Because of the success of the last open thread, I'm inclined to try another one. Talk about anything you want except culture war.
Also, I'm going to be in Boston this summer, July 19th-24th. I expect to hit a lot of the museum ships up there, and want to do a meetup at one if there's interest.
Comments
How useful is quantity qua quantity? A number of Communist militaries seem to hold on to huge amounts of antiquated to the point of obsolescent equipment, especially the North Koreans. While I'm willing to entertain the idea that a 2-1/2 ton truck from 1970 isn't that much worse than a modern 2-1/2 ton truck, do they really think a T-55 is going to make much difference?
Even assuming that the units get adequate training and maintenance, etc, it seems like they would be of limited utility against a modern enemy. I guess the idea is to use them against lighter opponents, like APCs/trucks, but even there the limited operational capability seems like they are basically just meat. Similarly with China's type 035 submarines.
I guess if you have enough people and you can staff them cheap enough, they make good training units and maybe they get lucky in the event of a war, but mostly it seems like all they do is inflate the numbers without actually adding much capability.
I believe the basic concept is one of preparing for the long war. A T-55 is dead meat on the modern battlefield, particularly when it has a scratch crew and has been sitting with minimal maintenance for the last few decades. But after the T-80s and M1s have destroyed each other, and the Americans are down to rifles and hand grenades, it's very potent indeed. Most of those are assigned to deep reserve units, which aren't going to activate very quickly, or are going to be used to rebuild units who have lost their equipment. It's a rather different paradigm than we think in. Under US assumptions, they aren't a good idea.
@RedRover
You are making the assumption that those units are being used against combat forces. As I am fond of saying about another obsolete technology: the human body is no more resistant to swords than it was two thousand years ago. The Type 035 wouldn't be much use against the USN, but it could (for example) grind the Philippine economy to a halt. Similarly, T-55s have been not much more than targets against a halfway modern military force, but against an insurgency that lacks any real anti armor capability it is still a tank.
In the case of North Korea, a large part of their pre-nuclear threat was rolling their antiquated armor over Seoul. As a bonus, the teeming masses of obsolete tanks act as chaff for your "modern" armor, giving it a chance to operate for a bit longer before being destroyed by aircraft.
What are your thoughts on the USS America class? My uninformed opinion? While not ideal, the USS America class is not terrible.
We would have been better to simply keep going with the Makin Island design, A well deck/stern gate, upgraded engines, iterative improvements over the Wasp class, but in the near term, an all Helo carrier isnt such a bad idea. Inevitability, in any amphibious assault there will be an extensive helicopter component, and I cant imagine that the Wasp class is very good at servicing helicopters with its extensive vehicle deck and space for LCACs. The current Americas will give the invasion force the ability to service its own helos without having to rely on a full carrier, Which would inevitably be around anyway, however.
Having said all that, i think, again, uninformed mostly, that the America class should have a well deck and stern gate and simply have two choices at build time: A mostly helicopter carrier with limited amphibious assault vehicle capacity, say, one LCAC, or, like the Makin Island, a mostly amphibious assault carrier with some helo support.
Thoughts? Is the America class a dead end? Are the wasp class/makin island any good? What should the USN have done instead?
@redRover, i would say that it varies depending on what type of combat/system you are talking about. Old rifles/mines/bombs will work just about as well as new so having a stockpile of older but still functional designs will be advantageous.
For some things, however, old means totally obsolete. Consider submarines, for instance. An old 1960s diesel electric will not be able to even detect a new nuke attack sub, nor will it be able to hide from its modern equivalent. Having a lot of them would just mean a lot of iron decorating the bottom of the ocean.
On an entirely different topic: Apparently the C-2 is going to be replaced by a V-22 derivative starting in 2020, while the E-2 will remain in service for the foreseeable future. Conceding that CATOBAR is still the holy grail of carrier design, does STOBAR or STOVL become more competitive as tilt rotors become more capable? That is to say, if you stick the heavy loads (cargo/AEW/refueling) on tilt-rotors, and use a STOBAR strike group, how much do you give up relative to CATOBAR?
