It's time for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't culture war.
Recently, Veritasium visited NSWC Carderock and did an interesting video on the MASK basin:
Also, I am planning one more virtual meetup next weekend, on Saturday the 17th at 1 PM Central (GMT-6). We'll use the usual Teams link. Hope to see you guys there.
Overhauls are Ironclads and Research Vessels. 2021 overhauls are The 6th Battle Squadron Part 2, my review of Ultimate Admiral - Dreadnoughts* and Eilat.
Comments
If you'll pardon my Italian, this is what will happen next year for the 100th anniversary of the Italian Air Force:
https://www.ilgiornale.it/news/nazionale/laeronautica-militare-italiana-compie-100-anni-ecco-tutti-2093052.html
“my review of Ultimate Admiral - Dreadnoughts*”
Was there supposed to be a footnote to go with that *?
@cwillu
No, in this case that's my designation for "big change". Specifically, I went in and added a couple of paragraphs on the current state of the campaign.
The NYTimes has another piece about recruits who fail the SEAL training course, and end up in shit jobs. It seems a bit strange that this happens, since many of these people who in some cases only just missed becoming SEALS. You'd think the Navy would be only too happy to place them in other demanding occupations. Or is scut-work really the best thing the Navy can do with a capable person who is in no position to say no?
An almost-SEAL would probably make for a pretty good Marine. Or Ranger, or paratrooper, or any number of things along that line. The problem is that none of those are part of the Navy. Not even the Marines, I think, at the we-can-reassign-you-there level. There really aren't any good positions in that service for someone whose skillset is humping fifty kilos of kit across fifty kilometers of wilderness undetected, and then killing a bunch of people in close-quarters battle; everybody else is a skilled technician, or bureaucrat, or I suppose potato-peeling deck-mopper.
If I had to place them in the Navy, I'd see if they were temperamentally suited to be a Master at Arms, or if they could learn the technical skills for Damage Controlman. But in hindsight, it might have been better if the SEALs were part of the Marine Corps from the beginning.
I think it's mostly that there are lots of positions which are hard to fill except with people who can't say no, with a side of it being hard to slot them into the system for various bureaucratic reasons. They need something to do today, not in 3 months when the next class at Master at Arms school starts, and that means it's off to sanitation with you.
I don't think the Army has quite the same problem. The failure rate in the 18X program (direct entry into the Green Berets) is high, but there failure mostly lands you in some sort of infantry MOS, which honestly sounds better than scraping out bilges in the Navy. At the very least, 0311 is closer to what the recruit was hoping to do in the Army.
Would the US military be better off if it radically repartitioned its armed forces? So joining the Navy to try and become a specialised infantryman isn't a course of action you could take. But also collapsing the distinction between a trucker who moves JP-8, a trucker who moves JP-5, and a trucker who moves whatever fuel they put in armoured cars. And training someone up in radar maintainance before it's decided whether they'll be working on a ship, an army base or an air base.
Obviously inertia would stop that from ever happening in real life.
Is SOF even that important in the general scheme of things or is that an artefact of two decades of COIN on top of the pre D-Day situation in Europe? People have argued for a long time that it results in the topslicing away of the best of the normal infantry.
Some of this is also an artifact of fairly recent changes in the SEAL career path. For a long time, you got a rating and then went to BUDS. Now, BUDS is the gateway to your rating, which leaves you without a fallback if you fail.
Bean,I just want to thank you for posting here. Found it in a link from ACOUP-to your fortifications series, iirc. I enjoyed your informative, yet not overly-dense, style so much that I kept reading. I’ve learned quite a bit-and thoroughly enjoyed doing so. I can now read most articles without having to look up acronyms! I was uninterested in military history when I got here, but you’ve helped me see that I was missing a lot of history thereby.
I don't see any way to donate here, or I would gladly kick in to fund book acquisitions. Guess I’ll have to wait until your book comes out: that’s the most honest praise for an author anyway.
Thank you, sir
How much of the "anti-ship missiles are unstoppable" memeplex is ultimately derived from the Milton Bradley Battleship game?
Why ARE the Seals not part of the Marine Corps? I'm not asking about some ancient history thing, but why are they not currently part of the Marine Corps?
(In a related note .. does every service really need a special tactics assult force? And can the Space Force have one too?)
The SEALs are part of the Navy because they started out as UDT, Underwater Demolition Teams, tasked with clearing beaches before landings, and from there they expanded to general mayhem.
