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the PROs and CONs of VLO(stealth) and High speed bombers
page: 1share:
lets see if this thread works(boy rough board )
the TU-160 and B-1s(not the B-1B) combination of size, speed and range is unparalleled but yet the much smaller and much slower B-2 can counter the TU-160 and B-1s agility by its ability 2 evade hostile enemy radar threw its VLO(or "stealthy") platform and give it the better chance of penetrating an enemy's defensive network.
Or has "stealth" lost some of its luster to were you won't need to build an all out VLO platform to achieve your objectives? Some studies have shown that just by applying and combining some aspects of VLO into an existing "non stealthy" platform could reduce its cross section and enhance its VLO at have the cost. Past recent events have also shown ways inwhich "stealth" can be counted or even defeated. But then again "high speed bombers" are still vulnerable to known countermeasures as well.
is VLO "the future" or can we see a place for both High speed bomber and "stealth" bombers still?
[edit on 16-4-2006 by LAWNMOWERMAN]
the TU-160 and B-1s(not the B-1B) combination of size, speed and range is unparalleled but yet the much smaller and much slower B-2 can counter the TU-160 and B-1s agility by its ability 2 evade hostile enemy radar threw its VLO(or "stealthy") platform and give it the better chance of penetrating an enemy's defensive network.
Or has "stealth" lost some of its luster to were you won't need to build an all out VLO platform to achieve your objectives? Some studies have shown that just by applying and combining some aspects of VLO into an existing "non stealthy" platform could reduce its cross section and enhance its VLO at have the cost. Past recent events have also shown ways inwhich "stealth" can be counted or even defeated. But then again "high speed bombers" are still vulnerable to known countermeasures as well.
is VLO "the future" or can we see a place for both High speed bomber and "stealth" bombers still?
[edit on 16-4-2006 by LAWNMOWERMAN]
is VLO "the future" or can we see a place for both High speed bomber and "stealth" bombers still?
Both are the future, I have no doubt that if hypersonic space orbiting vehicles become a reality then they wont need to be stealthy as their speed and altitude would ensure that any adversary wont have enough time to react. And LO aircraft will still be a necessity as being almost unseen by radar at distances still offers many advantages.
LAWNMOWERMAN,
First off, we have no 'modern' bomber to compare appropriate technology approaches to because every single existing platform was designed to SIOP specs which themselves have long been questionable (at least since Skybolt was abandoned) as 'penetrating strategic airpower'.
>>
The TU-160 and B-1s(not the B-1B) combination of size, speed and range is unparalleled but yet the much smaller and much slower B-2 can counter the TU-160 and B-1s agility by its ability 2 evade hostile enemy radar threw its VLO(or "stealthy") platform and give it the better chance of penetrating an enemy's defensive network.
>>
It depends on how you look at it. The B-1A was always much closer to the spec of the B-58 or Tu-22/22M as a must-base-forward theater asset than anything I would call 'Strategic'.
I also have my doubts as to the equity of trade inherent to the counter-force vs. value mission as typified by manned airpower carryng multiple 350-1MT class weapons into enemy airspace. For /even if you succeed/ in scoring non-empty silos; the likely fallout would still wreck the society which, if decapitated by city-attack would likely still have reserve infrastructure and resources inherent to it's remote/wilderness areas (exactly the place you find ICBM silos).
Indeed, this is the inherent flaw to Chrome Dome type 'rattle the saber, don't draw it!' missioning (as strategic airpower's original raison d'etre) because if you were to blow up five major cities in EITHER the U.S. or Russia, it is extremely unlikely that the governments which ran them would be able to retain sovereign control.
And five wardets means only as few as 10-20 bombers, each with a 2, 1,500nm aeroballistic (fast response from beyond local AD), weapons to hostage threat intentions 'straight to the leaderships ability to exert power over the electorate'.
Because you would have a terribly hard time finding, let alone killing bombers operating more than 500nm outside the continental peripheries of either nation. Yet with a few exceptions (Denver, Novo Sibersk and Kansas City) ALL high-density population assets are coastally exposed.
Indeed, once ICBM/SLBM accuracies were such that individual silo kills were possible (if that is your goal), we should have abandoned the use of SAC-air as a manned system element for strategic policy altogether.
TECHNICALLY, this invalidates the multiple /hundreds/ of 'response oriented' (flush the bombers) systems whose survivability is less than that of either in-place silos, vehicle/rail based TELs, or bastioned SSBN. And since once (for both targeting and attrition reasons) you don't need to maximize bomber carriage densities as a function of payload size for absolute performance and EMP systems redundancy.
EVERY SINGLE ELEMENT OF BOTH THE BUFF, TU-95, BONE and BLACKJACK DESIGN SELECTIONS ARE WRONG.
Again, principally because it is /kinder/ to kill cities, complete with their massed populations as 'cultural centers' than it is to plow up real estate with multiple heavy-yield fallout zones in bagging empty silos.
That said, does the 'bomber' have a place in the modern order of battle?
IMO, yes. Because all three of the primary enablers of it's use as a tactical standoff platform have roots going back to the 60's if not earlier-
TERCOM/AIN (Navajo if not SNARK).
Miniature Advanced Propulsion Systems (Hound Dog if not Quail)
LO (D-21/U-2/A-12)
And so a transition to a tactical CM carrier mission could readily have been made long ago, even if the SAC role was itself transitory toward fadeout.
Which means that _even if_ you have to pay (period equivalent) to FIVE TIMES the cost of cruise systems today, you could have saved enough in losses and multi-mission return raids, just during Linebacker II, to make up the difference in a SMALLER bomber force.
Taking that principal forward to the present, a force of 20 bombers which can each carry 4 AGM-158B, _externally_ (no LO) could still hostage upwards of 80 aimpoints every 15 hours or so. Which is probably about the best you can hope for on a reactionary (GSTF) basis of sudden engagement vs. the /days/ it would take to standup a combined force of tacair and targeting/support mission enablement from disparate base starting points as organizational/transit lags dogpiled on a 'first this before you start that' basis of force integration.
Indeed, such a 'one mission, out, drop and back' airframe could be powered by two, large, commercial powerplants and fly as a sonic cruiser with little or no requirement for penetration aids or targeting gear as militarization weight bloat.
On the other end of the scale, (SSC and below, where there is no effective air defense and approach to within 200nm of shore is thus not automatically precluded), things are a little fuzzier.
You can use the same airframe and still bypass the majority of self-defense systems, simply by flying higher than the trashfire floor.
And you can go internal with a _small_ weapons bay to provide multiple. _high density_ loadings of smaller IAM as a jam-in-place, quickload optimized, multirack numbering upwards of 40-50 shots.
All while maintaining the external count of (4X BRU-61 with 4X GBU-39) coventional 'rack and rail' systems.
For numbered totals of _realistically carriageable_ (rather than the idiotic maximums quoted for the long-interval B-1 CWM reload with next to zero gas) munitions counts that have not been seen since the Big Belly days.
All of them guided to within inches of DMPI as a mean CEP.
The problem here is that even a 737 class bomber is still going to cost roughly 2-3 times the amount of a late generation fighter, per sortie, to fly. And probably 5-7 times that of a UCAV.
It's initial acquisition costs for such a U.S. Only, small inventory, purchase are also going to be astronomical.
Targeting is another issue. You may well be able to strap-on a combination EO and SAR (Sniper and EL-2060 for instance) aperture set to those self-same external pylons in providing a reasonable if simplistic direct engagement option. But /finding/ those targets to 'point the pod at' is still going to likely require a separate, endurant, ISR platform and a netcentric BMC2 system to handoff from.
Which will dogpile costs even as they hamstring independent ops costs.
Furthermore, these assets, if present in densities sufficient to generate targeting for an 80 bomb weapons cabinet, imply the availability of forward operating fields or a carrier which are /far/ more likely to be able to generate a matching force of cheaper, longer enduring, _unmanned_ sorties-per-day coverage.
Predators don't come from nowhere you know. ;-)
There are other arguments against the use of bombers as 'Day 1 Standoff, Day 20 Penetrating' tactical assets as well.
DEWS being foremost among them as a system which can either be airborne directly or use relay mirror technology to put shots 400-500km downrange (to LOS anyway) with 1-2MW class 'only the highest vegetable' power generation.
Another problem is inherent to the much cheaper availability of high density loadout naval CM carriers with hypersonic '800 miles in 8 minutes' cruise systems at /pennies per ton mile/ superior efficiency. While the uSN inherently wishes us not to see it for what it is (one arsenal ship wins a war that 20 DDG couldn't hope to) the fact remains that bulk carriage from well out into the blue will CONTINUE to 'solve most problems' (ASST/ASUW/ASW) for at least another decade or three.
Lastly, the need exists, IMO, to get back to a sufficient force density as to be able to fight at least a win:hold:win dual campaign.
If Tacair steals a bunch of tankers to head east while Stratair flies west, you could end up not having enough of either to do the job. And without Tacair in place, in numbers, Stratair cannot penetrate, even in a single-war scenario force structure.
183 Raptors and 500 JSF (which is all I see the USAF being able to afford, post-Iraq) is not going to provide enough of a force balance to 'enable' a purely penetrating model of direct attack in two MTWs for which stealth might be needed at all.
One way to get around ALL of this would be to employ TAV type aero/space/ strike as an acknowledgment that if nobody likes the Ugly Americans enough to want us on their dirt, maybe we need to come from our own. Yet that is going to be such a HUGE investment, across the board, that even an interim, small, fleet of conventional bombers seems unwise as a hi-lo (risk diverse) resource drain.
>>
Or has "stealth" lost some of its luster to were you won't need to build an all out VLO platform to achieve your objectives? Some studies have shown that just by applying and combining some aspects of VLO into an existing "non stealthy" platform could reduce its cross section and enhance its VLO at have the cost. Past recent events have also shown ways inwhich "stealth" can be counted or even defeated. But then again "high speed bombers" are still vulnerable to known countermeasures as well.
is VLO "the future" or can we see a place for both High speed bomber and "stealth" bombers still?
>>
Again, NO MATTER HOW STEALTHY, I would _not_ take a penetrating strategic asset worth some 1,500 million dollars or more into enemy territory. OTOH, if I can drop that cost to about 500-700 million as a simple CM shooter, the ninja vs. longbow approach starts to look outright silly for what it says:
10-20 asssets with 16 IAM = 320 DPMI
20-50 assets with 4-6 CM= 200 DMPI
Because _in the difference between costs_ for the two different asset acquisitions (25 vs. 30 billion) I can afford FIVE BILLION DOLLARS worth of 'then we go home and reload' _better bullet theory_ munitions advantagement.
Given that the USN recently gave a multiyear contract to Raytheon for 1.6 billion to provide them 2,200 BGM-109 Blk.IV missiles, I feel 'very sure' that the conventional signature + cruise option then wins.
1. Because it can participate in two theater wars with a larger inventory.
2. It can participate in one war in which only limited Tacair is available
without excessive attrition risk.
3. In the difference between 'flying all the way there and back again' vs.
simply launch and leave from international airspace, the conventional
platform can actually OUTGUN the nominally superior ballistic weapons
delivery system platform. Simply because it RTBs and turns faster to fly
out again.
LO is a systemic approach optimized to making the most of a dynamic situation in which the ability to fight-back is less certain a survival mechanism than simply being able to /avoid/ engagement altogether. Since the basis of High Asset Valueing leverage (through support missions and strict doctrinal restrictions) is never enter into a random 'dice toss' scenario, LO's application to bombers is, IMO, overstated.
And vs. the guerilla threat, you are much more likely to be able to use standoff and hard/softkill DIRCM to beat down the threat than reliance on RF LO will provide security from.
Which only leaves the manned-or-no question.
IMO, perhaps as much as 20-25% of a 'fighter' airframe is waste-weight assigned to systems specifically associated with the baby-onboard manned presence. On a bomber, the /direct/ (system and structural) percentages are probably lower, say 10-15%.
But the final _operational_ fraction may in fact be significantly higher.
If you put a man on a platform that takes 8-10hrs to reach a point 2,000nm away, you have significantly impacted his useful time on station (or the cabin requirements for a relief crew) as a pointy-end percentage of combat persistence before it has to come back anyway.
If you employ sonic-cruise (1-1.4) technology to get him there in a hurry, the cycle efficiencies of what is almost certainly now a military core engine are blown to hell which means more gas and less loiter or munition delivery also.
But if you pull the man and simply have the bomber 'get there when it can' and 'stay until it can't', not only the direct weight but the cost trades for profile performance can be ENORMOUS.
Indeed, this may be the one method of in fact combining several previously unthought of performance regimes to include getting there in a supersonic hurry. And then loitering like a Global Hawk at .65 or less for 20+ hours.
If you then ally this with the absence of LO as it's own (severe) weight and materials _cost_ penalty, you can probably start to envision a route forward to an affordable (small) bomber force which works on the 'better bullet theory' of selective munitions enablement in a rather generic platform.
Unfortunately, despite all protestations of "No, NEXT TIME we really mean it!" sincerity aside, I am certain that the first time the USAF in particular will give up their 'cockpit priveleges' as a militiary wellfare service is when their testicles start flying formation with their eyeballs after a massive laser or microwave hit shreds an airframe like tissue paper.
Say around 2015.
Obviously, this is much more likely to happen with a tacair asset than a bomber based airframe but the fact remains that all the Air Services are run by pilot biased leadership and 'fighter pilots' are by far and away at the top of that select heap.
Even Robot /Bombers/, as 'studies' will thus be deemed acceptable only until their 'excess cost' interferes with the next perceived intrusion upon tacair R&M (such as is occuring daily in AfG and elsewhere).
Meanwhile, the French will go ahead with Neuron and the other element of driving technology base change will be proven Vae Victis Vickers true as ONLY WE are using manned shortrange assets and longrange robotic ones. Because ONLY WE are so disliked that we have to come from timezones away to play.
KPl.
First off, we have no 'modern' bomber to compare appropriate technology approaches to because every single existing platform was designed to SIOP specs which themselves have long been questionable (at least since Skybolt was abandoned) as 'penetrating strategic airpower'.
>>
The TU-160 and B-1s(not the B-1B) combination of size, speed and range is unparalleled but yet the much smaller and much slower B-2 can counter the TU-160 and B-1s agility by its ability 2 evade hostile enemy radar threw its VLO(or "stealthy") platform and give it the better chance of penetrating an enemy's defensive network.
>>
It depends on how you look at it. The B-1A was always much closer to the spec of the B-58 or Tu-22/22M as a must-base-forward theater asset than anything I would call 'Strategic'.
I also have my doubts as to the equity of trade inherent to the counter-force vs. value mission as typified by manned airpower carryng multiple 350-1MT class weapons into enemy airspace. For /even if you succeed/ in scoring non-empty silos; the likely fallout would still wreck the society which, if decapitated by city-attack would likely still have reserve infrastructure and resources inherent to it's remote/wilderness areas (exactly the place you find ICBM silos).
Indeed, this is the inherent flaw to Chrome Dome type 'rattle the saber, don't draw it!' missioning (as strategic airpower's original raison d'etre) because if you were to blow up five major cities in EITHER the U.S. or Russia, it is extremely unlikely that the governments which ran them would be able to retain sovereign control.
And five wardets means only as few as 10-20 bombers, each with a 2, 1,500nm aeroballistic (fast response from beyond local AD), weapons to hostage threat intentions 'straight to the leaderships ability to exert power over the electorate'.
Because you would have a terribly hard time finding, let alone killing bombers operating more than 500nm outside the continental peripheries of either nation. Yet with a few exceptions (Denver, Novo Sibersk and Kansas City) ALL high-density population assets are coastally exposed.
Indeed, once ICBM/SLBM accuracies were such that individual silo kills were possible (if that is your goal), we should have abandoned the use of SAC-air as a manned system element for strategic policy altogether.
TECHNICALLY, this invalidates the multiple /hundreds/ of 'response oriented' (flush the bombers) systems whose survivability is less than that of either in-place silos, vehicle/rail based TELs, or bastioned SSBN. And since once (for both targeting and attrition reasons) you don't need to maximize bomber carriage densities as a function of payload size for absolute performance and EMP systems redundancy.
EVERY SINGLE ELEMENT OF BOTH THE BUFF, TU-95, BONE and BLACKJACK DESIGN SELECTIONS ARE WRONG.
Again, principally because it is /kinder/ to kill cities, complete with their massed populations as 'cultural centers' than it is to plow up real estate with multiple heavy-yield fallout zones in bagging empty silos.
That said, does the 'bomber' have a place in the modern order of battle?
IMO, yes. Because all three of the primary enablers of it's use as a tactical standoff platform have roots going back to the 60's if not earlier-
TERCOM/AIN (Navajo if not SNARK).
Miniature Advanced Propulsion Systems (Hound Dog if not Quail)
LO (D-21/U-2/A-12)
And so a transition to a tactical CM carrier mission could readily have been made long ago, even if the SAC role was itself transitory toward fadeout.
Which means that _even if_ you have to pay (period equivalent) to FIVE TIMES the cost of cruise systems today, you could have saved enough in losses and multi-mission return raids, just during Linebacker II, to make up the difference in a SMALLER bomber force.
Taking that principal forward to the present, a force of 20 bombers which can each carry 4 AGM-158B, _externally_ (no LO) could still hostage upwards of 80 aimpoints every 15 hours or so. Which is probably about the best you can hope for on a reactionary (GSTF) basis of sudden engagement vs. the /days/ it would take to standup a combined force of tacair and targeting/support mission enablement from disparate base starting points as organizational/transit lags dogpiled on a 'first this before you start that' basis of force integration.
