Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea
scottlocklin.wordpress.com
scottlocklin.wordpress.com
While the Battle of Jutland may seem silly, the alternative would have been a bunch of smaller ships duking it out (probably for a similar result) or only one side possessing battleships and annihilating the other side.
Manoeuvre warfare with a lighter fleet was not an option, as smaller vessels had smaller guns that frequently could not even penetrate a battleship's armour. So a battleship would've been able to pick off opponents at ease while they struggled to cause any damage. It's no good getting inside your opponent's OODA loop if you can't cause any damage.
And the technology that would have permitted another nation to bypass the idea of a battleship altogether and attack it from a different angle just did not exist at the time. It was only decades after Jutland that naval aircraft and aircraft carriers became fast and advanced enough to make the aerial bombing and torpedoing of enemy vessels a real possibility. These days missiles are the great equalisers.
Manoeuvre warfare is fantastically effective when the circumstances allow for it, but the available conditions, technology and personnel can sometimes make it ineffective. For instance, the German Blitzkrieg was extraordinarily effective against the static French defences in 1940, but the same forces and tactics came unstuck in 1941 when faced with a vicious winter and the Russian scorched earth style of defence.
With reference to the hacker context, the lesson is that simply moving quickly isn't enough. You also need to understand what a competitor's real weaknesses are as well as understand which parts of their strengths you're incapable of attacking. If your enemy has battleships and all you have are frigates, then maybe you shouldn't be fighting them at sea.
Good insight!
Nah, the reason it came unstuck is because the Germans ran out of fuel and because overrunning Stalingrad became a point of pride with Hitler and the Wermacht...there were not tactical/strategic reasons to occupy the city when they could have encircled and passed.
Encirclement and passage was one of the lessons the American military learned (sort of) from Stalingard that they later executed in the island hopping campaigns of the Pacific. Rather than invading every island, they just bypassed those without strategic value, cut the shipping lanes, and let the occupying forces starve.
Blitzkrieg (around which the German forces had been designed) was predicated on the assumption that you could quickly overrun a territory before the defenders could react to it. Which works fine in Poland and, to a degree, France (though that was partly due to some interesting internal politics in France at the time) but where's the first defensible border you could run to and hold in Russia? The Urals. Waaaaaaay too far to go. Even if you're starting from Konigsberg (as was then) and aiming at Moscow, that's still further than the whole width of France.
Germany was faced with supply lines that grew too long and a front that rapidly fanned out and thinned their forces. They ended up moving supplies by rail but had to lay their own rails as they went because the pre-existing Russian lines didn't match what they had and could feed from Germany. They needed supplies at such a rate that they couldn't afford the track time of sending cars back, so cars were abandoned at the front instead. The supply lines just became too long to service.
Then partisan campaigns started breaking out in captured territory requiring manpower to keep that land placid enough to support the front. Yet more supply issues.
Then.... winter came. German troops were faced with weather so cold that when they were fed soup it froze on their spoons before they could get it into their mouths. Yet Russian troops would hide in the snow all day and come out to attack by night. No doubt helped by convict armies which had regular army guns trained on them from behind and were under no illusions that returning in any condition to still fight would have them shot by their own side.
I don't believe there's been a single successful western land invasion of Russia since the Vikings. The country has demonstrated itself well able to simply absorb and tire out attackers by going back into the ample available space, safe in the knowledge that if they could somehow overcome the horrendous logistical challenges, they'd be so weak by the time winter came that it woudln't matter anyway. A brutal strategy, but apparently effective.
However such a storytelling tends to discard or fade the importance of Russian endevaours, ingeniuity and sacrifice. Another kind of storytelling would focus in finding factors which made Russia the ultimate victor. Such a discussion would prove far more interesting in my opinion. Then one could touch on questions such as how to withstand a strong inital attack, regroup, learn from your enemy and prevail.
The Russian army did not do this in WWII -- the Russian army that faced the Germans at the border was entirely annihilated. Those who didn't die at the front mostly died in German POV camps. The Russians won the war because they had the manpower and industrial capacity to raise entire new armies to fight the Germans at a rate faster than the Germans could destroy them.
