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https://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-apparently-gets-its-rear end-handed-to-it-in-war-games-2019-3 The US has been getting 'its rear end handed to it' in war games simulating fights against Russia and China In war games simulating a high-end fight against Russia or China, the US often loses, two experienced military war-gamers have revealed. "In our games, when we fight Russia and China, 'blue' gets its rear end handed to it," David Ochmanek, a RAND warfare analyst, explained at the Center for a New American Security on Thursday, Breaking Defense first reported. US forces are typically color-coded blue in these simulations. "We lose a lot of people. We lose a lot of equipment. We usually fail to achieve our objective of preventing aggression by the adversary," he said. At the outset of these conflicts, all five battlefield domains — land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace — are contested, meaning the US could struggle to achieve the superiority it has enjoyed in the past. In these simulated fights, the "red" aggressor force often obliterates US stealth fighters on the runway, sends US warships to the depths, destroys US bases, and takes out critical US military systems. "In every case I know of, the F-35 rules the sky when it's in the sky," Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defense and an experienced war-gamer, said Thursday. "But it gets killed on the ground in large numbers." Neither China nor Russia has developed a fifth-generation fighter as capable as the F-35, but even the best aircraft have to land. That leaves them vulnerable to attack. "Things that sail on the surface of the sea are going to have a hard time," Ochmanek said. Aircraft carriers, traditional beacons of American military might, are becoming increasingly vulnerable. They may be hard to kill, but they are significantly less difficult to take out of the fight. Naval experts estimate that US aircraft carriers now need to operate at least 1,000 nautical miles from the Chinese mainland to keep out of range of China's anti-ship missiles, according to USNI News. "If we went to war in Europe, there would be one Patriot battery moving, and it would go to Ramstein [in Germany]. And that's it," Work explained, according to Breaking Defense. "We have 58 Brigade Combat Teams, but we don't have anything to protect our bases. So what difference does it make?" "If we went to war in Europe, there would be one Patriot battery moving, and it would go to Ramstein [in Germany]. And that's it," Work explained, according to Breaking Defense. "We have 58 Brigade Combat Teams, but we don't have anything to protect our bases. So what difference does it make?" Simply put, the US military bases scattered across Europe and the Pacific don't have the anti-air and missile-defense capabilities required to handle the overwhelming volume of fire they would face in a high-end conflict. In a conflict against a near-peer threat, US communications satellites, command-and-control systems, and wireless networks would be crippled. "The brain and the nervous system that connects all of these pieces is suppressed, if not shattered," Ochmanek said of this scenario. Work said the Chinese call this type of attack "system destruction warfare." The Chinese would "attack the American battle network at all levels, relentlessly, and they practice it all the time," Work said. "On our side, whenever we have an exercise, when the red force really destroys our command and control, we stop the exercise and say, 'let's restart.'" "These are the things that the war games show over and over and over, so we need a new American way of war without question," Work stressed. Ochmanek and Work have both seen US war games play out undesirably, and their damning observations reflect the findings of an assessment done from last fall. "If the United States had to fight Russia in a Baltic contingency or China in a war over Taiwan, Americans could face a decisive military defeat," the National Defense Strategy Commission — a bipartisan panel of experts picked by Congress to evaluate the National Defense Strategy — said in a November report. The report called attention to the erosion of the US's military edge by rival powers, namely Russia and China, which have developed a "suite of advanced capabilities heretofore possessed only by the United States." The commission concluded the US is "at greater risk than at any time in decades."
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Mar 11, 2019 20:31
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The Glumslinger posted:lol, so lets just keep dumping more and more money into the Military Industrial Complex furnace, that'll totally fix the issue The only real takeaway from this is that if you fight a near-parity country on their home turf then you're going to get owned. There isn't some sort of gap the military could bridge by throwing more money at the DoD. The Chinese and Russians have played catch up and there's no going back.
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Mar 11, 2019 20:38
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The Dipshit posted:Why are you repeating right wing talking points? This is just whining for more money through corporate mouthpieces. The US will get utterly brutally owned in any shooting war with China or Russia isn't a right wing talking point. The USM does everything it can to suppress the results of these war games because they keep wanting easy money for worthless boondoggles. The right wing wants more money for the military no matter what, as if they're feeding some sort of martial spirit that grows in power with every budgetary increase.
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Mar 11, 2019 20:42
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The Glumslinger posted:Because they high ranking officers would probably get fired as congress/executive branch tries to find competent people to turn poo poo around, and the MIC would be forced to stop profiteering like crazy and actually spend the money effectively. SO its better for them to just pretend that the status quo is cool and good Imperial power also depends on the image of invulnerability. If everybody knows they can call our bluff then it puts American hegemony in a shaky position.
