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I've been hearing that tanks are obsolete for a really long time. So that isn't a shocker.

The norm for land warfare has been that it tended to favor the defender unless there was some killer app (mounted knights, tanks) that allowed for a decisive advantage of force at a point of decision that could then be exploited. In the past whenever offense has been dominant you've tended to get more inequality, since offense is usually capital intensive relative to defense.

Still let's remember that Ukraine could not produce these weapons themselves, it still takes a lot of state capacity to make defensive weapons.

Many have talked a lot about the entire concept of manned combat aircraft being obsolete. Aircraft carriers have been in question for a awhile too. If armored column WW2 nostalgia has been an Achilles heal for Russia, perhaps WW2 aircraft carrier nostalgia will be for the USA.

If China ever goes for Taiwan, it may never land on the island. It might just shoot at any tanker carrying fuel and any warship attempting to protect convoys that get close to Taiwan. Without imports all of the island nations of East Asia would starve in short order.

I'm not entirely sure what control of the seas even means. Surely, China would love to trade with us. If it "controlled" the South China Sea, it's not as if it would want to cut off the flow of trade. If it re-integrated Taiwan by force, its goal would ultimately be to sign an armistice and re-open trade.

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There was a important quote 40 years ago when I was at the Naval Academy: "There are two types of ships. Submarines. And targets."

I suspect relatively cheap drone self-guided sleeping torpedoes will be used to defend against expected amphibious assaults. Israel's Iron Dome (?) is showing increasing defensive ability to shoot down rockets - quite expensive tho.

It's so sad to look back and see how our liberal anti-nationalist globalists failed so miserably to help post-commie countries develop democracies with little or no corruption - but the OECD countries are all full of corrupt elites.

Winning battles, like the US did against the Taliban in virtually battles, is not sufficient to govern an occupied territory. Tho it looks like Russian (war-crime?) brutality in their conquered areas will show the world what is "needed" for an occupier to keep control.

I saw a picture of a possible new alternative to tanks ... infantry ... on motorcycles. Made me think of the Rat Patrol with a machine gun mounted on jeep/ pick-up trucks. Which could also be some surface to air or surface to surface missile.

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founding

We're on it. See USMC's Force Design 2030

https://www.hqmc.marines.mil/Portals/142/Docs/CMC38%20Force%20Design%202030%20Report%20Phase%20I%20and%20II.pdf?ver=2020-03-26-121328-460

All 5 of the US services, particularly the Marines & USAF, have been preparing for future wars even before Ukraine.

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I’m not sure hardware vs software is very good for understanding naval warfare. The big hardware in the navy almost always gets more attention than it deserves.

1. WWI showed what a boondoggle the Dreadnought arms race was. The expensive battleships existed largely to continue existing and thus served no real strategic role in the war. The important battles were the development of the submarine vs the destroyer in protecting shipping.

In the Atlantic this continued in World War II, and also in the pacific with the US ultimately waging a very successful and under-discussed (even today) submarine war against Japanese shipping.

The emergence of the aircraft carrier in the pacific was due to specific challenges of projecting power rather than controlling the sea. Aircraft carriers in the Atlantic were useful but they were typically small and cheap anti-submarine weapons.

So the big hardware was very dependent on a specific situation, which was the need to bring a lot of air power to bear across a big string of islands that were, in the grand scheme of things, only important because they led to Japan.

One could imagine a scenario where a slower, more cautious US invested more in subs and simply starved the Japanese out of most of these places.

2. Almost nobody has a clue about how major naval battles would be fought because it’s been so long since it’s happened, and even the naval warfare that has happened, like the Falklands, featured realatively limited numbers of equipment, and that was 40 years ago.

3.The obvious candidate for a major naval war is around Taiwan, and it’s hard to even imagine the obvious strategies being carried out because both China and the US and it’s Allie’s are so dependent on trade with each other. China’s natural position as primarily a land power would be to build a fleet of subs to starve out Taiwan and disrupt trade with its Allies. But since that trade is so much with China itself, why is it worthwhile for them?