Recruitment 'direct' to spec ops seems pretty close to false advertising given that most of them aren't going to pass and that goes double for those branches that don't have normal infantry to put any wannabe Rambos in.
bean:
That is the usual military punishment for failure, though other branches don't punish spec opcs course failure.
Lambert:
Some other countries do some of that but I don't think any that have separate services do it completely.
Probably be mostly small countries that come the closest since they're the ones that can't really afford to duplicate everything.
As far as I can tell, they don't. Most of the growth of special forces outside of the army is a product of SOCOM suddenly becoming fashionable, and all the services wanting to get in on the new hotness.
These special forces types are clearly infantrymen, and as such should be trained and organized by the army. There might be some similar forces in the other services, but they would be ultra-specialized for specific missions like gathering weather information in hostile territory (air force) or boarding ships (navy).
@Emilio: SEALs started with UDTs, yes, but the reason we needed UDTs was to clear the beaches that the Marines were going to land on. So it could have been a Marine job from the beginning, and probably should have been.
You could argue that the Navy had all the diving experience, but despite the 'U' the original WWII UDTs did small-boat and surface swimming operations - this was pre-SCUBA, and mostly pre-rebreather, so the Navy only knew how to do the kind of underwater diving that requires a support craft almost directly overhead. Taking a small boat to an enemy coast, and maybe getting wet in the final approach to the beach, seems like a Marine thing.
This doesn't seem obvious. Does the mission of army infantry (defend and attack fortified positions, basically modern-system positional warfare as described by e.g. Stephen Biddle) have much overlap with special ops? Granted, they both involve at some point fighting on foot, but when, where, with what, for how long, and to what end, all seem different.
@ Lambert
There actually is already a bunch of joint training schools for things like radar maintenance or weather forecasting or jumping out of perfectly good airplanes.
But someone who joined to float on a boat will be unhappy if they never get a chance, and someone who joined to help planes go zoom will be unhappy if they’re stuck on a boat. And also people on boats need to know how to do damage control, while someone on an air base just needs to know how to use a fire extinguisher or run away.
@johan
it wasn't SOF becoming fashionable. it was goldwater-nichols setting up SOCOM as quasi independent semi-service in the aftermath of the failure of eagle claw. That meant there was money available if you called what you were doing SOF. At first, it wasn't that much money, though. the marines refused to participate entirely on the grounds that all marines are special. That changed after september 11th, which led to a huge explosion in SOF funds for door kicking and manhunting, and all the SOF forces growing dramatically and getting more trigger pull-y.
I, for one, would like to see them dial back and focus more on the classic SOF roles.
The standard popular work on the subject is Naylor's "Relentless Strike"
@ CmdrKien -- surely the armed forces could use the plentiful research already done on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stablemarriageproblem ?
@ cwillu https://xkcd.com/2708/
Israel has a sufficiently joint recruiting pipeline that someone that drops off pilot training can end up in one of the commando units.
Enlistees submit their preferences and sometimes go to test days. Positions are assigned by some sort of computerized bidding system, but both enlistees and unit commanders do a lot of politics and playing-the-system to get what they want.
BUT - the forces have sufficiently different standards that I can’t see the Air Force getting a man trained by ground-pounders to touch one of their radars, they might get mud on it. Or an artilleryman being happy with the radar-fixing paperwork being heavier than the radar truck.
arielby:
Because Israel doesn't technically have an Army, Navy or Air Force.
I really think I was clear. When I asked "Why ARE the Seals not part of the Marine Corps? I’m not asking about some ancient history thing, but why are they not currently part of the Marine Corps?" I did not want answers of a history lesson about clearing beaches of mines.
What I'm asking is if having Navy Seals and not Marine Corps Seals is a good idea, and if so why it's a good idea. Currently should the Seals be in the Navy or the Marines? Not a backward looking answer, but a forward looking answer!
@Kit
They're not part of the Marines because organizations cling to missions. Moving them would be very difficult, and I suspect that the Navy actually gets a fair bit of use out of failed SEALs and doesn't want to give that up.
Troubling from a taxpayer's pov, is the number of candidates that the Navy shuttles off to BUDS knowing full well that 80% will not successfully complete the program. That is an obvious waste of money.
Shouldn't there be a better way to screen candidates? When I swim at my local Y I sometimes see the Navy recruiters running PT and swim tests. They are not they rigorous at that stage and any fit youth, imo, should enjoy it.
