battle, there was very little in-battle testing of them. so nobody knew which ship designs would work or not work (to the point where they all started adding ramming spikes for a while cos they thought that might be a thing again) and there were whole generations of incredibly weird ships that were built and scrapped without seeing action or anyone knowing if they were actually any good.
and the british got high on their own farts and complacent with training but also things got weird - the captains were all fighting for promotions but they couldnt do feats of derring-do in battle, so they practiced increasingly more elaborate sail-changing parade drills (on ships where the masts and sails were more and more vestigial), and huge amounts of sailors fell to their deaths doing them. simultaneously they were all painting their ships white on their own dime to look good on parade (again for promotions), and actually firing guns would get the paint dirty so they avoided actual gunnery practice, and then when they needed to turn up at the colonies to shell some uppity natives into submission they couldnt fucking hit anything.
and they measured everything in terms of number of guns of a given calibre as their key indicator of naval power, and then when they had to fight a real battle at jutland, it turned out that the important stuff was shit they hadnt even thought of (mostly cos it was the boring shit and wasnt as cool as big guns go bang) - vulnerability of ammunition magazines was way more important than how many guns of how large a calibre, and it turned out their signalling/communications systems were dogshit because they hadnt bothered training that in battle conditions cos it wasnt cool and macho so nobody knew what the fuck they were doing (especially when they were at full speed and the smoke obscured the signals anyway), and the captains all wanted glory (and their institutional culture would brand them a coward for not always charging in suicidally) so they ignored the signals anyway.
anyway whenever i hear about stuff like this and the millennium challenge and how long its been since america fought a conventional war where this sort of shit could be tested against real opponents, it always reminds me of this
I wonder what the American equivalent of “there seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today” will be.
Some independent actor with a drone swarm blows up an aircraft carrier by overwhelming it with $100 dollar drones.
When the entirety of the US falls apart simultaneously. The whole this is what’s wrong with our bloody ships
deleted by creator
looking forward to that
are you implying that there is more to the us armed forces than dodge chargers, military base Burger King, and calling for air support when you see a child?
:seen-this-one:
that and the navy is infamous for promoting people for aristocratic connections.
glances at John McCain
no proper aristocrats the kind that are like racehorses in that past 30 they are essentially put on a shelf. A good example is prince Andrew all the British state ever wanted from him was to serve out his navy career after which point he was done and started to make his own decisions, which as it turns out he was too evil and stupid to do properly
We did conventional war back in the 90s during Desert Storm, and we basically mopped the floor with the Iraqi Army - then the 5th largest in the world. But yes, a lot of those battles really did boil down to "My tank can shoot twice as far and drive twice as fast as your tank and can actually hit what its aiming at" conflicts, wherein a dozen American vehicles just backpeddled and decimated an Iraqi tank battalion.
The modern US military still does periodically have to deal with quasi-combat situations, particularly in air defense. But the theory is that our tech so vastly outstrips the competition that there really isn't a countermeasure you can deploy against it. The Millennial Challenge was a shock, because Americans assumed you could just roll through the Iranian military unimpeded. But the real "defeat" in that scenario was in expected American casualties (which officers predicted would be near-zero, but opposition commanders proved would be far higher). America still "won" the conflict with overwhelming force.
These scenarios definitely illustrate how American military units are under-trained and unprepared for a full-scale conflict. But anyone who thinks the US couldn't wipe the UK off the map in a serious conflict is crazy. There's a huge gulf between believing the US units are invincible and inexhaustible, and that they can't do horrific damage in a stand-up battle.
Destroying your oponent isn't winnning a war. We can brake shit. We can drop more nukes. However, we don't realy have the logistical lower to pick an objective and do it.
Consider china, we are never going to do a grownd war with them. But if we tried, we wouldn't be a le to get even a quarter of our sfuff there. And hhen there it wouldn't work half as well. We could burn it all down at the cost of most our stuff. Couldn't proper call it a voctory even though we'd be thr last ones standing. It be the opposite of ww2. Where we won by really not getting onvovled and looting the corpses of the combatents.
The big lesson of WW2 is that you don't need to control territory in order to establish a global economic hegemony. Breaking the opposition's industrial base is sufficient to consolidate power within your own.
We don't want to do an open war with China, but we absolutely do want to cut off their industrial capacity and chain them to our supply routes. So we cut deals with Australia and we foment revolts in Xinjiang and we destabilize the border with India. All in the hope that China's gangbusters growth will lag long enough for our own economy to finally get its shit together after a 40 year Volcker-Shock induced development lag.
i think i read that book too. the part about racing maggots was super gross lol
lol its been a while since i read it, remind me?
sorry for the late response. as you say, "the british got high on their own farts and complacent with training but also things got weird" lol... but yeah it just talked about how isolated sailors were and how disgusting their food got. so boring were their lives that, for entertainment, they would shake maggots out of old biscuits to see which would find its way back faster!
there's a fairly recent Dollop episode, "The Essex" that I highly recommend for similar vibes. Of course it's a story about American sailors but yeah! they're so good at making the worst situations hilarious