US shoots down two of its own Navy pilots over Red Sea
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The US has the most advance tech and the largest budget, nobody can deny that. But how useful are these when something like the B2 cost billions and there is only one tank factory in the entire country? Also, many critical parts for these expensive war machines are difficult to source and easily disrupted by an adversary.
One example is the artillery ammunition being supplied to Ukraine. The US can barely break 50K/month. Meanwhile, Russia is producing them by the hundreds of thousands. China is even higher.
The US has the fanciest toys but those can barely be made and are only good for strategic, precision attacks; and their supply chain cannot sustain a prolonged conflict. In a peer conflict, these are fatal. If China started a war, their manufacturing base can potentially pump out more weapons than the US can destroy. And in the long term, the US may not be able to keep up in both weapons and personnel.
Just like how Japan got the largest and most advance battleships with the more experienced crews at the beginning of WW2 but still lost to the US. Japan could not match the production and rapid replacement rate the US had. Now, the US is in Japan position compared to China.
The Royal Air Force has less active fast jets (fighters and bombers) now than it had just bomber aircraft (Tornados) 20 years ago, and the Royal Navy is struggling to find sailors to man ships (not surprising given the pay, and the fact the UK doesn't do what the US armed forces do and pay for education, i.e. college).
If you look at accident reports over the past year from the US Air Force, the amount of flying time pilots are getting for practice every three months is around a third of what is was 10 years ago.
The history example with Japan also demonstrated this point. Japan had highly trained and effective sailors and pilots. But they all died and by the end of the war, Japan had to scrape the barrel and forced untrained young boys into the fights, who did not received any advice or training from the experienced veterans because those had all died. And so they lost.
The US may walk the exact same path on both equipment and personnel.
1. https://media.defense.gov/2024/Dec/18/2003615520/-1/-1/0/MIL...
2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/12/18/...
These are totally different tasks, and I'm not sure you can deduce much about one from the performance in the other.
But when the fight dragged out, as it has always done and absolutely will be in a peer or near peer conflict, the effectiveness of the US military drops like a rock. It is here that I question what is the point of all the expensive toys and the trillion dollars budget.
And the US military is still stuck in the past in term of strategy for all out conflicts. A bunch of drones scared the entire nation the last few days and the army literally has no effective means to immediately response or track them. Meanwhile, billions are poured into aircraft carriers, all of which are easy targets for mass drone strikes or an ICBM attack. The US has no way to recover even a single carrier loss. There is simply no time or material to build them faster. Yet they are still the backbone of the US force. A bone that is getting more and more vulnerable every day.
All these previous wars were definitely not cases like this. There was no shortage of kit or firepower. It was rather that the US didn't know how to fight a counter-insurgency. That is a strategic failure, but seems to tell you nothing about matching up to Russia or China.
Industrial production, hmm, maybe. I guess its hard for anyone to compare to China, and I really hope we never live to find out. But Russia is no great comparison point. US is certainly out producing Russia in terms of aircraft and lots of ammunition types, so much so that the small part that makes it to Ukraine is just-about a match for what Russia produces and imports in a wartime economy, with nothing diverted to reserves.
And why do you conclude the US couldn't ramp it up? It hasn't tried for many decades, I guess since Vietnam. My impression, if anything, is the opposite. It has plenty of spare capital which could be put to that use, should the political will arise.
As for broader US strategy and carriers being easy targets for ICBMs or drones, I would think this is speculation at this point. Until there is a hot war, it's so hard to know. And with 11 carrier groups, the US can afford to lose a lot of them and still have substantially more than the next opponent. Russia lost many ships to Ukraine drones, but in incomparable scenarios, such as a lone cruiser with its air defences unmanned, pretty close to the coast. I think that's hard to compare to how a carrier group might fare hundreds of miles offshore.
Where did this massive budget go to? There is one tank factory, 7 major shipyards, and about 250 aircrafts made per year. Except aircraft, China military production dwarfs the US in everything else.
Even Russia is producing more ammunition than the US can. Just to be clear, Ukraine is receiving aid from the entire Western hemisphere, not just the US. At the start of Ukraine conflict, the US made 28K artillery shells per month, and is really struggling to ramp up to 50K in the next few years. Meanwhile, Russia is making over 200K. Just that alone should raise alarms about how pathetic the US manufacturing base has become compared to its adversaries.
