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Comment by ahmedfromtunis | Hacker News Reader

Something I learned from trying to learn how military equipment works is that "fifty-year old" and the likes aren't necessarily synonymous with "obsolete".

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The problem isn’t the ships’ age per se and more the concern that we lack the industrial base to replace them if faced with a war of attrition.

But, also, seagoing stuff just tends to get worn out in ways that land or even air assets don’t. So 50+ years for a ship is remarkably old and probably quite close to the end of its life, even assuming that the shipowner is taking measures that wouldn’t be economic in the commercial world.

Yup. An example of this is the Air Force’s B52 which has lived longer than many of its immediate successor program (B1 non B) and is scheduled to live longer than the successors to its successor (B1-B, B2) alongside the B21.

We have plenty of mothballed chassis for parts and a seemingly never ending series of modernization programs. A new engine has been proposed repeatedly and is maybe finally happening.

However what we can simply never do is make another one from scratch as all the tooling has been gone since the 1960s. They could do an “inspired by the B52” replacement like the B21 is to the B2, but much like the B2 and F22 we just won’t make more of them for practical and Military Industrial Complex reasons.

>However what we can simply never do is make another one from scratch as all the tooling has been gone since the 1960s. They could do an “inspired by the B52” replacement like the B21 is to the B2, but much like the B2 and F22 we just won’t make more of them for practical and Military Industrial Complex reasons.

iirc they are doing this with the new F-15's they are producing, the F-15EX Eagle II

How much ocean shipping of troops do we expect, though?

I think there are lots of real concerns about fleet construction, and fleet construction capacity [1]; but if the troop carriers we have work well enough, and we generally airship troops, I don't think we need to be building new ocean going troop carriers with any urgency. As these age out, it may not make sense to replace them.

[1] In WWII, existing shipyards retooled to make warships (as well as replacement cargo ships), and new shipyards were built. In 2025, there are few shipyards in the US and building new shipyards would be challenging... most of the suitable coastal properties are developed.

> don't think we need to be building new ocean going troop carriers with any urgency

If air lift is denied and our troop transports get potted, we’d essentially have outsourced our ability to fight to Tokyo and Seoul.

Troop transports are kind of a red herring here. The issue isn’t moving troops, it’s moving their equipment. You can pretty easily move a division’s worth of troops by air (activate CRAF and requisition a few dozen 777s, boom, done), but it’s a lot harder to move their equipment (tanks, helicopters, artillery, air defense, ammo, etc.) that way. If the troops don’t have pre-positioned equipment in the battle area, then it really needs to get there aboard ships.

I’m of two minds about re-creating the logical and industrial capabilities of World War II (or, at least the subset of them needed to fight a major conflict with a near peer). On the one hand, I’m pretty sure that enough money could and would be thrown at the problem to solve it. On the other hand, I’m not sure any direct confrontation with a near-peer military would last long enough for that to matter.

> On the other hand, I’m not sure any direct confrontation with a near-peer military would last long enough for that to matter.

Hasn’t Ukraine shown us the opposite? Drones of all typees covering the battlefield have reset military doctrine once again. That war has been anything but quick.

> On the one hand, I’m pretty sure that enough money could and would be thrown at the problem to solve it.

I'm skeptical that this is the case. Supply chains for goods have become much more intricate than they were a hundred years ago and America has completely ceded them to China.

At the same time by ceding these supply chains America has let manufacturing skill sets completely atrophy and with it has seen the evaporation of institutional knowledge necessary to train new generations of blue collar workers necessary to scale up manufacturing.

This isn't even a 'nine people can't make a baby in one month' type scenario, this is more like 'we just plum forgot how to make babies' scenario which is disconcerting to say the least.

> How much ocean shipping of troops do we expect, though?

How much ocean shipping of tanks is expected? How much ocean shipping of trucks is expected? How much ocean shipping of jeeps is expected? How much ocean shipping of artillery is expected? How much ocean shipping of ammunitions is expected? How much ocean shipping of fuel is expected?

How much ocean shipping of food is expected? Because how many commercial carriers will want to sail into an active war zone?

This. We don’t have the shipbuilding capacity to replace our current navy as it wears out. We are living in a twilight period while our adversaries build like it’s the 1960s.

They aren’t “obsolete” but at that age they become difficult or impossible to source spare parts for. Particularly because we seem to have such a variety of differing ship designs in the fleet.

The video mentions several ships being laid up to be cannibalized.

The B-52 will likely reach a century of service. It's really good at what it was designed to do and any wholesale replacement would be extremely expensive for not a lot of benefit.

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