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Typo posted:but why would you suppress the results of war games where you get owned if you want additional funding? well it would make sense if you need to convince people that your current wunderwaffen will totes get a sick 90:1 KDR and win a future war on their own, which is absolutely a thing people push because doing otherwise raises real questions about competency/procurement that might threaten people's jobs/reputations/opportunities to make megabucks while doing as little as possible but like... the entire point of these wargames (beyond training) is to find and expose weaknesses to be addressed and somehow "the US would take real casualties and material damage in a conflict with a major power on their own turf that somehow stayed non-nuclear" is being translated to "the US gets brutally owned" - this is some combination of asking for yet more military funding and suggesting that emphasis shift back to building capability to fight conventional military conflicts against relative peers rather than optimizing our ability to remotely bomb weddings and goat herders Wheeee posted:If there's one thing America excels at it's killing. and killing-related logistics
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Mar 11, 2019 21:04
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Pener Kropoopkin posted: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. 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
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Mar 11, 2019 21:17
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Ardennes posted:The Syrians were almost certainly warned by the Russians, and we warned the Russians because we are in reality scared of Russian nukes. 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 I fully agree that the US military is by no means invincible or without major flaws (i.e. the F-35 is absolutely an unconscionable piece of poo poo), grossly misallocates resources, and would have some real issues tangling with China/Russia atm, I just think that the proposition "You can just throw up a bunch of missiles to destroy everything on the ground" as an ultimate solution to airpower isn't actually well supported by the historic track record LGD has issued a correction as of 21:53 on Mar 11, 2019 |
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Mar 11, 2019 21:49
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:The "historic track record" you tried to claim was an extremely limited attack done purely for political theater. tbf that's one more example than you've provided you can also look at things like the Al Hussein attacks during the first Gulf War, Egyptian FROG-7's during the Yom Kippur War, etc. I'm aware targeting has gotten significantly more accurate, but we're still fundamentally talking about slinging 500-1500kg warheads at targets that can be hardened or dispersed
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Mar 11, 2019 22:39
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Pener Kropoopkin posted: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. of course, but we're all extrapolating from limited and incomplete data - and the historic data for older and less accurate missiles points to them not being particularly effective at shutting down airbases, and the newest example involves a fairly large deployment of much more accurate missiles and the results there suggest that there is at least a very strong possibility that they will fail to utterly devastate a prepared enemy and actually render aircraft and airbases useless a bald assertion that this just ain't so and Chinese/Russian missiles with warheads/theoretical accuracy that is very similar to a Tomahawk will be hugely more effective through sheer volume of fire isn't particularly persuasive to me (because 59 Tomahawk missiles is actually quite a few [>1% of the US stockpile] and resulted in disruption to operations measured in hours - obviously the forewarning makes a big difference, but a real no-poo poo war would involve degraded intelligence/targeting information for any adversary and the US has more than a handful of airbases available to it) LGD has issued a correction as of 01:46 on Mar 12, 2019 |
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Mar 12, 2019 01:35
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420 Gank Mid posted:Does it count as winning for the USA if it's our killbots that end up going skynet and purging the earth of all human life? imo it depends on the killbots' reasoning - i.e. if its a classic AI rebellion against its putative masters scenario then no, but if its Universal Paperclips-type thing where the AI is just trying to achieve its original goal of Making America Great Again and the most optimal way to do that involves Killing All Humans then yes
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Mar 12, 2019 01:50
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Slavvy posted:When has concentrating a monumental amount of value and power in one big thing been a better strategy than spreading it out among many numbers of halfway decent things? It's not the more common mode imo there are lots of particular moments in time where "halfway decent things" have turned out to not really be up to the task vs. expensive stuff that takes a lot of investment (steel armor, ships of the line, ironclads, medium/heavy tanks over inter/early-war light tanks, etc.)? obviously it's easy to bring the countervailing boondoggles and failed wunderwaffen to mind, and I don't think anyone is particularly enamored of the way the US is currently structuring things, but it's a fair point that it's really hard to tell where that shifting line of overinvestment actually falls when you're talking about the relative effectiveness of a bunch of integrated/dependent stuff that hasn't actually been used at scale
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Mar 30, 2023 05:06
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