@colin
That's a good point. An AK in cosmoline is good basically forever, while a 1960's era Mig is basically live target practice.
@Chuck
Good point on the anti-insurgency capability, though it seems like an expensive way to go about it.
@bean
This is probably the best answer. But, I guess the question then is how likely is it that the war makes it long enough that the long war comes into play. I suppose it goes back to their heritage in the various revolutionary wars?
@colin
I have mixed feelings. While I'm very fond of America herself, the design fails on a couple of levels. First, helicopter carriers without boats are never that good of an idea. If the weather is too bad for helos, your troops are stuck. (That said, modern helos are a lot better than old ones.) Second, it's too easy for senior civilian decision-makers to confuse one with an aircraft carrier, which must be avoided at all costs.
The Wasps are quite good at servicing helicopters. Despite what the Navy may be claiming, my understanding is that the aviation improvements on the Americas are more incremental than revolutionary. Keep in mind that we routinely operate helicopters off of destroyers and frigates that are much smaller than either ship. Also, remember that the idea of a dedicated helicopter carrier goes back to the 60s. We went away from that towards a hybrid design because (mumbles and makes note to self to check the relevant Friedman).
And good point about the differing obsolescence of weapons.
@RedRover
AIUI, tilt-rotor isn't as good as CATOBAR at lifting loads. I'm not quite sure what's going on with the COD replacement. The C-2 is very similar to the E-2, so it shouldn't be a huge cost to restart the line. But maybe Boeing was just able to bring a cheaper airframe to the table.
@bean
In googling around a bit more, it appears that the V-22 can barely take an F135 engine, while it won't fit in a C-2 at all. There are some other benefits that they cite, like being able to fly from non-airstrips, as well as being able to help with VERTREP, but the F135 seems like the key. Also, the V-22 apparently is more obstructive to the general flow on the carrier, in terms of not being able to get out of the way once recovered, than the C-2, though I don't know how important that is in practice.
@RedRover said...
re: How useful is quantity qua quantity
In addition to what the others have said, there is very often a demand for a certain minimum quantity. Having one really good division is not much good if you have to defend an area three divisions wide.
@RedRover
The gap will definitely close somewhat, but flying your planes off with empty tanks and then immediately refueling them is still more complicated and costly than being able to just launch planes with enough fuel in the first place.
T-55s have done OK in the Syrian Civil War. Both sides continue to keep them around and fight with them. The Ukrainians apparently were pretty happy with the performance of T-64s with moderate upgrades in the Donbass too.
Also, sometimes there's no substitute for quantity. If you need armor on X objectives but you only have Y tank companies, you might be in trouble no matter how good the tanks are.
So, one of the differences between sailing and steam ships is that if your sailboat gets damaged, you can come ashore next to a forest, put your carpenter to work, and after a few days or weeks have everything fixed up. Repairing a steam ship requires going to a port if you don't have replacements directly on hand. (Something similar happened in land warfare when motor transport replaced horses.)
Was there any part of a sailing ship that absolutely couldn't be replaced except in a well-equipped port? The sails themselves seem like one candidate.
Large iron fittings were very difficult to replace in the wild. You could do a lot with coal and anvils, but (say) making new cannon, or replacing one of the 1820's diagonal iron bars that kept the hull firmer, would be another matter, and I'm not sure about rudder fittings.
Major yards were hard to find (you needed long straight trees, which aren't always available near where ships could be brought to shore)
Major structural timbers would be a problem, too, though you'd likely be able to jury-rig something that would let you get to a major naval base.
Also, if you ran out of iron tools and nails you might not find it easy to make new ones from scratch.
