@jaybate, this one's for you.
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I read this and immediately thought of you @jaybate-1.0 , given your penchant for posting basketball philosophy tied into US Naval history. Which, by the way, fascinates me since I am ex Navy.
I thought this article was very interesting because of the different view points involved about how big and how strong the US Navy needs to be in today’s seemingly ever unstable world. China and Korea on our west and ISIS & Al queda on our east, ish. I find it amusing to read politicians, who have never probably even sat foot on any military ship of any kind or even served one day in the military, spew out uneducated opinions like they know what they are talking about.
I am more inclined to respect the opinions of the top military brass on this subject because oddly enough, I agree with their logic. It is odd because my mind is not groomed to live in the military lifestyle. I push back against forceful, follow orders & dont think type of leadership. But its ok now because I can still appreciate the need to keep our US Navy at the top. We may not have the sheer numbers on anyone anymore, like we did at the end of WWII but the strength of our current Navy and its continued efforts to produce and out class and out technologize ( my word ) every other potential threat are what counts here.Its quality not quantity! I would much rather have 4 Ford class aircraft carriers than 200 more FFG’s or smaller amphibs. We put two Ford class Carriers on both coasts and rotate deployments to keep everyone fresh and our systems upgraded. There’s really not much an opposing force of any kind could do against that kind of power.
I know we don’t have that many yet. I believe the article says we have one coming out of dry dock early next year and then second one that just started its keel. I expect at some point the Navy would like to replace all of its Nimitz class Carriers with Ford class, if that is economically feasible. We have 10 of said class, which again in the article, is more than the whole world does. Quality not quantity!
Another example, I would rather have less number of F-22’s and F-35’s than twice that number of F-14’s and A-10s. Of course air superiority is not as familiar to me of a subject.
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Another example, I would rather have less number of F-22’s and F-35’s than twice that number of F-14’s and A-10s. Of course air superiority is not as familiar to me of a subject.
The F-14 is a 40+ year aircraft that is no longer being used by the US military and the A-10 is a low speed, high maneuverability, ground support aircraft that the military is getting close to retire the few that are left in service. Comparing theme to the F-22 and the F-35 is the equivalent of comparing and old Mustang and a UPS truck to modern, high performance NASCAR cars, in this case not a fair comparison.
The F-14 is the plane that was used in the movie Top Gun in 1986, the F-35 is the plane rumored to be used in the sequel that is apparently in the works.
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@JayHawkFanToo I am aware that the F-14 has been retired from service. And, yes I saw Top Gun, in theater. I was just making a point of quality over quantity.
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I was just comparing the age of the various technologies. You most definitely must have the quality but sometimes you need the quantity as well.
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Thanks so much for thinking of me!
I am on the road today, and will read it eagerly, but may not respond for a day or so.
Go Navy!
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A lot depends on principal central bank ownership goals, agent-state goals, client naval mission, on perceived decisive strategic pinch points and battle spaces, on fighting and logistic technologies, on force, robotic and propulsion technologies, on raw material and manufacturing sources for building and operations, on what we want our allies to contribute, on who our allies and opponents are likely to be, and on their characteristics in all these same regards. You match up “us vs them” in pursuit of MUA, and remember that what ever you do, the navies you, your allies and your opponents commit to build, the building will then trigger you, your allies, and your opponents to revise all of the above to counter the MUA created and that over time some highly complicated equilibrium strategy with enormous sunk costs, strengths, and weaknesses and limits of adaptability will result that will itself be obsoleted by whatever actual mission and conflict scenarios in fact evolve.
The key really is building navies capable of handling what goes on foreseeably without overcommitting and becoming too inflexible to respond to the unforeseeable nonlinearities of sudden large scale conflict.
It’s only about numbers of ships, and quality of same, after you know what you foreseeably will be facing and decide the extent to which you cannot foresee things. Some periods are harder to foresee than others and so better to avoid major sunk costs in.
I can imagine scenarios where mission, allies, opponents and technology applied make past ship numbers useful indicators, followed by nonlinear escalations of conflict that make such numbers and composition irrelevant.
In foreseeable, linear conflict situations it’s hard for me to imagine us ever needing even half what we have now. The Crown of Great Britain is running the first, second or third largest economic entity on the planet with a tiny fleet.