There's an excellent book I bought at a library sale a couple years back, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege (http://www.amazon.com/Stalingrad-Fateful-1942-1943-Antony-Be...) that really tells the story well.
I don't want to minimize the fact that Russia bore a lot of casualties (more than any other country) in the process of defeating the Germans and pushing east, but frankly most wars are won and lost by the factors that existed before the first shot is fired, including population, logistics, and geography. If Stalin had done a better job, maybe Russia wouldn't have suffered so many casualties; if Hitler had done a better job, maybe they would have suffered even more. But there's no way Germany could have actually won, just as there's no way the South could have actually won the American Civil War.
Remember the Jevons paradox--any technological advance that increases the efficiency a given good can be utilized (including labor) results in an increase in the demand for that good. This is why slavery was even around back then--it was on its last legs until the cotton gin made it profitable again.
True, except I'd replace 'cold war' with 'continued legislative compromise'; the North was damnably willing to compromise with the South, allowing them to get much of what they wanted with rather little sacrifice. There was, in fact, a compromise in the works when the South attacked Fort Sumter and, from a larger perspective, a lot of 19th Century American politics prior to the Civil War was an increasingly desperate dance done by the North to placate the South to prevent the inevitable war.
> The time was ripe to replace slavery with automation
Read the Cornerstone Speech, given by the Vice President of the CSA. It lays out the reasons they wanted to secede and slavery was foremost among them. Slavery, by that point, wasn't just an economic engine, it was a cultural imperative. Preserving slavery was so ingrained in the Southern mindset that I feel fairly certain the plantation owners would have gone through a certain amount of economic dislocation if that meant keeping the slaves and the social system built on slaves.
Besides, even if you're right, the CSA still would never have allowed former slaves equal rights. Not without a race war that successfully toppled the post-slavery CSA establishment by force of arms. In the real world, it took the direct threat of Federal force of arms to ensure the reality of Civil Rights in the South nearly a century after the Civil War. (Admittedly, this is at least partially because Reconstruction didn't go on long enough or go nearly far enough.)
Was the civil war a better outcome? After the war former slaves were still agricultural workers, working long days in the fields. Only now they faced random violence and Jim Crow laws. Lynchings occurred well into the 20th century. Oh and the cost of the civil war was 600,000 lives, unbelievable destruction and a complete abandonment of all of the principles this nation was founded on(self-determination).
> Not without a race war that successfully toppled the post-slavery CSA
Why not? It almost happened before the invention of the cotton gin. Slavery was in serious decline.
This happened because Reconstruction was stopped too early. There was a period, from 1865 to 1876, where blacks were in state-level political office across the South, there were no Jim Crow laws, and the Klan was killed off by focused Federal action.
Secondly, slavery was horrible. Slavery involved much of what went on in the Jim Crow era, plus it meant a slave's life to try to escape the South. The Jim Crow South never managed to track down and forcibly return all the blacks who escaped to Detroit or Harlen.
> complete abandonment of all of the principles this nation was founded on(self-determination).
No. No. No. No. We fought this war and as it turns out, self-determination has to include everyone, not just the people lucky enough to be born rich and white. Read the Cornerstone Speech if you still doubt the primary cause of the Civil War was the CSA's insane determination to hold on to slavery.
> It almost happened before the invention of the cotton gin. Slavery was in serious decline.
If it's the CSA doing the inventing, there would have been another invention that saved slavery. And another. And so on. (After all, can't slaves work in assembly lines?)
Just so you know, I imagined you yelling this and slamming your shoe on the table.
> We fought this war and as it turns out, self-determination has to include everyone
What about the first civil war? The one between Great Britain and its american colonies? At the time the colonies had slavery and GB eliminated the slave trade in 1807 and all slavery in 1833. Why were the slave-holding american colonies justified in rebelling in 1775 but a different group of slave-holding americans not justified in rebelling in 1861? Was that self-determination for all?
How did the Second Civil war ensure self-determination for everyone? The fact is that it did not. Many blacks in the south were denied the right to vote for decades through a variety of tactics including literacy/law tests and threats of outright violence.
> After all, can't slaves work in assembly lines?
