It's time once again for our regular Open Thread. Apologies for getting this up late.
Overhauls are Iowa Part 6, The Navy and the Space Program, and for 2023, my review of the old Midway movie and the 2023 USNI sale, which should serve as a reminder to everyone to go and check out this year's sale.
Comments
If anyone in NG Land has a minimum of $2750 and the ability to tow ships across the Pacific and is yearning to own a genuine World War 2 warship, do I have an opportunity for you: APL-39, ex-USS Mercer is for sale!
Just finished Shattered Sword. Interesting read, although not as gripping as the Jutland books, if only because the stakes were lower, the outcome of the Pacific war being so massively overdetermined, that there was nobody at Midway who could `lose the war in an afternoon.'
It is remarkable how seemingly crazy the Japanese were, at basically ever level, from strategic (what real benefit would be gained from occupying Midway or the Aleutians?)to operational (why divide the fleet? were't the IJN supposed to be disciples of Mahan?) to tactical, although the authors do a pretty compelling job of explaining why the organizational culture of the IJN (and the political culture of wartime Japan) may have produced such poor decision making.
Are you planning a Midway series at some point? Or is it out of scope, since it's not a big gun battle? Incidentally, you don't have a Tsushima series. I'd be interested to read that one, if you were ever motivated to write it, since Tsushima seems to be the only truly decisive battle of the steam powered battleship era. (I'm guessing that the age of fighting sail is out of scope for the blog).
I am very much not planning a Midway series. This blog is in some ways a reaction against what was in the libraries of my childhood, and there was a lot of Midway. And if anyone wants more detail, Shattered Sword exists.
"The Russo-Japanese War" is on my list of things to write about, and I even have some drafts, but I have gotten tangled up in the sociopolitical side of things and not gotten to the shooting. Hopefully, it will happen eventually.
The general idea of occupying outposts in the Pacific was that this gave the Japanese more depth against the American counteroffensive, and therefore more time to wear the Americans down and convince them to accept a compromise peace. It turned out that island outposts are not really very helpful in doing this, because the larger fleet can always concentrate against one part of the cordon and blow its way through; if you have the fleet/air superiority, you can take the islands you need, and if you don't have the fleet/air superiority, you can't hold the islands you need. (And, yes, Mahan pointed this out wrt the French effort to build a mighty Gibraltar of Canada off the mouth of the St. Lawrence.)
The more specific idea of Midway was that by seeking a battle, you could provoke the Americans into sending out their carriers to be defeated, hastening the wearing-down of American willpower. This was not, in principle, a bad idea -- just sitting there doing nothing lets the Americans build in peace -- but the execution did not necessarily develop to Japan's advantage.
A recent piece on military-industrial (un)preparedness by Mark Bowden of the Atlantic, appearing for free on MSN:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ar-AA1w1O6h
Anyone have any thoughts? "Nobody ever has enough ammo" is a truism. A global supply chain may just be a serious liability, as well. More competition might help the defense industry. Some details, though, undercut credibility: calling "fighter jets, bombers, guided missiles, aircraft carriers" "arguably outdated" shows only how lazy that one adverb "arguably" allows a writer to be.
I am not particularly impressed. The issues with ammo production are not really news. Anyone who was serious about defense logistics could have told you this was going to be a problem by March 1st, 2022. That said, I'm glad he calls out munitions as the "bill payer", because that's a dynamic I've long suspected, but haven't seen anyone mention in print. Worth it for that alone.
(My theory on the best way to solve this for missiles is to offer fixed-price, effectively unlimited-volume contracts over, say, 5 years. We will pay a certain amount for every spec-conforming missile they deliver, so there's incentive to scale up production without having to specifically allocate money. The problem is that this violates basically every way the government thinks about doing contracts.)
I am skeptical that competition is the big issue in the defense industry. It's a very weird industry from an economic perspective, and I think a lot of normal analysis breaks down. In particular, I tend towards the view that "The Last Supper" was a perfectly reasonable response to the fact that, yeah, the defense budget was going to shrink a lot, and it's better to tell everyone this. The alternative wasn't to still have "51 primes" (I am somewhat skeptical of that number, as consolidation was already going on) it was to just have the process be messier.
And yeah, that's a classic weasel-wording thing that I would hope someone with Bowden's experience could avoid.
Also, one of the "you should also reads" was to an article by Jerry Hendrix, which does not positively dispose me towards the Atlantic's military coverage. (Nor does the one time I had to do an emergency post explaining that an article about how anti-ship missiles changed everything that didn't mention Eilat should not be taken seriously.) And they reference CNAS a lot, which I can never take seriously after they published that awful thing from Hendrix.
