Hacker News Reader

Comment by wing-_-nuts | Hacker News Reader

This is very much a 'you break it, you buy it' situation. The US should be running destroyer screens for convoys a la WW2 today, yet AFAIK the US fleet is sitting hundreds of miles out of the Persian Gulf, within bombing range, outside of easy strike range.

View on HN

The navigable part of the Strait of Hormuz is only 15-ish miles wide, maybe less. There is no way the US can convoy screen anything without significant loss in sailors and ships.

The WW2 convoy situation was far easier to escort (but still quite dangerous obviously) because:

1. The Atlantic is a much bigger place, even considering common routes and chokepoints.

2. U-Boats had to surface frequently, making them extremely vulnerable to Allied air cover.

3. U-Boats had to be within visual range to strike convoys, versus the drone and missile world we live in now.

Yes. I think the biggest issues though are:

- We likely don't have the assets to move the amount traffic that needs to get through

- We probably can't protect them perfectly (we don't have maritime supremacy) so ships will still take damage and that will stop the convoys pretty quickly

I suspect the escort ships would be fine though. They can defend themselves.

So if we did start them, they wouldn't continue for long until the economic pain was pretty massive and the cost of loosing ships was worth it.

> I suspect the escort ships would be fine though. They can defend themselves.

From underwater drones? Does that technology exist?

I know nothing of the rise of the underwater drone but I highly suspect they are loud and slow and no match for ships designed to look for modern submarines.

No match for detection, but do countermeasures exist? Can torpedos target them? Do the ships in question carry such torpedos, or any kind of torpedo?

It would be cheaper just to build an oil pipeline around it than to cover insurance and risk through that Strait. It would do well to just forget the Strait exists, our conflict has taken it out of commission for the indefinite future.

Let's replace a choke point by an even smaller single static point of failure transporting highly flammable content, are you an adviser for the white house? If not you should apply

You might be surprised to find out the Abu Dhabi pipeline, which does this exact thing, is still running.

Cheaper but less resilient to attacks. Pipelines are fixed infra, and are imminently targetible by even the smallest drones. One successful attack and your entire pipeline is down.

Probably a 'why not both' question though. If the US could quick deploy enough pipelines to support the entire d-day offensive back during ww2 I don't see why we couldn't do so today

Good idea, but pipeline would need to be 100m underground

The US shouldnt be starting wars with countries, and bombing civilians, at all.

Captain Obvious? Is that you??

> The US should be running destroyer screens for convoys a la WW2 today,

That's harder than bombing schools, goat herders or kidnapping the leader of the most corrupt country in the world, are you sure they can still pull it off, I'm starting to think even they know they cannot anymore.

After seeing the latest white house CoD style propaganda videos and Pete "Kafir" Hegseth speeches it's clear the people in charge completely lost it

> In After the Empire, written in 2001, Todd claimed that the reason for America’s “theatrical micromilitarism” was to prove that it was still an indispensable power in a post-USSR world. In his latest work, however, he revises this thesis, arguing that it would imply attributing rational intentions to Washington.13 The American liberal oligarchy is not driven by any clear project.

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/11/how-the-west-was-...

Lol how did I know someone was gonna link Emmanuel Todd? Too bad more of his work isn't translated to english.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com