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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

If this keeps escalating, the US might get more involved

I don't undertand why the EU isn't all over this. those containerships are mostly going to them.

I'm also curious how long this route around africa is the best option, since right now, its summer in the southern hemisphere.. I seem to remember hearing that winters around the cape of Africa are pretty legendary.

I have a suspicion that it's the same reason European aid to Ukraine has so far been a tiny fraction of what was publicly pledged: western European military capabilities are much, much more degraded than anyone is publicly admitting. After the collapse of the USSR it was fine to just write off defense capabilities for a while and lean on the American security shield, but now after ~35 years of kicking that can down the road there's nothing useful they can do to to help against a bunch of unguided rockets getting fired from the desert, never mind a shooting war with Russia.

European navies can project force just fine, especially the Royal Navy, French Navy and the Italian Navy all of ehich have aircraft carriers.

By the way, military support for Ukraine runs just fine.

Main reason nobody goes to fight over this, is the avoidance of escalation. And so far, some delays in shipping is not the end of the world.

Don't they have like one aircraft carrier each. Would be absolutely embarrassing to have it melted by Houthis.

Last time I checked, Italy had two.

Anyway, for now geo politics mean that taking the long way around, and not intervene with force, the smart decision for everyone involved.

To be clear, the displacement of the aircraft carriers of the Italian navy are 30k tonnes and 14k tonnes. US carriers are about 100k tonnes, UK about 65k tonnes. I don't think they're really comparable, as US amphibious assault ships have greater displacement than the Italian carriers.

And yet, both can project force. Even using F-35s like the US Navy does. Not that any of that would help against Houthi rebels.

Absolutely capable of projecting force, yes. But the commenter above pointed out that it would be an big risk for a country with two (they said one, but it's two very small) ACs to send one of them into a war zone instead of trade ships simply going around. At least that's was my read of it.

Although it's a worthwhile correction to say Italy's navy fields two ACs instead of one, I just don't think it's material to their point.

Boring pedantic note: the US Navy uses the heavier catapult-launched F-35. Other nations use the STOVL F-35, which has a smaller weapons payload and shorter range.

(Only three nations in the world have catapult-equipped aircraft carriers: the US, France and China. The latter two countries are not F-35 users.)

> By the way, military support for Ukraine runs just fine.

If that was the case Ukraine wouldn't be so worried about loss of US support. Sure Europe is giving some support, but the EU alone is enough bigger than Russia that Ukraine should have no problems getting enough support. This is true even if you eliminate a few players like Hungary that are supporting Russia. (UK of course isn't in the EU)

The major players in Europe (France, Germany, UK) don't seem to be against supporting Ukraine, but they don't have the ability to do it despite an economy that says they should be able to if they wanted. There are a lot of smaller players in Europe that likewise should have plenty of ability to provide support but somehow they can't provide it.

Yeah, this is a point a lot of people simply don't understand. Having billions of dollars in GDP generated by the service industry (like financial services or informational technologies) does not map one to one to generating a functioning arms industry to produce artillery ammunition for example. You need manufacturing facilities, a large pool of candidates with potential expertise in technical hardware skills to run these factories and logistical lines to keep them running. These prerequisites existed in the West during the earlier part of the 20th century which was why the transition to the war economy was relatively painless but no longer exists now. It is simply irrelevant to talk about multibillion dollar GDP economies specialized in unrelated industries if you don't have the actual physical resource and staffing requirements.

True, maintaining an industrial base in the defence sector is hard. Demand is usually, luckily, rather low. Technology is pretty advanced, making ot impossible to just repurpose existing industrial sites as was done during WW2.

Civilian industry could build a metric shit-ton every day of the equivalent of the Iranian shaheed drones. If the political will was there to repurpose civilian industry.

Yes, they can easily be shot down, but if several hundreds keep coming every day, the defences will be overwhelmed. It's already a war of attrition and Europe could easily win it, but it's mostly sitting on its ass.

Let this be a lesson to all: you need to ensure your industrial base can actually step up and produce what you need for war. Thankfully you don't normally need it, but you are not in control of when someone will decide to attack. You are not in control of if NATO or other alliances fall apart. You have some input on both (please work for peace!), but there are factors outside your control involved.

That nobody is producing enough artillery shells almost 2 years later is criminal. I give Ukraine a small pass here only because evidence is post 2014 they were doing their best to build capacity, and that takes time. The rest of us didn't have the corruption and other problems that Ukraine has done internally, and so we should already have that in place. (or in place the ability to give Ukraine air supremacy so they don't need artillery - there are lots of options)

The idea of "If you want peace, prepare for war" is as true today as it was back then. Only risk being, that some people in power might tempted to use a strong military for all kinds of reasons.

Yes, like now for instance.

The US is the largest individual contributor, but the combined contributions of the EU and its member states are larger both in absolute terms and especially as a fraction of GDP. You just hear less about it, because it's generally less newsworthy. Except for Hungary's attempts to stop some EU-level programs.

Not really. European navies suffer from very similar problems to their airforces and armies. Small amounts of expensive kit, surprising unavailability of forces at any given time - very limited logistical kit, manpower available for any operation.

The Royal Navy is basically irrelevant outside their nuclear submarines, along with the rest of the UKs armed forces.

And no, military support for Ukraine is not going fine as can be easily checked in several recent articles in reputable sources such as the NYT, FT, Politico and The Economist.

French ships are still going through. CMA CGM just resumed shipping there.

This entire issue is basically Israel trying to pretend the entire global supply chains are about to collapse if no one intervenes (keeping in mind they have their own navy, but declined to participate in operation Prosperity Guardian, despite them being the main target of the Houthi blockade...)

Did you hear about Operation Prosperity Guardian and its complete failure to address the situation?

I can’t tell if this comment is a joke or not but I agree! It’s just funny to see that on the story “95% of traffic through the Suez Canal diverted” —- seems pretty escalated!

I presume by escalation, they are referring to the entire conflict, not just the diversion of traffic.

the theory I’ve heard says that’s extremely unlikely. The US only has ~80 destroyers most of which are protecting their super carriers. They don’t want to police the worlds oceans anymore. [1] https://youtu.be/mcZPOuI-vcU?feature=shared

Israel has been begging for the US to get more involved.

Like how they are provoking Hezbollah with their "double-tap" strikes.

Israel and Hezbollah have been in a low-grade state of war for over a decade. If Hezbollah hadn't diverted its energy to the Syrian Civil War, they might by now have been in a state of total war. Hezbollah has units dedicated to infiltrating and attacking targets in Israeli Galilee. My guess is, and I could be wrong, that it probably doesn't make sense to attribute a motive of "dragging the US in" to Israeli strikes on Hezbollah. In many ways, Israeli strikes on Hezbollah are far more ordinary than strikes in Gaza are.

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