Call it my opinion but when an army become overreliant on high tech but with precious few numbers that they can't replace easily, against a new paradigm in war where disposable mass strikes, i.e. drones, is becoming dominant, it is clear who is losing. Japan lost exactly this way in the Pacific to the US.
The US military is now optimized for cost and profit, like everything else here. Lawyers and businessmen are taking charge, not engineers and scientists. Worse, they are considered a cost to be cut.
In fairness, the US trained the Afghan military, and then pulled out.
The Afghan army folded like a cheap suit, showing the US so objective to stand up a national army failed.
Along the way we became a country where it was legal to torture people, have secret courts, and 2/3 of Americans outwardly state they don’t trust the judicial system (so, basically Russia/China/authoritarian shit hole levels of “trust”).
What if they’re just full of shit?
There's a difference between "lying" about things, and being simply deluded or deeply misunderstanding them.
Of course they lied about WMD. But they didn't "lie" about those other two situations. Whether you like it or not, there's a major distinction at play here.
lost the last 5 decades of wars
It's true that they lost the 3 major wars (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan). But they didn't lose all of their pet wars in this time period. The Gulf War (I betcha forgot that one!) was a very, very major conflict that they won unambiguously.
So already, you're completely out to lunch, right there. But there were numerous second-order conflicts that they won also during this time period. This most significant was the proxy war against the USSR in Afghanistan (effectively the "First Afghan War" from the US perspective) which was unambiguously won, also. Which BTW had some pretty huge consequences (though it seems you've forgotten about those, as well).
And several second-order conflicts in addition (Panama, Yugoslavia, Kosovo) that were effectively won also, even if others (Syria, Libya) were not.
I know, I know - like Reagan said, "facts are boring things". What's my point, you ask? Let's get right to it.
What if they’re just full of shit?
Of course they're full of shit.
But what's vastly more important point is -- if you can't be even ballpark correct about the stuff above -- or (as seems to be more likely the case) you plainly don't care -- then what does that make you full of?
If it's all just word salad to you -- if the basic factual accuracy of stuff like this just doesn't really matter to you; as long as you can smoosh the various bullet points together somehow, and sculpt them in your into whatever broad, sweeping, hypermoralistic narrative that your worldview seems to hinge on -- then not only are you no different, really, from "them" and all of their big, fat stinking lies.
Effectively, you're on the same team.
You wrote a big long post to say I lied as bad as the warmongers and liars, and totally left out my other points. Essentially built an entire argument on a keyboard slip and called me a liar on the same magnitude to distract - without mentioning anything about the legalized torture, secret laws, and secret courts!
Cool trick, but it probably won’t work here - we’ve read the manual about subverting and redirecting online discourse.
Meanwhile, yours wasn't merely a keyboard slip. The point, simply, is that your encapsulation of the last 5 decades was very myopic. Don't mean to condescend, but it does seem that in terms of basic global history you're still playing catch-up, as it were.
The concern (as I attempted to articulate) wasn't so much that you were "lying", but that (going by your statements) you do seem to have a rather blasé attitude about the truth, and/or to have simply missed out on a lot of the major event chronology of the last 50 years. Which suggests that you're much more interested in your moral narratives than in what actually happened, or why.
The irony here is that we probably agree about 70 percent in terms of which side is "bad" and who is to "blame". It's just that that other 30 percent is, unfortunately, complex and intermixed.
If it helps, I hereby mention "legalized torture, secret laws, and secret courts".
In turn, if you like, you can "mention" the ethnic cleansings in Srebrenica, Prijedor, Foča, Zvornik, Doboj Bosanski Šamac and Bijeljina -- and what, precisely, you think the morally compromised Western powers should have done about this general state of affairs at the time.
That is, if these events ping your awareness at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing_in_the_Bosnia...
> The US has the most advance tech
In the Ukraine conflict, drones have played an important role. And China (in DJI) is the undisputed leader in drones. Not only is the US sorely behind in this area, it's unclear if we can even produce drones without buying critical components from China.
> and the largest budget
Similar to many other things, the US pays a lot, but that doesn't guarantee a better result. When the Russia-Ukraine war broke out, articles came out about how Russian troops were wearing fake body armor due to corruption. While the US isn't (AFAIK) quite that bad yet, _everything_ we're seeing with enshittification affects the military as well. When a normal company sacrifices on quality control, or does stock buybacks instead of R&D--that plain sucks. With a defense contractor this impacts the military's effectiveness. If Boeing can't make a civilian plane where the doors don't fall off, should we expect their military products to be any better? And that's to say nothing of the suppliers that _significantly_ overcharge the government for replacement parts.