Indeed, such a 'one mission, out, drop and back' airframe could be powered by two, large, commercial powerplants and fly as a sonic cruiser with little or no requirement for penetration aids or targeting gear as militarization weight bloat.
On the other end of the scale, (SSC and below, where there is no effective air defense and approach to within 200nm of shore is thus not automatically precluded), things are a little fuzzier.
You can use the same airframe and still bypass the majority of self-defense systems, simply by flying higher than the trashfire floor.
And you can go internal with a _small_ weapons bay to provide multiple. _high density_ loadings of smaller IAM as a jam-in-place, quickload optimized, multirack numbering upwards of 40-50 shots.
All while maintaining the external count of (4X BRU-61 with 4X GBU-39) coventional 'rack and rail' systems.
For numbered totals of _realistically carriageable_ (rather than the idiotic maximums quoted for the long-interval B-1 CWM reload with next to zero gas) munitions counts that have not been seen since the Big Belly days.
All of them guided to within inches of DMPI as a mean CEP.
The problem here is that even a 737 class bomber is still going to cost roughly 2-3 times the amount of a late generation fighter, per sortie, to fly. And probably 5-7 times that of a UCAV.
It's initial acquisition costs for such a U.S. Only, small inventory, purchase are also going to be astronomical.
Targeting is another issue. You may well be able to strap-on a combination EO and SAR (Sniper and EL-2060 for instance) aperture set to those self-same external pylons in providing a reasonable if simplistic direct engagement option. But /finding/ those targets to 'point the pod at' is still going to likely require a separate, endurant, ISR platform and a netcentric BMC2 system to handoff from.
Which will dogpile costs even as they hamstring independent ops costs.
Furthermore, these assets, if present in densities sufficient to generate targeting for an 80 bomb weapons cabinet, imply the availability of forward operating fields or a carrier which are /far/ more likely to be able to generate a matching force of cheaper, longer enduring, _unmanned_ sorties-per-day coverage.
Predators don't come from nowhere you know. ;-)
There are other arguments against the use of bombers as 'Day 1 Standoff, Day 20 Penetrating' tactical assets as well.
DEWS being foremost among them as a system which can either be airborne directly or use relay mirror technology to put shots 400-500km downrange (to LOS anyway) with 1-2MW class 'only the highest vegetable' power generation.
Another problem is inherent to the much cheaper availability of high density loadout naval CM carriers with hypersonic '800 miles in 8 minutes' cruise systems at /pennies per ton mile/ superior efficiency. While the uSN inherently wishes us not to see it for what it is (one arsenal ship wins a war that 20 DDG couldn't hope to) the fact remains that bulk carriage from well out into the blue will CONTINUE to 'solve most problems' (ASST/ASUW/ASW) for at least another decade or three.
Lastly, the need exists, IMO, to get back to a sufficient force density as to be able to fight at least a win:hold:win dual campaign.
If Tacair steals a bunch of tankers to head east while Stratair flies west, you could end up not having enough of either to do the job. And without Tacair in place, in numbers, Stratair cannot penetrate, even in a single-war scenario force structure.
183 Raptors and 500 JSF (which is all I see the USAF being able to afford, post-Iraq) is not going to provide enough of a force balance to 'enable' a purely penetrating model of direct attack in two MTWs for which stealth might be needed at all.
One way to get around ALL of this would be to employ TAV type aero/space/ strike as an acknowledgment that if nobody likes the Ugly Americans enough to want us on their dirt, maybe we need to come from our own. Yet that is going to be such a HUGE investment, across the board, that even an interim, small, fleet of conventional bombers seems unwise as a hi-lo (risk diverse) resource drain.
>>
Or has "stealth" lost some of its luster to were you won't need to build an all out VLO platform to achieve your objectives? Some studies have shown that just by applying and combining some aspects of VLO into an existing "non stealthy" platform could reduce its cross section and enhance its VLO at have the cost. Past recent events have also shown ways inwhich "stealth" can be counted or even defeated. But then again "high speed bombers" are still vulnerable to known countermeasures as well.
is VLO "the future" or can we see a place for both High speed bomber and "stealth" bombers still?
>>
Again, NO MATTER HOW STEALTHY, I would _not_ take a penetrating strategic asset worth some 1,500 million dollars or more into enemy territory. OTOH, if I can drop that cost to about 500-700 million as a simple CM shooter, the ninja vs. longbow approach starts to look outright silly for what it says:
10-20 asssets with 16 IAM = 320 DPMI
20-50 assets with 4-6 CM= 200 DMPI
Because _in the difference between costs_ for the two different asset acquisitions (25 vs. 30 billion) I can afford FIVE BILLION DOLLARS worth of 'then we go home and reload' _better bullet theory_ munitions advantagement.
Given that the USN recently gave a multiyear contract to Raytheon for 1.6 billion to provide them 2,200 BGM-109 Blk.IV missiles, I feel 'very sure' that the conventional signature + cruise option then wins.
1. Because it can participate in two theater wars with a larger inventory.
2. It can participate in one war in which only limited Tacair is available
without excessive attrition risk.
3. In the difference between 'flying all the way there and back again' vs.
simply launch and leave from international airspace, the conventional
platform can actually OUTGUN the nominally superior ballistic weapons
delivery system platform. Simply because it RTBs and turns faster to fly
out again.
LO is a systemic approach optimized to making the most of a dynamic situation in which the ability to fight-back is less certain a survival mechanism than simply being able to /avoid/ engagement altogether. Since the basis of High Asset Valueing leverage (through support missions and strict doctrinal restrictions) is never enter into a random 'dice toss' scenario, LO's application to bombers is, IMO, overstated.
And vs. the guerilla threat, you are much more likely to be able to use standoff and hard/softkill DIRCM to beat down the threat than reliance on RF LO will provide security from.
Which only leaves the manned-or-no question.
IMO, perhaps as much as 20-25% of a 'fighter' airframe is waste-weight assigned to systems specifically associated with the baby-onboard manned presence. On a bomber, the /direct/ (system and structural) percentages are probably lower, say 10-15%.
But the final _operational_ fraction may in fact be significantly higher.
If you put a man on a platform that takes 8-10hrs to reach a point 2,000nm away, you have significantly impacted his useful time on station (or the cabin requirements for a relief crew) as a pointy-end percentage of combat persistence before it has to come back anyway.
If you employ sonic-cruise (1-1.4) technology to get him there in a hurry, the cycle efficiencies of what is almost certainly now a military core engine are blown to hell which means more gas and less loiter or munition delivery also.
But if you pull the man and simply have the bomber 'get there when it can' and 'stay until it can't', not only the direct weight but the cost trades for profile performance can be ENORMOUS.
Indeed, this may be the one method of in fact combining several previously unthought of performance regimes to include getting there in a supersonic hurry. And then loitering like a Global Hawk at .65 or less for 20+ hours.
If you then ally this with the absence of LO as it's own (severe) weight and materials _cost_ penalty, you can probably start to envision a route forward to an affordable (small) bomber force which works on the 'better bullet theory' of selective munitions enablement in a rather generic platform.
Unfortunately, despite all protestations of "No, NEXT TIME we really mean it!" sincerity aside, I am certain that the first time the USAF in particular will give up their 'cockpit priveleges' as a militiary wellfare service is when their testicles start flying formation with their eyeballs after a massive laser or microwave hit shreds an airframe like tissue paper.
Say around 2015.
Obviously, this is much more likely to happen with a tacair asset than a bomber based airframe but the fact remains that all the Air Services are run by pilot biased leadership and 'fighter pilots' are by far and away at the top of that select heap.
Even Robot /Bombers/, as 'studies' will thus be deemed acceptable only until their 'excess cost' interferes with the next perceived intrusion upon tacair R&M (such as is occuring daily in AfG and elsewhere).
Meanwhile, the French will go ahead with Neuron and the other element of driving technology base change will be proven Vae Victis Vickers true as ONLY WE are using manned shortrange assets and longrange robotic ones. Because ONLY WE are so disliked that we have to come from timezones away to play.
KPl.
WestPoint23 and CH1466 thanks for the response
CH1466, very in-depth take and assessment on the subject, in a nutshell
you brought up some key points that now i must consider and take in to account
WestPiont23
agree too, as the technology evolves we will still see a "strategic need" for both
CH1466, very in-depth take and assessment on the subject, in a nutshell
you brought up some key points that now i must consider and take in to account
WestPiont23
agree too, as the technology evolves we will still see a "strategic need" for both
Originally posted by LAWNMOWERMAN
can we see a place for both High speed bomber and "stealth" bombers still?
either is good but both is by far the best. Stealth so that they cant see you until you are close and then high speed so they dont have time to engage.
justin
Funny you should ask this now! I've been doing private research into just this issue!
The basic issue is the nature of the threats that are facing bombers in the feild. Today, more then ever it's a combination of ground and air threats. each kind of threat requires the right combination of responses to each threat. What is needed is something simular to what they are doing with fighters.
I would think if they could make a version of the B-2 that could Supercruise, that might be the best answer for our next penetrating bomber. Maybe we should develop next generation stealth and apply it to a bomber that can supercruise at about Mach 1.4 to 1.8!
Tim
The basic issue is the nature of the threats that are facing bombers in the feild. Today, more then ever it's a combination of ground and air threats. each kind of threat requires the right combination of responses to each threat. What is needed is something simular to what they are doing with fighters.
I would think if they could make a version of the B-2 that could Supercruise, that might be the best answer for our next penetrating bomber. Maybe we should develop next generation stealth and apply it to a bomber that can supercruise at about Mach 1.4 to 1.8!
Tim
Maybe we should develop next generation stealth and apply it to a bomber that can supercruise at about Mach 1.4 to 1.8!
One bomber that has that potential is the FB-22. It would combine stealth with speeds around Mach 2 and perhaps super cruise ability. The faster US bomber now is the B-1B at speeds around Mach 1.25.
Speed. Air Force leaders have also said that the FB-22 is an attractive candidate for a regional bomber, because its speed, potentially up to Mach 1.8+, would make it effective in attacking moving or time-critical targets. Secretary Roche is reported to have said that the Air Force needs a supersonic bomber to more effectively attack mobile targets, particularly as the United States is engaged in a prolonged war on global terrorism. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers also stated that speed is critical in attacking rapidly moving targets, particularly in counter-terrorism operations.
CRS Report FB-22 PDF
[edit on 18-4-2006 by WestPoint23]
Originally posted by WestPoint23
Maybe we should develop next generation stealth and apply it to a bomber that can supercruise at about Mach 1.4 to 1.8!
One bomber that has that potential is the FB-22. It would combine stealth with speeds around Mach 2 and perhaps super cruise ability.
[edit on 18-4-2006 by WestPoint23]
B.T.W. what ever happened to the FB-23 concept? There seems to be no mention of it! I would think an FB-23 could do the job just as well or maybe even better then the FB-22. If I recall correctly, speed range and stealth were the the three big areas where the YF-23 outprformed the YF-22 during the ATF competition by the largest margines.
Tim
[edit on 19-4-2006 by ghost]
Remember the riddle, “How do you tell the men from the boys? Answer: By the price of their toys.” Holy Christ! I just did a spell check on this
lengthy exposition and I have concluded maybe I can read it and maybe I cannot. I am two years post baccalaureate but this seems to be of little aid
here. This must surely be written in what unfriendly critics have called “Pentagonese.” A language understandable only to the initiate, which from
the Military Industrial Congressional Complex point of view, is just what the doctor ordered. Or, rephrased, always keep the taxpayers in the dark.
“If it weren’t for needing them so much, we’d discount them altogether.”
I’m given somewhat to quick assessments, and the first words of description that came to my mind here were those memorable words of frustration attributed to Marie Antoinette, “Let them eat bread!” Perhaps it is pure coincidence but this epistle has the same number of words as St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, which may give a hint of the usefulness of both? 1,640 words.
OK, I give up. What’s “SIOP?”
I assume “VLO” means “very low something.” Maybe “observability?” Help me, please. The subject matter seems to relate more to a grand strategy debate of the 1980s than to a debate valid in 2006. Unless I have missed some crucial point or closely held perceptive ordinary citizens are not privy to.
Q. Do our highly paid leaders actually sit around talking like this? I’m serious. I mean no disparagement of your talent, CH1466, that speaks for itself. Language is supposed to convey facts, ideas, thoughts, and etc., but not to befuddle the reader or listener. Could this commentary be re-written, in American English so I can understand it, and assume I am too uninformed to decipher the acronyms. In 500 words or less?
Well, I offer this observation. Any government that has failed its people so badly as to launch a “5 city take out destruction operation” against another country ought to be replaced. Pronto! And probably by the first five primates you find a the closest zoo which would be an upgrade in cellphone jargon.
Sweet Jesus. I am embarrassed again. What the heck is a “w-a-r-d-e-t?” From the context it must relate to a city. I do recall many American cities were divided into wards, so maybe this derives from a Tammany Hall setting or something like that? And, what does “AD” mean if not Anno Domina. You know CH1466, and I know a nautical mile is 1.1515 times a statute mile, but frankly, I never use nautical miles. I am trying to update to kilometers, about .62 of a mile, but at my age, it is slow going. I’m not even going to go to what “hostage threat” and the somewhat foreboding connotations implicit in “leadership’s ability to exert power over the electorate” mean because that may well be projected towards the United States of America, internally, and not towards Russia. Talk about scary. Now I’m thinking Genghis Khan.
I know what ICBM stands for, but you got me on SLBM. Maybe the “S” is for “short?” but then, what’s the “L?” Oh, I’ve worked it out, “Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile.” If the degree of accuracy you recite was a product of the 1970s, then abandoning our manned bomber capability would have put us into a very much wakened position, world-wide power projection, IMO, because we’d be into an either or negotiating stance. Not good.
OK, CH1466, you’ve got me again. What’s a “TEL?” I understand “SSBN” which are they not sometimes called “thumpers?” “EMP” is electro-magnetic pulse, that bogey man which will bring down the Universe! to hear some of its advocates or naysayers.
I’d call this the “LeMay Doctrine.”
Wow! A new use for AF 1. I give up, CH1466. I am sorry I cannot engage you in a more friendly way, but I am not a fan of the New Speak Language as adopted by the Pentagon and its preferred contractors. I’d like to be able to say “Low Bidder” contractors, but when you have only one supplier bidding and its former CEO is the government’s Procurement Officer, well, you can see where that is leading.
Unfortunately, I hear our congresspersons on the Sunday talk shows use this same lingo and they act as if everyone knows and understands what they are saying. In truth, hardly anyone knows and that means, ever fewer care, what they are talking about, which may have been the goal of New Speak all the time? The ultimate test of any new language is its ability to convey information. Failing that, I predict a quick demise for New Speak as soon as we get CFR - Campaign Finance Reform - the necessary antecedent to a genuine reform and overhaul of our government to better serve us in the 3rd millennia.
Remember the riddle, “How do you tell the men from the boys? Answer: By the price of their toys.” Holy Christ! I just did a spell check on this lengthy exposition and I have concluded maybe I can read it and maybe I cannot. I am two years post baccalaureate but this seems to be of little aid here. This must surely be written in what unfriendly critics have called “Pentagonese.” A language understandable only to the initiate, which from the Military Industrial Congressional Complex point of view, is just what the doctor ordered. Or, rephrased, always keep the taxpayers in the dark. “If it weren’t for needing them so much, we’d discount them altogether.”
I’m given somewhat to quick assessments, and the first words of description that came to my mind here were those memorable words of frustration attributed to Marie Antoinette, “Let them eat bread!” Perhaps it is pure coincidence but this epistle has the same number of words as St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, which may give a hint of the usefulness of both? 1,640 words.
OK, I give up. What’s “SIOP?”
I assume “VLO” means “very low something.” Maybe “observability?” Help me, please. The subject matter seems to relate more to a grand strategy debate of the 1980s than to a debate valid in 2006. Unless I have missed some crucial point or closely held perceptive ordinary citizens are not privy to.
Q. Do our highly paid leaders actually sit around talking like this? I’m serious. I mean no disparagement of your talent, CH1466, that speaks for itself. Language is supposed to convey facts, ideas, thoughts, and etc., but not to befuddle the reader or listener. Could this commentary be re-written, in American English so I can understand it, and assume I am too uninformed to decipher the acronyms. In 500 words or less?
Well, I offer this observation. Any government that has failed its people so badly as to launch a “5 city take out destruction operation” against another country ought to be replaced. Pronto! And probably by the first five primates you find a the closest zoo which would be an upgrade in cellphone jargon.
Sweet Jesus. I am embarrassed again. What the heck is a
“w-a-r-d-e-t?” From the context it must relate to a city. I do recall many American cities were divided into wards, so maybe this derives from a Tammany Hall setting or something like that? And, what does “AD” mean if not Anno Domina. You know CH1466, and I know a nautical mile is 1.1515 times a statute mile, but frankly, I never use nautical miles. I am trying to update to kilometers, about .62 of a mile, but at my age, it is slow going. I’m not even going to go to “hostage threat” and the somewhat foreboding condition “leadership’s ability to exert power over the electorate” because that may well be directed towards the United States of America and not to Russia. Talk about scary. Now I’m thinking Genghis Khan.
I know what ICBM stands for, but you got me on SLBM. Maybe the “S” is for “short?” but then, what’s the “L?” Oh, I’ve worked it out, “Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile.” If the degree of accuracy you recite was a product of the 1970s, then abandoning our manned bomber capability would have put us into a very much wakened position, world-wide power projection, IMO, because we’d be into an either or negotiating stance. Not good.
