The newest and costliest U.S. aircraft carrier has been dogged by trouble
bloomberg.com
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1.) To sit there and look powerful, and ideally dissuade potential adversaries from forcing you to build a wartime military.
2.) To experiment with a bunch of new technologies, so that when you need to go to war, there is some report buried on a bureaucrat's desk detailing precisely the capabilities that the wartime military will have.
3.) To keep military industrial capacity alive, so that you don't have to build new shipyards & tooling from scratch if war breaks up.
4.) To keep military human capital engaged & employed, so that you don't need to train up a generation of engineers to build the tooling to build the war machines that you actually want.
5.) As a form of Keynesian stimulus & political welfare, to redistribute money from wealthy regions of the country to poor regions.
In basically every military conflict since the American revolution, people have found that military doctrine is going to be out-of-date, and all the best tactics & weapon systems you thought you had are largely useless. When Vietnam started, we thought that the war would be conducted through missiles, airplanes, and ICBMS; instead we had a long hard slog of infantry jungle warfare. When Korea started, we thought the next war would be nuclear and over in an hour; instead, jets & amphibious landings had a large place. When WW2 started, we thought we'd have a titanic clash of battleships; instead, the whole naval war was fought by submarines in the Atlantic and aircraft carriers in the Pacific. There's no reason to believe that the next war will be any different; for all we know, it'll be fought with drones in the sky, or hackers in cyberspace, or maybe we'll finally get the nuclear apocalypse that we thought Korea would be.
The point of a peacetime military is to keep options open so that when you find out just how the next war will be fought, there is some low-level engineer, somewhere, who has been experimenting with precisely the technology you need, and can be rapidly promoted and tell everyone else how to do it. Things like the Gerald Ford or F-35 fit right into that strategy. They aren't intended to be fighting machines in their own right; they're floating/flying R&D platforms for developing new technologies, most of which are useless but a couple of which will probably be crucial.
I think the project warrants more respect just for its audacity. It's basically a moonshot project.
That's good considering it costs several times more than a literal moonshot ($400b vs ~$110b for Apollo in today's dollars). I would describe it as less a moonshot and more a transfer of wealth to military contractors.
FWIW the $400b figure is to buy the planes, the Pentagon estimates a further $1 trillion to maintain them.
They're not going to ever actually buy all of those planes, and the maintenance cost will be far lower accordingly.
All you have to do is look at the F22 program to understand what's actually going to happen; there are numerous other recent examples of how they tend to slash & burn on ordering however. Ten years out they'll be on to the new new thing, and they'll be slashing the purchase program toward zero accordingly.
The planes are costing $93 million per unit currently, they'll buy less than 500-600 of them across all branches of the military, that's ~$60 billion, give or take $10-$15 billion on cost inflation over 10 years. Then reduce the maintenance cost accordingly for that number versus the laughable former numbers (thousands? ha ha ha).
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?year_h...
Think of the military as the backdoor way to get basic science & technology research funded in the U.S. The American public isn't willing to directly fund basic research, but if you frame it as "We're defending you from evil threats out there", you can pay for things like computers, the Internet, GPS, rocketry, satellites, carbon fiber composites, robotics, the colonization of Mars, etc.
Yes.
> The US spends more on it's military than every other militarily significant country combined -- what are we defending against?
If women ran the world, I might agree with you; they seem to be more cooperative than men, and they don't seem to be as driven as men to prove their superiority and establish their power. (I know, it's a pair of sweeping generalizations.)
And certainly there's room for debate about specific defense expenditures, or whether overall we should cut them back or scale them up.
But there are wolves in the world; if you've read even a little history, you'll know that perceived weakness invites predation. A strong military can be a really handy thing to have around — as, sadly, the world keeps having to relearn, often at terrible cost.
Like it or not, the U.S. is the ultimate guarantor of the global order on which so much of modern life depends.
(And it's "The US spends more on its military ....")
"For scholars such as Steven Pinker, a psychologist, and Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist, these are grounds for thinking that a world run by women would be more peaceful."
"But European history suggests otherwise, according to a working paper by political scientists Oeindrila Dube, of the University of Chicago, and S. P. Harish, of McGill University. They studied how often European rulers went to war between 1480 and 1913. Over 193 reigns, they found that states ruled by queens were 27% more likely to wage war than those ruled by kings."
http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21722877-european-histo...
Spending money on the military isn't a "stimulus", it's very a very damaging drain on the economy. The workers and engineers building those carriers and planes could be building commercial ships, cars, buildings, airliners, and developing new technologies for commercial use. We are sacrificing all those things to fund a military that is nearly irrelevant when we have the largest nuclear deterrent in the world.
(Now, if you'd said roads, bridges, dams, and basic research, you might have a point...ostensibly there is bipartisan interest in infrastructure repairs this term, we'll see if they get it done.)
The point of Keynesian spending is that as productivity increases, markets tend to saturate, and money ends up in the hands of those with a lower marginal propensity to consume. Redistribution - by any means, whether it's welfare, infrastructure, basic income, or defense spending - puts money back in the hands of those with a higher propensity to consume, which then raises aggregate demand and raises total economic output.
While even saving induces spending, it does so at a lower domestic velocity, on average, than consumer spending.
It's clear it is not about actual defense of the US, but about extracting as much wealth as possible from all of us; the tax payers.
This is simply not sustainable. Trillions of dollars spent on military programs that don't really give us "high-tech" weaponry and defense.
[1] http://warisboring.com/the-f-35-is-a-terrible-fighter-bomber...