I am not being silly when I ask if these recruiters would be better off by just keeping the kids up all night for three days and then take them out in the cold air and hose them down with cold water until they are flopping around. 3 days of testing and a ton of air fare saved.
The wet and cold seem to be the real crackers of will. Most everyone can lower a shoulder and fight through cold or wet or hunger or fatigue. Get those factors together however, and only a few can keep going.
All that can be screened before getting anywhere near San Diego. (Injuries of course are separate).
Better screening before hand is the key.
Today in the if-it-looks-right-it-flies-right department: the QT-2PC, an experimental aircraft developed for nearly silent reconnaissance in Viet Nam. Look at that beauty: an engine behind the pilot, and a propeller out in front of the pilot, connected by drive shaft outside the body of the aircraft.
This looks wrong, though. Very, very wrong.
Did it work?
In case anybody is wondering the reason for that unusual configuration is apparently that it's an aftermarket conversion of a commercial glider and that was the best way to bolt on an engine and prop without messing up the CoM.
And not to go all material conditions but I'm not terribly surprised that this sort of thing with the SEAL recruits happens from time to time in an organistion that is exempt (for understandable reasons) from so much employment law. Especially when sweeping decks is getting baumolled.
I understand why the one engine had to go where it did, but then, why not make it a twin-prop (presumably mounted onto wing leading edge)? "Wright brothers layout".
If reducing noise is a priority, avoiding intersecting prop vortices would help, making twin props less attractive.
Yup. The QT-2PC was a successful prototype that was later developed into the more conventional YO-3 Quiet Star.
Neal:
The training program probably isn't all that expensive so it might not actually be wasting much money, might even be the cheapest way to fill the crap jobs no one wants but which the Navy needs doing anyway.
It seems to me the standard that should apply here is probably Informed Consent. Someone signing up for the SEAL training progam migth end up a SEAL, or the might end up placed in some other profession in the navy, or they might end up as a temporary laborer doing whatever scut work needs doing around the navy. But they should be informed of the chances of each result, and have a chance to back out if the odds seem too daunting.
@Neal
I don't think it's a huge waste of money. I don't remember exactly what the drop rate looks like through the course, but it's pretty front-loaded, and I suspect that a lot of those people go on to reasonably long and successful navy careers, and that this is by design.
@Johan
Anyone signing up to be a SEAL who doesn't know about the drop rate deserves what they get. BUDS is legendary for being tough.
@bean
The problem isn't the drop rate. Like you, I expect SEAL candidates to have a good understanding of just how tough it is to make it through the course. But I am rather less convinced they understand what typically happens to those who don't make it. I mean, these are people capable enough that they almost became SEALs, right? They have a lot to offer. With appropriate training, many of them could do some really difficult things. And instead the Navy puts theym to work scraping bilges and sweeping decks? That's honestly surprising, and not in a good way. The Navy should not be in the business of handing out such rude shocks.
I'm not sure how typical the examples in the article are. Selection bias is a thing, and while I'm sure there's a problem, I don't think there are two sailors scraping bilges for every SEAL graduate. In particular, I bet there's a decent pipeline to take early washouts (the majority of the group) and move them elsewhere. Later washouts are more likely to have health problems that can't be cured in a few weeks and more spread out. BUDS is a pretty long course, and if you have a handful of people you need to deal with, then they're likely to slip through the cracks. And in that case, the sort of people who sign up to be SEALs are unlikely to be dissuaded if they're told they have a 10% chance of bilge-scraping.
Johan Larson:
Yes.
bean:
It's not just the failure rate but the consequences of failing and the that whether or not someone drops out seems to be more about luck than ability.
bean:
Which is exactly why failing it should not be have such negative consequences.
@bean:
I agree that proportions matter here. If the bilge-scrapers are just cherry-picked examples, meh, stuff happens. Let's hope the current investigations by the press and the government persuade the Navy to discose the actual breakdown of jobs the SEAL rejects end up in.
The report on the grounding of the Ever Forward is out: https://www.dco.uscg.mil/Portals/9/DCO%20Documents/5p/CG-5PC/INV/docs/documents/EverForwardGroundingROIRedacted.pdf The master left the bridge to get dinner; the pilot distracted himself with making phone calls, sending texts and writing an email.