OK, CH1466, you’ve got me again. What’s a “TEL?” I understand “SSBN” which are they not sometimes called “thumpers?” “EMP” is electro-magnetic pulse, that bogey man which will bring down the Universe! to hear some of its advocates or naysayers.
I’d call this the “LeMay Doctrine.”
Wow! A new use for Air Force 1. I give up, CH1466. I am sorry I cannot engage you in a more friendly way, but I am not a fan of the New Speak Language as adopted by the Pentagon and its preferred contractors. I’d like to be able to say “Low Bidder” contractors, but when you have only one supplier bidding and its former CEO is the government’s Procurement Officer, well, you can see where that is leading.
Unfortunately, I hear our congresspersons on the Sunday talk shows use this same lingo and they act as if everyone knows and understands what they are saying. In truth, hardly anyone knows and that means, ever fewer care, what they are talking about, which may have been the goal of New Speak all the time? The ultimate test of any new language is its ability to convey information. Failing that, I predict a quick demise for New Speak as soon as we get CFR - Campaign Finance Reform - the necessary antecedent to a genuine reform and overhaul of our government to better serve us in the 3rd millennia.
[edit on 4/19/2006 by donwhite]
I’m given somewhat to quick assessments, and the first words of description that came to my mind here were those memorable words of frustration attributed to Marie Antoinette, “Let them eat bread!” Perhaps it is pure coincidence but this epistle has the same number of words as St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, which may give a hint of the usefulness of both? 1,640 words.
posted by ch1466: “LAWNMOWERMAN, First off, we have no 'modern' bomber to compare because every single existing platform was designed to SIOP specs which have been questioned as 'penetrating strategic air power'. [Edited by Don W]
OK, I give up. What’s “SIOP?”
The TU-160 and B-1s combination of size, speed and range is unparalleled but yet the much smaller and much slower B-2 can counter the TU-160 and B-1s agility by its ability to evade hostile enemy radar threw its VLO (or "stealthy") platform and give it the better chance of penetrating an enemy's defensive network. It depends on how you look at it.
I assume “VLO” means “very low something.” Maybe “observability?” Help me, please. The subject matter seems to relate more to a grand strategy debate of the 1980s than to a debate valid in 2006. Unless I have missed some crucial point or closely held perceptive ordinary citizens are not privy to.
The B-1A was always much closer to the spec of the B-58 or Tu-22 as a must-base-forward theater asset than anything I would call 'Strategic.' I also have my doubts as to the equity of trade inherent to the counter-force vs. value mission as typified by manned air power carrying multiple 350-1MT class weapons into enemy airspace. Even if you succeed/ in scoring non-empty silos; the likely fallout would still wreck the society which, if decapitated by city-attack would likely still have reserve infrastructure and resources inherent to it's remote/wilderness areas (exactly the place you find ICBM silos).
Q. Do our highly paid leaders actually sit around talking like this? I’m serious. I mean no disparagement of your talent, CH1466, that speaks for itself. Language is supposed to convey facts, ideas, thoughts, and etc., but not to befuddle the reader or listener. Could this commentary be re-written, in American English so I can understand it, and assume I am too uninformed to decipher the acronyms. In 500 words or less?
“ . . this is the inherent flaw to Chrome Dome type 'rattle the saber, don't draw it!' mission-ing (as strategic air power's original raison d'etre) because if you were to blow up five major cities in EITHER the U.S. or Russia, it is extremely unlikely that the governments which ran them would be able to retain sovereign control.
Well, I offer this observation. Any government that has failed its people so badly as to launch a “5 city take out destruction operation” against another country ought to be replaced. Pronto! And probably by the first five primates you find a the closest zoo which would be an upgrade in cellphone jargon.
And five wardets means only as few as 10-20 bombers, each with 2, 1,500 nm aeroballistic (fast response from beyond local AD), weapons to hostage threat intentions 'straight to the leadership’s ability to exert power over the electorate'. Because you would have a terribly hard time finding, let alone killing bombers operating more than 500 nm outside the continental peripheries of either nation.
Sweet Jesus. I am embarrassed again. What the heck is a “w-a-r-d-e-t?” From the context it must relate to a city. I do recall many American cities were divided into wards, so maybe this derives from a Tammany Hall setting or something like that? And, what does “AD” mean if not Anno Domina. You know CH1466, and I know a nautical mile is 1.1515 times a statute mile, but frankly, I never use nautical miles. I am trying to update to kilometers, about .62 of a mile, but at my age, it is slow going. I’m not even going to go to what “hostage threat” and the somewhat foreboding connotations implicit in “leadership’s ability to exert power over the electorate” mean because that may well be projected towards the United States of America, internally, and not towards Russia. Talk about scary. Now I’m thinking Genghis Khan.
Yet with a few exceptions (Denver, Novo Sibersk and Kansas City) ALL high-density population assets are coastally exposed. Indeed, once ICBM and SLBM accuracies were such that individual silo kills were possible (if that is your goal), we should have abandoned the use of SAC-air as a manned system element for strategic policy altogether.
I know what ICBM stands for, but you got me on SLBM. Maybe the “S” is for “short?” but then, what’s the “L?” Oh, I’ve worked it out, “Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile.” If the degree of accuracy you recite was a product of the 1970s, then abandoning our manned bomber capability would have put us into a very much wakened position, world-wide power projection, IMO, because we’d be into an either or negotiating stance. Not good.
TECHNICALLY, this invalidates the multiple hundreds of 'response oriented' (flush the bombers) systems whose survivability is less than that of either in-place silos, vehicle rail based TELs, or bastioned SSBN. And since once (for both targeting and attrition reasons) you don't need to maximize bomber carriage densities as a function of payload size for absolute performance and EMP systems redundancy.
OK, CH1466, you’ve got me again. What’s a “TEL?” I understand “SSBN” which are they not sometimes called “thumpers?” “EMP” is electro-magnetic pulse, that bogey man which will bring down the Universe! to hear some of its advocates or naysayers.
Again, principally because it is kinder to kill cities, complete with their massed populations as 'cultural centers' than it is to plow up real estate with multiple heavy-yield fallout zones in bagging empty silos. That said, does the 'bomber' have a place in the modern order of battle? IMO, yes. Because all three of the primary enabler’s of it's use as a tactical standoff platform have roots going back to the 60's if not earlier-
I’d call this the “LeMay Doctrine.”
Taking that principal forward to the present, a force of 20 bombers which can each carry 4 AGM-158Bs, could still [hold] hostage 80 aimpoints [targets] every 15 hours or so. Which is probably about the best you can hope for on a reactionary (GSTF) basis of sudden engagement vs. the days it would take to standup a combined force of tactical and targeting support mission enablement from disparate base starting points as organizational transit lags dog piled on a 'first this before you start that' basis of force integration. Indeed, such a 'one mission, out, drop and back' airframe could be powered by two, large, commercial powerplants and fly as a sonic cruiser with little or no requirement for penetration aids or targeting gear as militarization weight bloat.
Wow! A new use for AF 1. I give up, CH1466. I am sorry I cannot engage you in a more friendly way, but I am not a fan of the New Speak Language as adopted by the Pentagon and its preferred contractors. I’d like to be able to say “Low Bidder” contractors, but when you have only one supplier bidding and its former CEO is the government’s Procurement Officer, well, you can see where that is leading.
Unfortunately, I hear our congresspersons on the Sunday talk shows use this same lingo and they act as if everyone knows and understands what they are saying. In truth, hardly anyone knows and that means, ever fewer care, what they are talking about, which may have been the goal of New Speak all the time? The ultimate test of any new language is its ability to convey information. Failing that, I predict a quick demise for New Speak as soon as we get CFR - Campaign Finance Reform - the necessary antecedent to a genuine reform and overhaul of our government to better serve us in the 3rd millennia.
Remember the riddle, “How do you tell the men from the boys? Answer: By the price of their toys.” Holy Christ! I just did a spell check on this lengthy exposition and I have concluded maybe I can read it and maybe I cannot. I am two years post baccalaureate but this seems to be of little aid here. This must surely be written in what unfriendly critics have called “Pentagonese.” A language understandable only to the initiate, which from the Military Industrial Congressional Complex point of view, is just what the doctor ordered. Or, rephrased, always keep the taxpayers in the dark. “If it weren’t for needing them so much, we’d discount them altogether.”
I’m given somewhat to quick assessments, and the first words of description that came to my mind here were those memorable words of frustration attributed to Marie Antoinette, “Let them eat bread!” Perhaps it is pure coincidence but this epistle has the same number of words as St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, which may give a hint of the usefulness of both? 1,640 words.
posted by ch1466: “LAWNMOWERMAN, First off, we have no 'modern' bomber to compare because every single existing platform was designed to SIOP specs which have been questioned as 'penetrating strategic air power'. [Edited by Don W]
OK, I give up. What’s “SIOP?”
The TU-160 and B-1s combination of size, speed and range is unparalleled but yet the much smaller and much slower B-2 can counter the TU-160 and B-1s agility by its ability to evade hostile enemy radar threw its VLO (or "stealthy") platform and give it the better chance of penetrating an enemy's defensive network. It depends on how you look at it.
I assume “VLO” means “very low something.” Maybe “observability?” Help me, please. The subject matter seems to relate more to a grand strategy debate of the 1980s than to a debate valid in 2006. Unless I have missed some crucial point or closely held perceptive ordinary citizens are not privy to.
The B-1A was always much closer to the spec of the B-58 or Tu-22 as a must-base-forward theater asset than anything I would call 'Strategic.' I also have my doubts as to the equity of trade inherent to the counter-force vs. value mission as typified by manned air power carrying multiple 350-1MT class weapons into enemy airspace. Even if you succeed/ in scoring non-empty silos; the likely fallout would still wreck the society which, if decapitated by city-attack would likely still have reserve infrastructure and resources inherent to it's remote/wilderness areas (exactly the place you find ICBM silos).
Q. Do our highly paid leaders actually sit around talking like this? I’m serious. I mean no disparagement of your talent, CH1466, that speaks for itself. Language is supposed to convey facts, ideas, thoughts, and etc., but not to befuddle the reader or listener. Could this commentary be re-written, in American English so I can understand it, and assume I am too uninformed to decipher the acronyms. In 500 words or less?
“ . . this is the inherent flaw to Chrome Dome type 'rattle the saber, don't draw it!' mission-ing (as strategic air power's original raison d'etre) because if you were to blow up five major cities in EITHER the U.S. or Russia, it is extremely unlikely that the governments which ran them would be able to retain sovereign control.
Well, I offer this observation. Any government that has failed its people so badly as to launch a “5 city take out destruction operation” against another country ought to be replaced. Pronto! And probably by the first five primates you find a the closest zoo which would be an upgrade in cellphone jargon.
And five wardets means only as few as 10-20 bombers, each with 2, 1,500 nm aeroballistic (fast response from beyond local AD), weapons to hostage threat intentions 'straight to the leadership’s ability to exert power over the electorate'. Because you would have a terribly hard time finding, let alone killing bombers operating more than 500 nm outside the continental peripheries of either nation.
Sweet Jesus. I am embarrassed again. What the heck is a
“w-a-r-d-e-t?” From the context it must relate to a city. I do recall many American cities were divided into wards, so maybe this derives from a Tammany Hall setting or something like that? And, what does “AD” mean if not Anno Domina. You know CH1466, and I know a nautical mile is 1.1515 times a statute mile, but frankly, I never use nautical miles. I am trying to update to kilometers, about .62 of a mile, but at my age, it is slow going. I’m not even going to go to “hostage threat” and the somewhat foreboding condition “leadership’s ability to exert power over the electorate” because that may well be directed towards the United States of America and not to Russia. Talk about scary. Now I’m thinking Genghis Khan.
Yet with a few exceptions (Denver, Novo Sibersk and Kansas City) ALL high-density population assets are coastally exposed. Indeed, once ICBM and SLBM accuracies were such that individual silo kills were possible (if that is your goal), we should have abandoned the use of SAC-air as a manned system element for strategic policy altogether.
I know what ICBM stands for, but you got me on SLBM. Maybe the “S” is for “short?” but then, what’s the “L?” Oh, I’ve worked it out, “Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile.” If the degree of accuracy you recite was a product of the 1970s, then abandoning our manned bomber capability would have put us into a very much wakened position, world-wide power projection, IMO, because we’d be into an either or negotiating stance. Not good.
TECHNICALLY, this invalidates the multiple hundreds of 'response oriented' (flush the bombers) systems whose survivability is less than that of either in-place silos, vehicle rail based TELs, or bastioned SSBN. And since once (for both targeting and attrition reasons) you don't need to maximize bomber carriage densities as a function of payload size for absolute performance and EMP systems redundancy.
OK, CH1466, you’ve got me again. What’s a “TEL?” I understand “SSBN” which are they not sometimes called “thumpers?” “EMP” is electro-magnetic pulse, that bogey man which will bring down the Universe! to hear some of its advocates or naysayers.
Again, principally because it is kinder to kill cities, complete with their massed populations as 'cultural centers' than it is to plow up real estate with multiple heavy-yield fallout zones in bagging empty silos. That said, does the 'bomber' have a place in the modern order of battle? IMO, yes. Because all three of the primary enabler’s of it's use as a tactical standoff platform have roots going back to the 60's if not earlier-
I’d call this the “LeMay Doctrine.”
Taking that principal forward to the present, a force of 20 bombers which can each carry 4 AGM-158Bs, could still [hold] hostage 80 aimpoints [targets] every 15 hours or so. Which is probably about the best you can hope for on a reactionary (GSTF) basis of sudden engagement vs. the days it would take to standup a combined force of tactical and targeting support mission enablement from disparate base starting points as organizational transit lags dog piled on a 'first this before you start that' basis of force integration. Indeed, such a 'one mission, out, drop and back' airframe could be powered by two, large, commercial powerplants and fly as a sonic cruiser with little or no requirement for penetration aids or targeting gear as militarization weight bloat.
Wow! A new use for Air Force 1. I give up, CH1466. I am sorry I cannot engage you in a more friendly way, but I am not a fan of the New Speak Language as adopted by the Pentagon and its preferred contractors. I’d like to be able to say “Low Bidder” contractors, but when you have only one supplier bidding and its former CEO is the government’s Procurement Officer, well, you can see where that is leading.
Unfortunately, I hear our congresspersons on the Sunday talk shows use this same lingo and they act as if everyone knows and understands what they are saying. In truth, hardly anyone knows and that means, ever fewer care, what they are talking about, which may have been the goal of New Speak all the time? The ultimate test of any new language is its ability to convey information. Failing that, I predict a quick demise for New Speak as soon as we get CFR - Campaign Finance Reform - the necessary antecedent to a genuine reform and overhaul of our government to better serve us in the 3rd millennia.
[edit on 4/19/2006 by donwhite]
Don,
I can help you out with a few of them:
SIOP: Single Integrated Operational Plan. Basically, a pre-canned strategy for fighting a nuclear conflict for a given scenario. These are very classified warplans, when are periodically revised and updated, which military commanders can use in the event of a nuclear exchange with an adversary. Primarily a product of the Cold War, they are still in use within the US and NATO.
VLO: Very Low Observable, aka "Stealth". Within the DoD, there are three general levels of stealth. "Low Observable" (LO) is basic stealth capability. "Very Low Observable" (VLO) is advanced stealth capability. "Extremely Low Observable" (XLO) is for cutting edge stealth systems.
TEL: Transporter-Erector Launcher. A movable vehicle designed to transport and launch ballistic missiles. Recall during the First Gulf War the Coalition forces were "Scud hunting"? These were the mobile vehicles that carried Scuds, and where hard to locate because after the Scud was launched, the vehicle could quickly pack up shop and skedaddle out of town.
Some of the others have me scratching my head as well, and I have been in this business for over 20 years. Oh, and BTW, this is not how people in the DoD and their "preferred contractors" communicate. We speak english, just like most everyone else.
And Kurt, having to constantly wade through your incessant rants and diatribe against the human pilot is really becoming tiresome. You sound like a broken record. We get the hint - you don't like pilots and think that UAVs are the future. Well, I think warp drive and interstellar travel is the future, but that doesn't mean it's going to happen in my lifetime. And before you go on about the current state of the art, know that I already have intimate knowledge of all of the UAV ongoings at Mr. Tether's organization. The aerospace technology is promising, and some systems may even see action, but wholesale changes in warfighting philosophies will not change until the C3 infrastructure becomes mature and, more importantly, protectable. That is a generation away, at best. So get used to the concept of Roger Ramjet in the cockpit.
I can help you out with a few of them:
SIOP: Single Integrated Operational Plan. Basically, a pre-canned strategy for fighting a nuclear conflict for a given scenario. These are very classified warplans, when are periodically revised and updated, which military commanders can use in the event of a nuclear exchange with an adversary. Primarily a product of the Cold War, they are still in use within the US and NATO.
VLO: Very Low Observable, aka "Stealth". Within the DoD, there are three general levels of stealth. "Low Observable" (LO) is basic stealth capability. "Very Low Observable" (VLO) is advanced stealth capability. "Extremely Low Observable" (XLO) is for cutting edge stealth systems.
TEL: Transporter-Erector Launcher. A movable vehicle designed to transport and launch ballistic missiles. Recall during the First Gulf War the Coalition forces were "Scud hunting"? These were the mobile vehicles that carried Scuds, and where hard to locate because after the Scud was launched, the vehicle could quickly pack up shop and skedaddle out of town.
