It's time once again for our regular Open Thread. Apologies for getting this up late.
Overhauls are Iowa Part 6, The Navy and the Space Program, and for 2023, my review of the old Midway movie and the 2023 USNI sale, which should serve as a reminder to everyone to go and check out this year's sale.
Comments
If anyone in NG Land has a minimum of $2750 and the ability to tow ships across the Pacific and is yearning to own a genuine World War 2 warship, do I have an opportunity for you: APL-39, ex-USS Mercer is for sale!
Just finished Shattered Sword. Interesting read, although not as gripping as the Jutland books, if only because the stakes were lower, the outcome of the Pacific war being so massively overdetermined, that there was nobody at Midway who could `lose the war in an afternoon.'
It is remarkable how seemingly crazy the Japanese were, at basically ever level, from strategic (what real benefit would be gained from occupying Midway or the Aleutians?)to operational (why divide the fleet? were't the IJN supposed to be disciples of Mahan?) to tactical, although the authors do a pretty compelling job of explaining why the organizational culture of the IJN (and the political culture of wartime Japan) may have produced such poor decision making.
Are you planning a Midway series at some point? Or is it out of scope, since it's not a big gun battle? Incidentally, you don't have a Tsushima series. I'd be interested to read that one, if you were ever motivated to write it, since Tsushima seems to be the only truly decisive battle of the steam powered battleship era. (I'm guessing that the age of fighting sail is out of scope for the blog).
I am very much not planning a Midway series. This blog is in some ways a reaction against what was in the libraries of my childhood, and there was a lot of Midway. And if anyone wants more detail, Shattered Sword exists.
"The Russo-Japanese War" is on my list of things to write about, and I even have some drafts, but I have gotten tangled up in the sociopolitical side of things and not gotten to the shooting. Hopefully, it will happen eventually.
The general idea of occupying outposts in the Pacific was that this gave the Japanese more depth against the American counteroffensive, and therefore more time to wear the Americans down and convince them to accept a compromise peace. It turned out that island outposts are not really very helpful in doing this, because the larger fleet can always concentrate against one part of the cordon and blow its way through; if you have the fleet/air superiority, you can take the islands you need, and if you don't have the fleet/air superiority, you can't hold the islands you need. (And, yes, Mahan pointed this out wrt the French effort to build a mighty Gibraltar of Canada off the mouth of the St. Lawrence.)
The more specific idea of Midway was that by seeking a battle, you could provoke the Americans into sending out their carriers to be defeated, hastening the wearing-down of American willpower. This was not, in principle, a bad idea -- just sitting there doing nothing lets the Americans build in peace -- but the execution did not necessarily develop to Japan's advantage.
A recent piece on military-industrial (un)preparedness by Mark Bowden of the Atlantic, appearing for free on MSN:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ar-AA1w1O6h
Anyone have any thoughts? "Nobody ever has enough ammo" is a truism. A global supply chain may just be a serious liability, as well. More competition might help the defense industry. Some details, though, undercut credibility: calling "fighter jets, bombers, guided missiles, aircraft carriers" "arguably outdated" shows only how lazy that one adverb "arguably" allows a writer to be.
I am not particularly impressed. The issues with ammo production are not really news. Anyone who was serious about defense logistics could have told you this was going to be a problem by March 1st, 2022. That said, I'm glad he calls out munitions as the "bill payer", because that's a dynamic I've long suspected, but haven't seen anyone mention in print. Worth it for that alone.
(My theory on the best way to solve this for missiles is to offer fixed-price, effectively unlimited-volume contracts over, say, 5 years. We will pay a certain amount for every spec-conforming missile they deliver, so there's incentive to scale up production without having to specifically allocate money. The problem is that this violates basically every way the government thinks about doing contracts.)
I am skeptical that competition is the big issue in the defense industry. It's a very weird industry from an economic perspective, and I think a lot of normal analysis breaks down. In particular, I tend towards the view that "The Last Supper" was a perfectly reasonable response to the fact that, yeah, the defense budget was going to shrink a lot, and it's better to tell everyone this. The alternative wasn't to still have "51 primes" (I am somewhat skeptical of that number, as consolidation was already going on) it was to just have the process be messier.
And yeah, that's a classic weasel-wording thing that I would hope someone with Bowden's experience could avoid.
Also, one of the "you should also reads" was to an article by Jerry Hendrix, which does not positively dispose me towards the Atlantic's military coverage. (Nor does the one time I had to do an emergency post explaining that an article about how anti-ship missiles changed everything that didn't mention Eilat should not be taken seriously.) And they reference CNAS a lot, which I can never take seriously after they published that awful thing from Hendrix.
It would be interesting to see whether competition does, empirically, lead to better results by some reasonable metric (overall expenditure for quantity of arms obtained, speed at which effective weapons systems are developed, flexibility to new threats, ability to solve problems, etc.). That might only be possible to tell in the future, granted that comparison with other countries would require data that probably don't exist, as well as structural similarities in military needs, etc. that just can't be presumed. The Russians, at least, seem to have consolidated all their aircraft production bureaus into one (on paper, anyway), and I don't have the impression that anybody else's defense industry is exactly nimble, diversified, and full of productive startups. But I do say all of this as a complete civilian with no experience in military acquisitions beyond what I read on the internet, so I might well be missing something.
That said, and with full recognition of my likely ignorance, there are some high-profile cases where the Pentagon and/or the US defense industry raise my eyebrows. Most everything to do with the littoral combat ships is one pertinent to this blog; likewise, the delivery of Zumwalt and sisters without ever having worked out the problems with the primary armament. That all looks like just so much screwing around, wasting everyone's money and hurting military readiness. (Would it have been so hard just to license-build some Absalon-class frigates, if we needed a bunch of small modular warships?) But the issues that really make me scratch my head are hypersonics and UCAVs. How long were X-43 and X-51 in development, and yet the Russians and Chinese still seem to have beat the US to practical IRBM and FOB applications? I also remember reading a piece, linked I thought on this blog (in a comment?), about promising American developments in UCAVs that appear to have gone absolutely nowhere.
It sure looks, in cases like this, like the military has been playing around for years with highly advanced systems, lets other countries get ahead, and only then scrambles to catch up, rather than securing a lead well in advance. Or is that not, in fact, what happened with hypersonics (and might yet with UCAVs)? I do understand, of course, that doctrine or reasonable logistics/production concerns may lead to relative weakness in certain areas: for example, thermobarics or SAMS, where I have the impression that the Russians are perennially more invested; or something like the F-35, where trying to unify America's three air forces around one basic design does make some sense. But stuff like this just makes me wonder what they're thinking, off in that giant, five-sided building.
The problem with "we need more competition" is that no matter how much competition there is on the seller side, there's only one buyer. So if that buyer wants competition, they have to pay for it, in the form of funding two programs. I'm not saying this is never worth it, but the track record isn't strong, particularly because you end up with entrenched interests behind both programs, and then you have a big buy of both LCS variants.
Re abandonment of promising ideas, I will point out that unmanned aircraft for deep strike in hostile areas have been around for decades. They're called cruise missiles. For all of the hype in that article about the X-45, it's really not clear to me what advantages it brings over just using JASSM/Tomahawk/whatever. As for hypersonics, I'm on the record as a skeptic, so I'm not bothered that we're lagging, and in other areas like lasers, we're definitely on the cutting edge.
They sit there thinking five-sided thoughts, impenetrable to us mere mortals. More seriously, yes, they make a lot of bad decisions there, but I'm far from sure this is a uniquely American problem.