It's way cheaper to employ people for industrial work than it is to enslave them. Slaves are expensive and are a major capital investment, with significant risk of loss if they become injured or killed on the job. With employees you just replace them when they cannot work and you do not have to invest capital in buying them.
If you believe that the US invaded the south to free the slaves, the only reasonable conclusion is that they failed, at an enormous cost of lives, liberty, and property.
Yes, and that's OK. Free men with tractors were about to tear out the foundations of slavery. We know that slavery was economically infeasible by 1920, and that's with a decade or two of lost progress due to War losses. With a balls-out effort for industrial independence, that could probably have been accelerated to 1890.
That didn't happen because the abolitionists decided that it was better to kill one man today than to free two men tomorrow, and because the CSA let the abolitionists choose the terms of the conflict.
"Besides, even if you're right, the CSA still would never have allowed former slaves equal rights."
And that's OK too. In a Christian nation, the master is responsible for his estate's dependents, even if there is no use for them. After farm automation, most plantation owners would have freed them in desperation to escape the room and board costs. (In short order there would have been nothing left but lifestyle slaveholders and the obscenely rich, and the Southern abolitionists would have taken care of them.)
"Admittedly, this is at least partially because Reconstruction didn't go on long enough or go nearly far enough."
It has been argued that Reconstruction had to wait for the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program, which diverted vast amounts of resources into Southern industrialization.
Slaves can build tractors.
> We know that slavery was economically infeasible by 1920
This was a generation after it was abolished and the South had had to do something else. It's my contention that had the South been able to hang on to slavery, it would have found ways to work it into niches it never filled in the real world. Assembly line labor, for example, or mining, or fishing.
> the CSA let the abolitionists choose the terms of the conflict.
The abolitionists, by and large, thought they could win enough seats in Congress to outlaw slavery if they could prevent slavery from expanding into the new Western territories. That's why such expansion was the main topic of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and why Bloody Kansas was so bloody, and so on. There were certainly militant abolitionists, but they were the minority; the CSA chose its own war.
> In a Christian nation, the master is responsible for his estate's dependents, even if there is no use for them.
In a Christian nation, slavery either doesn't exist or is infinitely gentler than what actually occurred.
> After farm automation, most plantation owners would have freed them in desperation to escape the room and board costs.
Farm automation means machinery, and slaves can make machinery. Maybe that would involve plantations being turned into factories, but it isn't a slam-dunk that it would involve freeing slaves.
> It has been argued that Reconstruction had to wait for the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program, which diverted vast amounts of resources into Southern industrialization.
This is an interesting idea. Who argues that?
I doubt they can do it well. Machinery is hard enough for enthusiastic people who are being showered in money.
> It's my contention that had the South been able to hang on to slavery, it would have found ways to work it into niches it never filled in the real world.
Perhaps. My experience is that skilled industrial jobs are hard. Even in the time of Henry Ford, high wages had to be paid to attract good enough people. If slaves could get the job done, then auto workers at minimum wage could do it, which seems absurd to me.
> In a Christian nation, slavery either doesn't exist or is infinitely gentler than what actually occurred.
Southern slaves were not treated nicely (slavery, duh), but they were treated well in comparison to many other examples of slavery. Elderly, worn-out slaves were a reasonably common sight, despite the fact that their economic output was near zero. Slaves were given the very important job of child care (creating the Southern accent in the process), which is not a job given to a sullen, mistreated drudge. Compare this to the Arabs, who use slaves completely up and plow the bodies under as fertilizer. (See Dubai for a modern example.)
> This is an interesting idea. Who argues that?
TVA, Oak Ridge, Huntsville, and so forth. Huge amounts of resources were poured into creating technology projects from scratch. By the time of Apollo, Southern senators were good at bringing home the money and economic development.
Not considering the first World War as a successful invasion seems rather unfair. After all, Russia did get knocked out of the war and ceded huge tracts of land.
On the other hand, the entire purpose of the Nazi regime was to conquer eastern Europe, enslave or exterminate its population, and resettle Germans there. Victory required a successful invasion of Russia.
Also, few considered air power to be actually capable of fighting battleships until the Battle of Taranto, where the effectiveness of air raids surprised almost everyone. The German planners almost certainly didn't believe in the capability of Luftwaffe to destroy the Royal Navy.