We hear a lot about the value of "precision" in modern warfare, most recently in this RUSI report examining the lessons of the Ukraine conflict for Western militaries. From the executive summary:
I have an intuitive understanding of what "precision" means. To me, it means weapons that are guided, and which are accurate enough to have a significant probability of hitting their targets on the first attempt. But this seems like a pretty fuzzy definition, and I'd appreciate having a link to a military or Department of Defense source that can authoritatively draw a line between a "precision" munition and a non-precision or "dumb" munition.
@Basil Marte
Fixed Link
Are we really going to have to make a rule that says, "No texting while driving (a container ship displacing hundreds of thousands of tons)"?
@quanticle,
what “precision” means. To me, it means weapons that are guided, and which are accurate enough to have a significant probability of hitting their targets on the first attempt.
Speaking from an engineering perspective: This is not a good definition of precision.
And, based on the way the word is used in this article, they mean what engineers would call "accurate". (Not precise, which is subtly different.)
Anyway, a precision (accurate) weapon doesn't necessarily need to be "guided". It just needs to be able to direct its damage so that it takes very few shots to destroy the target.
Ideally one shot, but you don't always get what you want. And compared to the hundreds, or thousands of shots it might take using old fashioned World War type technology, hitting the target in 3, or even 5 shots, is still a spectacular improvement.
To give an example, we've been seeing the case where a drone has been able to give real time feedback to things like T-62 tanks firing long distance at targets they can't even see. And using detailed video of how their shells miss, combined with some neat software that has been put together and run on laptops or iPads, they manage to zero in on their target in a handful of shots. To artillery of past decades this would have been a complete fantasy. And not a guided shell in sight.
To give another example, drones have been dropping simple grenades with home made fins on them. But because the rotary wing drones can come to a mid air stop 50 metres above the targets, they can drop bombs into open vehicles or within a trench. Once again, the grenade itself is something that would not be out of place in the trenches of the Somme. But the combination of systems is what is making them precision.
@quanticle
I don't have a formal reference, but I believe "precision-guided" is generally DOD-speak for "LGB accuracy or better", which in practical terms is good enough for the vast majority of purposes. There may be a more formal definition, but it's not one I know offhand.
I would read the "fight for precision" as a comment not only on weapons, but also on finding targets. Precision weapons aren't much use if you're not able to find places to put them.
@Doctorpat
The DoD definition is different from the engineering definition? Perish the thought!
More broadly, you're very much correct that modern weapons, even unguided, are a lot more accurate than previous unguided weapons. At the same time, there's a big difference between being able to refine the system around tactical weapons and the operational use of precision that I think the RUSI is talking about.
The virtual meetup discussion raised a question that bears some examination. Where does the hunt for the Bismarck rank among the biggest events of WWII, in the public mind?
From an American perspective, I would guess the biggest events of the Pacific theatre were:
All of these are higher-profile than the Bismarck. Next might be Midway and the fall of Singapore, which I'd put at the same level as the Bismark.
In the European theater, we have:
All of these, I think, are bigger than the Bismarck story.
After that, I get more uncertain. Was Bismarck bigger than Enigma? Bigger than the entire North African campaign? The U-boat war?
Anyway, I feel pretty confident in saying that the hunt for the Bismarck was not among the top ten big stories of WWII, at least from an American perspective.
Oh, and let me add the Holocaust to that list.
I doubt the fall of Singapore would have rated all that important among the US population and Midway would probably be more well known than what Japan did to China.
Bismarck was mainly notable because it blew up the pride of the Royal Navy, it and the Battle of Britain are probably the only notable events of the war in Europe that Americans really know about that didn't have significant American involvement.
In context, the "fight for the right to precision" is referring to dealing with adversarial electronic warfare that can degrade the accuracy of precision munitions. In other words, the report is saying that in the future we won't neccessarily be able to count on precision munitions remaining accurate in the face of countermeasures, and we have to think consciously about preparing the way for our long-range precision guided munitions with both electronic warfare and kinetic strikes.
The difference between "precise" and "accurate" is the difference between hitting the same place multiple times and hitting what you aim at.
For the purposes of weapons, an effective system has to be both accurate and precise. It does you no good to have a small CEP if you can't center the CEP circle on your intended target, and likewise putting the center of the CEP circle on the intended target if your CEP radius is larger than your radius of effect
Kuznetsov caught fire again.
Oh, goodness. Am I going to have to revise the William D Brown award for the year?
Does 'Degrade the accuracy' tend to mean double the CEP or make x% of the munitions miss completely? Is there a better metric than CEP we should be using because the assumption of a gaussian distribution that worked fine for iron bombs needn't apply to PGM?