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Mar 11, 2019 20:50
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Cerebral Bore posted:The US armed forces are a reflection of American society insofar that the closer you get to the top, the larger the proportion of incompetents and careerists who have kept failing upwards grows. Hence the first and usually last instinct of a general is to cover their own rear end and gently caress everything else. I don't think any kind of imperial contest in the 21st century is going to be "protracted." All the forces that will fight in a theater are already committed. The US Fleet Response Plan is for a CSG to be deployed within 30 days, but the war will already be decided within a month. A protracted war would require total mobilization, and there's no way the stakes will get that high without also going nuclear. In that case, whoever is closer to home has the advantage, even for a country as dysfunctional as Russia.
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Mar 11, 2019 21:02
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Wheeee posted:America's massive incompetent military complex is a giant welfare project that keeps the doors open and ready, in the event America actually for real needed an effective military it still has by far the greatest capacity to build one. All planes have to land no matter how good they are, and airbases don't move. You can just throw up a bunch of missiles to destroy everything on the ground. Planes can't be in the air forever.
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Mar 11, 2019 21:06
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Cerebral Bore posted:Sure, but they'd still be starting a war against the countries whose money they need to keep the lights running. And I doubt that trade relations would just normalize the moment that they stop the shooting. The issue isn't an actual war really happening, the issue is the threat to American hegemony and our ability to call all the shots all the way up to their border. If Russia or China can feint a punch and make us blink then it creates a whole new paradigm. I'm not implying America's decline as a hyperpower is bad, it just is what it is.
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Mar 11, 2019 21:11
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Feldegast42 posted:Seriously though, any serious military conflict between the major nuclear armed powers would be over in an hour, regardless of the state of the rest of their conventional military. And also in all seriousness, one hour is probably an exaggeration in the amount of time it would take. The stakes were also a lot higher during the Cold War. Are we going to let the nukes fly over Latvia? It's doubtful.
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Mar 11, 2019 21:14
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LGD posted:yes, we all remember how Trump's missile strike on Shayrat back in 2017 completely obliterated the Syrian air force in a single blow and completely prevented their ability to use that base forever, and we're definitely sure none of this "targeting fixed facilities," "hitting planes on the ground," and "degrading command and control" works in reverse or would have any impact on an adversary's ability to target US airbases at optimal times You can't act this smug if you're being stupid.
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Mar 11, 2019 21:21
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Cerebral Bore posted:No neutral country will try to run a blockade in this day and age, you dingus. Well I've got a ship here that made the Malacca run in 12 hours.
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Mar 11, 2019 21:32
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Fuligin posted:look until the millenium dawn mod team completes their code merge and updates for 'Ironclad' 1.6 HoI IV this is all just idle speculation Now that Man the Guns is out we can experiment with anti-missile cruisers where all the modules are anti-missile missiles.
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Mar 11, 2019 21:36
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Wheeee posted:remember how WW1 started out with old world technology and tactics and rapidly turned into a nightmarish horror show once chemical and heavy weapons development really got rolling? remember how WW2 started out with updated WW1 poo poo and ended with pressurized modern aircraft dropping nuclear bombs? Any conventional war in the 21st century is never going to last that long. Especially not if nukes are involved. WW1 didn't end in a significantly advanced stage of technology compared to how it began either. Everybody started out with barbed wire, machineguns, mass artillery, and poison gas and they ended with the same. Tanks were new, but they figured out how to counter tanks with massed artillery and anti-tank rifles pretty quickly. A case like World War 2 where technology can rapidly advance like that based on pre-existing development paths isn't going to happen again. There isn't some kind of great leap forward from stealth fighters, ballistic missiles, and nuclear submarines to some other sort of revolutionary weapons platform and doctrine. Technology doesn't magically advance under pressure like that. The industrial conditions of the early 20th century were still catching up with what science and engineers could conceive of. "Wunderwaffe" are a waste in systemic material terms. The only wunderwaffe that made any difference was the nuclear weapon, and that's still highly debatable.
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Mar 11, 2019 21:47
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LGD posted:oh sure, but its not like the US isn't capable of taking similar measures in a situation where a war with China/Russia is about to go hot and it doesn't really change anything about their ability to continue using the airfield within 24 hours of getting hit with a bunch of cruise missiles The "historic track record" you tried to claim was an extremely limited attack done purely for political theater.
