It's even funnier thing actually, RN ships don't have ASuW missiles because they did had murican Harpoons, but they were retired in 2018 due to being obsolete. With no replacement, they are promising it for 2028 (unlikely) so currently RN ship wanting to shot enemy ship must close to the gun range. They did bought some Norwegian ASuW system recently but it's only been fit to few ships at most and was not tested, it's also a short range system.
Some harpoon missiles retired from RN most likely did arrived in Ukraine, where they had so huge success as using two to hit a tugboat.
army built exclusively for fighting third world countries
Struggle at that
I'm also wondering about those Norwegian missiles, it must work wonderfully since they dind't even sent that ship that is armed with them.
And so, they have to fly planes from Cyprus 1500km away to strike Yemen. That ship is there to shot down Yemeni drones with Sea Viper missiles - each one of those cost 1-2million$.
Man, what a goddamn waste of resources. Imagine all that put to peaceful use. Fuel, materials in the jets and missiles, manpower it took to make them, etc
Makes me think of that Eisenhower speech. He was a bastard but even broken clocks etc
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
Jesus fuckin Christ, and It's likely even worse with modern bloat. We could probably house every homeless person worldwide and rebuild entire cities to be renewable and walkable, just on US military budget
Oh easily! Just looking at America it would take an estimated $20 billion to end homelessness according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The Marines alone have a yearly budget of over $50 billion. You could completely eliminate the Marines, end homelessness in America twice over, and barely make an impact in the American military's capabilities.
Why did they deem something as obsolete when they have no replacement for it?
No idea, i guess they were literally crumbling. The lack of replacement is weirder since the need to retire these was known years before, but you know how decaying states can be, for example Poland need helicopters for like 20 years but didn't managed to sign any deal that would be even legal, or how we build a modern corvette which after 19 years of being in construction ended up as barely armed patrol boat.
I find it funny that unofficial armies (guerrillas?) are able to go toe to toe with state militaries, holding their own incredibly well, while said state militaries struggle so much. Why is that?
New technology is shifting the balance of power. Stuff like drones didn't exist until fairly recently, and western military doctrine doesn't account for them. Drones are very cheap to produce, costing mere thousands of dollars, and they're difficult to intercept. This piece of technology pretty much invalidates the whole US air defence strategy. It's simply not cost effective to use million dollar missiles to intercept cheap drones.
It's simply not cost effective to use million dollar missiles to intercept cheap drones.
And yet they keep doing it!
Economic collapse of US military when?I imagine the bigger problem is going to be lack of industrial capacity. Most of the supplies come from existing stocks, but once those run dry there's gonna be a problem because US can't produce missiles at the rate drones are produced.
Because you can shoot down a helicopter but you can’t shoot down an idea
Sorry global shipping, we gave all of our missiles to Ukraine so we could stop the imminent Russian advance of 23km^2
Quite possibly, missiles do have a shelf life and theirs might not be functional at this point or even worse could be unsafe to use as they could blow up prematurely.