It would be interesting to see whether competition does, empirically, lead to better results by some reasonable metric (overall expenditure for quantity of arms obtained, speed at which effective weapons systems are developed, flexibility to new threats, ability to solve problems, etc.). That might only be possible to tell in the future, granted that comparison with other countries would require data that probably don't exist, as well as structural similarities in military needs, etc. that just can't be presumed. The Russians, at least, seem to have consolidated all their aircraft production bureaus into one (on paper, anyway), and I don't have the impression that anybody else's defense industry is exactly nimble, diversified, and full of productive startups. But I do say all of this as a complete civilian with no experience in military acquisitions beyond what I read on the internet, so I might well be missing something.
That said, and with full recognition of my likely ignorance, there are some high-profile cases where the Pentagon and/or the US defense industry raise my eyebrows. Most everything to do with the littoral combat ships is one pertinent to this blog; likewise, the delivery of Zumwalt and sisters without ever having worked out the problems with the primary armament. That all looks like just so much screwing around, wasting everyone's money and hurting military readiness. (Would it have been so hard just to license-build some Absalon-class frigates, if we needed a bunch of small modular warships?) But the issues that really make me scratch my head are hypersonics and UCAVs. How long were X-43 and X-51 in development, and yet the Russians and Chinese still seem to have beat the US to practical IRBM and FOB applications? I also remember reading a piece, linked I thought on this blog (in a comment?), about promising American developments in UCAVs that appear to have gone absolutely nowhere.
It sure looks, in cases like this, like the military has been playing around for years with highly advanced systems, lets other countries get ahead, and only then scrambles to catch up, rather than securing a lead well in advance. Or is that not, in fact, what happened with hypersonics (and might yet with UCAVs)? I do understand, of course, that doctrine or reasonable logistics/production concerns may lead to relative weakness in certain areas: for example, thermobarics or SAMS, where I have the impression that the Russians are perennially more invested; or something like the F-35, where trying to unify America's three air forces around one basic design does make some sense. But stuff like this just makes me wonder what they're thinking, off in that giant, five-sided building.
The problem with "we need more competition" is that no matter how much competition there is on the seller side, there's only one buyer. So if that buyer wants competition, they have to pay for it, in the form of funding two programs. I'm not saying this is never worth it, but the track record isn't strong, particularly because you end up with entrenched interests behind both programs, and then you have a big buy of both LCS variants.
Re abandonment of promising ideas, I will point out that unmanned aircraft for deep strike in hostile areas have been around for decades. They're called cruise missiles. For all of the hype in that article about the X-45, it's really not clear to me what advantages it brings over just using JASSM/Tomahawk/whatever. As for hypersonics, I'm on the record as a skeptic, so I'm not bothered that we're lagging, and in other areas like lasers, we're definitely on the cutting edge.
They sit there thinking five-sided thoughts, impenetrable to us mere mortals. More seriously, yes, they make a lot of bad decisions there, but I'm far from sure this is a uniquely American problem.
Goose of Doom:
What use would the US have for either?
IRBMs don't have the range to reach anyone the US might want to bomb from US territory (hence why the US uses ICBMs instead).
FOB means using a big rocket to launch a small warhead when a conventional trajectory would allow the same warhead to be carried by a smaller, cheaper rocket or allow the same rocket to carry a big warhead or lots of little ones.
Goose of Doom:
They might not have bothered to tell the whole world they entered service.
At the very least there is precedent for the US to announce a new weapons system, say nothing about it for a decade or so then reveal that they had it in service for the past couple of years.
Goose of Doom:
The US has tended to prefer smaller bombs delivered more accurately due to the US preference for not killing those they aren't trying to kill (they still have the big ones for when the terrorists are kind enough to put their training camps in the middle of nowhere) while Russia has been more willing to just kill everything even if there are civilians around.
On SAMs the issue is likely one of quality versus quantity, history is that western SAMs going up against Soviet/Russian aircraft is rare but much more effective than the more common cases of Soviet/Russian SAMs going up against western aircraft.
There's also a cultural difference in that Russia cares much more about export sales and has a much higher level of corruption.
"On SAMs the issue is likely one of quality versus quantity, history is that western SAMs going up against Soviet/Russian aircraft is rare but much more effective than the more common cases of Soviet/Russian SAMs going up against western aircraft."
I don't think there are a bunch of people out there saying Russian SAMs are Not Good. After all, Russian- and Soviet-built GBAD was good enough to deny the sky to both the Russian and Ukrainian air forces as long as the missile inventory lasted.
The quantitative difference is down to the Soviet, later Russian, belief that ground-based systems would be more reliable (politically, tactically, and technically) than air-launched systems. This in turn pushed the West to spend vast amounts of time, energy, and resources over the past 60-odd years on suppressing and/or destroying ground-based air defenses - investments that ex-Soviet forces (including forces trained and equipped by the Soviets and Russians) never had to make, since their doctrine was a lot less dependent on controlling the skies. That difference in emphasis, rather than a major qualitative difference, is mostly why Western SAMs do better against Russian/Soviet aircraft than vice versa.