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Mar 11, 2019 21:54
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Wheeee posted:the current rate of scientific advancement in most fields is accelerating, we are on the cusp of major revolutions in multiple fields. Yea rockets and airplanes are pretty well figured out now, but biotech is just ramping up and machine learning and general AI are advancing extremely quickly Which TEDx talk told you that?
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Mar 11, 2019 21:56
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Typo posted:cerebral bore is the best because when he's stupid, he's at least aggressively stupid enough to be entertaining Well let's be for real a second. The Chinese could interdict blockade runners easily and turn them around without having to kill anybody. The IDF executed those people on the Mavi Marmara because they're assholes. You can say "that's illegal" but so is the blockade of Gaza. So what's anybody going to do about it?
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Mar 11, 2019 22:03
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Typo posted:You are assuming the PLAN would never, ever gently caress up an interaction with a blockade runner...or five  A war over Taiwan isn't realistic to begin with.
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Mar 11, 2019 22:08
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the thread title is not a serious prediction of world war, folks
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Mar 11, 2019 22:20
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Just like world war 3 there's no way to win.
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Mar 11, 2019 22:22
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twoday posted:World War 3 will be rough but World War 4 is the real bad one, and then it's gonna be bronze-age weapons in World War 5 I think after World War 4 we get the Ghost in the Shell timeline.
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Mar 11, 2019 22:30
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LGD posted:tbf that's one more example than you've provided So you’re aware of why what you’re talking about doesn’t compare to the hypothetical. when two countries with big missile stockpiles go to war I’ll call you.
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Mar 11, 2019 23:39
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Moist von Lipwig posted:i mostly agree with you with the caveat that biotech is, indeed, developing rapidly and will probably be the forefront of all kinds of horrors in the next major war. AI/ML on the other hand, has hit huge stumbling blocks, largely around the same bottlenecks that traditional computing hardware has. maybe there'll be some big breakthroughs in quantum computing that'll change things but right now it's a lot of hype with little to show for it. Biotech advancement coming up with some new types of bioweapons will still be just as problematic after their advancements as they were before. Like, how do you stop bioweapons from becoming an uncontrollable epidemic, and how do you prevent the political backlash by using bioweapons from doing more harm than the use of the weapons? What's to stop a biowar from going nuclear? There's a lot of supposition that these advancements will be paradigm-changing revolutions in doctrine, but it's just as likely that those advancements won't mean anything because you won't even be able to use them.
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Mar 12, 2019 12:17
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The whole concept of "human wave" is vastly overstated to try and imply Second World powers didn't care about casualties.Typo posted:if you want to look at a bad moment for china look at their 1979 invasion of vietnam China accomplished what they set out to do, which was to prove a point to the Soviet Union that their support didn't count in China's back yard because they were powerless to do anything. Not saying it was easy for them, but if they wanted to conquer Vietnam they could have done it with sheer inertia. They didn't do it because occupying Vietnam is stupid, and Hanoi was so well defended that Deng would have lost the political victory he was trying to achieve with all the casualties they would have taken.
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Mar 12, 2019 20:09
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Lincoln suspending habeas corpus is always something that libertarian freaks try to harp on as being tyrannical, even though persecuting secessionists was obviously correct.
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Mar 12, 2019 20:12
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Typo posted:This is true but the PLA was also a complete dumpster fire during the invasion The speculation is that this was also part of the point. That Deng could prove the army was trash and needed reforms. Typo posted:the PLA was enough of a dumpster fire in 1979 even with serious numerical advantage in a longer war they probably still would have lost esp since vietnam had soviet aid hostilities persisted on the border throughout the 80s. it wouldn't have taken long to reform the Peoples' Army and attempt conquest.
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Mar 12, 2019 20:14
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Phi230 posted:Why hasn't anyone come up with a stealth missile or a missile with EWAR capability Apparently it's easier to just make them go Mach 5.
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Mar 12, 2019 20:34
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Filthy Hans posted:I remember there was a test of some scramjet missile a few years ago that got up to mach 10 or mach 20 or something crazy like that (the ones launched via ICBM should be able to reach mach 20) and the US was like "the test was successful in that it flew really loving fast but we don't know where it went, maybe it landed somewhere in the Pacific but who knows" Is there something preventing scramjets from being used in a ballistic missile instead of something massive like an ICBM? The only reason anybody thinks tomahawks aren't nuclear armed is because we insist all the nuclear tomahawks are retired.