Some of the others have me scratching my head as well, and I have been in this business for over 20 years. Oh, and BTW, this is not how people in the DoD and their "preferred contractors" communicate. We speak english, just like most everyone else.
And Kurt, having to constantly wade through your incessant rants and diatribe against the human pilot is really becoming tiresome. You sound like a broken record. We get the hint - you don't like pilots and think that UAVs are the future. Well, I think warp drive and interstellar travel is the future, but that doesn't mean it's going to happen in my lifetime. And before you go on about the current state of the art, know that I already have intimate knowledge of all of the UAV ongoings at Mr. Tether's organization. The aerospace technology is promising, and some systems may even see action, but wholesale changes in warfighting philosophies will not change until the C3 infrastructure becomes mature and, more importantly, protectable. That is a generation away, at best. So get used to the concept of Roger Ramjet in the cockpit.
posted by Pyros
Don, I can help you out with a few of them: SIOP: Single Integrated Operational Plan. Primarily a product of the Cold War, they are still in use within the US and NATO. [Edited by Don W]
Thanks, Pyros, I understand the need for contingency plans on even inconceivable contingencies.
VLO: Very Low Observable, aka "Stealth" "Extremely Low Observable" (XLO) is for cutting edge stealth systems.
TEL: Transporter-Erector Launcher. A movable vehicle designed to transport and launch ballistic missiles. Recall . .
Also, recall a good movie with Clint Eastwood hijacking one in the Siberian forest? Or defeating it?
Some of the others have me scratching my head as well, and I have been in this business for over 20 years. Oh, and BTW, this is not how people in the DoD and their "preferred contractors" communicate. We speak English, just like most everyone else.
That is a comfort to know. Actually, I have the highest regard for career U.S. Government employees. Without you, we could not exist! Political appointees are another breed altogether. Mostly like vultures.
And Kurt, war fighting philosophies will not change until the C3 infrastructure becomes mature and, more importantly, protect able. That is a generation away.
Uh, Pie, what is “C3?”
[edit on 4/19/2006 by donwhite]
"Threat Daddy" is a nickname I picked up in the service, due to what some of my shipmates referred to as a "diabolical" ability to recite the
"threat" of the local bad guys where we were operating (i.e., what kind of aircraft they flew, what weapons the uses, what sensors they had, what
tactics they used, etc....) It was only because I had healthy interest in the subject matter...
C3 - Command, control & communications. In this reference, the things that make UAVs "unmanned" in the first place. The computers that run them, and the data links that allow the UAV to communicate with its remote operator(s). Its the most vulnerable part of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle / Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle technology.
C3 - Command, control & communications. In this reference, the things that make UAVs "unmanned" in the first place. The computers that run them, and the data links that allow the UAV to communicate with its remote operator(s). Its the most vulnerable part of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle / Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle technology.
i think the FB 22 is agreat replacement for the B 2 it's supposed to supercruise at mach 1.6 even though it's a larger F 22 it will be stealthier than th B 2 and the F 22 since it takes the advances in stealth tech from now until the fighter bomber is made. It's also a fighter.
The new FB-22 differs markedly from the one originally conceived, according to John E. Perrigo, senior manager of combat air systems for Lockheed Martin’s business development branch. One major change is that it will be stealthier than the F/A-22.
“This thing will have improved stealth capabilities over any other airplane ever built,” Perrigo said. The FB-22 will incorporate all the advances in low observable or stealth technology that have come since the F/A-22 design was set, roughly 12 years ago. Perrigo claimed that the FB-22 will be even stealthier than the B-2 bomber.....
“It can go places other airplanes can’t go. Even the B-2 can’t go back there [far behind enemy lines] and survive and ... do global persistent attack.”
Compared to the F/A-22, the FB-22 will be “more stealthy, and it needs to be, because it’s going to operate in an environment where the F/A-22 may not. ... It could be down in very direct support of forces on the ground—we see that as one of its prime missions.
www.afa.org...
hope it comes out although the b 2 and raptor stealth will be efficient for the fututre but hey the more stealth the better.
[edit on 19-4-2006 by urmomma158]
[edit on 19-4-2006 by urmomma158]
posted by Pyros: “Threat Daddy" is a nickname I picked up in the service, due to what some of my shipmates referred to as a "diabolical" ability to recite the "threat" of the local bad guys. . C3 - Command, control & communications. In this reference, the things that make UAVs "unmanned" in the first place. [Edited by Don W]
And thanks one more time, Pyros. It is a (lamentable for me) fact that I am visually handicapped. Your “threat” became my “thread.” In ‘03 I sustained a major retinal detachment in my good eye. Thank you God. The repair was made promptly - I was on the OP table in less that 10 hours after the event on Sunday morning of the July 4 weekend - and the care was competent. It is just that it does not work every time, unlike the old Dr Kildare shows.
I had already scratched the cornea on my other eye but did not worry about that as I was 20/20 in my good eye. Now I’m 20/400 in the retinal eye and 20/70 in the scratched eye. I am afraid to have that scratched eye worked on because I’m sure my pineal ‘eye’ would not work well if anything went wrong.
came across an interesting on online report that stated that the Pentagon has given the USAF the green light and go ahead for the plans for the
development of an new NG-LRS(Next Generation-Long-Range Strike) weapons platform the apparent successor to the B-2, by 2018.
because of these requirements, have eliminated the FB-22 for contention as the next B-2 successor as of now, reason being for the FB-22's limited range and payload. but also note that the report did not state that the FB-22 program would be totally dropped.
the USAF has set a goal to increase its long-range strike by 50%(a big # ) by 2025.
the LRS is to be a bomber of much greater range and higher payload than in its current inventory
the goal of the LSR is 2 provide the USAF an weapons platform thats less dependent on forward ABs than its fighters and will give the USAF what they call quote " the speed of reaction and persistence" a funny way of saying a very fast bomber capable of hitting targets very soon after they have been detected in well defended airspace.
[edit on 20-4-2006 by LAWNMOWERMAN]
because of these requirements, have eliminated the FB-22 for contention as the next B-2 successor as of now, reason being for the FB-22's limited range and payload. but also note that the report did not state that the FB-22 program would be totally dropped.
the USAF has set a goal to increase its long-range strike by 50%(a big # ) by 2025.
the LRS is to be a bomber of much greater range and higher payload than in its current inventory
the goal of the LSR is 2 provide the USAF an weapons platform thats less dependent on forward ABs than its fighters and will give the USAF what they call quote " the speed of reaction and persistence" a funny way of saying a very fast bomber capable of hitting targets very soon after they have been detected in well defended airspace.
[edit on 20-4-2006 by LAWNMOWERMAN]
DonWhite,
First off, I'm about as far left of the MIGC as you could get. I don't believe our government works. I no longer even believe it's the best of all the alternatives.
My express point of view is that WAR MUST WORK (must pay for itself). Or be abandoned. Because it is the nature of war, not to split societies but to bring them together for reasons of conservation and amalgamation of resources.
One of the chief dangers of longrange-anything is thus that you gain an ability to influence events in a desultory rather than deterministic fashion.
>>
Remember the riddle, “How do you tell the men from the boys? Answer: By the price of their toys.”
>>
The problem with this argument is that it is not 'their' toys. They are OUR TOOLS. Which we pay for their use of like a man pays a limo, bus or truck driver.
>>
I’m given somewhat to quick assessments, and the first words of description that came to my mind here were those memorable words of frustration attributed to Marie Antoinette, “Let them eat bread!” Perhaps it is pure coincidence but this epistle has the same number of words as St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, which may give a hint of the usefulness of both? 1,640 words.
>>
The man asked for a reasoned explanation as to which direction we take airpower. IMO, this is one of those 'interlinked synergy' type things which can only be fractionally answered by specific platform questions. Expeditionary force doctrine (1 or 2 wars). Force /structure/ (Who does Tacair and for how long, unassisted?). Even the nature of technology change (DEWS, Hunting Weapons and Rapid Global Strike) and warfare itself (What IS 4GW?). All have to be answered together.
And if death is in the details, it is also in the boredom of placing all those puzzle-pieces into a larger mosaic picture.
>>
I assume “VLO” means “very low something.” Maybe “observability?” Help me, please. The subject matter seems to relate more to a grand strategy debate of the 1980s than to a debate valid in 2006. Unless I have missed some crucial point or closely held perceptive ordinary citizens are not privy to.
>>
You are actually quite correct. Though I think my own comment related specifically to the-
"It depends on how you look at it." statement.
We measure bomber capability by period design frame references that often get 'carried over' using what is called Cybernetic or Cognitive-Associative reasoning. Rather than a truly ANALYTICAL approach to warfare.
These two approaches can be summed up (in this context) as- "If it worked before, what can we do to make it work better/cheaper/more cheaply _in the given mold_"
Vs. "Okay, was there /ever/ a 'Roles and Missions' requirement that matched this particular system approach and if so, is that R&M still valid today?"
>>
Q. Do our highly paid leaders actually sit around talking like this? I’m serious. I mean no disparagement of your talent, CH1466, that speaks for itself. Language is supposed to convey facts, ideas, thoughts, and etc., but not to befuddle the reader or listener. Could this commentary be re-written, in American English so I can understand it, and assume I am too uninformed to decipher the acronyms. In 500 words or less?
>>
This I can summarize as Survivable Overkill @ Cost. Wherein the cost of an ICBM is inherent to the exotic materials and manufacturing tolerances required to sustain highly hypersonic flight for 30 minutes or so. It still weighs around 80-200,000lbs (Minuteman vs. Peacmaker). For roughly 7-10 million dollars in cost.
OTOH, the B-52's cost (in 1998 adjusted dollars) of around 53 million dollars was inherent to nearly HALF A MILLION pounds of mission systems. Designed around the concept of carrying multiple, very heavy weight, munitions (a quad of B-28INs or a single B-53 runs about 10,000lbs. 12 AGM-69 would run close to 27,000lbs, not including the stores adaptor).
And for what? The B-52, is not more survivable than an ICBM 'as it sits' (in designated hardstands on AF main operating bases). Nor is it's ability to make a second run inherent to the distances and lack of support facilities probable after a large scale SIOP exchange in which most silos were _EMPTIED_ on a use-or-lose basis. Even the notion of dispersal only increases the likely fallout effects as now the TOTAL WARHEAD COUNT must 'expand' to include every civil/municipal airfield with a 7-10,000ft runway.
Thus the notion that you paid for a HUGE platform that carried a HUGE payload 'deep and back' in a nuclear scenario is _ridiculous_. Because the best way to destroy an enemy so utterly /stupid/ as to initiate an attack on you is with underground or underwater response. And the best way to hostage his _conventional_ actions in say NATO Europe is to put 10-20 bombers over the pole with 'just enough' (1-2) aeroballistic weapons that they can hostage his principal population centers.
>>
Well, I offer this observation. Any government that has failed its people so badly as to launch a “5 city take out destruction operation” against another country ought to be replaced. Pronto! And probably by the first five primates you find a the closest zoo which would be an upgrade in cellphone jargon.
>>
No People to Rule = No Governmental Function past the point at which existing stockpiles of existing technology begin to deplete or fail.
BUT the rest of the world has a /chance/ to keep on going.
A full on nuclear exchange abrogates any hope for HUMANITY to survive what would almost certainly be horrific climatological and economy/infrastructure downturns. Forget the "I know WWIV will be fought with sticks and stones" argument.
Can you hunt? Can you build a cabin against the cold? Can you find drinkable water? Can you kill your fellow biped competitors without mercy so that the greatly reduced count of wild game species can support you and yours? If you cannot do these basic things then EVEN THE RADS ARE OF SECONDARY ULTIMATE IMPORTANCE.
Such is the penalty we pay for interdepence as an 'advanced' society where specialist synergy is rewarded more than generalist individuality.
Thus it is, if not 'kinder' perhaps, then certainly more responsible TO THE SPECIES OF MAN to kill cultural 'value' as cities than to kill weapons or 'force' as honorable (military) targets. Especially at the levels of (megaton) overkill required to root out largely empty C3 and Silo systems in the early days of limited accuracy.
>>
Sweet Jesus. I am embarrassed again. What the heck is a “w-a-r-d-e-t?” From the context it must relate to a city. I do recall many American cities were divided into wards, so maybe this derives from a Tammany Hall setting or something like that? And, what does “AD” mean if not Anno Domina. You know CH1466, and I know a nautical mile is 1.1515 times a statute mile, but frankly, I never use nautical miles. I am trying to update to kilometers, about .62 of a mile, but at my age, it is slow going. I’m not even going to go to what “hostage threat” and the somewhat foreboding connotations implicit in “leadership’s ability to exert power over the electorate” mean because that may well be projected towards the United States of America, internally, and not towards Russia. Talk about scary. Now I’m thinking Genghis Khan.
>>
WarDet=Warhead Detonation.
AD= Air Defense. Principally ARADCOM (Army Air Defense Command) and the overarching NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) at the time the B-52 was a principal leg in the triad.
The only thing to keep in mind regarding nautical miles is that, at 6080 feet unit measure, they are easier to integrate with airspeed and Mach number and even kilometers than statutory ones. The point being that if you have to 'drag' interceptors a goodly ways offshore to kill the bombers, then /they and their tankers/ become both the principal vulnerability. And the principal operational lag inherent to 'forcing the issue'. And you can always add a booster to an aeroballistic (air launched miniature ICBM for argument's sake) that takes the engagement out 'another 500 miles'.
OTOH, the nation on whose behavior you are holding at risk STILL FACES the certainty of, not an 18-26 minute trip over the pole or out of the water. But an 8-10 minute window before those air launched weapons start obliterating coastal cities.
>>
I know what ICBM stands for, but you got me on SLBM. Maybe the “S” is for “short?” but then, what’s the “L?” Oh, I’ve worked it out, “Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile.” If the degree of accuracy you recite was a product of the 1970s, then abandoning our manned bomber capability would have put us into a very much wakened position, world-wide power projection, IMO, because we’d be into an either or negotiating stance. Not good.
>>
But the key determinative factor is not how you threaten but how you ACHIEVE (enact) a given mission function. And reactivating Chrome Dome just to make your "We really mean it!" levels of unhappiness obvious was largely pointless. You can only sustain a minute fraction of the total force (needed for Armageddon) on-point and by the 1970s the Russians could deal with them in the kinds of proximities to their airspace which would grant reasonably short direct-overflight (or within 50nm SRAM) in a reasonable time delay. At the same time, the switch from liquid fuel to solid and cold gas ejection launch (on land) and >3,500nm sea ranges meant that the missile force had lost the last of it's own 'timely or total loss' reactivity/vulnerability shortcomings, above ground.
SO NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO. You're limited in your ability to project force, rapidly, towards any other than select capital targets. With strategic airpower.
OTOH, when we switched to 'fighting around the fringes' as a function of so-called Domino theory, THERE is where a few aircraft, with high precision _conventional_ weapons (the SRAM was so good that F-111 pilots often preferred it's 'stable table' inertial navigator to their own), can really do some good. Because for the equivalent trade of an F-4 Phantom per shot (3-4 million) you can /bypass/ all the crap associated with 'roll back the Air Defenses and achieve Air Supremacy' mission approach around which the existing Soviet model (MiG-17/19/21 and SA-2/3/5) were being built. Hitting instead, urban-protected (offlimits) targets like government centers, radio stations, power, bridges and rail junctions. With 10-20 shots per 'raid' and 2-3 raids per day.
In this, the ability to occupy territory is actually a negative inducement to success because your in the briar patch surrounded by breyr rabbits then.
>>
OK, CH1466, you’ve got me again. What’s a “TEL?” I understand “SSBN” which are they not sometimes called “thumpers?” “EMP” is electro-magnetic pulse, that bogey man which will bring down the Universe! to hear some of its advocates or naysayers.
>>
Transporter Erector Launcher. Traditionally applied to heavyweight surface to surface sysems though it now can also mean select antishipping and surface to air systems. What used to be called a 'prime mover' or a 'tractor' in many cases.
SSBN = Boomer. Thumper is a Disney wabbit. Boomer is what makes a single sub equal to all the bombs dropped on Nazi Germany in one go. EMP is not to be underestimated. It will add a good 5% to your mission systems in high density cable braiding and FC enclosures for key systems and it is also one of the reasons why the BUFF is an 8-engine airframe when it could just as readily have run on 4.
>>>
Again, principally because it is kinder to kill cities, complete with their massed populations as 'cultural centers' than it is to plow up real estate with multiple heavy-yield fallout zones in bagging empty silos. That said, does the 'bomber' have a place in the modern order of battle? IMO, yes. Because all three of the primary enabler’s of it's use as a tactical standoff platform have roots going back to the 60's if not earlier-
>>>
>>
I’d call this the “LeMay Doctrine.”
>>
It's the attitude with which you espouse it that matters. LeMay honestly believed in the 'rightness' of a winnable nuclear war, even after we went to F3 weapons. I would never go that far. I am in fact one of those who does not believe in the correctness of our first nuclear use upon Japan as being more than Monday-Morning justifications (there is period-documented proof that the original Coronet invasion studies of Kyushu at least would have cost us only 20,000 men and that early planning for Olympic would have run some 50-70,000. NOT the 'half million' advertised.).
However; if it comes to it, it is better to destroy your enemy's cultural ability to sustain themselves. Than the environments ability to sustain life. And that is the difference between 'just enough' overkill to beat down the Galosh and Gazelle type systems. And hundreds more wardets than necessary to ensure that 'the army has nothing left to fight with'.
