Arable land requires water to grow food. China lacks the required fresh water reserves. You know who has them? Russia, in nearby-Siberia. Going to war over Taiwan is silly for us & stupid for China. Siberia, however, has timber, water, gold, iron, lithium... and no manpower to exploit it.
The problem in doing this is historical recall. The Rape of Nanking pales in comparison to the destruction of downwater population centers. Ref the studies...then glance at the rationale for war with China. Because they are overtaking us? Because we squandered our wealth in misplaced conflicts and internal strife? Because they are underhanded in currying favor? Because they make our refrigerators? Oh, and our bearings, bolts, solar panels, rugs, computers, phones...
And, tell me then how that war ends when we go Winchester in week 3?
Need to think this through. We haven't won a vexing conflict in 80 years.
If China does something to put our civilian population at risk (like an EMP strike), then busting the Three Gorges Dam should be on the table as retribution-in-kind.
The Army promotes tactical leaders (the best brigade commanders) to general. They have strategists, but those are in a sort of restricted line and will not make general. Personnel policy grows personnel, and personnel is policy.
AIr Force is (I thnk) better in this regard, but of course Air Force is not (and should not be) in charge of counterinsurgency strategy. Army and ground Marines lead here, but Army is absent.
Hallelujah! add in the oil. far, far easier to move armies WEST, than to move em...EAST across water. (nice touch that the Bear is weakening due to misadventures )
Growing a real live large Army right now, their war machine is ramping up production of everything, they have experience in combat with drones, arty, missiles and air supremacy.
They are not getting weak.
They have a great many blooded veteran troops.
We have diversity and soft as a deer skin glove military, nice to look at but thin and useless for hard work.
There is no such thing as being short on water as long as you have a coast line and the means to pipe it from a desalination station to it’s required location.
I was lucky enough to sit in on a meeting with David Kilcullen and a slew of O6-O7’s in Afghanistan in 11’, and they always kept taking about the next war being over water. As soon as folks with common sense pointed out that desalination works and has been done for a long time they got flustered. Side note: Kilcullen was flabbergasted at the Army’s approach to the war.
Army is doctrinal lead for counterinsurgency, but army leadership doesn't 'do' strategy. They grow and promote tacticians. So who is in charge and has a clue?
Perhaps you should stop helping me win my argument. BLUF: if you have a coastline and the means to transport it you’re never going to be out of water. You might want to read more yourself, perhaps other nations experience with using large scale desalination?
Pay attention to what Kevin posted. 30 years ago, we had a monthly production rate 10 times our current rate. The monthly rate rate was larger than our 10 year 'buy.
We've given Ukraine a million rounds out of a much smaller stock. In 1995 that stock was 25 million rounds
When I served in Germany, we had the Sheridan Recon vehicle that fired a 152mm missile. The bad news was that we didn't have many days of reloads. The good news was that we expected to run out of the aluminum Sheridans before we ran out of missiles.
I don't see 155mm shells as being critical except in a Korean Defense, but lots of longer ange and smarter weapons have dormant prod lines or depend on weak supply chains. We need a top to bottom SC analysis.
It's worse than that. The 2025 max build rate is projected to be 90,000 rds/month, the current max production rate is somewhere between 14,000 and 20,000 rds/month. So 1/40th of the build rate in 1995. How 'efficient', eh?
I wonder whether we can produce enough new gun tubes to replace the ones that get destroyed by the enemy or that wear out from firing all that magically manufactured new 155mm ammo.
Tubes are all made at Watervliet Arsenal. There was an article on Army.mil talking about a test on chrome plating M777 tubes that mentioned that there is a 2-3 year lead time to get the raw material to produce a gun tube. So it'll be fine.
August 2017 article:
"Given the long lead time to procure raw stock materiel, the arsenal will begin delivery of the chrome tubes for the Army and the Marine Corps in 2019 and will complete both orders by 2020."
We gave the USMC ones to Ukraine, not sure what else. I noticed that the most recent picture of Sierra (from before Ukraine) don't show the vast park of towed artillery - which looked like M198.
Every organization needs a billet I would define as the instructional skeptic. In his book “Up the Organization”, Robert Townsend described this person as the one person is the group that could cry “BS !” at any time and in front of anyone he wanted to, and not get fired. It seems DoD needs a whole raft of those folks.
20+ years ago and only a few years after I was discharged I was at a startup doing windows software and medical device compliance. President wanted to know when product would be shipping. Hardware said 8 weeks, software said ready in 6 unless hardware changed. I told the president 6 months if everything went well, perhaps 9.