I've never heard that before - do you have any references? The Nazis declared war on America, not the other way round.
The reason USA didn't join outright was that there was serious domestic opposition to the war, and Roosevelt understood well that he needed his Lusitania to be able to bring America fully into the war. The Germans took all pains to avoid this, and USA only managed to declare war after the Pearl Harbor.
In reality, history rarely contains black-and-white narratives where the one side is the clear aggressor. Had the USA not been actively engaging in combat operations against the Germans and the Japanese, they never would have been stupid enough to pick a fight with the Americans.
I firmly believe that the only possible route to German victory would have been capture of Gibraltar soon after the French campaign. German industries sorely needed raw materials, and it's war machine sorely needed oil. The Mediterranean could have provided both, and all the Germans needed to completely secure it would have been the Rock and Suez.
Was the capture of Gibraltar in any way realistic? With Franco joining on the German side, perhaps. The Germans had siege cannons that should have been able to reduce the foundations that Gibraltar stands on into rubble. But Franco had already won his war -- he had little to gain from joining, and a lot to lose.
Without an axis Spain, taking the Rock would essentially have required first attacking Spain. And they had a large, experienced and well-trained army, which would have had good defensive positions on the Pyrenees. I don't know.
It would not have been necessary to actually take Gibraltar -- only to silence it's guns, and place enough artillery west of it to block the strait.
I was just reading Machiavelli's "Discourses on Livy" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourses_on_Livy) last night, more exactly a chapter called "Fortresses are generally more injurious than useful":
> But when the prince has not a good army, then fortresses whether within his territory or upon the frontiers are either injurious or useless to him; injurious, because they are easily lost, and when lost are turned against him; and even if they are so strong that the enemy cannot take them, he will march by with his army and leave them in the rear; and thus they are of no benefit, for good armies, unless opposed by equally powerful ones, march into the enemy’s country regardless of cities or fortresses, which they leave in their rear. We have many instances of this in ancient history; and Francesco Maria did the same thing quite recently, when, marching to attack Urbino, he left ten hostile cities behind him without paying the least attention to them.
You can very well replace "fortress" with "battleship" and the idea is the same.
Anyway, I highly recommend the book, and you're mentioning somth about the US Army learning from the Germans' mistakes. Well, I can tell you that they certainly did not learn anything from reading Machiavelli, otherwise they wouldn't have trusted Karzai in Afghanistan (there's a chapter called "How dangerous it is to trust to the representations of exiles"), not to mention trying to conquer peace by bribing everyone involved in ruling present Afghanistan (there's also a chapter for it: "Republics and princes that are really powerful do not purchase alliances by money, but by their valor and the reputation of their armies") or not doing anything about Abu Ghraib ("How dangerous it is for a republic or a prince not to avenge a public or a private injury").
Here's the English translation of this great book: http://oll.libertyfund.org/simple.php?id=775
No, you can't, because the battleship can move and attack your supply lines.
Battleships won the first world war. Not because of any engagement they participated in, but because the Royal Navy stopped German merchant shipping entirely, while the Kriegsmarine only managed to harass British shipping. You cannot go around a battleship when one of the primary points in it's design is to be fast enough to interdict anyone.
Of course, a battleship, being mobile, does not suffer from the disadvantage of being easy for your opponent to bypass. And a battleship, carrying a stupidly large armament, has the advantage of being able to blow up lots of your opponent's stuff. Its primary disadvantage is its expense, which is why you don't see fleets consisting of only battleships.
German U-Boats demonstrated battleship's obsolescence during very early WWI (U-9 sank 3 battleships in under an hour in September 1914...), and this was confirmed in the early 20s with aerial torpedoing (which Admiral Percy Scott had predicted would end battleships in 1914).
The only thing which let battleships "survive" into the 40s were navy brass conservatism and inertia, and the lack of military conflicts.
In the Battle of Lepanto the Christian alliance was able to use big ships with cannons mounted on them to crush the Ottoman force before the Ottoman's flanking force was able to get in position.