If there is a principal lesson from 9/11 it is exactly that. That military forces, trained, equipped and remote-on-reservation are a LOT less vulnerable to attack than we, their paycheck signers are. So if you unleash them, you'd better make sure you do it deterministically. In a way that reflects a solid victory for your future as much vengeance fro any past bad-act.
>>
Wow! A new use for AF 1. I give up, CH1466. I am sorry I cannot engage you in a more friendly way, but I am not a fan of the New Speak Language as adopted by the Pentagon and its preferred contractors. I’d like to be able to say “Low Bidder” contractors, but when you have only one supplier bidding and its former CEO is the government’s Procurement Officer, well, you can see where that is leading.
>>
Look, a tactical platform of any kind works best at the frontal level. Because that's where dynamic changes open up TCT/TST or Time Critical/Time Sensitive Targets which it can best react to. Yet this very randomness is also the driving factor behind tacairs' 'undeclared' operational performance variables:
A. Cost.
Because you WILL lose that which /can/ be lost. By proximal exposure to a cunning foe.
B. Presence.
Because the definition of a TCT/TST is NOT that 'the convoy of black SUV only shows up for a few minutes.' It is that /inbetween/ moments when you can do a Yamamobin attack will be DAYS if not WEEKS of _sanitizing void_.
What this in turn means, especially now that we have precision and standoff in a relatively cheap munition system, is that you need to have LOTS of airframes present. To soak losses. And to sanitize (search with sensors) the greatest number of voids so that 'the moment' comes faster.
Getting all of this in place and running takes an incredibly long time for what you would nominally consider to be a 'lightweight thus quick/flexible' system like tactical airpower.
Strategic Air works the other way. It never really was intended to hit fleeting or mobile/point targets (though here too, the accuracy and survivability is present to do so). Yet, _for the target set originally intended_ (heavy societal as well as military infrastructure) it is actually fairly simple to run a bird overhead. Update 5-10 year old targeting data in a few hours while the tankers take off to make their forward-rendezvous orbits. And then have the bombers follow. In less than a day.
Vs. the 2-4 days it may take to get Tacair dragged behind 2-3 tankers, across territorial airspace, and setup in theater in a 'superwing' composite of complimentary missions necessary to do the same job.
This is inherent to the notion of GSTF as a Global Strike Task Force.
What you HAVE TO acknowledge however is that ANY direct-attack (say within 50nm of target) platform is going to have to have escorts the second it penetrates threat airspace. No matter how soon it gets there.
Because it is by increasing their buffer-zone proximal risk to threats that it insulates itself.
And so, the notion of using 'bombers' even as the HOLD portion of a Win:Hold:Win campaign is largely relative to the value of the targets you can hit 'as aid to your allies' as much as own war effort (if Iran were to light off and then the North Koreans decide come south behind atomics for instance). As well as how safe they are in the actual prosecution of a campaign.
And this is always going to be the case, IMO. Because even with CBM (Conventional ICBM) or TAV (Trans Atmospheric Vehicle ala FALCON) technologies, to hit microtargets like UBLs notorious vehicle convoy means having the TARGETING present to find and confirm his location.
While those systems which you can hit 'all the time' (because structural targets don't move) won't lose or gain much value, from a conventional standpoint anyway, simply because it takes you longer to reach them with a long ranging subsonic/stealth airplane. Than it might with a sonic/supersonic cruise capable platform.
Only the amount of good that destroying those targets does to the IMMEDIATE war effort counts.
>>
Unfortunately, I hear our congresspersons on the Sunday talk shows use this same lingo and they act as if everyone knows and understands what they are saying. In truth, hardly anyone knows and that means, ever fewer care, what they are talking about, which may have been the goal of New Speak all the time? The ultimate test of any new language is its ability to convey information. Failing that, I predict a quick demise for New Speak as soon as we get CFR - Campaign Finance Reform - the necessary antecedent to a genuine reform and overhaul of our government to better serve us in the 3rd millennia.
>>
The problem with your argument is twofold. If the subject is of sufficient relevance to you that you wish to be able to comment on it from an informed viewpoint, you need to be fluent in the language forms which define it's tenets.
And /gaining/ fluency in those base-ideas as 'shortcuts' of prepackaged word concept adjectives is not a function of mastering new ennunciative vocalization or word-symbolism as learning an actual language. But simply advancing your own vocabularies ability to recombine ideas QUICKLY. The essence of which is a trip out to Google where you type in "Definition of X" and are usually provided with, not one but multiple acronym dictionaries that are specifically (military, engineering, medical, philosophy) relevant to the field of your study.
KPl.
P.S. Having further read of your injuries, I apologize if what I wrote comes off as excessive or unsympathetic to the limits of your visual reading capacities. I have a relative in similar straights and he must limit his time in front of a monitor to only a few minutes a day as a consequence of conserving his vision. I say what I say but let me simply state that I hope that you are technically equipped to use alternative (DVI/O) interface to ease your participation online.
[edit on 20-4-2006 by ch1466]
First off, I'm about as far left of the MIGC as you could get. I don't believe our government works. I no longer even believe it's the best of all the alternatives.
My express point of view is that WAR MUST WORK (must pay for itself). Or be abandoned. Because it is the nature of war, not to split societies but to bring them together for reasons of conservation and amalgamation of resources.
One of the chief dangers of longrange-anything is thus that you gain an ability to influence events in a desultory rather than deterministic fashion.
>>
Remember the riddle, “How do you tell the men from the boys? Answer: By the price of their toys.”
>>
The problem with this argument is that it is not 'their' toys. They are OUR TOOLS. Which we pay for their use of like a man pays a limo, bus or truck driver.
>>
I’m given somewhat to quick assessments, and the first words of description that came to my mind here were those memorable words of frustration attributed to Marie Antoinette, “Let them eat bread!” Perhaps it is pure coincidence but this epistle has the same number of words as St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, which may give a hint of the usefulness of both? 1,640 words.
>>
The man asked for a reasoned explanation as to which direction we take airpower. IMO, this is one of those 'interlinked synergy' type things which can only be fractionally answered by specific platform questions. Expeditionary force doctrine (1 or 2 wars). Force /structure/ (Who does Tacair and for how long, unassisted?). Even the nature of technology change (DEWS, Hunting Weapons and Rapid Global Strike) and warfare itself (What IS 4GW?). All have to be answered together.
And if death is in the details, it is also in the boredom of placing all those puzzle-pieces into a larger mosaic picture.
>>
I assume “VLO” means “very low something.” Maybe “observability?” Help me, please. The subject matter seems to relate more to a grand strategy debate of the 1980s than to a debate valid in 2006. Unless I have missed some crucial point or closely held perceptive ordinary citizens are not privy to.
>>
You are actually quite correct. Though I think my own comment related specifically to the-
"It depends on how you look at it." statement.
We measure bomber capability by period design frame references that often get 'carried over' using what is called Cybernetic or Cognitive-Associative reasoning. Rather than a truly ANALYTICAL approach to warfare.
These two approaches can be summed up (in this context) as- "If it worked before, what can we do to make it work better/cheaper/more cheaply _in the given mold_"
Vs. "Okay, was there /ever/ a 'Roles and Missions' requirement that matched this particular system approach and if so, is that R&M still valid today?"
The B-1A was always much closer to the spec of the B-58 or Tu-22 as a must-base-forward theater asset than anything I would call 'Strategic.' I also have my doubts as to the equity of trade inherent to the counter-force vs. value mission as typified by manned air power carrying multiple 350-1MT class weapons into enemy airspace. Even if you succeed/ in scoring non-empty silos; the likely fallout would still wreck the society which, if decapitated by city-attack would likely still have reserve infrastructure and resources inherent to it's remote/wilderness areas (exactly the place you find ICBM silos).
>>
Q. Do our highly paid leaders actually sit around talking like this? I’m serious. I mean no disparagement of your talent, CH1466, that speaks for itself. Language is supposed to convey facts, ideas, thoughts, and etc., but not to befuddle the reader or listener. Could this commentary be re-written, in American English so I can understand it, and assume I am too uninformed to decipher the acronyms. In 500 words or less?
>>
This I can summarize as Survivable Overkill @ Cost. Wherein the cost of an ICBM is inherent to the exotic materials and manufacturing tolerances required to sustain highly hypersonic flight for 30 minutes or so. It still weighs around 80-200,000lbs (Minuteman vs. Peacmaker). For roughly 7-10 million dollars in cost.
OTOH, the B-52's cost (in 1998 adjusted dollars) of around 53 million dollars was inherent to nearly HALF A MILLION pounds of mission systems. Designed around the concept of carrying multiple, very heavy weight, munitions (a quad of B-28INs or a single B-53 runs about 10,000lbs. 12 AGM-69 would run close to 27,000lbs, not including the stores adaptor).
And for what? The B-52, is not more survivable than an ICBM 'as it sits' (in designated hardstands on AF main operating bases). Nor is it's ability to make a second run inherent to the distances and lack of support facilities probable after a large scale SIOP exchange in which most silos were _EMPTIED_ on a use-or-lose basis. Even the notion of dispersal only increases the likely fallout effects as now the TOTAL WARHEAD COUNT must 'expand' to include every civil/municipal airfield with a 7-10,000ft runway.
Thus the notion that you paid for a HUGE platform that carried a HUGE payload 'deep and back' in a nuclear scenario is _ridiculous_. Because the best way to destroy an enemy so utterly /stupid/ as to initiate an attack on you is with underground or underwater response. And the best way to hostage his _conventional_ actions in say NATO Europe is to put 10-20 bombers over the pole with 'just enough' (1-2) aeroballistic weapons that they can hostage his principal population centers.
>>
Well, I offer this observation. Any government that has failed its people so badly as to launch a “5 city take out destruction operation” against another country ought to be replaced. Pronto! And probably by the first five primates you find a the closest zoo which would be an upgrade in cellphone jargon.
>>
No People to Rule = No Governmental Function past the point at which existing stockpiles of existing technology begin to deplete or fail.
BUT the rest of the world has a /chance/ to keep on going.
A full on nuclear exchange abrogates any hope for HUMANITY to survive what would almost certainly be horrific climatological and economy/infrastructure downturns. Forget the "I know WWIV will be fought with sticks and stones" argument.
Can you hunt? Can you build a cabin against the cold? Can you find drinkable water? Can you kill your fellow biped competitors without mercy so that the greatly reduced count of wild game species can support you and yours? If you cannot do these basic things then EVEN THE RADS ARE OF SECONDARY ULTIMATE IMPORTANCE.
Such is the penalty we pay for interdepence as an 'advanced' society where specialist synergy is rewarded more than generalist individuality.
Thus it is, if not 'kinder' perhaps, then certainly more responsible TO THE SPECIES OF MAN to kill cultural 'value' as cities than to kill weapons or 'force' as honorable (military) targets. Especially at the levels of (megaton) overkill required to root out largely empty C3 and Silo systems in the early days of limited accuracy.
>>
Sweet Jesus. I am embarrassed again. What the heck is a “w-a-r-d-e-t?” From the context it must relate to a city. I do recall many American cities were divided into wards, so maybe this derives from a Tammany Hall setting or something like that? And, what does “AD” mean if not Anno Domina. You know CH1466, and I know a nautical mile is 1.1515 times a statute mile, but frankly, I never use nautical miles. I am trying to update to kilometers, about .62 of a mile, but at my age, it is slow going. I’m not even going to go to what “hostage threat” and the somewhat foreboding connotations implicit in “leadership’s ability to exert power over the electorate” mean because that may well be projected towards the United States of America, internally, and not towards Russia. Talk about scary. Now I’m thinking Genghis Khan.
>>
WarDet=Warhead Detonation.
AD= Air Defense. Principally ARADCOM (Army Air Defense Command) and the overarching NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) at the time the B-52 was a principal leg in the triad.
The only thing to keep in mind regarding nautical miles is that, at 6080 feet unit measure, they are easier to integrate with airspeed and Mach number and even kilometers than statutory ones. The point being that if you have to 'drag' interceptors a goodly ways offshore to kill the bombers, then /they and their tankers/ become both the principal vulnerability. And the principal operational lag inherent to 'forcing the issue'. And you can always add a booster to an aeroballistic (air launched miniature ICBM for argument's sake) that takes the engagement out 'another 500 miles'.
OTOH, the nation on whose behavior you are holding at risk STILL FACES the certainty of, not an 18-26 minute trip over the pole or out of the water. But an 8-10 minute window before those air launched weapons start obliterating coastal cities.
>>
I know what ICBM stands for, but you got me on SLBM. Maybe the “S” is for “short?” but then, what’s the “L?” Oh, I’ve worked it out, “Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile.” If the degree of accuracy you recite was a product of the 1970s, then abandoning our manned bomber capability would have put us into a very much wakened position, world-wide power projection, IMO, because we’d be into an either or negotiating stance. Not good.
>>
But the key determinative factor is not how you threaten but how you ACHIEVE (enact) a given mission function. And reactivating Chrome Dome just to make your "We really mean it!" levels of unhappiness obvious was largely pointless. You can only sustain a minute fraction of the total force (needed for Armageddon) on-point and by the 1970s the Russians could deal with them in the kinds of proximities to their airspace which would grant reasonably short direct-overflight (or within 50nm SRAM) in a reasonable time delay. At the same time, the switch from liquid fuel to solid and cold gas ejection launch (on land) and >3,500nm sea ranges meant that the missile force had lost the last of it's own 'timely or total loss' reactivity/vulnerability shortcomings, above ground.
SO NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO. You're limited in your ability to project force, rapidly, towards any other than select capital targets. With strategic airpower.
OTOH, when we switched to 'fighting around the fringes' as a function of so-called Domino theory, THERE is where a few aircraft, with high precision _conventional_ weapons (the SRAM was so good that F-111 pilots often preferred it's 'stable table' inertial navigator to their own), can really do some good. Because for the equivalent trade of an F-4 Phantom per shot (3-4 million) you can /bypass/ all the crap associated with 'roll back the Air Defenses and achieve Air Supremacy' mission approach around which the existing Soviet model (MiG-17/19/21 and SA-2/3/5) were being built. Hitting instead, urban-protected (offlimits) targets like government centers, radio stations, power, bridges and rail junctions. With 10-20 shots per 'raid' and 2-3 raids per day.
In this, the ability to occupy territory is actually a negative inducement to success because your in the briar patch surrounded by breyr rabbits then.
>>
OK, CH1466, you’ve got me again. What’s a “TEL?” I understand “SSBN” which are they not sometimes called “thumpers?” “EMP” is electro-magnetic pulse, that bogey man which will bring down the Universe! to hear some of its advocates or naysayers.
>>
Transporter Erector Launcher. Traditionally applied to heavyweight surface to surface sysems though it now can also mean select antishipping and surface to air systems. What used to be called a 'prime mover' or a 'tractor' in many cases.
SSBN = Boomer. Thumper is a Disney wabbit. Boomer is what makes a single sub equal to all the bombs dropped on Nazi Germany in one go. EMP is not to be underestimated. It will add a good 5% to your mission systems in high density cable braiding and FC enclosures for key systems and it is also one of the reasons why the BUFF is an 8-engine airframe when it could just as readily have run on 4.
>>>
Again, principally because it is kinder to kill cities, complete with their massed populations as 'cultural centers' than it is to plow up real estate with multiple heavy-yield fallout zones in bagging empty silos. That said, does the 'bomber' have a place in the modern order of battle? IMO, yes. Because all three of the primary enabler’s of it's use as a tactical standoff platform have roots going back to the 60's if not earlier-
>>>
>>
I’d call this the “LeMay Doctrine.”
>>
It's the attitude with which you espouse it that matters. LeMay honestly believed in the 'rightness' of a winnable nuclear war, even after we went to F3 weapons. I would never go that far. I am in fact one of those who does not believe in the correctness of our first nuclear use upon Japan as being more than Monday-Morning justifications (there is period-documented proof that the original Coronet invasion studies of Kyushu at least would have cost us only 20,000 men and that early planning for Olympic would have run some 50-70,000. NOT the 'half million' advertised.).
However; if it comes to it, it is better to destroy your enemy's cultural ability to sustain themselves. Than the environments ability to sustain life. And that is the difference between 'just enough' overkill to beat down the Galosh and Gazelle type systems. And hundreds more wardets than necessary to ensure that 'the army has nothing left to fight with'.
If there is a principal lesson from 9/11 it is exactly that. That military forces, trained, equipped and remote-on-reservation are a LOT less vulnerable to attack than we, their paycheck signers are. So if you unleash them, you'd better make sure you do it deterministically. In a way that reflects a solid victory for your future as much vengeance fro any past bad-act.
Taking that principal forward to the present, a force of 20 bombers which can each carry 4 AGM-158Bs, could still [hold] hostage 80 aimpoints [targets] every 15 hours or so. Which is probably about the best you can hope for on a reactionary (GSTF) basis of sudden engagement vs. the days it would take to standup a combined force of tactical and targeting support mission enablement from disparate base starting points as organizational transit lags dog piled on a 'first this before you start that' basis of force integration. Indeed, such a 'one mission, out, drop and back' airframe could be powered by two, large, commercial powerplants and fly as a sonic cruiser with little or no requirement for penetration aids or targeting gear as militarization weight bloat.
