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Forums Terrorist posted:How able is the US w/r/t fighting the rooskies anyway? Some extremely half-assed googling implies Congress' constant slapfights re: funding are loving with Army readiness but it's not like I know anything or can find sources that don't seem like either clickbait or PR campaigns to up defense spending. During the height of the Cold War it was theorized that with just the assets available in situ that we'd be able to conduct a purely conventional war with the Soviets for ~2-3 weeks, expandable depending on how many or 'x' percentage of convoys/reinforcements were able to get through. Nowadays? Far less time due to demobilization, but the policy and M-I mouthpieces would claim that we can 'do more with less' now.
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Apr 9, 2015 23:48
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I think people forget just how much of our spending is on global reach and maintaining the ability to crush regular armies. Failing at nation building doesn't necessarily equate to being bad at blowing up tanks and command centers. And if Russia and the USA had to go invade Western Australia and fight it out there we'd totally be better at that poo poo!
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Apr 9, 2015 23:52
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Mortabis posted:No, that doesn't even make sense, for two reasons: no money is being "extracted," firstly, and second, the Russian government buys its stuff from private (or partly private) companies too. I would not be surprised at all if over half of all the spending on the defense is fluff to drive up costs and bring more money to the MIC. And there's a big difference between the Russian Defense Industry and American Defense Industry. Just how much stuff was the military forced to buy recently that they didn't even want?
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Apr 10, 2015 00:15
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Taerkar posted:I would not be surprised at all if over half of all the spending on the defense is fluff to drive up costs and bring more money to the MIC. lol if you think waste, graft, and corruption here are worse than in Russia.
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Apr 10, 2015 00:18
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mlmp08 posted:And if Russia and the USA had to go invade Western Australia and fight it out there we'd totally be better at that poo poo! But in that scenario, who runs Bartertown, and what do they want in exchange for F-35 parts?
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Apr 10, 2015 00:21
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BIG HEADLINE posted:During the height of the Cold War it was theorized that with just the assets available in situ that we'd be able to conduct a purely conventional war with the Soviets for ~2-3 weeks, expandable depending on how many or 'x' percentage of convoys/reinforcements were able to get through. Don't you think that the ability of the Russians to conduct a conventional war may have ever so slightly fallen off since the height of the Cold War?
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Apr 10, 2015 00:30
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INTJ Mastermind posted:Probably not very good. We've spent the last decade fighting a low intensity occupation / counter-insurgency against idiot children who can't hit back. Not sure if Ol' Vlad has enough armored divisions around to try and have a go at Western Europe but if he did we'd be sorely out of shape. I'd like to think that there's also a huge group of people in the US military that have extensive combat experience and volunteered, which may or may not be better than a military with less combat experience and conscripts.
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Apr 10, 2015 00:39
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Don't you think that the ability of the Russians to conduct a conventional war may have ever so slightly fallen off since the height of the Cold War? Given they wandered around making GBS threads themselves in Georgia quite badly i would say that's a fair assessment; and they don't have the satellite countries any more and would instead have to wade through said countries to even get to the starting line they would have started at in the cold war means i don't think that Putin is eying up Paris any time soon. Plus their inability to stop setting their submarines on fire/blowing them up doesn't exactly point to a well maintained set of processes for taking care of military equipment.
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Apr 10, 2015 00:41
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What are their casualties in Ukraine like? I feel like it's pretty bad compared to say, '06 or '07 Iraq. Russians aren't very deft with their wars.
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Apr 10, 2015 00:45
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Mortabis posted:lol if you think waste, graft, and corruption here are worse than in Russia. Our politicians are cheap little corner walkers.
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Apr 10, 2015 00:49
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VikingSkull posted:What are their casualties in Ukraine like? Hard to be sure when the Kremlin is hiring full time professionals to beat the poo poo out of any Russian journalists who try to find out.
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Apr 10, 2015 00:51
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Every indication is that it's getting very difficult to find "volunteers" to go on "vacation," and allegedly they've moved in special discipline units to keep folks from "coming back to work early." It conjures up the notion of NKVD style  squads but I have no idea if that's what's actually happening.
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Apr 10, 2015 00:55
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Once God King Putin steps down in 20 years or whenever he gets domed in the back of the head it will interesting to see the background information percolate out. Until then though I suspect we'll get very little hard information any time soon.
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Apr 10, 2015 00:59
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I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being much worse than Georgia. Air support helps, guys.
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Apr 10, 2015 01:09
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VikingSkull posted:I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being much worse than Georgia. And even in Georgia, their air force got embarrassed. Turns out the best way to knock out Georgian air defenses is a tank rush 
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Apr 10, 2015 01:31
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I got the impression that as long as they stuck to low-intensity pretending-to-be-separatist thing everything was very slow (see: the siege of the Donetsk airport lasting months), but once they got fed up with nothing happening and deployed some real mechanized troops in force they just rolled over the Ukrainians and advanced very quickly for a bit just before the "ceasefire".