He unloaded on me for negativity, but apologized a few hours later. He said "I'm sorry; I just don't understand why it takes so long. You're the only one who's usually in the ball park; I just hate it."
My Ph.D dissertation was on DoD cost overruns. That was my Plan B. My plan A had been to study DoD delivery delays. The problem with Plan A was that too many program managers were either clueless about the difficulties of their task, or afraid to tell the truth, so they lied about delivery dates until the last possible second. All of that gave me too much bogus data for a legitimate study. So, on to Plan B, which had the advantage of actual costs expended vs. original cost estimates.
Unfortunate that Plan A was undoable. A military that lies to itself will have great difficulty prevailing. Once the martial institutions become more bureaucrat than warrior things eally go south.
Amen. A parallel example exists in the martial arts world. Once a discipline becomes a rules-controlled sport, it begins to fade as an actual martial art until it becomes pure sport. But like the holdouts in some martial arts (I once saw a legit takedown of a very large, trained man by a small Tai Chi practitioner completed in four seconds), we can hope that a few acquisition project managers still understand that projects delivered late become obsolescent if not obsolete by the time they are in the fleet.
It’s encouraged to lie, watch O3’s be told to “spruce” up their sitreps and story boards for submission to the JOC. It only gets worse the higher up it goes.
At the batallion or squadron level, those are chiefs, master chiefs, and sergeants major. Or are they all politicians now?
In higher staffs, those folks would be hard to come by. An old, curmudgeonly civilian chief engineer who has developed a few systems in his day would be good to have around.
The job absolutely needs someone who has nothing to lose in terms of income or social prestige, but is double-loaded with love of country and its sailors.
According to the Merchant Marine, during WW II American shipyards' troopship production was 2,710 Liberty ships between 1941 and 1945 (an average of three ships every two days).
China exceeded the US in steel production in 1992 and has never looked back. Hard to fight a war without steel, copper, aluminum, oil, and silicon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dnM-RQI23Y
Aug 2, 2023·edited Aug 2, 2023Liked by CDR Salamander
I got tired of being patted on the head and told to be a "good boy and shut up" on this topic back in 2003.
My gosh, when will they learn to listen to the "Iron Majors?" We do Powerpoint, and know stuff. Then they hire us as ORSA-pods and ignore us again. But the money spends.
No shit, there I was. In a meeting discussing compatibility issues between JBC-P software upgrades and the M1A2 SEPv2 tanks it was installed in. I told the SES Dep G3 (retired O7) that the JBC-P software had been tested as compatible with the M1A2 SEP v3 NOT the v2. I was then informed that there were no computers on ANY version of the M1A2 tank. I was also told needed to address the problem and not speculate about causes. I mean, I only been a tanker since 1998, WTF do I know about it? Force Management is institutional lying at it's finest.
When China launches a preemptive strike on our POL storage, refining, and production nodes, how do we intend to fill our Navy's remaining conventional ships with go juice? When China launches EMP strikes, how long do you suppose our lovely "mostly peaceful" cities will continue before their denizens start killing each other en masse (especially in winter)?
USN combatant vessels with reactors will be fine, but how do you conduct a war west of Wake (or even escort a CVN) when your Aegis cruisers and destroyers are all blinking on "E," and so are all your gators and landing craft and tanks and APCs and helos and strike aircraft?
How do you mobilize an economy to fight a war when the freight trains have no diesel and neither do the eighteen wheelers on the highway?
We need beans, bullets, bandages. We need fuel, power, comms, medicine.
WE ARE FRAGILE. Take out our fuel system and deliver a few EMP strikes at high altitude, and America will implode.
1, maybe 2 companies trained in taking out infrastructure, no need to worry about nuclear retaliation. Take out some compressor stations, smash some control panels for canals and railroads, and shoot transformers.
More guys? Take out National Guard tanker and transport aircraft.
And even if the Chinese forego EMP strikes, a sympathetic squad of Antifa goons with simple hunting rifles and scopes, and who know which fragile transformers to shoot, can black out an entire region in a day. In winter. Yay.
A comment here about this a while back made me curious. So I took an afternoon, and after looking at things- a handful of folks equipped with. A hundred bucks worth of Harbor Freight widgets and a couple pickup trucks could end the output of Bonneville Dam, and put a good chunk of the NW in the dark. Likely for months...
How hardened are to control centers for Starlink and Viasat? Would a van with a 120mm mortar and a few dozen guided HE and WP rounds be able to cause some minor issues for our network of the future command system?
A squad of trained marksmen and saboteurs can take out our grid substations and cause absolute cascade. Colonial pipeline ring a bell? North Carolina substation?