>>
Wow! A new use for AF 1. I give up, CH1466. I am sorry I cannot engage you in a more friendly way, but I am not a fan of the New Speak Language as adopted by the Pentagon and its preferred contractors. I’d like to be able to say “Low Bidder” contractors, but when you have only one supplier bidding and its former CEO is the government’s Procurement Officer, well, you can see where that is leading.
>>
Look, a tactical platform of any kind works best at the frontal level. Because that's where dynamic changes open up TCT/TST or Time Critical/Time Sensitive Targets which it can best react to. Yet this very randomness is also the driving factor behind tacairs' 'undeclared' operational performance variables:
A. Cost.
Because you WILL lose that which /can/ be lost. By proximal exposure to a cunning foe.
B. Presence.
Because the definition of a TCT/TST is NOT that 'the convoy of black SUV only shows up for a few minutes.' It is that /inbetween/ moments when you can do a Yamamobin attack will be DAYS if not WEEKS of _sanitizing void_.
What this in turn means, especially now that we have precision and standoff in a relatively cheap munition system, is that you need to have LOTS of airframes present. To soak losses. And to sanitize (search with sensors) the greatest number of voids so that 'the moment' comes faster.
Getting all of this in place and running takes an incredibly long time for what you would nominally consider to be a 'lightweight thus quick/flexible' system like tactical airpower.
Strategic Air works the other way. It never really was intended to hit fleeting or mobile/point targets (though here too, the accuracy and survivability is present to do so). Yet, _for the target set originally intended_ (heavy societal as well as military infrastructure) it is actually fairly simple to run a bird overhead. Update 5-10 year old targeting data in a few hours while the tankers take off to make their forward-rendezvous orbits. And then have the bombers follow. In less than a day.
Vs. the 2-4 days it may take to get Tacair dragged behind 2-3 tankers, across territorial airspace, and setup in theater in a 'superwing' composite of complimentary missions necessary to do the same job.
This is inherent to the notion of GSTF as a Global Strike Task Force.
What you HAVE TO acknowledge however is that ANY direct-attack (say within 50nm of target) platform is going to have to have escorts the second it penetrates threat airspace. No matter how soon it gets there.
Because it is by increasing their buffer-zone proximal risk to threats that it insulates itself.
And so, the notion of using 'bombers' even as the HOLD portion of a Win:Hold:Win campaign is largely relative to the value of the targets you can hit 'as aid to your allies' as much as own war effort (if Iran were to light off and then the North Koreans decide come south behind atomics for instance). As well as how safe they are in the actual prosecution of a campaign.
And this is always going to be the case, IMO. Because even with CBM (Conventional ICBM) or TAV (Trans Atmospheric Vehicle ala FALCON) technologies, to hit microtargets like UBLs notorious vehicle convoy means having the TARGETING present to find and confirm his location.
While those systems which you can hit 'all the time' (because structural targets don't move) won't lose or gain much value, from a conventional standpoint anyway, simply because it takes you longer to reach them with a long ranging subsonic/stealth airplane. Than it might with a sonic/supersonic cruise capable platform.
Only the amount of good that destroying those targets does to the IMMEDIATE war effort counts.
>>
Unfortunately, I hear our congresspersons on the Sunday talk shows use this same lingo and they act as if everyone knows and understands what they are saying. In truth, hardly anyone knows and that means, ever fewer care, what they are talking about, which may have been the goal of New Speak all the time? The ultimate test of any new language is its ability to convey information. Failing that, I predict a quick demise for New Speak as soon as we get CFR - Campaign Finance Reform - the necessary antecedent to a genuine reform and overhaul of our government to better serve us in the 3rd millennia.
>>
The problem with your argument is twofold. If the subject is of sufficient relevance to you that you wish to be able to comment on it from an informed viewpoint, you need to be fluent in the language forms which define it's tenets.
And /gaining/ fluency in those base-ideas as 'shortcuts' of prepackaged word concept adjectives is not a function of mastering new ennunciative vocalization or word-symbolism as learning an actual language. But simply advancing your own vocabularies ability to recombine ideas QUICKLY. The essence of which is a trip out to Google where you type in "Definition of X" and are usually provided with, not one but multiple acronym dictionaries that are specifically (military, engineering, medical, philosophy) relevant to the field of your study.
KPl.
P.S. Having further read of your injuries, I apologize if what I wrote comes off as excessive or unsympathetic to the limits of your visual reading capacities. I have a relative in similar straights and he must limit his time in front of a monitor to only a few minutes a day as a consequence of conserving his vision. I say what I say but let me simply state that I hope that you are technically equipped to use alternative (DVI/O) interface to ease your participation online.
[edit on 20-4-2006 by ch1466]
Pyros,
>>
And Kurt, having to constantly wade through your incessant rants and diatribe against the human pilot is really becoming tiresome.
>>
The beatings will continue until Morale Improves! :-)
That said, your failure to 'get it' in terms of what is being said is intrinsic to this single GIGO statement:
>>
but wholesale changes in warfighting philosophies will not change until the C3 infrastructure becomes mature and, more importantly, protectable. That is a generation away, at best. So get used to the concept of Roger Ramjet in the cockpit.
>>
1. Roger Ramjet cannot function, effectively, without PRISM based IDM technology (or better as TTNT) in his cockpit.
2. 'Setting up the infrastructure' is INHERENT TO THE PLATFORM.
Because netcentricity is like an internet with only 5 users. The sooner you add endurant platforms beyond the level of manned capacity. The more 'presence will generate traffic which will generate trade' in a purely military sense.
3. The basics of a heavyweight (able to endure weather both up and away and particularly around the boat or base) _endurant_ turbine powered drone have existed since the Jindivik and Firefly technologies matured in the late 1950's. The limitations of (Treasure for Blood) excessive pilot influence on the design of airframes as a /mechanical competition/ have been equally well known since _1914_.
QED: You cannot set up the infrastructure until you realize that the network must be both MOBILE and CHEAP enough to /have presence/ as a numbered (mosaic aperture) force construct. And that pilots cannot be a part of this because they inherently are babied for their life-state more than the /typical/ threat justifies in MOST wars for conservation of the constellation-of-airframes as a whole.
Understand now?
KPl.
P.S.
>>
The capabilities of the aircraft have made it desirable for commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan, General Gorenc said.
"Combatant commanders’ unceasing demands for additional Predator orbits, I think, should be viewed as a testament to that transformational system's utility and success," he said. "The Air Force's Predator employment has been a resounding success in the global war on terror."
General Gorenc said the Air Force plans to meet the increasing demand by expanding mission capability to nine orbits and by growing that to 12 orbits by the end of 2006.
>>
The problem is not that the tracks aren't laid. It's that the AF only wants a particular kind of sailplane Choo Choo to run on them. Because they don't care about the speed of transit or density of force decisions which would allow for OFFENSIVE prosecution of a netcentric OOTW campaign. They are merely 'reacting to requests' for immediate support by (defensively short-horizon obsessive) unit commanders.
While isolating themselves from having to commit a REAL percentage of their warfighter strike assets (squadron if not wing counts of turbine, fixed wing, robotic D1 or D101 airframes) to the CONTINUALLY OVERHEAD PRESENCE (COP) mission.
For it is with a force that behaves exactly like a cop car driving a patrol route that would-be guerilla 'perps' are encouraged to keep their bloody heads down.
Even as the ability to galumph along 'LO @ .85' with a 30-50nm standoff weapon over a 1,000nm radius for 25-30 million each which defines the UCAV as a SUPERIOR Day 1 raid systems.
>>
And Kurt, having to constantly wade through your incessant rants and diatribe against the human pilot is really becoming tiresome.
>>
The beatings will continue until Morale Improves! :-)
That said, your failure to 'get it' in terms of what is being said is intrinsic to this single GIGO statement:
>>
but wholesale changes in warfighting philosophies will not change until the C3 infrastructure becomes mature and, more importantly, protectable. That is a generation away, at best. So get used to the concept of Roger Ramjet in the cockpit.
>>
1. Roger Ramjet cannot function, effectively, without PRISM based IDM technology (or better as TTNT) in his cockpit.
2. 'Setting up the infrastructure' is INHERENT TO THE PLATFORM.
Because netcentricity is like an internet with only 5 users. The sooner you add endurant platforms beyond the level of manned capacity. The more 'presence will generate traffic which will generate trade' in a purely military sense.
3. The basics of a heavyweight (able to endure weather both up and away and particularly around the boat or base) _endurant_ turbine powered drone have existed since the Jindivik and Firefly technologies matured in the late 1950's. The limitations of (Treasure for Blood) excessive pilot influence on the design of airframes as a /mechanical competition/ have been equally well known since _1914_.
QED: You cannot set up the infrastructure until you realize that the network must be both MOBILE and CHEAP enough to /have presence/ as a numbered (mosaic aperture) force construct. And that pilots cannot be a part of this because they inherently are babied for their life-state more than the /typical/ threat justifies in MOST wars for conservation of the constellation-of-airframes as a whole.
Understand now?
KPl.
P.S.
>>
The capabilities of the aircraft have made it desirable for commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan, General Gorenc said.
"Combatant commanders’ unceasing demands for additional Predator orbits, I think, should be viewed as a testament to that transformational system's utility and success," he said. "The Air Force's Predator employment has been a resounding success in the global war on terror."
General Gorenc said the Air Force plans to meet the increasing demand by expanding mission capability to nine orbits and by growing that to 12 orbits by the end of 2006.
>>
The problem is not that the tracks aren't laid. It's that the AF only wants a particular kind of sailplane Choo Choo to run on them. Because they don't care about the speed of transit or density of force decisions which would allow for OFFENSIVE prosecution of a netcentric OOTW campaign. They are merely 'reacting to requests' for immediate support by (defensively short-horizon obsessive) unit commanders.
While isolating themselves from having to commit a REAL percentage of their warfighter strike assets (squadron if not wing counts of turbine, fixed wing, robotic D1 or D101 airframes) to the CONTINUALLY OVERHEAD PRESENCE (COP) mission.
For it is with a force that behaves exactly like a cop car driving a patrol route that would-be guerilla 'perps' are encouraged to keep their bloody heads down.
Even as the ability to galumph along 'LO @ .85' with a 30-50nm standoff weapon over a 1,000nm radius for 25-30 million each which defines the UCAV as a SUPERIOR Day 1 raid systems.
posted by ch1466: “DonWhite, First off, I'm about as far left of the MIGC as you could get. I don't believe our government works. I no longer even believe it's the best of all the alternatives. [Edited by Don W]
I have also reached that conclusion - our government is not working as I think it ought to. I wonder how we could get to a parliamentary system, which I see as a necessity if we are to remain democratic in this quick changing world and instant comminations environment. We just cannot afford do have fixed terms for our rulers or leaders, as you see them.
My express point of view is that WAR MUST WORK (must pay for itself). Or be abandoned . .
I am unfamiliar with the evaluation of the success of war based on war “paying” for itself. Let me think this through. Let’s take 2 vastly different wars. Korea and Vietnam. I do not have the real numbers of how much we spent in either war, but I once heard Vietnam cost us $100 billion. From the 1958 introduction of a few hundred advisers to the pull out in 1973, after we had reached a peak of 550,000 men in the immediate theater, around 1969.
Korea, OTOH, was different. Korea was a continuation of WW2 tactics. Large armies confronting each other in great open spaces. Totally unlike the Vietnam war to follow. Recall that in Korea, we were at the start, undermanned and ill equipped. The war began in June, 1950, and by fall, we were struggling to hold on at Pusan. MacArthur brilliantly landed about 150,000 men at Inchon and chopped the extended NK supply line, catching most of the NK soldiers in a squeeze play that proved fatal to the NK army. By late fall we were standing on the banks of the Yalu River, despite repeated Chinese warnings not to do that.
Keep in mind we had just witnessed our own guy in China, Chiang Kai Chek, escape to Formosa, in 1949. I believe it was MacArthur’s intention to provoke the Chinese into a war. And Korea was the perfect place. We had everything our way. We were close to Japan, which gave us a short supply line. We had air superiority - well, not all the time - and we had the atomic bomb, which I believe MacArthur fully intended to use. Say what you will about Mac, but losing was not one of his best attributes. He would have “smacked” the new PLA and PRC so hard it would be 1,000 years before they looked eastward across the Pacific again. Russia, which had just lost 25,000,000 people in WW2, had no stomach for more war, nor the industrial base from which to do anything. We’re talking 1950. But I digress.
I do not know our maximum strength in Korea. Based on 45,000 KIA, and figuring 10 to 1, I’d guess we had at a max about 450,000 men. I don’t know how many soldiers the allies brought but not many, about like Iraq 2, I’d guess. By the summer of 1951, we had stabilized the line of battle more or less along the 38th parallel, where it all began. The war was basically over, but for skirmishes, until the Armistice of July, 1953. Which is still “holding.” It is my guess we spent about $25 billion in Korea between 1950 and 1953.
OK, I’ve set the stage according to my memory. It is my opinion we won the Korean War, because our goal was met. That is, we were there to stop aggression. We certainly did that.
OTOH, it is my opinion we lost the Vietnam War, not on the ground, necessarily, but because we lost the will at home to continue the killing when it became obvious that was not working, but that we were bogged down in a quagmire. Compounding the sustainablity of the war, was the inability of the Administration to convincingly explain why our presence in Vietnam was essential to our security.
As to the arguments we could have “won” the Vietnam War if the military’s hands had not been tied, that overlooks that a war is not fought in isolation. There are many ramifications that are not susceptible of being resolved on the battlefield. I’m sure it must be demoralizing to the soldiers in the field when they finally become aware they are not expected to “win” in the traditional sense. No soldier wants to be the last man to die.
That’s enough for me in one day, CH1466. It's your turn.
* * * * * * Your PS. Having read of your injuries, I apologize if what I wrote comes off as excessive or unsympathetic to the limits of your visual capacities. I have a relative in similar straits and he must limit his time in front of a monitor as a consequence of conserving his vision. [Edited]
My Reply. Thanks, CH1466. I'm afraid it is my brain that is the more handicappedl
[edit on 4/20/2006 by donwhite]
KPl offers: “DW, the problem with your argument is twofold. If the subject is of sufficient relevance to you that you wish to be able to comment on it from an informed viewpoint, you need to be fluent in the language forms which define it's tenets.
And gaining fluency in those base-ideas as 'shortcuts' of prepackaged word concept adjectives is not a function of mastering new ennunciative vocalization or word-symbolism as learning an actual language. But simply advancing your own vocabularies ability to recombine ideas QUICKLY.
The essence of which is a trip out to Google where you type in "Definition of X" and are usually provided with, not one but multiple acronym dictionaries that are specifically, military, engineering, medical, philosophy relevant to the field of your study.
KPl.
[Edited by Don W]
Jeez, I didn’t realize just how easy that would be, KPI. Just a minute while I get up to speed.
The man asked for a reasoned explanation as to which direction we take air power. IMO, this is one of those 'interlinked synergy' type things which can only be fractionally answered by specific platform questions. Expeditionary force doctrine (1 or 2 wars). And if death is in the details, it is also in the boredom of placing all those puzzle-pieces into a larger mosaic picture. This I can summarize as Survivable Overkill @ Cost. Wherein the cost of an ICBM is roughly 7-10 million dollars in cost. OTOH, the B-52's cost (in 1998 dollars) of around 53 million dollars was inherent to nearly HALF A MILLION pounds of mission systems. And for what? The B-52 is not more survivable than an ICBM Even the notion of dispersal only increases the likely fallout effects on a 7-10,000 ft runway.
Yes, KPI
The only thing to keep in mind regarding nautical miles is that, at 6080 feet unit measure, they are easier to integrate with airspeed and Mach number and even kilometers than statute ones.
I understand.
The key determinative factor is not how you threaten but how you ACHIEVE a given mission. OTOH, when we switched to 'fighting around the fringes' as a function of the so-called Domino theory, THERE is where a few aircraft, with high precision conventional weapons can really do some good. Instead of hitting protected urban targets (off-limits), hit the governmental centers, radio stations, power, bridges and rail junctions. With 10-20 shots per 'raid' and 2-3 raids per day. it is kinder to kill cities, complete with their massed populations as 'cultural centers' than it is to plow up real estate. That said, does the 'bomber' have a place in the modern order of battle? IMO, yes.
I agree.
It's the attitude you demonstrate that matters. LeMay honestly believed in the 'rightness' of a winnable nuclear war concept, I would never go that far. I am in fact one of those who does not believe in the correctness of our first nuclear use upon Japan. Aside: There is period-documented proof that the original Coronet invasion studies of Kyushu at least would have cost us only 20,000 men and that early planning for Olympic would have run some 50-70,000. NOT the 'half million' advertised.
I share your disagreement with Gen. LeMay’s concept of the almost casual employment of nuclear weapons. Gen. LeMay regarded nuclear bombs as just one more component in the arsenal of democracy. LeMay's philosophy, "If you've got’em, smoke’em. Or, if you own’em, use’em.”
OTOH, I disagree with your apparent conclusion the Aug. 6 and Aug. 9 bombings of Japan were avoidable at best or unnecessary at worst. 2 reasons. 1, you cannot turn a country “off” and “on” like a light switch. It takes a lot of build-up to reach a national fever pitch. 2, if the public had learned the U.S. had a decisive weapon to quickly end the war painlessly for us, but had failed to use it, the president would have been impeached. Whether our KIAs would have numbered "but 20,000" or even "only 70,000.” Why sustain even 1 KIA otherwise avoidable when we’re at war? Recall what Gen. Sherman said about war.