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Apr 10, 2015 02:07
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Well, it can't exactly be easy to defend a large front against an enemy that can conjure new units from across a border that you cannot cross without escalating the conflict with your much larger and nuclear armed neighbor. Not to mention one that will shove a numerically and materially superior force across the border to counter major advances (or crush strongholds after a ceasefire takes effect...) It's a pretty hefty mismatch and from the very beginning the Ukrainian government has done everything it could to avoid escalating this thing further. It's also notable that the airport experienced a number of large scale attacks, complete with mass artillery bombardment, armor, and piles of what appeared to be dead Russian troops before finally capitulating.
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Apr 10, 2015 02:33
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mlmp08 posted:And even in Georgia, their air force got embarrassed. Turns out the best way to knock out Georgian air defenses is a tank rush Because lmbo
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Apr 10, 2015 02:39
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Insert name here posted:Didn't they lose a loving Backfire in Georgia Yep. That's kind of an embarrassing oops.
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Apr 10, 2015 02:46
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Don't you think that the ability of the Russians to conduct a conventional war may have ever so slightly fallen off since the height of the Cold War? Yes, but they still possess the tactical advantage of being able to move poo poo over land instead of having to ship it overseas. However, our ability to *see* them moving poo poo and our options on how to interdict it have improved immensely since the height of the Cold War as well. They know they can't 'hang' conventionally anymore, which is why they're investing heavily in stuff like Iskanders. You know, purely as a counter to the ABM sites. Not as an extremely mobile forward-deployed nuclear deterrent, nooooo.
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Apr 10, 2015 03:38
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A stand up fight against an opponent that doesn't hide in the general population and primarily rely on road side bombs would make the entirety of the US military erect enough to cut diamonds. Although there are recent failures of a conventional force failing to revert back from a counter-insurgency campaign such as
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Apr 10, 2015 03:42
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babyeatingpsychopath posted:It doesn't mean their schools didn't teach it, just that it didn't stick. People get pushed through the class unless they are literally a nonstop danger to themselves and others. Unmitigated screwups? That's fine, as long as they're not DANGEROUS. There are plenty of careers that simply don't translate into anything on the outside.
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Apr 10, 2015 03:49
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MrYenko posted:My experience with recent USAF short-timers would like to argue this point. I know some retired career Air Force maintainers that were borderline-wizards, but some of the single-enlistment people I've worked with have been loving dangerously incompetent. Like, can't be trusted to perform simple tasks unsupervised, even after repeated instruction levels of bad. There is a running joke about a certain company that hires a lot of single-enlistment maintainers from a certain MDS and their..."lack of quality." KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:lol Pretend I posted a link here to all the times the Russians have tried to "project power" using their awesome carrier except then it caught on fire like 500 miles away from Russian territory and had to be towed back for 6 months of repairs. Or pretend I posted a link about how anytime they try to send any ship anywhere in the world that's more than a couple hundred miles away from a Russian port the ship is shadowed by an ocean tug because ^^ Combat capability isn't about the shiny new toys, it's about logistics and sustainment. And I don't think the Russian military can even spell logistics. VikingSkull posted:What are their casualties in Ukraine like? I feel like it's pretty bad compared to say, '06 or '07 Iraq. As has been pointed out, the Russians had multiple aircraft (including a strategic* bomber) shot down by a bunch of drunk Georgians in '08. * I'm using the Reagan definition of the Backfire.
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Apr 10, 2015 04:20
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iyaayas01 posted:As has been pointed out, the Russians had multiple aircraft (including a strategic* bomber) shot down by a bunch of drunk Georgians in '08. Wasn't the Backfire lost in Georgia shot down by friendly fire? Either way, it's seriously embarrassing for the Russians regardless of which version is true.
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Apr 10, 2015 04:42
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MrChips posted:Wasn't the Backfire lost in Georgia shot down by friendly fire? Either way, it's seriously embarrassing for the Russians regardless of which version is true. Yeah I forgot to include that little tidbit lol I don't actually know off the top of my head which version is true (or if a definitive account is out in the public domain) but like you said either way its hilariously embarrassing for the Russian military
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Apr 10, 2015 04:45
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Hunterhr posted:A stand up fight against an opponent that doesn't hide in the general population and primarily rely on road side bombs would make the entirety of the US military erect enough to cut diamonds. I think the Russians are very well aware of this fact as well. That's why they will be very careful to stick their nose somewhere that USA actually consideres important or "in their sphere of influence". Yes, USA got spheres as well, and they're a lot bigger than yours.. Deal with it, Russia.
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Apr 10, 2015 10:44
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Russia is sticking their nose in the North Pole in a very big way. If there's anything that could cause NATO and Russia to come to loggerheads it'd be Polar oil rights.
BIG HEADLINE fucked around with this message at 11:12 on Apr 10, 2015 |
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Apr 10, 2015 11:06
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That seems far off, given that there's a lot of much lower hanging fruit than the north pole for oil exploration. At least for us, maybe less true for Russia.
