Nearly every chapter of Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World’s Oceans seems to provide good arguments for simply eliminating the U.S. Navy and redirecting nearly $400 billion per year (Wikipedia) into something other than World War I-style surface ships.
The author explains that the German U-boat innovations would likely have been sufficient to win the World War II Atlantic battle but for the Allies cracking German codes (i.e., we beat them due to an achievement that would no longer be feasible). He also notes that
There was a final bloody spurt of combat in the deep southern reaches of the Atlantic Ocean as the twentieth century moved to a close: the Falklands War. In the spring of 1982, over the course of ten weeks, Great Britain and Argentina fought a short, sharp war that cost a thousand lives, sank sixteen ships, and saw more than a hundred aircraft destroyed. … The war has been studied by naval strategists and historians and provides a good example of the vulnerability of surface ships to air attack in the era of cruise missiles.
Isn’t the threat from the air far worse today than it was in 1982? Enemy drone #1 can open the door to the bridge. Enemy drone #2 can come through the doorway and kill everyone standing on the bridge. Enemy drone #3 can come through the doorway and start driving the ship onto some rocks. Now a $5 billion ship has been destroyed by three $10,000 drones?
Assuming that we want to keep spending as much on our military as we do currently, wouldn’t we be more secure after spending $400 billion per year on drones than on ships?
Related:
- see the comments on Why our navy keeps running into commercial ships
A couple things to consider:
1. The Navy’s surface ships aren’t really there to fight other surface ships, they’re for slaughtering third world peasants where the Empire doesn’t have the ability to reach with sufficient numbers of land-based aircraft.
2. A significant chunk of the Navy’s budget goes to submarines, which actually _are_ useful for defending the country.
Ken: Regarding Item #1, with $400 billion couldn’t we contract with countries around the world to rent bases from them? It can’t be cost-efficient to build a floating airport and protect that floating airport from submarines, drones, missiles, etc. compared to renting ordinary airports (mostly dirt!).
The problem with renting dirt is you are always fighting the last war. Like right now we are renting Turkey dirt to fight in Syria and Iraq. But the next war will be somewhere else. Maybe we will need that floating air field to project power to North Korea or the southern China sea. Who knows. The issue is the floating platform is flexible.
You mean $400 B for drones like this?
“A very, very small quadcopter, one inch in diameter can carry a one- or two-gram shaped charge. You can order them from a drone manufacturer in China. You can program the code to say: “Here are thousands of photographs of the kinds of things I want to target.” A one-gram shaped charge can punch a hole in nine millimeters of steel, so presumably you can also punch a hole in someone’s head. You can fit about three million of those in a semi-tractor-trailer. You can drive up I-95 with three trucks and have 10 million weapons attacking New York City. They don’t have to be very effective, only 5 or 10% of them have to find the target. There will be manufacturers producing millions of these weapons that people will be able to buy just like you can buy guns now, except millions of guns don’t matter unless you have a million soldiers. You need only three guys to write the program and launch them. So you can just imagine that in many parts of the world humans will be hunted. They will be cowering underground in shelters and devising techniques so that they don’t get detected. This is the ever-present cloud of lethal autonomous weapons. They could be here in two to three years.”
— Stuart Russell, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California Berkeley
via https://www.buzzfeed.com/sarahatopol/how-to-save-mankind-from-the-new-breed-of-killer-robots
$400 B might be just enough for everyone on the planet.
Brian, it was possible 3 years ago assuming your point about 1 gram directional charge is true (otherwise someone my need 10 or 20 or whatever grams instead). Why does it take 3 people to program? Or do you imply we need large surface ships to protect personell against mini-drone doomsday?
Brian, use this http://img.costumecraze.com/images/vendors/disguise/11800-Brow-Raisers-Moveable-Robot-Mask-large.jpg to hack drones to full them that you are on their side, if you are not.
Submarines are the ultimate power. They’ll still be around, after everything else is destroyed.
There is a large electronic warfare aspect as well, and that has progressed somewhat since the Falkland Islands war. I did not read the book, so not sure how that is described. Many of the British ships were lost only after moving close to land for amphibious operations.
Regarding the drone swarm, one of the Matrix movies shows the use of EMP to disable a large swarm of robots, and electronic countermeasures are able to deliver that in a directed beam. You can harden the drone against that, but not with commercial off the shelf PCB and also only for up to certain power levels, meaning having to keep your distance.
There were some Israeli actions in 1973 where Egyptian gunboats launched missles that never found the Israeli ships due to ECM.
What does the book have to say about mines? They seems to have come a long way in modern times as well. The cheap ones can be sown by airplane, but there are others that get placed on the floor and wait for orders or signatures of interesting vessels and then launch torpedoes.
Peter: Thanks for the perspective. The book says almost nothing about mines or ECM or anything else that wouldn’t be familiar to a navy officer in World War I.