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founding

Surprised no one has brought up the analogy to battleships here. They were actually called Capital Ships in the last 1800s and up until Pearl Harbor. These giant, armored mobile gun platforms crewed by thousands of sailors were thought to be the key to naval supremacy until a bunch of relatively cheaper planes crewed by a single pilot or a handful of crew sunk an entire fleet of them on December 7. (Sure Taranto happed first, but the lesson wasn’t learned then.). The entire TOE of the navy had to be rethought and carriers won the battle of the pacific. Tanks may evolve, but the amount of capital to build them vs destroy them just may doom them to the status of battleships.

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I see where you're going with this but war requires some vehicle of violence. Or else we're not really talking about a war. For the all the hype around Cyber, the nation state on nation state attacks have been pretty small scale. Stuxnet was super badass but a total one off, very narrowly scoped, and very high effort.

Look, if there's a war, there's an explicit goal to kill/maim the enemy. That's very much a physical, tactile endeavor. Maybe the software matters more - like in the case of avionics - but software can't kill people. At the end of the day the core competences remain shooting, moving, and communicating. Software can help but only so much. And it's certainly not the area with the most deficiency. I would argue we have far too much software in the US military.

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Modern warfare is moving toward "hide and seek" but not just in the physical sense. The current concept being taught is 4th Generation Warfare (4GW) which in essence means broadening the concept of war to include both political and PR measures (ways to win over the hearts and minds of populations in areas you want to control) and also terrorism (ways to inflict or threaten damage anonymously, thus allowing you not only to escape retaliation, but to smear your foe's reputation by committing atrocities that appear as though he did them). These techniques may be the perfect response to the proliferation of WMDs (nukes aren't any use if you can't identify your intended targets).

The various real and false-flagged terror incidents we've been seeing domestically in the last decade are examples of the same technique. For instance, it is well known on the right that the people doing violence on January 6, and at "Unite the Right" before that, were all FBI agents provocateurs -- and that by those false flags (and preplanned media helping with the smear), the true bad guys have made it no longer safely possible for anyone on the right to hold peaceful protests.

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I wonder (hope?) whether modern technology has made defense a lot easier than offense.

The “Star Wars” missile defense system of the 80s seems like it would be a relatively easier issue today given the amount of computing power and sensing technology. Seems like the Iron Dome in Israel is quite effective. And the strategic hope of Star Wars still applies, as much today than ever: if we could reliably shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles, how much would Putin’s nuclear arsenal matter? I assume it’s a harder problem than I’m imagining, but if I were to compare the West’s ability to track and destroy a flying object against Russia and China’s ability to avoid that technology, I would bet on the West.

We do need perhaps a “Space X” for military systems, though. One of the things the emergence of Space X has demonstrated is that the US government is utterly inept at developing complex technologies. The procurement system and the industrial complex that serves it are simply leeches off of the country, and seem to produce very little of value for the time and money invested in them. They’re satisfied to re-answer the old questions for ever greater amounts of money.

If we look at Russia’s troubles in Ukraine and think about how our own assumptions about what makes a powerful military may be flawed, I think this is probably our biggest risk – a lack of imagination and a waste of resources. Maybe Elon can turn his attention to this issue after fixing Twitter…

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Specialists have said for over a decade now that certain missiles--the latest incarnation being hypersonic missiles--have rendered aircraft carriers obsolete. If an aircraft carrier tried to get to China from Hawaii during a hypothetical war over Taiwan, the aircraft carrier would be a sitting duck.

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‘ What if smart weapons can do to ships what anti-tank weapons have been doing to Russian tanks? Do our ships become obsolete.’

They have done for some time. HMS Coventry was set alight and burnt out, scuttled after an active radar controlled Exocet missile was fired from over the horizon from an Argentine aircraft during the 1982 Falklands War. Interestingly, the warhead did not explode but the rocket motor kept burning and caused a fire. The fire spread rapidly along cables through ducting throughout the ship, because whereas cables had previously been insulated with cotton on RN ships as a fire precaution (!) newer ships had cables insulated with plastic which melts and burns much better . Cheaper… unless of course the ship is lost.

But whereas tanks have no anti-missile defences, ships do and destroyers which provide defensive screens for aircraft carriers and frigates bristle with radar and long range/close range anti-missile weaponry.

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Tanks evolve too, with ever more sophisticated countermeasures.

Perhaps the new direction for warfare will be small, cheap and smart autonomous drones of various kinds. Makes me want to watch the Screamers movie again.

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