@sfoil
Well, the guns could never be so easily replaced, but are you talking about one ship or a fleet? Because for most of the sailing era naval stores (used broadly here to mean pitch, rope, wood, and tackle) were often quite hard to come by. Pitch was a fairly laborious and time consuming to make, and not all trees could make it. All trees can make wood, but most are decidedly suboptimal for shipbuilding. Even if you have the right kind of tree, and it's big enough for your purposes, wood needs to be aged and dried before it's ideal for going in a ship. Rope and tackle posed lesser but still significant burdens. In a pinch your carpenter or boatswain could make some minor repairs and do some patch up work, but if you needed a whole new mast or something, you probably weren't any better off than someone in a metal
What's the cost of keeping obsolete equipment running, compared to melting it down for scrap?
If it's fairly minimal (kept down by cannibalising equipment), you're just funging manpower.
Might as well sit a few soldiers in old tanks if the alternative is having them hoof it around with a rifle.
@RedRover
Makes sense re F135 engine. I think any other benefits are basically illusory.
@sfoil
I should probably point out that steam and steel/iron aren’t 100% linked. Steam became common a decade before Warrior made her appearance. Tony and Cassander have covered the details quite well.
@Lambert
In a lot of cases, the equipment isn’t really kept running. It’s in storage, for use either rebuilding destroyed units or equipping reservists who are recalled when war breaks out.
I'm not sure that's all of it. Some of it is the paranoia being born out of everyone being out to get you. Some of it, though, is strategic differences. In the US, if we face defeat on land, we simply withdraw, build more stuff, and come back. The oceans will protect us. The Russians and Norks can't do that, so they need to be ready to fight the land battle to the bitter end.
An old soviet era defector, who was a colonel in the Red Army before swapping sides, called Victor Suvorov (spelling just a guess) wrote a book called something like "Inside the Soviet Army" back in the early 1980s or something. Anyway, his explanation was as follows: The USSR had universal conscription (where universal means everyone without connections) and so all the men got to go through 2 years of training, with the training on the equipment (rifles, tanks, artillery, aircraft...) that was current at the time. Then they get demobilised, and go to civilian life. But they are all considered reserves, and if WW3 breaks out, they all get recalled into active service. So you would have all these 30, 40, 50? 60??! year old guys suddenly back in uniform and being sent forth to fight the hated... oh let's say Finns. Do you stick them in a modern T14? They have no idea about a modern tank. It takes 2 years of training to teach someone about a modern tank, with equipment and tech that these guys have never seen before. So you give them the stuff that they were trained on. If they were trained in the 1960s then give them a 1960 tank, that's what they know. It has the best chance that they will be able to be up to some sort of functionality by the time they reach the front lines. It should be pointed out that the Russians were (at least in theory) getting all their reserves back once a year for a refresher camp of a few weeks, so they still remembered the very basics about their equipment. I don't know if the North Koreans are doing the refresher camps.
I'm not saying this will work, but that was the theory behind it, at least according to this Russian colonel.
@doctorpat
I've read Inside the Soviet Army, and while Suvorov (the defector, who I assume is different from the commenter of that name) writes well, he's not the most reliable. Even leaving aside the whole Icebreaker theory (which is only loosely connected to reality, to put it politely), I've heard that Inside the Soviet Army is at times sensationalized for western ears. It's been a while, but Suvorov has been in my "check first" column for several years.
There's a couple problems with this. First and foremost, the math doesn't work. Even the Soviet military machine wasn't producing a new set of tanks every two years, as would have been required for this. There was a definite series of categories, with troops that have been out longer getting lower priority for equipment, but people trained initially on the older equipment were way too old by the 80s, while there wasn't enough equipment for the classes in their 30s and 40s.
While I agree that the math doesn't work. You've got a 10 or so sets of 2 year classes of soldiers for each generation of equipment. Nonetheless I'll try to steel man this argument.
I'm certainly not saying that for someone in the position and with the philosophy of the Soviets, saving old equipment is a bad idea. It's not. It gives you a big pool of equipment for your reserve units or for combat replacements, and the storage costs aren't too outrageous. I'm pointing out that the specific model of "using the equipment you used in active service" is unlikely. In the late 80s, the guy assigned to a T-55 unit was probably in his 40s and used a T-62 when he was active. The guy who used the T-55 when he was active is now in his late 50s, and simply too old to be an effective soldier. If you really want, I can start digging around in some of my other books on the Soviets to see if they have more information on how their reserve system worked, or if I can do some math on the equipment/user ratio to see what that tells us about how their system worked.