In the European expansion into the Indian Ocean large boats with big guns were able to easily defeat hordes of smaller, lighter ships that they faced letting the Portuguese, then the Dutch and English take control of some of the most valuable trade lanes in the world.
In the Opium War the British were able to easily win because of big guns that could out-range anything the Chinese had and fast steam engines that let them set the pace of engagement.
And if things at Jutland had gone just a little bit differently it might have been the Germans who had won the war.
Or, playing the "wolf card" amidst the fog of war and a resourcefully laid smokescreen with a bunch of smaller ships. (Causing the enemy commander to think, "They must have larger ships back there." This was destroyers vs. cruisers, not battleships, though.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_off_Samar
I suspect that the future belongs to drones. Autonomous Air Independent Propulsion submersible drones would be far less expensive than an aircraft carrier, but very likely to be able to lie in wait for a carrier and torpedo it.
EDIT: Correction -- one could actually say those American destroyers engaged the Yamato, which was the biggest, baddest battleship ever.
Isn't this basically an electric torpedo?
There's reasons this makes sense, even in the context of a fight against battleships (please assume similar technical capability, since a WWII Battleship would likely not fair well against a 2020 drone swarm..) A battleship, even a big automated one, has a series of weak points, such as sensors, removal of which can cripple the ship, and a swarm doesn't lose effectiveness at a blast from heavy weaponry...it may get a hole punched through it, and have only a few drones taken out...
The smoke and the rain squalls at the Battle of Samar were sufficient to make the larger guns available to the Japanese fleet irrelevant.
Cruisers and destroyers were always faster than battleships (they had to be), displacement hull and all. It gives no confidence when you start the article with a glaring factual error.
"The idea of battleships duking it out in the high seas is pretty ridiculous when you stop to think about it. It never really happened unless you count the Battle of Jutland."
If you write such an article, you should do a bit of research and be at least dimly aware of the battles of Tsushima, Heligoland Bight, Moon Sound etc. etc. etc. Battleships were indeed a bit slower, but when they showed up they instantly dominated the field with their range and firepower. Even in WW2, when the carrier greatly reduced their importance, battleships fought a few very important engagements, e.g. Denmark Strait and second battle of Guadalcanal.
It's easy to deride things you don't understand as "tumescent penii". But the historical fact is, for about half a century after 1890, battleships were indeed the most effective (and also expensive) naval weapons system in existence.
While we're picking on individual parts, though -
> For missile silos, just target the enemy’s silos with lots of missiles and you can duke it out and win (just like the phalanx). If he puts his missiles on rail cars, you haven’t got a chance of hitting them all.
Technically that's true, but I think the reason countries use missile silos and stationary bases is actually for ability to protect key installations and arms during domestic unrest and rioting, which is a statistically much more likely problem for a world power than getting hit with a first strike from another major world power without any warning or preparation time.
Still, even with some errors and exaggerations, it was quite an interesting read.
You are very mistaken. The only reason domestic unrest is a more likely danger for a world power is because the country we are speaking of already has missile silos and stationary bases in the first place. Ownership of missile silos with nuclear warheads reduces chances of attack by a foreign power by such a huge amount that domestic unrest becomes a more realistic threat.
Actually, I think you're mistaken, but let's think this through -
There's 200 countries in the world, roughly. Call the current world powers America, China, UK, Russia, and maybe a couple other European countries.
In any given year, there's a lot more chance of any given country having a riot/unrest than there is an attack by America, China, UK, or Russia. Like, much higher. And usually, there's considerable advance warning before attacks so you could prepare.
If you like, you can add in places with a decent mix of either high troop strength or very technologically advanced military - even adding in places like North Korea, Iraq before losing its various recent wars, and Israel doesn't seem to change the numbers that much. The chance of serious unrest in any given country in the world is much higher than the chance of attack by a militarily powerful nation.
We could check actual numbers if this isn't convincing, but the number of domestic insurrections every year are much higher than attacks by a major world power. And also, those usually come with more telegraphing beforehand than domestic unrest does.
> And usually, there's considerable advance warning before attacks so you could prepare.