If there is a principal lesson from 9/11 it is exactly that. That military forces, trained, equipped on remote reservations are a LOT less vulnerable to attack than we, their paycheck signers are. So if you unleash them, you'd better make sure you do it deterministically. In a way that reflects a solid victory for your future as much vengeance for any past bad-act.
Superficially, that sounds right on. But on reflection, I don’t see it that way. In ideological war, what targets are chosen depends on the decision of the attacker more so than on the state of preparedness of the enemy. Rational considerations - to us - very likely are irrelevant to the attackers. Indeed, the attacker did strike the Pentagon. Whether that was a primary target or a secondary target, I do not know. To me, a hit on the WH or Capitol would have been a much higher priority than to hit the Pentagon. OTOH, we have paid little or no attention to the publicly stated grievances that al Qaeda said prompted the Nine Eleven Event. Anybody remember what he said? Sadly, that is irrelevant to us. Maybe we are also ideologically driven? Act irrationally? Hey, don’t bring up Iraq.
Let me add a personal anecdote, albeit old. Military reservations are no more prepared for the unexpected than was NYC or W-DC. Soldiers and airmen do not walk around with cocked pistols. I admit I was discharged from the USAF in March, 1964, at MacDill, by the way. But human nature does not change.
What this in turn means is you need to have LOTS of airframes present. To soak up losses. Getting all of this in place and running takes an incredibly long time. Strategic Air works the other way. It never was intended to hit mobile targets. It is fairly simple to run a bird overhead. Update 5-10 year old targeting data while tankers take off to make their forward rendezvous orbits.
Versus the 2-4 days it may take to get tactical air dragged behind 2-3 tankers, across territorial airspace, and setup in theater in a 'superwing' composite of complimentary missions necessary to do the same job. This is inherent to the notion of a Global Strike Task Force. And this is always going to be the case, IMO. To hit microtargets like OBLs notorious vehicle convoy means having the TARGETING capability present to find and confirm his location.
Those fixed targets you can hit 'all the time' won't lose or gain much value. It takes you longer to reach them with a long ranging subsonic airplane than it might with a supersonic cruise capable platform. Only the amount of good that destroying those targets quicker adds to the IMMEDIATE war effort counts.
I agree.
[edit on 4/20/2006 by donwhite]
Donwhite,
>>
I have also reached that conclusion - our government is not working as I think it ought to. I wonder how we could get to a parliamentary system, which I see as a necessity if we are to remain democratic in this quick changing world and instant comminations environment. We just cannot afford do have fixed terms for our rulers or leaders, as you see them.
>>
Actually I hold Parliamentarism to be as indecisive (Compromise=Corruption) as 'autocracy by assumption' is. Indeed, I would rather empower a president with specific (albeit limited) budgetary authority in given areas of:
Defense
Conservation
Future America
Foreign Diplomacy (Future World)
With an UNTOUCHABLE budget. Than to force the interplay which devolves around our extended bicamberal+signing divisive-not-cohesive governmental rule.
In this he would be less a leader than a superintendent with the ability to manage 'futures' that are either not popular (but must be investigated) or to lead the initial response (where's my checkbook) to initial emergencies, SHAPING THE EVENT rather than the perceptions of it's cause or blame.
I also do not believe in limited terms for similar lame-duck = wait-for-the-next-guy abortions of the immediacy that is responsive governmental rule.
If we are to be ruled by a bicamberal legislature at all, I think it must be less '500 kings' than _200_ (different term periods to allow for immediate policy changes) area-specific legal specialists who can most contribute to a specific field (relevant to their state or otherwise).
Each legislator to be paid 1-2 million dollars a year in salary.
Each to be _statuatorily required_ to abstain from any horse trade vote influence based on partisan (my state, my electoral vote) politics. If the subject under review involves your state, you must abstain from voting. Nor can you take ANY 'campaign contributions', junkets, gifts or speaking endorsements while in-office. Or join a political action group or commercial interest whose subject legislation you voted after office. Upon penalty of 10-15 year imprisonment.
Each STATE to be given a fixed allotment of the federal dole (which they may apply as they wish) each to also gain periodic access to a 'rotating superfund' for specific transport/infrastructure/disaster projects to allow for large scale changes in social position or specific relief.
Each Congressional session would be of a given (short) length and would be divided between voting on _intelligently grouped_, LIMITED, legislative bills of no more than 4-5 issues. And consideration of such issues for grouping as .5, 1 or 2 year studies.
Obviously, I am much more interested in leaving the technicalities of day to day rule to the States but would rather concentrate on larger issues like the refutation of capitalism as an 'only for profit' driven system in a world where governmental protectionism amounts to free R&D. Active Population controls 'irrespective of religion'. And the role of the UN and World Court as a worldwide governing body to which we either commit or leave.
Among MANY other 'big picture' issues which should be solely the purview of NATIONAL LEADERSHIP.
In this, pursuit of a career must be the sign of your 'dedication' (through multiple terms) to becoming wealthy, independent of external influences and as a function of voting ONLY where your philosophies suggest national not local interests lie.
Do this alone and the amount of mud slinging in Congress would drop by 70% or more.
Ultimately, I believe that the regional isolation, individual intellect and population densities disparities which caused our nation to come to be ruled 'representatively' is itself a concept no longer justified by the nature of Global Village awareness and the mean education level among our very smartest rise to rival or even exceed that what are all too literally called 'Statesmen'.
So that, at some point, we must enact a directed democracy whereby voting priveleges are granted directly based on 'following along' a given chain of scientific and legal briefs (individually tested for via AI driven comprehension exams at the end of each reading) so that you can have the right to enact legislation from the perspective of an _educated_ awareness of the issues. This would eliminate voter 'POP' quiz and Tamany Hall type glad-hand influence as well.
Of course the concept of such OPEN RULE depends on our willingness to begin training our children to become more than staticist beneficiaries to our governing system. But rather to feel empowered to /grow it/. Into something new and better.
And that means EDUCATION beyond any and all other considerations, including, nominally, 'defense'.
Will it happen? No. I'm not even sure a Constitutional Convention could encompass the putative concepts of 'how we ought to be as a function of our future, not our failings' by which such a system could be empowered as a transitional architecture to a much more free form system of rule.
But it is the only way forward. IMO.
>>>
My express point of view is that WAR MUST WORK (must pay for itself). Or be abandoned...
>>>
>>
I am unfamiliar with the evaluation of the success of war based on war “paying” for itself.
>>
Look at any conqueror. Caesar, Alexander, Charlegmagne, Fredrick, Genghis, Tammerlane, Cortez, Pizarro, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, not to fail in mentioning the entire LINE of U.S. Presidents involved with the 'settlement of the West' as a manifest destinty process of disenfranchising an existing nation base to invest a new one.
Like it or lump it. Their wars worked. Because they left no 'separate' population to be offended into taking vengeance. And what loot or tribute they 'liberated' they sent home in VAST quantities for the benefit of their own.
This IS a valid argument for war sir. You see it all too often in the animal world for it not to be 'as deep as instinct' to take in moments what you cannot build in a year.
BUT.
If it is amoral or immoral to you. There are options. The UN could become empowered with the policing powers to make men like UBL fugitives with no shelter beyond the reach of some pretty powerful guns.
The UN could make WAR ITSELF illegal. As an act. As an export. As a death penalty offense for the leadership as well as 'soldiers' caught participating in it. Outside their own borders.
If you will not take. You must share. And the process towards getting there must begin with a system that renders all men equal under a common law. Before all states.
Advanced (autonomous) Robotics will end human slave labor. New systems of commerce and distribution of state-profit margins deriving therefrom will destroy inequities of purchasing power. And SPECIFICALLY ENFORCED (cameras on sight, backed by UN guns) human rights doctrine to _gain access to_ the priveleges of a common-controlled resource monopoly will ensure that those who would be members are so on a 'first we try, then we trust' basis of apprenticeship which is itself the initiation of massive (irreversible, by time) social changes.
>>
Let me think this through. Let’s take 2 vastly different wars. Korea and Vietnam. I do not have the real numbers of how much we spent in either war, but I once heard Vietnam cost us $100 billion. From the 1958 introduction of a few hundred advisers to the pull out in 1973, after we had reached a peak of 550,000 men in the immediate theater, around 1969.
>>
Try closer to 400. The current idiocy is running on towards 600 and most people I know are saying it will end somewhere between 800 and 1 trillion.
Here is the LINK-
www.cwc.lsu.edu...
You want.
>>
Korea, OTOH, was different. Korea was a continuation of WW2 tactics.
>>
If you assume WWII to be a loss bordering on total write off, that is correct.
OTOH, BOTH Vietnam -and- Korea represent the dregs of 3rd generation warfare bleeding over into 4th gen in which industrial complexes were at war for social as well as strategic and geo resources.
And once you define them as a Rome:Carthage level conflict, 'profit' derives from survival and post-war access to things like cheap slave labor. Not particular $$:lives exchange formulas.
>>
Large armies confronting each other in great open spaces. Totally unlike the Vietnam war to follow.
>>
Korea is Italy without the icewall of the Alps to shield the climate. This means that there are some narrow coastal plains and a whole LOT of rock to mess with and damn little else. The way you fight in Korea is the way Rommel fought _in Italy_, in WWI. With elite forces and air mobile or assault tactics on a hook and sweep basis. But only in the summer. In winter you pull your ass back to a contiguous line and you wait things out.
Korea is also akin to Vietnam in that you have a largely stoneage culture prior to the Japanese takeover whose CHIEF "Bomb them back to their roots!" instructive feature is that nothing they fought with could they make on their own.
Thus, regardless of whether you treat China as Switzerland or Germany, you have to treat the entire country as a bullshead for which the trick is to cut the neck so that you can puncture the lungs and get the bleedout. You go for the temple 'through the horns' and you are a world class dummy.
>>
Recall that in Korea, we were at the start, undermanned and ill equipped.
>>
I recall we sent in a Custer infantry team to get blown away holding a pass that a force four times their size couldn't do, against armor. It's really a bad commentary on the gullibility of America when our own stupidity of entry to a combat theater must serve as the justification as much as the leapoff to 'Real Commitment'.
>>
The war began in June, 1950, and by fall, we were struggling to hold on at Pusan. MacArthur brilliantly landed about 150,000 men at Inchon and chopped the extended NK supply line, catching most of the NK soldiers in a squeeze play that proved fatal to the NK army. By late fall we were standing on the banks of the Yalu River, despite repeated Chinese warnings not to do that.
>>
The Koreans were not equipped to handle the fight. They should have been bypassed completely and strategic forces (including the B-29s) brought in to fight the BAI campaign rather than playing Hercules-Takes-Bull-By-Horns.
i.e. Exactly the way WWII in ETO should have been fought as a Blitz campaign for which ground forces were only fixers and targeters for an enemy that could find enough of them to make a difference.
That's the funny thing about 'fluid front' mechanized campaigns, they are CONSTANTLY stringing themselves out and thus vulnerable to collapse-of-spearhead tactics while their logistics are equally exposed ONLY SO LONG as they try to sustain the momentum of the offensive. Without ever really learning that it is intentional on the (smart guys) part that they keep right on running.
>>
Keep in mind we had just witnessed our own guy in China, Chiang Kai Chek, escape to Formosa, in 1949. I believe it was MacArthur’s intention to provoke the Chinese into a war. And Korea was the perfect place. We had everything our way. We were close to Japan, which gave us a short supply line. We had air superiority - well, not all the time - and we had the atomic bomb, which I believe MacArthur fully intended to use. Say what you will about Mac, but losing was not one of his best attributes. He would have “smacked” the new PLA and PRC so hard it would be 1,000 years before they looked eastward across the Pacific again. Russia, which had just lost 25,000,000 people in WW2, had no stomach for more war, nor the industrial base from which to do anything. We’re talking 1950. But I digress.
>>
If China is Carthage and you feel you are Rome, you have to act upon the needs of the future in eliminating her influence as much as direct threat.
That doesn't admit that Mac had the right to trump Truman but it does mean that, by the time China became a proactive rather than logistics threat to the campaign, we should have LONG SINCE been behind a heavy interlock of fires with any and all atomics intended to be released (as shock and awe shucks compensation for a lack of true all weather strike capability) were on KOREAN soil. Across a mighty-wide freefire zone.
Daddy Mac was too full of himself as Co-Emperor of Japan to take care of the military business of knowing the weather and creating the disposition of forces to take advantage of the fires (and minimize the vulnerability of terrain) that was inherent to the NK Winter.
THAT WAS HIS JOB ALONE. And he blew it completely.
Atomics would never light up Bejing under the given strategic circumstances. But they could readily have turned the approaches to Pyongyang into glass and Mac's lack of political saavy on that fact put Truman in a position where (intermixed forces) he could not give the release signal at all.
I have no pity for the Corncob Warrior.
>>
I do not know our maximum strength in Korea. Based on 45,000 KIA, and figuring 10 to 1, I’d guess we had at a max about 450,000 men. I don’t know how many soldiers the allies brought but not many, about like Iraq 2, I’d guess. By the summer of 1951, we had stabilized the line of battle more or less along the 38th parallel, where it all began. The war was basically over, but for skirmishes, until the Armistice of July, 1953. Which is still “holding.” It is my guess we spent about $25 billion in Korea between 1950 and 1953.
>>
54 billion and 5.4 million men according to the above LINK.
>>
OK, I’ve set the stage according to my memory. It is my opinion we won the Korean War, because our goal was met. That is, we were there to stop aggression. We certainly did that.
>>
No. We are simply still in the process of losing it. China knows, KNOWS, that we will leave 'eventually'. Thus all they need to do is bleed us white while empowering asian society with our industrial know how and commercial-tapeworm dollars. Until THEY decide the the Norks are no longer necessary as a Stalking Horse method of keeping U.S. "Better there than at home." wasting money for the defense of others that could be reinvested in our own broken economy.
China wants to rule the world as the next Super Power sir. And they combine an immediate hunger for the status and wealth. Combined with an 'inscrutable' awareness that time is on their side as the old becomes decrepit.
So as to feel neither guilty nor rushed in how they get there.
>>
OTOH, it is my opinion we lost the Vietnam War, not on the ground, necessarily, but because we lost the will at home to continue the killing when it became obvious that was not working, but that we were bogged down in a quagmire. Compounding the sustainablity of the war, was the inability of the Administration to convincingly explain why our presence in Vietnam was essential to our security.
>>
The only way to win a war of attrition is to continually disrupt the enemy supply system by which THEIR 'expeditionary' force construct is maintained. That means you DO NOT fight in RVN. You fight in Cambodia, Laos and The North.
When we did this in the Ia Shaw and Ia Drang campaigns, we had piece. When we didn't we had Tet and Easter 'one year later' (trundling down like ants).
The Israelis know this. The South Africans know this. The policy as well as the op is called 'external-ism'.
And if LBJ was such a hand wringer and/or ball breaker (depending on which tape or aide you listen to) that he couldn't be up front about that, we didn't belong in SEA.
That said, the real nature of 'Dominoism' is not so much an active as a regressive loss of influence. Countries stop respecting your military might as a function of primitive social submission to the 'bigger dog' and they soon find that they don't have common-cause morality to share with you either (U.S. soldiers are often disliked, with cause, throughout our PacRim stations). This perception that we were lazy and irresponsible to our 'dominant interests' caused those happy for the privelege of being the vassal if not chattle of the worlds strongest power to feel they should choose their own way. Ffar more than Marcos, our weakness was what drove us out of the PI. Far more than a downed EP-3 (as a function of no Cam Rahn Bay access to base-in escorts) was what cost us guaranteed access to the SCS.
And absent assured maritime control /through the littoral basing areas around it/ a limited presence in the principal trade lanes is going to cost us our access to the Far East slave economies.
As a consequence, the entire Vietnam protest effort at home was minimal. It certainly didn't keep us from making the same mistake in 1991. It was on foreign soil that our 'defeat' was and will continue to be measured most.
Until we decide that the 'real' weapons system required is one that contravenes poverty as a low cost labor source with automation as a no-cost one.
In this, 'losing' the war may ultimately leave us with more dignity and more /drive/ to save ourselves from the inevitable capitalism-follows-money shift of power base.
>>
As to the arguments we could have “won” the Vietnam War if the military’s hands had not been tied, that overlooks that a war is not fought in isolation. There are many ramifications that are not susceptible of being resolved on the battlefield. I’m sure it must be demoralizing to the soldiers in the field when they finally become aware they are not expected to “win” in the traditional sense. No soldier wants to be the last man to die.
>>
NO. It SHOULD BE encumbant upon them to expect /exactly/ that. The problem is that the soldiers viewpoint was not where the real battle was being fought!
The difference, besides having a passive-aggressive control freak for a president, was that if you want to take out Vietnam as a military threat, you had bloody well better not do it from the wide-side of the logistics funnel.
And doing that with manned platforms was impossible so long as the enemy could shelter their IADS within exclusion zones. Because now you are losing the fight with the real enemy over their soil. And looking like a bully. While losing the phantom-warfare contagion that is insurgency in the South. And looking like a helpless git.
Cruise systems that could reach into a given area to obliterate strategic targets /without/ being attrited (as a manned=national ego representative force) or having to attrite their air defense systems can give you back the air war over the North.
And once you have them by the balls. They will be have a lot more inclined to contrition in Paris.
IMO, this inability to be politically decisive in 'hitting the enemy where it leads' is what truly drove the development of VLO systems. Because the massive air campaign approach with packaging and rollback works. It's just that the margin between overpowering and pathetic victim (of your own ambitions) did not match the will of a POTUS as much as people in winning without seeming to be excessive.