[2] http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-us-navys-expensive-new-wars...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/pentagon-burie...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
(I don't think that was your intent, it just ended up that way)
I wouldn't say that's what it's about. It's just that America's prevailing mindset about defense and weapon systems is 'performance at all costs' and 'if it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing'.
So they don't set out to develop a weapon system that will perform well on the battlefield at some level of risk in exchange for a reasonable cost, they set out to build a weapon system that is absolutely dominant to the point of negligible risk on the battlefield. So every system coming down the pipe gets loaded up with every bell and whistle possible.
Of course the defense industry actively lobbies for bleeding edge and expensive weapons systems. But the fact is that the military and congress are all about dominance, not competence.
It makes sense to a degree. If you've got stealth bombers and the enemy doesn't, they may not want to start a war at all. But at a certain point your next-gen stealth bomber becomes so expensive and complex that it may never work properly or you can't field enough of them to make a difference. Or you've built something extremely expensive to perform a job that a plane 1/20th the cost can perform at little to no risk.
This seems to be plaguing a lot of areas of the American economy - areas where we basically write a blank check because we NEED x.
E.g., College Tuition, Health Care, Infrastructure, Jet Fighters. We spend a ton of money for rather unimpressive outcomes in all these areas.
Flip the incentives around, where war material is politically expensive and combat casualties are cheap, and you wind up with something much closer to what the Soviets did.
Realistically, unless we really piss off Canada or Mexico (okay, that part's not realistic...) or end up in a nuclear apocalypse, the U.S. isn't going to lose to any foreign power. The sheer logistics of bringing an invasion force across 3000+ miles of ocean make that basically impossible.
I'd be much more worried about the U.S. breaking up under domestic pressures, and then the various regions going to war with each other.
I think what you're saying is that the US isn't going to be successfully invaded by any foreign power. Losing a war is a very different thing (and indeed, the US has lost more than one war that didn't involve being invaded).
It's worth noting the US didn't even actually lose Vietnam. When we left, the US + South Vietnam, held 80% of territory and 90% of the population base when the Paris Accords were signed. It was a civil war the US should have never been involved with, the South lost that civil war once the US pulled out. The sole difference, is that the South would have lost it dramatically faster had the US not intervened. The North was in the end more than happy to sign on to the accords, because they knew once the US was gone they could finally take the South with relatively modest resistance.
The US didn't get what they wanted; the north did get what they wanted. Sure sounds like a win for the north.
Personally, as long as I get to write code without fear of having a gun pointed in my face or my house bombed out (both of which actually happened to my dad...we take a lot for granted in America), I'll consider that a win for me.
- At the end of the day, the Nimitz class carriers are still the most advanced in the world by about 30 years. We have a lot of time to get the Ford class working properly.
- In the absolute worst-case scenario, the electromagnetic launch and corkscrew arrest systems can be swapped out for steam systems in a fairly straightforward manner. It won't be cheap, but it's not a big mystery.
There aren't major problems with the other new systems on the Ford class that I know of. It will have plenty of power needed for future weapon platforms (railguns, energy weapons, etc). You could argue that carriers will be obsolete etc, but that's a different question and fairly speculative. There's not really a scenario where the Ford class puts us behind the Nimitz class after 2025 or so.
Other programs are fundamentally a bit shakier and deserve more worry. The F35 doesn't have a single "bad" part you can swap out to fall back to the capabilities of a fourth-gen fighter. Unfortunately, we're basically stuck with them, because if we cancel the F35, the British navy and the marines will have a dozen totally useless carriers without a modern VTOL fighter to put on them.
It's hard to tell when a weapons system under development in is trouble, and when it's just working out its kinks. Compared to past projects, the Ford class isn't all that far outside the projected budget.
They don't have.
They don't have a massive salvo of cruise missiles.
They don't have an armada of small red boats.
If you're arguing "if they had" you might as well say "if they had magic". They don't have, barring few enough to count on the fingers of one hand.
Aircraft carriers are still useful, they just aren't invincible. They are supposed to stay out of harms way and project force with aircraft. That is something that Riper's enemies did not calculate well. They grossly overestimated themselves and underestimated him and his men.
If we could get more honest exercises we could see what that actual limits are. Those limits probably don't make Aircraft carriers completely useless and probably don't leave the de facto platform to launch all war activity from.
but seriously, the gross fiscal negligence in this sector is appalling, and it's been the case since the start of the Military Industrial Complex.
Otherwise, the MIC is one of the only good funding sources available.
Who would be? I'm not aware of any. In fact, I got out of the industry partly because the money is total shit compared to the commercial world.
Moreover, a lot of people are uncomfortable about making robots decide who to kill.
- the lag. Aerial fight implies split-second decisions, many of which are matter of life and death. Sat link is way slower than that.
- kiss your stealth goodbye. First, you need a radar-transparent dome and a satellite dish under that; it's hardly stealthy. Second, you need a downlink that can be detected in a large vicinity of its target - even if it's a "tight" beam, it's still kilometers across. Third, the uplink will still bleed some RF energy that can be detectable. Planes fly in a radio silence for a reason.
- very low "sensor bandwidth". Fighter pilot constantly receives tons of data using almost all of their senses, while drone pilot only sees a grainy glitchy videostream.
To put it in another way: F-35 is basically a multi-ton, hyper-technological shell for about a kilo of squishy brain mass. Unless we invent some form of undetectable, very-low-ping, multi-gigabit communication it will always be better to have that brain "locally" in an adversary environment.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_Aircraft_Launc...