Well, it’s not “my” point. Just a quote. The implication was that instead of spending $400 B on the Navy, you could spend $400 B on these drones as the “bigger Air Force” that Phil was asking about. Resulting in a sort-of person-specific MAD (assuming our opponents do the same).
I have no idea where the “3 programmers” comes from. I think the point is, you need far less manpower relative to the attack scope than “conventional” attacks.
As far as masks – my understanding is that you can be identified just as readily by your gait, and other features. But for military purposes, it may be sufficient to know where the target lives or works or the car he drives. Our current drone Hellfire missiles take out entire buildings and compounds. At least this method might be able to avoid women and children. Won’t make us more loved though.
If there is a point it is that we are spending a lot of money preparing to “fight the last war.” The US is vulnerable to asymmetric attacks, such as this one, in a way we never were for most of our history. And we are spending very little preparing for such attacks.
But it seems the primary aim of the USN is to make the world safe for US capitalism and, by extension, most other capitalism. Ships can carry goods with very little fear of pirates. Therefore countries can ship goods throughout the world without having to build their own navies to escort their exports. A secondary aim is to discourage allies from building up their own defensive navies by demonstrating that we will protect them.
Lastly, should we really worry so much about how much is spent on the military, or even how it is spent? Is it not one of the best forms of income redistribution? The top 1% reportedly pays half of federal taxes. Some of this goes right back to those same 1%ers, but a lot of it goes to military personnel and contractors, in essentially every congressional district in the country:
https://www.bbhub.io/bgov/sites/12/2015/10/BGOV_StatebyStateStudy.pdf
The F-35 is a case in point:
http://www.businessinsider.com/this-map-explains-the-f-35-fiasco-2014-8
Who cares if it can’t fight? It has provided good jobs in 47 states!
Isn’t this at least an approximation of the universal basic income (except for, you know, actually requiring people to do some work, however productive, to “earn” the income)?
I’m not a sailor, but I would be surprised if just killing everyone on the bridge would enable you to take over a ship with a drone. Anyway, I’m sure the drone threat is real and I’m not surprised that USN is underprepared for it. However, I can’t see it being very difficult for them to develop defenses; one successful attack will be motivation enough (DARPA is working on it now). Also, rented air bases would still depend on ships for supplies; I think most of the materiel (by weight) used overseas by the US military which can’t be sourced locally still moves by sea.
Brian, F35 is poised to become a workforse delivery vehicle for the next 2 or 3 decades that is detectable by anti-aircraft radars in the radius of 25 miles to or so Although over the budget it has been delivered to foreign customers and now in process of being smoothed into existing airforce tactics in very demanding real world conditions.
Agree about assymetric threats, not necessary about cheap drones with low range anf high vilnerability. Sligshot and yellow pages combination + cheap literate workforce is more dangerous. Or pets with web cams. Dogs or pigeons. Bees.
A real war is going to turn into a bunch of ships and battlegroups hunting for each other and blasting away pretty quick. People don’t seem to get that the ocean is huge and none of this remotely controlled drone stuff is actually going to be working during a real war. “Just launch some drones and missiles!” is not gonna work. How will they find the target? How will they not get shot down before engaging the target?
If you want to talk about full blown autonomous SkyNet destroyers then maybe you have a point. But that seems quite a ways off. Skynet can’t repair a gas turbine, and those break underway all the time.
To clarify, you can plan on most comms be jammed and there’s a good chance the satellites will be shot down. Unless your drones are fully autonomous they’ll be useless.
The Air Force is more interested in its shiny toys than in the mission, just see how they’ve been trying to kill off the A-10 Warthog because the close air support mission is beneath them.
A-10 is obsolete. Only good for blowing up brown peasants. And there’s a case to be made that long range artillery would make more sense for that problem. The A-10 is useless against any modern industrialized adversary.
But the only people the US ever fights are peasants.
No doubt the threat to surface ships by missiles is high these days, but I don’t
think the lesson of the Falklands war is “vulnerability of service ships to cruise missiles”.
I’d say the lessons are
the “vulnerability of unready crews to attack of any sort.”
Or, “relying on 30-ish short range fighters and 1970’s technology + guns for air defense, while in range of enemy land airbases isn’t a good idea, regardless of what tech the attacker uses”.
1. Recent declassified reports indicate the Sheffield crew didn’t even think they were under attack, didn’t activate the defenses (chaff) that were effective in deflecting other Exocet attacks, and did a poor job of damage control after the impact:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/15/revealed-full-story-behind-sinking-of-falklands-warship-hms-sheffield
2. Strictly speaking, the Exocet is not a “cruise missile”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruise_missile
3. 20 of 23 british ships damaged or sunk were not hit by missiles. If more Argie bombs had exploded, the sunk count would have likely been higher:
http://www.naval-history.net/F62-Falklands-British_ships_lost.htm