Covert Cabal
March 8, 2019 3:50 PM   Subscribe

YouTube channel that has interesting discussions of defense topics: Why Does the US Not Have Supersonic Anti-Ship Missiles? Electronic Warfare - The Unseen Battlefield. Are Aircraft Carriers Becoming Useless? They seem well researched and they avoid politics.
posted by Bee'sWing (15 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
There are two types of vessels in the navy: submarines and targets...
posted by jim in austin at 4:46 PM on March 8, 2019 [8 favorites]


The Harpoon is an extremely capable and mature system which is still being improved.

A floating airbase will never be "useless" but carrier battle group doctrine may become obsolete just as the battleships did.

And SSBNs are pretty important targets too, just really difficult ones.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:53 PM on March 8, 2019 [2 favorites]


Defense News on current carrier decisions:
The Navy’s Calculating Carrier Caper: The Drift, Vol XX
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:58 PM on March 8, 2019


They'd have to pay Jamiroquai licensing rights then.
posted by symbioid at 6:04 PM on March 8, 2019 [1 favorite]


I feel like he's putting a little too much weight in the US's ability to develop counters to anti-ship missiles to say aircraft carriers will continue to be effective. He just mentioned they are working on them and then moved on.
posted by Space Coyote at 6:23 PM on March 8, 2019 [1 favorite]


Also, China won't just put its ASBNs on its coast. It will be putting them on the artificial islands it's been building. (That article is about SAMs.)

You can't sink an island. You can bomb the shit out of it, but that didn't make Tarawa any easier.

Just yesterday:

Hanoi: Chinese ship rams, sinks Vietnamese fishing boat

HANOI, Vietnam — A Vietnamese fishing boat capsized after being rammed by a Chinese vessel in the South China Sea’s contested Paracel Islands, a Vietnamese official said Friday.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:18 PM on March 8, 2019 [2 favorites]


There are two types of vessels in the navy: submarines and targets...

Sone with the development of meshed ocean sensors there will only be targets. In less than 30 years Navies will be 100% vulnerable to incredibly low cost weaponry.
posted by srboisvert at 5:23 AM on March 9, 2019 [1 favorite]


nationalize all firecracker factories.
posted by clavdivs at 7:31 AM on March 9, 2019


In less than 30 years Navies will be 100% vulnerable to incredibly low cost weaponry.

Remember the Cole
posted by BWA at 7:34 AM on March 9, 2019 [2 favorites]


I think the USS Cole attack is like the September 11 hijackings: the militants were exploiting a mindset that is now gone. I think it would be a really bad plan to put your speedboat too close to a naval ship in a Mideastern or West African port now.

And drones are certainly looking like the way of the future. Skynet approves.
posted by Bee'sWing at 10:39 AM on March 9, 2019


I feel like he's putting a little too much weight in the US's ability to develop counters to anti-ship missiles to say aircraft carriers will continue to be effective.

I dunno. Raytheon's got an office up the road from where I am, and I've run across many former engineers from there in the last decade. I'm just going off of second-hand stories told by systems programmers after a few beers, but I can say with some confidence that, as of about 2008, ship-mounted gatling cannons were reliably able to knock a hundred targets a minute out of the air, even if they were skimming 18 inches over the water and traveling at 200 knots. It's possible that antiship missiles are getting better faster than the countermeasures are, but I would be willing to bet that a country willing to spend $170 billion a year maintaining naval supremacy is also willing to put in the investment required to keep the naval equivalent of IEDs from neutralizing the force-projection of a carrier group.
posted by Mayor West at 10:58 AM on March 9, 2019


I'm willing to bet that in the country spending $170bn a year the money is mostly going to "admin costs", overage, and vaporware, with a tiny amount t going to actual military hardware.
posted by evilDoug at 11:53 AM on March 9, 2019


They don't "avoid politics". The fetishization of US military imperialism is inherently political.
posted by kafziel at 12:46 PM on March 9, 2019 [7 favorites]


Well, good to know they have defenses against missiles. Let's just hope any enemy doesnt deploy container ships or oil tankers. Evidently we have no defenses against those high-tech weapons.
posted by happyroach at 9:42 PM on March 9, 2019 [1 favorite]


It seems like a good time to mention the Millennium Challenge.
posted by uberchet at 12:01 PM on March 21, 2019


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