China wouldn’t even have a navy if we hadn’t built their economy and insisted they build a navy and help pay for securing the Sealanes.
We don’t need a single aircraft carrier to project sustained attack force anywhere in the world, if we change emphasis on delivery technology.
In unforeseeable terms, we need a naval space fleet. We need hundreds, maybe thousands of nano fleets for earth and space. We need completely submersible fleets hardened to directed energy from space. We need truly amphibious fleets that run on both air and land. We need completely unmanned fleets that can fight and rescue in CBW and nuclear and net degraded regions. We need primitive fleets capable of fighting without wifi and using only the energy they can generate themselves. These are the unforeseeable realms of conflict where wars will soon be fought.
Navies exist to control trade routes with force pure and simple. It’s all they have ever done and what they are good for. We have created a vast global economy that now requires a solar system economy to underwrite the cost of securing its space flanks and space trade routes. The best way to store and protect critical information is off planet. The best way to out flank enemies on earth with directed energy is to locate directed energy batteries farther out in the solar system than our enemies. To pay for it and defend its off planet storage, trade will be enabled. Space Trade will have new space trade routes and new pinch points on and off earth. Thus we have no choice but to continue Age of Exploration 2.0. Into Age of Colonization 2.0. There WILL BE more and more heavily used trade routes than ever before.
THE QUESTION FOR THE CENTRAL BANK OWNERS AND THE CNO WILL BE WHICH TRADE ROUTE SECURITY TO INVEST AND ENGAGE IN NOW, AND WHICH TO LEAVE FOR THE TIME OF CONFLICT NONLINEARITY.
Sunk costs map a topology of both naval strength and naval inflexibility.
Naval inflexibility at a time of extraordinary potential nonlinear conflict seems a more grave threat to national security now than insufficient conventional ships and fleets for foreseeable linear conflict.
Thus if it were up to me, I would be standing pat with conventional naval maritime fleets, or even cutting back, and moving all ahead full with the naval space fleet formation; that space fleet will be what Mahan would be advocating were he alive now instead of maritime fleets. The key always is to be prepared to wage war in the ways and in the places that will yield decisive advantage when the time comes.
The critical flank for surface fleet force projection and control of pinch points necessary for control of maritime trade is in space. You can’t wage war effectively here without controlling space, and how space is controlled will determine the way the navy wages war on the oceans of earth.
Many of the most critical aircraft carriers and fleets of the near future will be in space. They may already be there and we just don’t know it. But given the tendency of inside the box thinking, I doubt it.
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@jaybate-1.0 Im gonna have to digest this one for a bit. Quite heady that.
One question does stick out to me though. Aircraft carriers in space? Im sure thats not in the literal sense unless the starship enterprise warps in from the future. So, that would have to be either some sort of dual military/privately funded space station that we are unaware of, that would be capable of deploying defenses from outer space and low earth orbits, and have a ton of server space to carry information around the planet. Is that what you had in mind?Trade routes in space… Thats an interesting concept. Gives the star wars program of the Reagan era some new life perhaps?
Since Nasa retired their space shuttle fleet, who else is left for this country to provide the US with a military presence off this planet?
I am really excited to learn about the defense and information capabilities of the Ford Class Carriers.
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The deep space network is being expanded rapidly for a reason.
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@jaybate-1.0 So the wars of the future will no longer be fought on the open seas but in space? Why invest all this money into building the best, most technologically advanced aircraft carrier on the planet? No more air to air combat either? Why then are we making F-22’s and F-35’s? We also just released the latest upgrade to our destroyers. The class of ship escapes me at present.
I can see the necessity to protect information, especially sensitive high classified info that has national security implications.
Dont we still need to have raw offensive power capable of basically blowing anything in its way out of the water?
Which of our current enemies even holds the slightest threat to us in space? The Russians, the Chinese. the Islamic State? North Korea? If I had to pick one, it would be Russia and it seems to me that the Cold War could reoccur, or maybe it has never fully stopped. Just now in recent times the tensions between the Ruskies and the US have been escalated. Of course, all of this is my opinion based on my very limited world knowledge base.
Oh yes, can you define your acronym CBW for me? Actually I think I just answered my own question. Chemical Biological Warfare. Is that right?