Not really naval-related, but for the benefit of everyone here I'd like to note that when you come across a reference to SLA Marshall or Dave Grossman as an authoritative source, it's a wonderful cue that says you now have a little extra time to take a pleasant walk in the sunshine, pet a kitty, or perhaps get a snack.
After all, there's no point in reading any further.
That may sound a little harsh, but it comes from my frustration in seeing how pervasive the misconceptions they introduced have become in many discussions, popular and otherwise, about military history and even current military policy.
I won't outright call SLAM a fraud, but there are, shall we say, serious questions about where exactly his data came from and how he used it to reach his conclusions.
It also strikes me that my dictum is perhaps a little redundant, given that Grossman uses Marshall as a source.
@DirectrixGazer
Seconded. I read Grossman several years ago, and he's quite persuasive, but as best I can tell, mostly wrong. I suspect there's some truth that people in battle posture and fire into the air instead of into the enemy, but SLAM's more extreme claims about something like 80% of infantrymen not firing at all are just unsustainable.
The MiG-21 is still a pretty effective point-defense fighter/light attack aircraft, but I think the live target practice angle is underrated. If the Chinese hung on to them, they probably have enough 1960s era aircraft sitting around to, say, run the magazines dry on a carrier battle group. I doubt converting them to drone aircraft costs all that much (although the USAF says that it costs $2.4 million to convert a QF-4, for what it's worth) and it might be easier to do than start and procure an equivalent number of air-launched decoys. Not to mention they're more convincing than decoys; they're the real deal!
That's not me; I'm the other Suvorov ;)
I believe the Russians also found their massive pools of equipment very convenient for when they want to arm an insurgency without handing out their newest, most expensive top-of-the-line gear. I believe they sent a bunch of inactive T-64s to the rebels in Ukraine.
I think the “Fleet in Reserve” principle holds true for land forces as well, especially when it comes to holding large swaths of territory. Obsolete tanks still must be accounted for, and even if your best equipment will make mincemeat of them until they do they could possibly be a threat. If you choose to destroy them to alleviate that threat, you spend time and energy that could have been used more productively. In the worst case, you end up dividing your better equipped forces up so much that the enemy is able to defeat your units in detail with his own modern units. There will be horrible attrition in those obsolete units, but paying human costs is not generally something communist governments have been shy of. Also @doctorpat #3 is a good point in general.
@bean The statistic was that 80% did not fire weapons with the direct purpose of hitting enemy soldiers. They would fire, downrange even, but would not specifically aim at people. (I say people, because this expressly did not apply to vehicles, which they would fire at) I would defend Grossman if it wasn’t for the fact that he’s completely gone around the bend, and I wouldn’t want to be misinterpreted as defending anything he might have said recently.
@Suvorov
Not really. NCTR means that it's pretty easy to tell that those are MiG-21s, and I doubt that they'd be able to surprise us with this kind of thing. Also, remember that the planes have to be taken care of, which isn't cheap. Overall, probably better to build MALD-ski.
That's a really good point.
@Chuck
What principle? Naval reserve fleets have been getting increasingly stupid since the 50s. Ships degrade if not maintained, and keeping deactivated ships in a condition to return to service is expensive. Also, they rapidly become obsolescent. Much better to spend the cash on new ships. Seriously, the RN has found that reserve costs about a third as much as active service.
It's a bit different on land, where you can put a bunch of tanks in a warehouse that keeps the worst of the weather out, smear anything important in cosmoline, and don't have to worry about their combat system going obsolete.
That was how Grossman read the statistic, but Marshall himself at least at some points claimed that 80% just didn't fire. That sort of thing is obvious from the ammo reports. I could buy the Grossman read on it, although I think he overstates his case.