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Mar 13, 2019 03:05
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Filthy Hans posted:they're heavy and they have to be lifted up to 10s of km at a speed of mach 4 before their own engines can take over, ICBMs are powerful enough to do that. The scramjet is basically a ballistic missile in and of itself, just one that needs a massive booster No I get it. I looked up enough about scramjets to know they can't work without air moving through their intake at supersonic speeds to begin with, so you'd need a platform to get them up to that point to start with. The X-43 is the fastest hypersonic craft ever recorded, and it had to be deployed at altitude from a B-52. Pener Kropoopkin has issued a correction as of 03:39 on Mar 13, 2019 |
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Mar 13, 2019 03:37
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Crazy to think this thread has only become more relevant in the two years since I posted it.
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Dec 4, 2021 06:32
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lifetime bitch alert
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Dec 4, 2021 16:30
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It's also why China is developing a blue water surface navy, even if in a real conflict it'd be useless. China needs to be able to challenge the US on the open oceans to have an international deterrent, and you can't really interdict shipping with submarines.
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Dec 18, 2021 23:42
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Bar Ran Dun posted:3 million TEUs per year by 2040 is not as much as you think it is. There is no "shipping" to landlocked countries in central Asia. Everything has to get there by plane, train, or truck.
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Dec 18, 2021 23:50
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Bar Ran Dun posted:at-least not with the little diesel electric ones that are such a real brown water threat. What I mean by "challenging" the US is presenting a dangerous threat to the USN in international waters. Which is enough of a deterrent to make us think twice about trying to do piracy with Chinese shipping. Which I suppose is a moot point anyway, because global demand for Chinese goods is already so high that loving with their shipping creates too many knock-on problems. The dependency is its own deterrent.
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Dec 19, 2021 00:09
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The possibility that we degenerate to the point where we're willing to start a war regardless is very real. That's true. That's really the problem I have with trying to articulate to people why they shouldn't be WW3 or nuclear annihilation doompillers. You're thinking as if these are certainties and not possibilities. The reality of the possibility doesn't equate to its inevitability. You're leading yourself into unnecessary despair.
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Dec 19, 2021 00:34
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They told somebody else that America was no paper tiger. A little man you may have heard of named, MAO TSEDONG!?
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Dec 28, 2021 23:08
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etalian posted:The same aristocracy also made big errors in not realizing how new inventions like the Maxim machine gun would change the battlefield. Oh they knew it, they just didn't want to think about it. Besides, machineguns had already been introduced in the Franco-Prussian war, and despite the French having better repeating firearms they still lost to Prussian mobilization power. Surely this war will be won by whoever can mobilize and deploy their forces the fastest... It was really a combination of things. Machineguns, barbed wire, and massed artillery were huge game changers when combined together - but European countries had never fought wars where all the weapons of industry were necessary.
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Dec 29, 2021 01:00
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We're more likely to see people reject a draft for purely libertarian reasons than that they're afraid to lose a child.
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Dec 29, 2021 01:27
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strange feelings re Daisy posted:US government is so weak they can't even stop their own armed forces from destroying themselves with plague lmao I have to admit that I do get some nerdy pangs of frustration seeing my own country be so bad at this - but we're also the evil empire so I'm glad we're destroying ourselves. I just can't get rid of that "you're doing it wrong" impulse.
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Jan 4, 2022 23:04
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American hyperpower is premised on being able to put out fires everywhere at once. So it's only natural that as soon as there's a real challenge to our dominance by a regional power we're way too overstretched to meet it.
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Jan 5, 2022 00:02
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A Buttery Pastry posted:I'm pretty sure it's premised on being able to start fires everywhere at once. Oh God no. You want to be starting all the fires one at a time.
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Jan 5, 2022 11:30
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That reminds me of how top brass are all required to clear ranger school these days, which was probably arrived at to solve exactly the problem being quoted there. https://mwi.usma.edu/ranger-school-not-leadership-school/ quote:Consequently, Ranger School is more of a character and leadership assessment than a leadership school. Students do learn whether they can lead (or follow) when tired, hungry, physically on the edge of exhaustion, and pushed to their often previously untested limits—but not necessarily how to do so. So the bottom line is, Ranger school will make you a much better combat soldier and commander at the tactical level - but doesn't really prepare you for anything at the operational level or gives you the leadership skills to be a good operational commander. And because Ranger school is so physically grueling, you have a lot of people dropping out who would have otherwise been good leaders - especially women soldiers who have more difficulty meeting the physical challenges. So by trying to solve the small unit tactics problem in a kind of "send the intellectuals to the fields" method of leadership training, you end up filtering down your pool of recruits for command to a bunch of athletic males whose small unit tactics training won't be any use in a top command position.
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Jan 5, 2022 21:48
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