The key word is "usually". How usually is usually? When Nazis attacked the USSR, was there an advance warning? There was none. True, major attacks are rare, but when they do come, I would say about 50% of them are without warning. Yes, they are usually preceded by some diplomatic hostility, but not always. There were some 45 years of diplomatic hostility between the US and the USSR, yet there was no attack.
But the biggest thing you are missing is this: attacks on a major power by another major power are rare precisely because the country being attacked is a major power. Attacks of a major power on a minor country happen about every five years or so if recent history is any guide.
Side note from the referee: writing is a form of thinking things through, and even if it isn't you're distracting from the issue. 5 yard deduction and 2 minutes in the penalty box, plus parent gets a free shot.
Stalin had plenty of advance warning - there were even people defecting from the German ranks and telling them that the Germans were coming (they were probably shot for their troubles).
Even after the invasion started Stalin refused to believe the reports coming from frontline units for a long time after the invasion started.
See: http://www.simonsebagmontefiore.com/stalincourtredtsar.aspx
Does this mean you would only count it as a "warning" if the Nazis actually sent an envoy that said, "Hey, we're coming for you now?"
You may have a delightfully convincing and logical treatise on this topic, but if you lose your audience in the first sentence, we won't get the benefit of it.
A casual scan of the parent's commentary indicates some semblance of cognitive analysis of the issues at hand, so it's not even clear to me your analysis of their (lack of) thinking before exposition is accurate, and, regardless, you could have worded your position somewhat more politely - perhaps by identifying the flaws in their logic, rather than making a claim of lack of thought on their part.
A civil apology would go a long ways towards recovering traction in your discussion with them and convincing the readers of this thread of your good will.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT-2UTTKh_Topol_M
They have randomized patrol routes, so it is hard to track them, but they can launch thermonuclear MIRV warheads.
Yeah subs are a lot better but also a lot more expensive...
US probably has the capability to track other countries' subs, but it is a little harder to do that with hundreds of always moving launch platorms. Those are much cheaper to build and if they carry MIRV warheads, they can be very dangerous. It is of course possible to see them from a satellite but because they are always moving targetting them like one target a stationary silo is very different.
After the advent of the hydrogen bomb, no harden target can really be called safe. Coupled with modern military GPS and you have a super-precise, super-powerful weapon.
Thanks for the downvote tho'.
And I'm not sure why you're so interested in downvotes, but it wasn't me.
This means that the silos are protecting each other -- you'd need to wait hours between hits to be able to land nukes on all of them. (Or hit them all within the minute.)
So why the need for launch on warning? If you are confident that your missiles are going to be safe from a first strike you could sit there and take the damage.
What you describe sounds more like Dense Pack - which I don't think was ever implemented:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_triad
They all have their advantages and disadvantages and strategic uses. Taken together they are a complete package of nuclear strike capabilities. Nothing about it is obsolete as the author suggests.
Battleships also are hardly obsolete and also have advantages and disadvantages. For instance, when the Missouri class battleships were retired in the 90's, it was met with a great deal of opposition by the marines. No other weapon in the military arsenal could provide beach bombardment like the battleship; and certainly not for the low cost. The marines were promised a replacement - they are still waiting.
These capital ships aren't being built today because missiles and fighter planes suddenly negated their advantage, not because they weren't a good idea to begin with.
IMHO it's an overwhelming act of condescension pretending to be smarter than thousands of admirals and military advisors, many of them with lots of real world experience fighting wars and stuff.
I thought the same thing, but then I remembered that the military leadership and tactics during The Great War were pretty damn lousy (e.g. trench warfare). For some reason it seems like it's surprisingly common for wide varieties of armies to repeat history.
What's so lousy about trench warfare? I mean, yes, it sucks, but it's a Nash equilibrium given the technology at the time (very good machine guns, lousy tanks and aircraft). If your enemy has trenches, you need trenches too. What else would you have done?
I'd do what actually happened: innovate with technology and tactics to break through the trench line.
(I heard that the Belgian king was held in high esteem by the normal Belgians for not ordering those suicidal attacks.)
IF the other guys are also defending, you can think about, maybe, peace?
World superpowers would have gone bankrupt had they used this tactic.
In hindsight, if the ability to deliver more ordinance a longer distance was the thing, the aircraft carrier should have been a shoo-in.