That's sort of the point, though; the Chinese still have MiG-21s active in their inventory, and we'd have to engage them if it was a shooting war or risk that turning fight I keep going on about. :P NCTR is great, but can't tell if there's a pilot in the cockpit or not, while it could presumably ID a MALDski that wasn't jamming.
Admittedly, MALDs are pretty awesome and I think everyone should be using them.
I don't know much about this controversy--heard a thing or two--but it sort of sounds to me like it is possible that someone misunderstood suppressive fire? I could see someone doing a survey, seeing result that showed that most people never actually aimed at a human target, and totally misinterpreting that evidence.
Admittedly, I believe that at least in air combat, a disproportionately high number of kills were scored by small numbers of aggressive pilots, so it seems plausible to me that a minority of people were the most violent/effective.
@Chuck
The issue is that the famous 75% figure from Men Against Fire seems to be inconsistent with the statements of most people who have actually experienced infantry combat, and that many of the people who were involved in the specific engagements used as case studies by Marshall strongly disagree with the version of events he spun from his interviews. He was also pretty opaque about his raw data, and there are questions about how he managed to do X number of claimed interviews in a visit lasting Y time when X/Y ends up being a very incredible rate of interviewing.
These issues have led to at least Men Against Fire being pushed steadily towards "thoroughly discredited" status.
Grossman is a bit different. The problem with the extended thesis presented in On Killing and his other works is that there is a very important nut of truth to it, but that he goes on to greatly exaggerate its importance and extent. Basically, it is correct that combat is largely a psychological phenomenon; that posturing and morale effects are vital to the outcome, and that conditioning and ritual are important for the soldier to contextualize combat and to become more effective and more willing to kill. Of course, all these things have been said by other people, many of them centuries ago. On its own that's not bad, a restatement and systematization of a large body of previous knowledge can be extremely valuable. The problems come in with the suggested universality of his conclusions and with his uncritical acceptance of much of Marshall's work.
It may be reasonable to say that at least a large proportion of modern Westerners are very reticent to kill and require extensive conditioning to do so without suffering severe psychological issues, but it is hard to argue that this has been true of all peoples at all times, as Grossman seems to. For instance, it's very hard to square this idea with the fact that peasant levy armies of the pre-modern era tended to be pretty brutal with the populations of invaded territories (and sometimes their own!) even in campaigns that involved little fighting, or with the way previous periods of European culture casually accepted mass as well as individual killing outside the military context.
I'm not familiar with his more recent statements, though. How has he gone "around the bend?"
@Suvorov
That assumes they can use them in a way that makes them look (a) like piloted MiG-21s and (b) a threat. Neither of those is guaranteed, particularly given the short range of the MiG. My point was more that they couldn't pretend to be a MiG-29 or an Su-27, which are threats we'd have to take seriously.
I'd assume that the basic MALD (as opposed to MALD-J) is at least reasonably good against NCTR.
Agreed.
And if that was the version I'd heard consistently, that would make perfect sense. But I know I've heard claims that 80% didn't fire at all, which is less sensible. Add in other criticisms of Marshall, and I'm not inclined to be charitable. On the other hand, the source may have been my History professor who really hated Marshall, and I may be being doubly uncharitable. I'll have to look into this more.
That's a very different thing, and one nobody is really questioning. You're always going to see that kind of breakdown, particularly in a fairly inexperienced Army. There's the guy who crawls up to the bunker with a bunch of grenades, and the guys covering him. Marshall said that the covering guys basically weren't shooting.
@Directrix Gazer
One aspect is that Grossman is a strong proponent of the "violent video games cause violence" theory, which I consider to be shaky at best. Most of the studies are very short-term, and it's intuitively plausible that someone who has just played a violent game and is thus kind of amped up is more willing to commit the lab proxy for violence (which is not quite the same as actually killing someone) without a long-term effect. The correlation between people who play violent games and violence might well run the other way, where people prone to violence play violent video games. And there are some pretty good studies showing that violent movies prevent violent crime.