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Apr 10, 2015 13:23
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Mortabis posted:That seems far off, given that there's a lot of much lower hanging fruit than the north pole for oil exploration. At least for us, maybe less true for Russia. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-04/who-owns-the-north-pole-debate-heats-up-as-climate-change-transforms-arctic.html If you thought it was odd that Russia recently threatened Denmark's navy with nuclear destruction this would be the 'why' behind it. http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/22/us-denmark-russia-idUSKBN0MI0ML20150322
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Apr 10, 2015 13:27
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iyaayas01 posted:Combat capability isn't about the shiny new toys, it's about logistics and sustainment. And I don't think the Russian military can even spell logistics. They're totally gonna have hypersonic double-deck transport aircraft that can carry eight main battle tanks thanks to two electric turbofans. Totally gonna solve their logistic problems, because they'll build 80 of them in the coming nine years. I hear that with the cutbacks on the PAK-FA program, they'll buy Qaher-313 from Iran to escort them.
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Apr 10, 2015 16:21
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Took me about a month after discovering this thread existed to work my way through it but I'm caught up now. Since this book hasn't been linked yet, allow me to do the honours: http://www.amazon.com/Hunter-Killers-Iain-Ballantyne/dp/1409144186 Iain Ballantyne has written a history of the Royal Navy's SSN fleet and their role during the cold war gathering intelligence off the coast of the USSR. The RN shared the job with the USN, but apparently the Americans would rotate subs so each one only ever did one cruise up there, whereas the British subs would make repeated visits. There's some great stuff about the Perisher course too. I'm currently rereading it so I can review it for Lawyers Guns and Money, will link that in here if there's interest when I finally get around to it. Another interesting and related book is Cabinets and the Bomb: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780197264225.do It's a collection of documents from the archives detailing the discussions that the UK government went through when deciding to develop a nuclear deterrent and then the repeated discussions that happened every few years after that when they had to choose to either keep funding it/renew it, or disarm. Regardless of which party was in power, the Treasury would usually lobby against Blue Streak/Polaris/Trident and the MoD would obviously take the other approach, and obviously each time they won the day.
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Apr 10, 2015 17:22
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iyaayas01 posted:There is a running joke about a certain company that hires a lot of single-enlistment maintainers from a certain MDS and their..."lack of quality." I don't deny that you're right, but isn't the very fact that the Russian conventional military is so bad a proof that there can't be a conventional hot war between the USA and Russia? Why would they get involved in a war they know they can't win? As long as they have all their nuclear weapons they're still dangerous enough that Nato won't intervene when Russia protects its citizens in Georgia or in Crimea.
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Apr 10, 2015 18:17
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Cippalippus posted:Why would they get involved in a war they know they can't win? Same reason we do. Pride. lol
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Apr 10, 2015 18:41
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Cippalippus posted:Russia protects its citizens in Georgia or in Crimea. 
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Apr 10, 2015 18:49
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Germany was just protecting its citizens in Danzig etc etc
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Apr 10, 2015 18:52
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drgitlin posted:Took me about a month after discovering this thread existed to work my way through it but I'm caught up now. Since this book hasn't been linked yet, allow me to do the honours: http://www.amazon.com/Hunter-Killers-Iain-Ballantyne/dp/1409144186 I really couldn't get into Hunter Killers, unfortunately. Blind Man's Bluff, which I liked, has the same kind of chronological vignette style going on, but somehow Ballantyne's book put me off stylistically. What's your quick take on it? I'm definitely interested in a full review since it might help me get unstuck from being only 28% in.
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Apr 10, 2015 19:05
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Cat Mattress posted:They're totally gonna have hypersonic double-deck transport aircraft that can carry eight main battle tanks thanks to two electric turbofans. Totally gonna solve their logistic problems, because they'll build 80 of them in the coming nine years. I hear that with the cutbacks on the PAK-FA program, they'll buy Qaher-313 from Iran to escort them. Don't forget that those transport planes will also be stealth. Somewhere, a USMC general is rubbing his chin and going "hmmmm..."
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Apr 10, 2015 19:16
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Forums Terrorist posted:How able is the US w/r/t fighting the rooskies anyway? Some extremely half-assed googling implies Congress' constant slapfights re: funding are loving with Army readiness but it's not like I know anything or can find sources that don't seem like either clickbait or PR campaigns to up defense spending. p hosed honestly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cp7mM2TP_1A
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Apr 10, 2015 19:16
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The Silent War by John Piña Craven is worth your time. Red Star Rogue by Kenneth Sewell (with Clint Richmond) is a
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Apr 10, 2015 19:17
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Found this today: A report from some budgetary think-tank about Future Air Combat I didn't have the time to read it front to back yet but from what I have it seems like a pretty great read for those interested. A good history of air combat, engagements with different weapon types in the past 60 years, and the value of poo poo like AWACS and sensor fusion. Develops into a pretty interesting look of future aircraft design based on all that (by interesting I mean actually well thought out and not "YOU CAN"T DOGFIGHT WITHOUT A GUN!!!!") Mazz fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Apr 10, 2015 |
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Apr 10, 2015 19:42
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