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Traditional weaponry like the aircraft carriers are in my layman’s opinion rather the contemporary equivalents of the battle ship at the start of WWII. They continue to have utility of a kind, especially in what might now be called conventional limited and unconventional limited warfare, or what I am calling linear warfare. By linear warfare, I am referring to great powers engaging in, or sponsoring surrogates in the engagement in, warfare of the kind we have been witnessing since WWII. Things never really get threatened in the grand strategic order. Force is used in a kind of chess game at the frontier of the status quo to try to bring about incremental changes that may over time lead to tipping points for regimes. But unlimited warfare is never engaged in, because nuclear arms and CBW and cyber warfare technologies could easily converge to wipe us all out.
But I foresee what might be called a “nonlinear” conventional and unconventional warfare risk. War is not just a phenomenon of wealth and force. It is wealth and force interplaying in a battle space. What the Age of Discovery 1.0 did is geometrically (if you will) expand the battle space by enabling/requiring grand strategic interplay to occur around a globe, not just in an eastern Hemisphere stretching from Western Europe across Eurasia, the Mediterranean and the Indian and Southwest Pacific oceans. Over several centuries the geometric expansion of battle space (known accessible world) prompted concerted massive investment in technology to fight in and control this expanded space.It was a nonlinear increase in warfare relative to the war making before it. It culminated by the 20th Century in first nuclear weapons and then an array of weapons of mass destruction. This lead to an end of the option of escalating to unlimited warfare, except by accident.
But as the ending of unlimited warfare was occurring space exploration was simultaneously leaping forward to open up “exponentially” if you will the size of our known universe. We now know there are almost certainly other inhabitable exo planets perhaps even in our own galaxy. We now know that there are the raw materials needed for colonization on other planets and moons in our own solar system. And we now know that we are now critically dependent on our internet cloud for sustainment of human life on earth without catastrophic disruption. And we now know that this “information” is not defensible here on earth. Electromagnetic pulses can wipe all, or parts, of it out. And when that data wipe out occurs, there will be catastrophic interruptions in human activity and loss of status quo with unforeseen consequences. In turn we know that that is an intolerable risk and one that at least the great powers of the world will do their best to minimize. And we can reasonably infer that part of the risk management solution will be to place “backups” of our cloud in locations that can be protected, at least for periods of time, where the backups cannot be damaged, so that all, or parts, of human civilization on earth can be “reset” if you will in the event of an accident, or what have you.
Part of the risk management will have to involve moving “back ups” off planet. Moving back ups off planet will only be a partial and imperfect solution, as have all strategic steps of risk management throughout human history, but it will be taken as surely as the British built great fortresses at Gibraltar, the Straits of Malacca, and St. Kitts from which to secure the trader routes of the Crown of Great Britain a world away in the age of sail in the British Isles. There is no distance too great, no cost too great to bear, no risk management too imperfect to be tried, when the perpetuation of a private oligarchy of a global power is at stake. Just look at the lengths the Vatican and the Habsburgs were willing to go to when the Seljuk Turks cut off their trade with the Far East and triggered the Age of Discovery 1.0.
We are in the throes of the Age of Discovery 2.0. First the nuclear arsenal of USSR and now the onrushing development of Russian and Chinese spanning of the Eurasian Center Point have effectively set at risk and threaten to cut off USA-Crown of Great Britain from their global trade routes.
Space exploration in the Age of Discovery 2.0 is the contemporary equivalent of ocean voyaging in Age of Discovery 1.0. but instead of increasing our navigable and trade-able world geometrically around a globe, it is expanding it exponentially across a solar system and a galaxy and eventually beyond. I used to think this notion was poppycock, but now I think it is already happening and I have just been too thick headed to recognize it.
The back-ups have to be put out under a frozen ocean on a moon of Jupiter, or Saturn, first. They have to be stored somewhere far enough away that most of the powers of earth cannot yet get to them and destroy them. It HAS TO BE DONE. It may already be done.
The moon was close enough in the 1960s. Mars is close enough now. The moons of Jupiter and Saturn will be close enough once Mars is close enough. It is a game of moving the pea under the shell farther and farther out from threat.