@bean
Yeah, it takes extremely clever experimental design to come up with a sociological experiment that can distinguish the arrow of causation in situations like that (most don’t seem to try) and a very large sample size with repeated confirmations (ditto) to make sure the conclusion is generally applicable.
Ah, I see. True enough (although we still take the MiG-21s seriously enough to do DACT against them, I believe.)
I'm not sure about that--although now that I take a closer look, it appears that the basic MALD actually uses active radar reflectors instead of merely passive measures to spoof deceive enemy radar, which is basically deception jamming. So you might be correct.
Yeah, that seems pretty crazy. I wonder if it's like a game of academic telephone: "80% of fire is suppressive" ends up being "80% of soldiers never fire!"
The decline of violent crime (at least in the States) since the introduction of video games would suggest this is more likely, to me.
@Directrix Gazer
The violent video games thing is pretty widely accepted at SSC, which is where a lot of the commenters came from, but I knew you came from elsewhere, so I gave the full explanation.
@Surovov
Passive reflectors haven’t been effective for decoys since the 70s or 80s. Yes, it’s basically deception jamming, but I suspect it’s designed to thwart at least some NCTR techniques.
That’s pretty much just declining lead levels. The drop in crime follows the banning of leaded gasoline very closely. The only number I have suggests that a violent movie prevents about 1000 assaults. Some back-of-the-envelope math says that’s about .1% of all violent crime in the US on an annual basis. Violent crime is down about 50% from 80% peak, so we’d need to see about 20 violent movies a week to explain the fall. Obviously, video games might affect things differently, but I’m going to stick with lead as the primary explanation.
@bean
Sorry, I meant “fleet in being” not fleet in reserve. If you have 10,000 armored vehicles more than your opponent, they could conceivably be used for any number of things which your opponent will have to account for. I think it’s relevant that this is combined with a strong air defense doctrine, but I’m not sure how to explain why.
@Directrix
He has taken his “sheepdog” theory (essentially that there are prosocial sociopaths that are able to use deadly force at will but show no other antisocial traits) and turned it into a bizarre series of lectures for law enforcement. These lectures are big on the themes that you are distinctively called to law enforcement, you must be ready to kill at any time, and that no one outside of law enforcement can understand you. So really helpful stuff that in no way reinforces misguided beliefs. (/sarc)
@bean
I wonder if the "Fleet in Reserve" principle Chuck mentioned may have been something more along the lines of having a strategic reserve. Like, you commit your Zumwalts and CVNs to one area, but the enemy can't totally commit to defending/attacking that area because you still have your LHAs and Perrys in reserve and waiting to go to the other area. More of a Force in Being, if you will.
@Chuck
Ah. That makes sense. I’m not sure it’s too far from my theory, which kind of comes down to “some tank is better than no tank”. Having lots of places with “some tank” gives you an edge, even if those tanks are obsolete.
It stops the other guy from just using air strikes to destroy them left and right. I suspect that their air defense doctrine comes from the same place, namely a not entirely baseless paranoia about things going wrong in war.
@RedRover
I’m sending Burkes with the CVNs. I want them to live. (And LHAs are not small carriers, either.) But yes, I think we’re all on the same page now.
I didn't realize there was that much of a correlation!
To be clear, I wasn't trying to credit violent video games with the entire drop in violent crime, just to suggest it was more likely that they caused a drop in violent crime than an uptick based on the broad body of evidence. I suspect that there are a lot of factors at play, even if declining lead rates are a major contributor.
Good grief! The Purge series should get HHS funding! :P
@Suvorov
Fair enough. An intelligent opponent is going to point to lead, and claim that it would have fallen even further if not for video games. I obviously don't agree with this, and there's definitely a lot going on here, but it's good to be prepared.
Why CATOBAR is less popular than STOBAR and/or SVTOL ships? Ok, I might actually get the math behind SVTOL which can be much smaller, but the point is thus: as much as I understand, the primary cost imposed by hosting and operating an air wing is maintenance/C&C, so catapult is not going to increase the total all that significantly, but it gives much greater tactical flexibility and increase in takeoff weight.