To return to the original thread theme, imagine the alternative to parades in the streets if the targets hit, every night, were on the order of a couple buildings each. And you begin to see how WRONG our approach to strategic bombardment really was. Because we had the means to QRC convert AGM-28 Hound Dogs as readily as we did AGM-86C 'Secret Squirrels'. And we chose not to do so.
Thus voiding out half of downtown Hanois and Haiphongs target list as being too buried in collaterals to strike with conventional tacair. And persisting in this belief (long after other restrictions on IADS related systems had been lifted, of only on an 'as attacked' basis) until /no matter what we did/ in Linebacker I/II, it looked brutal acts of a desperate bully trying to reestablish face. And thus was too late to provide a political route towards anything but retreat.
My own personal choice for the employment of tacair then would have been to attack the dykes and coffer dams that provided flood control of the DPRV rice crops. In combination with the drastic loss of workforce as half the country went south to 'the place of dying'; this would have been the way to make The North both leaderless, powerless and unable to sustain it's own subsistence economy.
KPl.
AND A COUNTER POINT-
www.cia.gov...
>>
I have also reached that conclusion - our government is not working as I think it ought to. I wonder how we could get to a parliamentary system, which I see as a necessity if we are to remain democratic in this quick changing world and instant comminations environment. We just cannot afford do have fixed terms for our rulers or leaders, as you see them.
>>
Actually I hold Parliamentarism to be as indecisive (Compromise=Corruption) as 'autocracy by assumption' is. Indeed, I would rather empower a president with specific (albeit limited) budgetary authority in given areas of:
Defense
Conservation
Future America
Foreign Diplomacy (Future World)
With an UNTOUCHABLE budget. Than to force the interplay which devolves around our extended bicamberal+signing divisive-not-cohesive governmental rule.
In this he would be less a leader than a superintendent with the ability to manage 'futures' that are either not popular (but must be investigated) or to lead the initial response (where's my checkbook) to initial emergencies, SHAPING THE EVENT rather than the perceptions of it's cause or blame.
I also do not believe in limited terms for similar lame-duck = wait-for-the-next-guy abortions of the immediacy that is responsive governmental rule.
If we are to be ruled by a bicamberal legislature at all, I think it must be less '500 kings' than _200_ (different term periods to allow for immediate policy changes) area-specific legal specialists who can most contribute to a specific field (relevant to their state or otherwise).
Each legislator to be paid 1-2 million dollars a year in salary.
Each to be _statuatorily required_ to abstain from any horse trade vote influence based on partisan (my state, my electoral vote) politics. If the subject under review involves your state, you must abstain from voting. Nor can you take ANY 'campaign contributions', junkets, gifts or speaking endorsements while in-office. Or join a political action group or commercial interest whose subject legislation you voted after office. Upon penalty of 10-15 year imprisonment.
Each STATE to be given a fixed allotment of the federal dole (which they may apply as they wish) each to also gain periodic access to a 'rotating superfund' for specific transport/infrastructure/disaster projects to allow for large scale changes in social position or specific relief.
Each Congressional session would be of a given (short) length and would be divided between voting on _intelligently grouped_, LIMITED, legislative bills of no more than 4-5 issues. And consideration of such issues for grouping as .5, 1 or 2 year studies.
Obviously, I am much more interested in leaving the technicalities of day to day rule to the States but would rather concentrate on larger issues like the refutation of capitalism as an 'only for profit' driven system in a world where governmental protectionism amounts to free R&D. Active Population controls 'irrespective of religion'. And the role of the UN and World Court as a worldwide governing body to which we either commit or leave.
Among MANY other 'big picture' issues which should be solely the purview of NATIONAL LEADERSHIP.
In this, pursuit of a career must be the sign of your 'dedication' (through multiple terms) to becoming wealthy, independent of external influences and as a function of voting ONLY where your philosophies suggest national not local interests lie.
Do this alone and the amount of mud slinging in Congress would drop by 70% or more.
Ultimately, I believe that the regional isolation, individual intellect and population densities disparities which caused our nation to come to be ruled 'representatively' is itself a concept no longer justified by the nature of Global Village awareness and the mean education level among our very smartest rise to rival or even exceed that what are all too literally called 'Statesmen'.
So that, at some point, we must enact a directed democracy whereby voting priveleges are granted directly based on 'following along' a given chain of scientific and legal briefs (individually tested for via AI driven comprehension exams at the end of each reading) so that you can have the right to enact legislation from the perspective of an _educated_ awareness of the issues. This would eliminate voter 'POP' quiz and Tamany Hall type glad-hand influence as well.
Of course the concept of such OPEN RULE depends on our willingness to begin training our children to become more than staticist beneficiaries to our governing system. But rather to feel empowered to /grow it/. Into something new and better.
And that means EDUCATION beyond any and all other considerations, including, nominally, 'defense'.
Will it happen? No. I'm not even sure a Constitutional Convention could encompass the putative concepts of 'how we ought to be as a function of our future, not our failings' by which such a system could be empowered as a transitional architecture to a much more free form system of rule.
But it is the only way forward. IMO.
>>>
My express point of view is that WAR MUST WORK (must pay for itself). Or be abandoned...
>>>
>>
I am unfamiliar with the evaluation of the success of war based on war “paying” for itself.
>>
Look at any conqueror. Caesar, Alexander, Charlegmagne, Fredrick, Genghis, Tammerlane, Cortez, Pizarro, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, not to fail in mentioning the entire LINE of U.S. Presidents involved with the 'settlement of the West' as a manifest destinty process of disenfranchising an existing nation base to invest a new one.
Like it or lump it. Their wars worked. Because they left no 'separate' population to be offended into taking vengeance. And what loot or tribute they 'liberated' they sent home in VAST quantities for the benefit of their own.
This IS a valid argument for war sir. You see it all too often in the animal world for it not to be 'as deep as instinct' to take in moments what you cannot build in a year.
BUT.
If it is amoral or immoral to you. There are options. The UN could become empowered with the policing powers to make men like UBL fugitives with no shelter beyond the reach of some pretty powerful guns.
The UN could make WAR ITSELF illegal. As an act. As an export. As a death penalty offense for the leadership as well as 'soldiers' caught participating in it. Outside their own borders.
If you will not take. You must share. And the process towards getting there must begin with a system that renders all men equal under a common law. Before all states.
Advanced (autonomous) Robotics will end human slave labor. New systems of commerce and distribution of state-profit margins deriving therefrom will destroy inequities of purchasing power. And SPECIFICALLY ENFORCED (cameras on sight, backed by UN guns) human rights doctrine to _gain access to_ the priveleges of a common-controlled resource monopoly will ensure that those who would be members are so on a 'first we try, then we trust' basis of apprenticeship which is itself the initiation of massive (irreversible, by time) social changes.
>>
Let me think this through. Let’s take 2 vastly different wars. Korea and Vietnam. I do not have the real numbers of how much we spent in either war, but I once heard Vietnam cost us $100 billion. From the 1958 introduction of a few hundred advisers to the pull out in 1973, after we had reached a peak of 550,000 men in the immediate theater, around 1969.
>>
Try closer to 400. The current idiocy is running on towards 600 and most people I know are saying it will end somewhere between 800 and 1 trillion.
Here is the LINK-
www.cwc.lsu.edu...
You want.
>>
Korea, OTOH, was different. Korea was a continuation of WW2 tactics.
>>
If you assume WWII to be a loss bordering on total write off, that is correct.
OTOH, BOTH Vietnam -and- Korea represent the dregs of 3rd generation warfare bleeding over into 4th gen in which industrial complexes were at war for social as well as strategic and geo resources.
And once you define them as a Rome:Carthage level conflict, 'profit' derives from survival and post-war access to things like cheap slave labor. Not particular $$:lives exchange formulas.
>>
Large armies confronting each other in great open spaces. Totally unlike the Vietnam war to follow.
>>
Korea is Italy without the icewall of the Alps to shield the climate. This means that there are some narrow coastal plains and a whole LOT of rock to mess with and damn little else. The way you fight in Korea is the way Rommel fought _in Italy_, in WWI. With elite forces and air mobile or assault tactics on a hook and sweep basis. But only in the summer. In winter you pull your ass back to a contiguous line and you wait things out.
Korea is also akin to Vietnam in that you have a largely stoneage culture prior to the Japanese takeover whose CHIEF "Bomb them back to their roots!" instructive feature is that nothing they fought with could they make on their own.
Thus, regardless of whether you treat China as Switzerland or Germany, you have to treat the entire country as a bullshead for which the trick is to cut the neck so that you can puncture the lungs and get the bleedout. You go for the temple 'through the horns' and you are a world class dummy.
>>
Recall that in Korea, we were at the start, undermanned and ill equipped.
>>
I recall we sent in a Custer infantry team to get blown away holding a pass that a force four times their size couldn't do, against armor. It's really a bad commentary on the gullibility of America when our own stupidity of entry to a combat theater must serve as the justification as much as the leapoff to 'Real Commitment'.
>>
The war began in June, 1950, and by fall, we were struggling to hold on at Pusan. MacArthur brilliantly landed about 150,000 men at Inchon and chopped the extended NK supply line, catching most of the NK soldiers in a squeeze play that proved fatal to the NK army. By late fall we were standing on the banks of the Yalu River, despite repeated Chinese warnings not to do that.
>>
The Koreans were not equipped to handle the fight. They should have been bypassed completely and strategic forces (including the B-29s) brought in to fight the BAI campaign rather than playing Hercules-Takes-Bull-By-Horns.
i.e. Exactly the way WWII in ETO should have been fought as a Blitz campaign for which ground forces were only fixers and targeters for an enemy that could find enough of them to make a difference.
That's the funny thing about 'fluid front' mechanized campaigns, they are CONSTANTLY stringing themselves out and thus vulnerable to collapse-of-spearhead tactics while their logistics are equally exposed ONLY SO LONG as they try to sustain the momentum of the offensive. Without ever really learning that it is intentional on the (smart guys) part that they keep right on running.
>>
Keep in mind we had just witnessed our own guy in China, Chiang Kai Chek, escape to Formosa, in 1949. I believe it was MacArthur’s intention to provoke the Chinese into a war. And Korea was the perfect place. We had everything our way. We were close to Japan, which gave us a short supply line. We had air superiority - well, not all the time - and we had the atomic bomb, which I believe MacArthur fully intended to use. Say what you will about Mac, but losing was not one of his best attributes. He would have “smacked” the new PLA and PRC so hard it would be 1,000 years before they looked eastward across the Pacific again. Russia, which had just lost 25,000,000 people in WW2, had no stomach for more war, nor the industrial base from which to do anything. We’re talking 1950. But I digress.
>>
If China is Carthage and you feel you are Rome, you have to act upon the needs of the future in eliminating her influence as much as direct threat.
That doesn't admit that Mac had the right to trump Truman but it does mean that, by the time China became a proactive rather than logistics threat to the campaign, we should have LONG SINCE been behind a heavy interlock of fires with any and all atomics intended to be released (as shock and awe shucks compensation for a lack of true all weather strike capability) were on KOREAN soil. Across a mighty-wide freefire zone.
Daddy Mac was too full of himself as Co-Emperor of Japan to take care of the military business of knowing the weather and creating the disposition of forces to take advantage of the fires (and minimize the vulnerability of terrain) that was inherent to the NK Winter.
THAT WAS HIS JOB ALONE. And he blew it completely.
Atomics would never light up Bejing under the given strategic circumstances. But they could readily have turned the approaches to Pyongyang into glass and Mac's lack of political saavy on that fact put Truman in a position where (intermixed forces) he could not give the release signal at all.
I have no pity for the Corncob Warrior.
>>
I do not know our maximum strength in Korea. Based on 45,000 KIA, and figuring 10 to 1, I’d guess we had at a max about 450,000 men. I don’t know how many soldiers the allies brought but not many, about like Iraq 2, I’d guess. By the summer of 1951, we had stabilized the line of battle more or less along the 38th parallel, where it all began. The war was basically over, but for skirmishes, until the Armistice of July, 1953. Which is still “holding.” It is my guess we spent about $25 billion in Korea between 1950 and 1953.
>>
54 billion and 5.4 million men according to the above LINK.
>>
OK, I’ve set the stage according to my memory. It is my opinion we won the Korean War, because our goal was met. That is, we were there to stop aggression. We certainly did that.
>>
No. We are simply still in the process of losing it. China knows, KNOWS, that we will leave 'eventually'. Thus all they need to do is bleed us white while empowering asian society with our industrial know how and commercial-tapeworm dollars. Until THEY decide the the Norks are no longer necessary as a Stalking Horse method of keeping U.S. "Better there than at home." wasting money for the defense of others that could be reinvested in our own broken economy.
China wants to rule the world as the next Super Power sir. And they combine an immediate hunger for the status and wealth. Combined with an 'inscrutable' awareness that time is on their side as the old becomes decrepit.
So as to feel neither guilty nor rushed in how they get there.
>>
OTOH, it is my opinion we lost the Vietnam War, not on the ground, necessarily, but because we lost the will at home to continue the killing when it became obvious that was not working, but that we were bogged down in a quagmire. Compounding the sustainablity of the war, was the inability of the Administration to convincingly explain why our presence in Vietnam was essential to our security.
>>
The only way to win a war of attrition is to continually disrupt the enemy supply system by which THEIR 'expeditionary' force construct is maintained. That means you DO NOT fight in RVN. You fight in Cambodia, Laos and The North.
When we did this in the Ia Shaw and Ia Drang campaigns, we had piece. When we didn't we had Tet and Easter 'one year later' (trundling down like ants).
The Israelis know this. The South Africans know this. The policy as well as the op is called 'external-ism'.
And if LBJ was such a hand wringer and/or ball breaker (depending on which tape or aide you listen to) that he couldn't be up front about that, we didn't belong in SEA.
That said, the real nature of 'Dominoism' is not so much an active as a regressive loss of influence. Countries stop respecting your military might as a function of primitive social submission to the 'bigger dog' and they soon find that they don't have common-cause morality to share with you either (U.S. soldiers are often disliked, with cause, throughout our PacRim stations). This perception that we were lazy and irresponsible to our 'dominant interests' caused those happy for the privelege of being the vassal if not chattle of the worlds strongest power to feel they should choose their own way. Ffar more than Marcos, our weakness was what drove us out of the PI. Far more than a downed EP-3 (as a function of no Cam Rahn Bay access to base-in escorts) was what cost us guaranteed access to the SCS.
And absent assured maritime control /through the littoral basing areas around it/ a limited presence in the principal trade lanes is going to cost us our access to the Far East slave economies.
As a consequence, the entire Vietnam protest effort at home was minimal. It certainly didn't keep us from making the same mistake in 1991. It was on foreign soil that our 'defeat' was and will continue to be measured most.
Until we decide that the 'real' weapons system required is one that contravenes poverty as a low cost labor source with automation as a no-cost one.
In this, 'losing' the war may ultimately leave us with more dignity and more /drive/ to save ourselves from the inevitable capitalism-follows-money shift of power base.
>>
As to the arguments we could have “won” the Vietnam War if the military’s hands had not been tied, that overlooks that a war is not fought in isolation. There are many ramifications that are not susceptible of being resolved on the battlefield. I’m sure it must be demoralizing to the soldiers in the field when they finally become aware they are not expected to “win” in the traditional sense. No soldier wants to be the last man to die.
>>
NO. It SHOULD BE encumbant upon them to expect /exactly/ that. The problem is that the soldiers viewpoint was not where the real battle was being fought!
The difference, besides having a passive-aggressive control freak for a president, was that if you want to take out Vietnam as a military threat, you had bloody well better not do it from the wide-side of the logistics funnel.
And doing that with manned platforms was impossible so long as the enemy could shelter their IADS within exclusion zones. Because now you are losing the fight with the real enemy over their soil. And looking like a bully. While losing the phantom-warfare contagion that is insurgency in the South. And looking like a helpless git.
Cruise systems that could reach into a given area to obliterate strategic targets /without/ being attrited (as a manned=national ego representative force) or having to attrite their air defense systems can give you back the air war over the North.
And once you have them by the balls. They will be have a lot more inclined to contrition in Paris.
IMO, this inability to be politically decisive in 'hitting the enemy where it leads' is what truly drove the development of VLO systems. Because the massive air campaign approach with packaging and rollback works. It's just that the margin between overpowering and pathetic victim (of your own ambitions) did not match the will of a POTUS as much as people in winning without seeming to be excessive.
To return to the original thread theme, imagine the alternative to parades in the streets if the targets hit, every night, were on the order of a couple buildings each. And you begin to see how WRONG our approach to strategic bombardment really was. Because we had the means to QRC convert AGM-28 Hound Dogs as readily as we did AGM-86C 'Secret Squirrels'. And we chose not to do so.
Thus voiding out half of downtown Hanois and Haiphongs target list as being too buried in collaterals to strike with conventional tacair. And persisting in this belief (long after other restrictions on IADS related systems had been lifted, of only on an 'as attacked' basis) until /no matter what we did/ in Linebacker I/II, it looked brutal acts of a desperate bully trying to reestablish face. And thus was too late to provide a political route towards anything but retreat.
My own personal choice for the employment of tacair then would have been to attack the dykes and coffer dams that provided flood control of the DPRV rice crops. In combination with the drastic loss of workforce as half the country went south to 'the place of dying'; this would have been the way to make The North both leaderless, powerless and unable to sustain it's own subsistence economy.
KPl.
AND A COUNTER POINT-
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