Think of Msft, Oracle, IBM, Apple as the phalanx fighters. They lock shields and charge, spending millions (billions) of dollars (instead of soldiers).
The problem is their tactics are clumsy. Imagine all the Microsoft VP's circling the wagons around really bad _implementations_ (the ideas aren't bad) - I'm sure you can thing of some.
If you are lean agile Mongol (hacker) you can easily run around them and attack them from the back.
Your OODA loop is much tighter. You can maneuver and decide much better than a big hierarchical organization.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
See: The Smartphone Wars: Tightening the OODA Loop http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2975
As the author points out, the battleship was the fastest thing afloat which makes it more akin to Stonewall Jackson's foot cavalry and the first principal of maneuver doctrine - "get there fastest with the mostest." It is only in hindsight and perhaps anachronistically that one classifies battleships as the phalanx rather than the mongol horde - or perhaps more appropriately Viking Longship. I will add that the scale and costs of aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines dwarf those of the battleship - there is some evidence that pouring money into holes in the water such as the Alpha and Typhoon classes played a significant role in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
[edit] All this to point out, that the distinction between maneuver and phalanx isn't always obvious and neither is the choice as a matter of tactics - when the enemy masses on your front, digging in and calling for aircover is may be the preferred alternative - even for highly mobile force.
But of course the German Blitzkreig, a brilliant archetype of maneuver warfare, overran these emplacements, the fixed system of defense built by the French being the best example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maginot_Line).
The US military has been developed for the last 60 years to re-win World War II; even the Cold War was really just the US and Russia building to re-win WWII until Russia ran out of cash.
As one can see given the issues that the US military has had in Iraq and Afghanistan the WWII methods of battle, which have devolved back to phalanx warfare, are struggling (again) to defeat maneuver warfare.
Manuever warfare often relies on a static force to pin the enemy in place while the mobile elements do their thing. Saying "Maneuver good, static bad" is just as silly as the reverse, whats needed for success is to understand the advantages and disadvantages of the various tools available and intelligently choose the right tool or combination of tools for the task at hand.
What makes this particularly galling is relative strengths of the two armies at the time; the Allied forces in northeastern France had significantly more tanks (for example) available there than the Germany army had in total, let alone defending the western front. It's far from impossible that a serious, concerted attack on western Germany in the 1939-1940 'phoney war' period could have had enough success to significantly alter the course of the war and turn it significantly into a land war in western Germany for much of the period.
Anyways, no one actually takes his advice. Acquisitions are always busy buying supplies for the last war. Surprise, surprise.
What is better with very expensive but obsolete machinery than to people use their machinery to duke it out. Will things explode and sink "at great cost" ? Well yes, that's sort of the point. It is even more costly to keep them afloat and maintained.
To those who think this is cruel, European powers periodically fought wars with each other for thousands of years before 1914, they just never were quite as catastrophic (enter chemical weapons and, later, nukes). Hell, the Catholic church tried to ban jousting many times since... you guessed it, people frequently died trying to poke each other with sticks for the sake of scarves from pretty ladies.
Hooah!
EDIT: Actually, if you click on the picture, the description does mention it's "likely an artist's vision".
The Mongols easily won the Battle of Legnica in Poland: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Legnica
That's really the most Western of their major battles, and they were turned back by choice, not by losses in battle.
Were there any cases where they had anything other than skirmishes with Germanic tribes?
Information theory? Software? Modern quantum mechanics?
Yeah, I know there's been no important stuff except that important stuff.
Napoleon kind of knew what he was doing. His use of position and movement is actually mentioned in the Wikipeda's article on maneuver warfare [2].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Austerlitz [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuver_warfare#Napoleon.27s_u...
true fact: my wife's great uncle, Tuck Smith, is the US pilot who spotted the Bismarck, back when the US (supposedly) wasn't involved in WWII.
http://www.navytimes.com/legacy/new/0-NAVYPAPER-1642064.php
(Interesting fact, he was flying over Wake island on 12/7/41)
Although I'm not sure this qualifies as "hacker", let alone "news".