@Goose of Doom, @bean You don't have to be a hard core Marxist to recognise that large enterprises in a capitalist system prefer not to compete on price and quality if they can avoid doing so, and as bean notes the military has special conditions that make it easy to avoid such competition. There are historical methods for improving the situation, but they're currently not acceptable politically.
One problem with military spending is that in peacetime it is difficult for the buyer to evaluate what value they're actually getting. Without a war, what is essential and what is gold plated over engineering? It's especially bad when government expertise has been lost ("hollowing out") by privatizing everything possible.
The solution (from a Drachinifel video, can't remember exactly which) used successfully by the British navy in the first half of the 20th C was Royal dockyards, state owned and operated defence manufacturing. A government shipyard would provide a reality check against private shipbuilders: "We can build a dreadnought in three years for two million pounds. Why are you quoting us five years and four million?"
Another way for big business to avoid competition is becoming effectively a monopoly, using intellectual property as a "moat". With enough patents and these days closed source software you don't have to worry about competition.
In WW2 the US government worked around this by ensuring that military designs could be built by any company, not just the original designer. The equivalent today would be the US government taking ownership of all the blueprints, specs, patents, and code for the F-35 and telling Lockheed Martin that if they can't/won't meet US govt requirements, maybe Boing or Airbus will.
And for an even more radical solution, there's cooperation rather than competition. One example is open source software, where I believe (or sincerely hope) that most military stuff with a computer in it is now running Linux, not some proprietary OS. And I would bet that most of the drones being used in Ukraine are running the open source autopilot software.
@Hugh
Yet again, Drachinifel is stealing my points. (OK, not explicitly, because I don't think I've published this, but the Royal Dockyards and similar US yards have actually been a big impact on my thinking here.)
I think you missed my point here. Admittedly, I have a conflict of interest, but I think the problem here is mostly on the buyer side. Given that there's only one buyer, the amount of practical competition you're going to have is limited. We had a competition for the JSF, and Lockheed won and Boeing lost. Should we have funded both the F-35 and F-32 for production to ensure we had competition? (And we did this with LCS, and it didn't work out that well.) What about software? Do we pay for two separate combat systems? Either you get criticized for duplication and wastefulness, or you get criticized for lack of competition.
In general the government owns any IP developed with government money, although there are a lot of complications. (And, uhh, I've seen them try to steal IP developed with company money.) But there are two problems with effectively bidding design and production separately. First, at some point the contractor has to get paid. A lot of "we could save money by doing X" proposals basically ignore this, and modern accounting standards remove the sort of nonsense British shipbuilders got up to in the early 20th century. (Seriously, check out the profit margins of the defense industry. They're not amazing compared to other industries.) Second, a lot of the competitive advantage Lockheed has is that they have the team and the production line. If Lockheed really, really screwed up, then it might make sense to turn to Boeing or Northrop, but for that to produce any savings, you're talking a Brewster-level screwup. Modern manufacturing is just too complicated for it to make sense to have Boeing set up a second production line and expect it to break even under anything remotely like normal circumstances. The WWII analogy also breaks down because it's not like the original manufacturer wasn't getting a piece of the pie. But we're not buying in anything like that volume today.
(Also worth noting that separate design and build bidding was done in the 20s. It caused problems, and was abolished for a reason.)
There's some Linux, but the problem with open source from the military perspective is finding someone to fill out the forms that they need. (There's also some of the old "open source will be hacked!" still floating around, particularly if you start talking about classified stuff.) And there's also the fact that if you're doing stuff with weapons, you need a real-time OS because dropping bombs in the wrong place is bad.
Philistine:
Is there anyone arguing that they preformed as well as Russia expected them to?
It is true that they performed well enough in basically every conflict they've been in to shoot some planes down, but historically western air defenses have tended to work better.
Philistine:
Normally you'd expect emphasizing a technology to make that technology work better, not the other way around.
Philistine:
But that was Soviet/Russian air defenses going up against Soviet/Russian aircraft.
Hugh Fisher:
The problem the US had during WWII was that for a lot of stuff the company that designed it simply didn't have the production capacity to make as many as were needed, these days that's only really an issue with ammunition.
The US also went to command economy to do it, that's not going to happen during peacetime.
bean:
There are open-source RTOSes available, assuming you actually need an OS.
"Normally you’d expect emphasizing a technology to make that technology work better, not the other way around."
That's usually true in the West, but almost never true in Soviet military philosophy. For them, "emphasizing a technology" meant "build this category of stuff in the greatest possible quantities" rather than "build the best possible stuff in this category." And Soviet/Russian GBAD is still good enough to be a real threat, that the US can only beat because we invest heavily in doing exactly that.
"But that was Soviet/Russian air defenses going up against Soviet/Russian aircraft."
Western-built fighters haven't suddenly enabled the Ukrainian Air Force to start ignoring Russian GBAD.
Philistine:
Not even the US (which has historically gone into combat equipped with only western fighters) was ever able to do that.