Take Queen Elizabeth for example: it's a full-fledged carrier except that it will only be able to operate F-35B and helicopters, ever. No Typhoons, nothing. And considering that carriers are usually thought as strike platforms, such design significantly degrades the capacity of each plane as a strike platform because of weight limitations. And yet, only French have ever built CATOBAR ship outside of US Navy. Is this just about procurement cost or is there something else?
@Inky
I'm sure bean will have a longer answer, but my guess is that the system and operating costs multiply on themselves. So not only do you have the cats themselves, you also have to generate the steam to drive them, and distill the water for that steam. All of that means a bigger ship, which means more people and operating cost. Plus, I think a cat launch requires more crew than the standard line up and go approach of a STOBAR/STOVL launch.
That being said, I think the costs of a well designed modern cat shouldn't be that large relative to the overall costs of a carrier, unless you have MoD managing the procurement.
Would this mean that once EMALS becomes a mature technology, CATOBAR carriers may become more common? It seems like it's supposed one of those things that will be simpler once the complicated parts are figured out.
@Directrix Gazer, bean
I think the explain-away approach to Marshall's stuff regarding old-timey armies was that the guys were so close together, they were being observed by the other men and so would fight. Non-firing or whatever is supposedly linked to dispersing the soldiers (one or two or three men in a foxhole or whatever) and supposedly crew-served weapons shoot at the enemy with intent to hit them at a higher rate. I don't know if this is Marshall or a later interpreter. I myself would agree with the "there's something there but then he exaggerated it significantly."
Alternative hypothesis: combat is by D&D rules, and soldiers are mostly 1-3 HD, so maybe they're just whiffing a lot.
Regarding the idea of stocks running out in a modern war - presumably some things would be easier to get to the troops than other things. It is easier to convert a factory that builds something else to make small arms bullets, rations would be even easier, and civilian transport vehicles would be easy to come by (assuming gas doesn't run out).
Would the result of this be units of motorized infantry with weaponry limited to small arms and relatively light support weapons (mortar shells are probably more feasible than guided anti-tank weapons)?
STOBAR is the sort of thing that could only come from Russia, currently successful because Russia is the only exporter of carriers and carrier expertise to several countries who want into the game. India is definitely looking towards CATOBAR, and I wouldn't be surprised if China went that way in the long term. Russian defense logic makes no sense anywhere else, but you take what you can get.
I'm not sure about why the British chose STOVL instead of CATOBAR for the QEs. It was certainly discussed, but IIRC, it fell victim to British Defense Perversity and in-year cost savings. I've seen it defended as making the ships better multi-role platforms, but I can't say how accurate this is. Everyone else is going for a stripped-down minimal "carrier" capability, for which STOVL is the only logical choice.
EMALS should make it easier to build CATOBAR with gas turbines, although in fairness, donkey boilers are not exactly rocket science.
@dndnrsn
That's a pretty accurate description of the likely situation during a mobilization. Stuff like tanks takes specialized industrial equipment, and we can't roll them off the lines like we used to.
Re Marshall, I had a professor who had done a lot of work on US infantry in WWII. Unfortunately, his book is packed right now, so I can't go looking for more details.
I Marshall was more or less describing Pareto effectiveness, and made up data/handwaved to support it. I believe that WW2 soldiers also trained in close order and then often fought in a much more open order, which led to some confusion/disorientation during initial combat experiences.
Grossman has about half of one good idea but is otherwise pretty much full of shit.
Taking things in another direction, I've lately been studying the process of developing warship specifications, which has also involved learning about the US defense acquisition system and DoD 5000 (the overall directive for how the US acquires military hardware). An interesting point is that DoD 5000 works much better for things like tanks or aircraft than it does for warships. The whole system is predicated on a pattern that goes something like:
Analysis -> R&D -> Prototype -> Low-rate production -> mass production
With all of the detailed milestones and program reviews and other bureaucratic machinery designed to fit that pattern.