Ever see Independence Day or, more recently, Battle LA? Didn't you find it stupid that once the command ship are destroyed, the enemy essentially dies? This is what aircraft carriers represent.
Take the $23 billion dollars it takes to build the first Gerald R. Ford Carrier and invest that into various decentralized, independent, small technologies, and your army is considerably better for it when it comes to any serious threat.
It's like our military planners never read Ender's Game.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_ship
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_212_submarine
A fleet of Sea Shadow type vessels and Air Independent Propulsion submarines combined with a good land-based air force would make life very difficult for carrier battle groups.
11 US aircraft carriers? 11 missiles. $100+Billion vs $15 Million. 30000 soldiers vs 0.
During the cold war this is the strategy that Russia took - let the US build expensive ships, they build [relatively] cheap missiles. The Chinese are doing the same with the Dong Feng missiles.
However, missiles do scale well. Even 1000 missiles will cost much less than the carrier and will almost certainly take it down.
There are 190-odd countries in the world. The US Navy's aircraft carriers are extremely effective against at least 185 of 'em.
All the countries with a "remotely comparable force" also have nuclear weapons, so if the US ever winds up in a full-on shooting war with one of them then it's all over for both sides anyway.
No aircraft carrier has actually been sunk since World War 2. So they can't be that vulnerable.
Bear in mind that anything capable of launching a thouand anti-ship missiles will be one of the things the USAF will destroy within the first few hours of the war.
With a hundred small boats
> And how would you get that launch platform within range of a US aircraft carrier?
With civilians on board
> Bear in mind that anything capable of launching a thouand anti-ship missiles will be one of the things the USAF will destroy within the first few hours of the war.
Yep, nothing better to start a war on the right foot than civilian massacre.
Isn't that like saying Hoover Dam has never been destroyed, so it can't be that vulnerable?
I'm not sure that there have been serious attempts to destroy either (is my point).
In comparison, most of the cruise missiles we hear about (Tomahawk for example) are subsonic (though the US does have a few old supersonic ones).
The effectiveness of missile defense systems isn't 100%. It's hard to shoot something travelling at 3600mph. It takes a lot of power, a lot of accuracy, generates a ton of heat, and a requires dash (or two) of lady luck. The defensive system can be overwhelmed for a fraction of the price.
This is his only proof that they're useless? Sorry, I need a lot more than that. Anybody who's played Civilization will know that you keep your battleships safe due to their cost, but they're supremely powerful nonetheless.
What a load of bollocks. The author hasnt heard of the situationism, dada-ism, Zerzan or Sartre but for sure the western civilization has.
Further on "The Mongols never had the societal organization the West did, so they could never take advantage of their successes, and their various empires only served to make the Russians and Chinese paranoid, and Eastern European women more exotic looking.".
This is also bollocks, the mongols successfully ruled a vast area from China to Europe, the silk road was again revived, you could travel from Poland to Peking and not get robbed. The mongols collected all the taxes from such a vast region, even after Djenghis Khan died, thats some hell of organization right there.
On manuvre warfare, Alexander The Graeat (or as persions like to call him Alexander the Gay) certanly knew about this.
They successfully ruled.. for a very short period of time even by empire standards, before splitting up into various dynasties and going native and whatnot.
Why did Subutai stop in Eastern Europe, after destroying all opponents and units on par with the best Western Europe could offer, and with every prospect of conquering the Holy Roman Empire and extending the Mongolian empire to the Atlantic? Because Ghengis Khan's successor, Ogedei, had died and the succession process was so ill-defined and chaotic that Subutai had to stop everything and travel a continent back to Mongolia.
Succession and peaceful transfers of power, among other things, was never something the Mongols managed to deal with competently. We can admire them for their military prowess, we can admire individuals like the sinicized Kublai Khan for being good peace-time rulers, but we can't admire them for ruling competently 'from China to Europe' because they didn't.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Don't forget robots! Man, you think the guided missiles in the first Gulf War were cool? Now we can kill people entirely by electromechanical proxy, staying out of the line of fire and incurring little to no risk ourselves! Man, we're living in the future! What a bunch of pussies we are.
Like Bill Hicks said, why can't we use this technology to shoot food into the mouths of hungry people instead?