And to do it requires the ability to have lines of communication with the sites. And to set up sustainable long term communications requires means of regular access to the storage sites. And the building of this trade route will trigger great discoveries that will alter what we do out there and what we do here.
And so vast monies are going to be invested to develop ways to develop the trade routes out to the flanks of space that have to be controlled by private oligarchies on earth. And so there will be colonization and resource exploitation and “bidness.”
And the kinds of weapons that can be created in space with unlimited access to solar energy in a void grow frankly unthinkable to someone like myself. Star Wars and Star Trek will seem like the science fiction fairy tales they are.
And such devices are already technologically feasible should we devote our resources to going there, staying there, and enabling trade routes.
Space navy.
Space anchors away.
The ships have already started sailing IMHO.
No turning back now.
The only question is how much human involvement in space will occur, or will it be a driverless realm.
You and I can conceive looking back what a change occurred in naval strategy when air space over fleets became navigable by airplanes extending from air craft carriers and from land air bases.
We have learned that the US Navy networked the entire ocean with microphones just to listen to russian nuclear subs.
We hear it reputed that our defense forces are working with directed energy weapons from space, presumably from low earth orbit.
What kinds of weapons could be built on Mars, or the moon and moved aloft into orbiting tracks that control pinch points of travel around the solar system and on and off the earth?
And we now know why the exploration will be continue to be driven outward.
To move the pea under the next shell outward.
To find dynamic circulating networks of information bounced so far out, around and back, that time itself would become a defense against those that would seek to harm the information.
And, here is the scary part, for all human spatial expansion has the scary element.
The more protected the backups begin, the more incentive there is to screw with the other guys information that is not as well backed up. If we can restore and they cannot restore, then we win in this primitive attavistic human calculus.
And that is an iPandora’s Box that humanity slipped into after the Age of Discovery 1.0 started and has lived with to this day. It may be been that way before the Age of Discovery 1.o. There may have been an Age of Discovery Beta that I just haven’t read about yet. But his dynamic is real and seems to have some capacity for recurrence. History never repeats. It just comes close with infinite variation within limits.
Nonlinear warfare in an exponentially increased battle space with backed up information off planet seems a harrowingly significant risk to me now.
It didn’t ten years ago.
But it does now.
I suspect that the guys at Office of Net Assessment contemplated all of this at considerable length quite some time ago and what we have been living through the last couple decades is significantly a part of their recommended response.
And then there is the usual blundering and misreads to complicate it further.
Come on people now,
Smile on your brothers (and sisters),
Everybody get together
Try to love one another
Right now…
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Post Script: And I am not even addressing what Steven Hawkings keeps saying through his voice synthesizer; that we ought to stop sending out beacons across the galaxy and universe, because there is a very good chance that any extra terrestrial life we attract the attention of is apt to be superior to us technologically and so we are apt to come to a very bad end, say, the way the native Americans of Mezzo America did when the Europeans went looking for a sea trade routes around the Seljuk Turks road block down at Constantinople and Cairo. Maybe I’m just having one of those days, but this is what my antennae are picking up.
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Bottom line, we need basketball season to start.
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So: have you had time to digest?
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@jaybate-1.0 Holy cow dude! Now I need to read your other book on here. I just got home from work
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@jaybate-1.0 Dude, thats mind blowing stuff. But I do realize that the precursor to science fact is science fiction.
With Nasa taking a back seat to this new age of space exploration, it seems like the progression of means of transporting our billions of terabytes of space in cloud drives off planet will grow unfettered by government/political restrictions. Private multi billionaires (Private Oligarchies) working with their own resources may not have that government oversight committee to slow down that process. The weapons of that new age, presumably developed by the US military may not have many restrictions either except to work within current technological boundaries. Lasers, Rail guns, sonic pulse devices are all weapons that could be planted on Mars or the moon for a first line of defense. I realize sound isnt possible in space but surely wave lengths of some kind could be weaponized out in deep space. To my knowledge, the only country coming close to exploring the sheer distance that the US is capable of going is the Russians. Am I a child of the Cold War era or what?
Anyways, I had to read your second post twice. EMP’s detonated in any major city would surely knock out our communication trade routes. But would it be a permanent knock out to the pre industrial era? It would have to be a very large EMP. Cyber warfare is definitely ramping up. The Chinese have attacked us a few times already. You are right in that we need to move our servers off planet to maintain superiority and keep those trade routes online.