It costs more and takes longer today to build new planes than it did in the 1940s--and we have computers now. Sure planes are more complicated, but $2 trillion to design a plane--that's absurd!
None of this is new, the military industrial complex has been ramping up for over half a century, but the problems are accelerating. For now, we've avoided this attrition by just throwing more money at the military, but it's not enough. We are buying fewer munitions, fewer planes, because they're just too damn expensive--not because they need to be, but because of grift.
China is currently building ships 200x faster than the US. We rely on them for much of our advanced manufacturing. If we really want to beat China--militarily or economically--our industries will need to focus on producing better products, rather than just increasing shareholder value.
But also, take this with a grain of salt. I'm not an expert--I just dabble :)
ETA: Also, at risk of making this political, China has a much larger population than the US. The US could try to offset their weakness by taking advantage of relationships with other countries--but Trump is currently angling to start trade wars with Canada, Mexico, and the EU. Which is not how you build a coalition against China.
That will be our downfall though. It became less about providing value to customers and more about providing value to shareholders (even foreign ones). It’s OK to screw everyone (including and especially your countrymen) if you make enough doing it. Not paying taxes is seen as a pro move, not as parasitic.
This is the ultimate synthesis of the current American model; it will make us weaker and weaker as a people until we are defeated from within, with our enemies never firing a shot.
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The commander said while they were able to fire off a lot of rounds, the U.S. troops conducting that training did not have a full understanding of the challenges Ukraine would face fighting Russia.
“Well, we got a luxurious shooting practice (around 100 rounds fired by each gunner) and some good overall knowledge about the tank,” he explained. “But the American instructors AND military were completely unaware of the modern battlefield threats. And still are unaware (I communicate with some of the American tankers and try to share information with them).”
For example, the commander said his trainers “are shocked that Russians can see us at night with thermal-vision recon drones (we were taught that we would be haunting the Russians who are blind at night), they do not understand at all the threat posed by the FPVs, etc.”
“The American tankers should act promptly,” he urged. “Their tanks are too thin and vulnerable given the current threats on the battlefield. Protect your tanks urgently to avoid losses in potential near-future conflicts, taking into account our experience.”
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Found another comment about "Bradley commander who said he was taught in Germany to ride with the hatches open and they did that for about 2 days"
Procurement is still leaning hard on expensive high end drones expecting them to survive while even Houthis easily and regularly shoot down Reapers. Spotting drone life is counted in days in Ukraine, more than one day of survivability is really good. Everything needs to be expendable, US will not get far with $100K FPV kamikaze drones https://www.twz.com/air/rogue-1-is-one-of-the-marine-corps-n... when adversary is sending $1-2K fiber optic (unjammable) ones at you at 100 to 1 ratio.
The US is not tooled for "winning" wars, it's tooled for making money and causing chaos. It's like a private equity firm and everyone at the top will continue to make out like bandits until the scam falls apart.
In this case, the US pilots were likely fighting against the Yemenese, who are supporting the Palestinian people against the Israeli genocide. When the genocide stops, the red sea will reopen. This is clear.
>> Pilots recovered alive – one with minor injuries – after ejecting from fighter jet as US military says its guided missile cruiser ‘mistakenly’ fired on the F/A-18.
https://www.defensenews.com/air/2024/04/12/air-force-to-get-...
https://theaviationist.com/2024/01/24/usaf-to-fly-f-16s-into...
https://www.twz.com/litening-targeting-pod-tested-on-f-a-18-...
The F22 fleet is capped at 200, and I gather significantly less than that in a state of combat readiness. There are technically around 600 F35s in service, but they are plagued by reliability issues, to the point that they are only averaging 50% availability for missions.
USN aircraft, by count: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_United_States_n...
USN wings, by squadron equipment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Navy_air...
In short: there's little reason to majority-equip carrier air wings with F-35Cs.
They're an exquisite asset, with the maintenance and availability penalties that come along with that. Not all missions require exquisite assets.
When you're thousands of miles from the nearest supply depot, in the middle of the ocean, it makes sense to be pragmatic and use a design that's been in production and refined for almost 30 years. Sometimes, good aerodynamic performance, good engines, and weapons compatibility is enough. Therefore a lot of the time, the F/A-18E/F is enough.
Last time an American war plane was shot down by a missile fired from the ship was in Vietnam!