You can see how that might make sense for something you're going to make 1,000+ nearly-identical copies of, at a relatively low unit cost proportional to overall budget. It breaks down for warship classes, though, since each ship within a class is slightly different from the last (minor tweaks and tech improvements), they're too fundamentally complex to take much advantage of the advantages of mass production, and they cost far too much to build prototypes for.
As a result, most of the things that are supposed to occur as distinct events during the last three stages of the above flowchart instead get smeared out rather confusingly across the entire class, with various negative consequences for meeting schedule and budget targets.
From various Freidmans (mostly destroyers, amphibs, and carriers), this was obvious even fairly far back. When McNamara brought that kind of programmatic stuff in, it was a lot harder for the Navy to justify what it was doing than the Army and Air Force. Warships are complex, and didn't fit McNamara's neat little analytical buckets. Of course, his habit of manipulating analysis to give the desired results didn't help.
@bean
I wonder if the decision to make the QE STOVL was more about justifying the F35B than the other way around. It makes a kind of sense: There are numerous things you can do with a fleet of STOVL capable aircraft, especially in naval scenarios, but none of them quite justify acquiring a fleet of them in the first place. If you don't have CATOBAR, then you are committed.
@Chuck
That's an interesting take on it, and one that makes some sense. The UK signed on to buy the F-35B when it first joined JSF in 2002. The idea was that the QEs would be fitted for but not with CATOBAR, but that died at about the same time. I'm struggling to remember if the JSF or the QE was supposed to be in service first, but I suspect it was the combination of a reasonable STOVL strike fighter and institutional inertia within the UK. The MoD has a fairly serious problem with picking whatever solution looks to be the cheapest, without considering either cost escalation or (seemingly) effectiveness. The MRA.4 program is probably the best example. It was stupid to start with, and just kept getting stupider.
Is it just a coincidence that almost every "bad decision" mentioned in the history of US defence in the last 60 years seems to have the name McNamara associated with it?
I'll admit that some of it is that it's easy to keep dropping anvils on him, and the British (the only other country whose defense politics I even half understand) are just as screwed up without his intervention. But he was an absolute disaster as SecDef, so I'm going to say no.
You guys may be intrigued by something I'm running on another forum. It was actually partially inspired by the "So You Want To Build A Navy" series - basically, take that idea and apply it to a fictional universe. The back-story of Battletech has a lot of big ships in it, and so I jumped players back to the start of the space-navy era and have them competing against each other to build the best fleet. Knowledge of the game's spacecraft construction/combat rules is helpful for understanding design details, but probably not necessary to most of the discussion - as a rough cut, imagine late-1930s strategy, but with one nation's fleet as overwhelmingly powerful(and as averse to major wars) as the 1870s Royal Navy.
https://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php?topic=61764.0
I've seen that Bean mentioned that he worked in the airline a couple of times, so I'll drop this here: do the low-costers actually make money? This video claims they do, but I don't know how well is it's autor versed. More interestingly, do long-haul lowcosters, ala Norwegian, make money, and can they even? You have mentioned that Norwegian is loosing money on the long-haul flights, will the arrival of long-haul, single-aisle airliners (i.e. A321neoLR) fix that?
Most of the shorthaul budget airlines are profitable, at least at the moment (even they are heavily tied to oil prices and the state of the economy). The video seems pretty good (I skimmed through, because that's the sort of thing I prefer in text), but I think the biggest thing he misses is that they basically are shifting the price around to get you on the plane. Sure, you may pay less for your ticket, but you pay for a carry-on, water, and the bathrooms (OK, not quite). The only real exception to this is Southwest, which is fantastic.
Norwegian in particular is very not profitable, to the point that I doubt they'll survive a couple years in their current form. But long-haul is currently where airlines are losing money, a reversal of the traditional pattern.
Probably not. Larger planes generally cost less per seat, so the single-aisles are most effective on cases where you couldn't fill enough seats at reasonable prices on the twin-aisles. But I doubt that downgauging is going to save them in their current form.