How far ahead of our potential enemies are we in terms of space distance explored? We have to be light years ahead in terms of distance explored. We have already sent unmanned space craft past Jupiter and Saturn. Billion dollars says there was a covert OP to plant the beginning stages of back up cloud storage out there somewhere. But do we have the technology to protect said storage from severely harsh environments of those planets? Liquid nitrogen, massive electrical storms 5 times the size of earth, etc? I guess we do have knowledge of potential super earth type planets that could be potential storage spaces. It will have to be a driverless realm until we can master the art of cryogenic storage units like in the movie Aliens.
And speaking of Aliens, I agree with your Post Script. All this moving off planet of unthinkable amounts of storage space and information on those devices will surely attract other life forms like a drop of blood in a million gallons of water does to a shark. Its mathematically impossible that there is nothing else out there. I love thinking about that stuff!!
There is a book by a favorite author of mine. Douglas Preston, who wrote “Impact” great book about a similar topic.
What better way to keep our minds busy with until basketball season starts?
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Great response. Thx for indulging me and sharing.
Re: who can get out there, and how far–EU, Russia, China and Japan have probed meteorites, if I recall. Front end cost of solar system mapping has been substially completed for some time. Front end propulsion research cost incurred already too. Thus entry cost obstacles are reduced for all. China and Russia now seem to have the combined resources enabling both near and deep space exploration. Japan and France maintain space capacity. Israelis supposed to have nukes and nuclear subs which suggest capacity for ICBMs and space delivery. Since driverless exploration and trade are apt to prevail, that makes it much cheaper to undertake on a solar system level and so more players should be able to compete and so stimulate trade. Defense applications are where space will grow costly, same as on earth. Space trade will have its own unique economic parameters, just as ocean trade has.
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@jaybate-1.0 Thanks for the same thing, for sure.
I was unaware that China and Russia were teaming up. I guess that makes sense though.
Japan and France too. But, they are allies to the US. Whats ours is theirs right? Shared info, shared intelligence amongst each countries intel acronyms. I would assume that they would be with us in defending anything off planet.
Man, if it costs 13 Billion dollars to build the latest and greatest Ford class aircraft carrier, would the R&D on space weapons technology be more or less costly?
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Nano fleets in space seem like the future to me. Very cheap. You do not need gigantic spaceships to move gigantic objects in the void.
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@jaybate-1.0 Oh yah, that makes sense. a thumb drive today can store terabytes on it.
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And nearly instantaneous communication across great distances can be achieved through quantum entanglement
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@jaybate-1.0 Quantum Entanglement? Thats Stephen Hawking type stuff. Waaaaay above my head.
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Not over your head. Formalizations are more complicated than concepts formalized. Less than a decade ago an experiment was done at CERN in Switzerland in the particle accelerator. They were testing the Einstein Podolsky Rosen (EPR) paradox and quantum entanglement hypotheses. Physics of both Newton and Einstein hold locality assumptions. Cause and effect cannot occur at supra-luminal speeds. If I swing a baseball bat here, I cannot cause a baseball across the universe to go out of the park. Cause here can only create effects here. EPR paradox was posed to show that quantum entanglement of particles (altering the spin of one altering the spin of another) implied by quantum mechanics formulas violationed the locality assumption. But the experiment at CERN proved quantum entanglement by holding one particle at CERN and sending its entangled mate out a fiber optic cable some distance; then altering the spin at CERN and measuring spin of the mate. It changed spin. Therefore at the quantum level particle spin can theoretically be altered at great distances. Particle spin can be a 0 and a 1 and so digital communication over great distances with short time lags is theoretically now possible.
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@jaybate-1.0 Yeah, I have read briefly about CERN. That stuff is fascinating to me! I say over my head but what I really mean is I have no formal education in quantum physics. But, I think that I can understand its principles if it is explained in terms I can relate to. What you said for example, that makes sense to me. It sounds like quantum entanglement proves, on a quantum level, that particles can be affected by one another at great distances.
Is there a limit to those distances?
It sounds like similarity of the energy level or frequency of those particles is tied together some how to make them move in tandem, kind of like how twins know what the other is thinking or feeling even being miles apart.