"When China launches EMP strikes, how long do you suppose our lovely "mostly peaceful" cities will continue before their denizens start killing each other en masse (especially in winter)?"
Forstchen's book One Second After may be a little dated, perhaps less than optimistic, but I think he's overall pretty close. When the power goes out for a couple months, you'll have people farming (herding) and eating people within the first two months.
They don’t need to do that. Read the “Assassins Mace” on their mine warfare capabilities. It’s crazy how easily they’ll be able to hem us up and how easy and relatively cheap it’ll be too.
The analogue to 155mm is ships and anti-ship missiles.
I still think war can be avoided, at the decision point the PRC has to decide whether it's worth giving up its hard-won prosperity. For that reason, harsh rhetoric, pinprick economic measures, sanctions affecting the Chinese middle class which travels, and attempting to exclude China from international institutions are counterproductive. Speak softly and build a big stick.
If it kicks off and our luck isn't good in the initial days, I hope there is a plan to know when to fold 'em and live to fight another day.
I expect that China would use a nuke. Probably a torpedo against a US SSN to make a discreet statement. Then what do you do?
China's antiship ballistic missiles are certainly nukes imho. Several good reasons, like CEP against a moving target. And their usefully ambiguous 'no first use' policy ... unless defending 'China' ... oh wait, they say Taiwan IS China ... is wonderfully consistent. AND, they have copied the old Soviet 'correlation of forces' model and anti-carrier strike package almost slavishly. That system calculated the number of nukes per CV and was how it was gonna go ... fjords would'a been very hot and windy ya' know.
On the other hand China is also limited by budgetary constraints and is appearing to reshuffle her aviation assets in both doctrine and tactics. Frickin PDF. Cut and paste if you wanna see.
Nothing we haven't talked about before. The Peace Dividend writ large and stupid: We decided we can 'manage' the amount of stores we have on hand using the assumptions of the finest minds in DC - that have never fired a round.
Instead of deciding on how much is just right (just enough), we should be filling every square foot of every storage facility - and when those are filled, start replacing the old ones, FIFO.
Of late, it appears the "finest minds of DC" are for more concerned with keeping the people in this country in line and under control than they are with any external defense, and I'm starting to think it'd been that way far longer than I'd like to admit.
The push to shape the modern military into a “corporation” over the last (realistically) 30+ years has come to fruition and shown the weaknesses to this approach. Process Improvement techniques like AirSpeed, Lean Six Sigma, Toyota Kata, and bringing in an evolving door of consultant groups in the quest to improve efficiency were futile in this effort.
Oh sure, the Excel sheets and 3M summary reports in the areas of ship, aircraft and mission readiness looked good-in theory. But the actual results are abysmal and anyone looking at the situation of our military with a clear-eyed objective view can see that we are nowhere close to being ready for a conflict with a near-peer adversary.
Anybody else remember TQL, where they took Demings Total Quality Management and did a cut and paste to "leadership" because "we're leaders, not managers, you know" and made us train on it?
How much of this is because of the shutdown of the GOEX black powder plant. Although black powder isn't used as a propellant anymore it is used in primers and detonators. It is supposed to be running at full capacity sometime this year.
Sadly, not because of GOEX being off-line. It's about producing the projectile and cartridge casings, ensuring enough explosive filler, and having labor.
Arable land requires water to grow food. China lacks the required fresh water reserves. You know who has them? Russia, in nearby-Siberia. Going to war over Taiwan is silly for us & stupid for China. Siberia, however, has timber, water, gold, iron, lithium... and no manpower to exploit it.
and only 2 RR tracks as a GLOC
did a bit of looking:
- the main TS tracks (2 tracks) lay close to China. - major weakness
- the Baikal–Amur Mainline (1 track) is laid to the North and less vulnerable- a strength
- all three tracks are electric. How can you expect maintain an electric line in wartime? - major weakness
We can give them water galore with a few well placed bangs delivered to the Three Gorges Dam. Rapid irrigation, free of charge, courtesy of Uncle Sam.
And apparently Taiwan is planning to do that in case of invasion....
I would, I bet it will be a race to who gets them first, Taiwan or Japan.
The problem in doing this is historical recall. The Rape of Nanking pales in comparison to the destruction of downwater population centers. Ref the studies...then glance at the rationale for war with China. Because they are overtaking us? Because we squandered our wealth in misplaced conflicts and internal strife? Because they are underhanded in currying favor? Because they make our refrigerators? Oh, and our bearings, bolts, solar panels, rugs, computers, phones...
And, tell me then how that war ends when we go Winchester in week 3?
Need to think this through. We haven't won a vexing conflict in 80 years.
And we won't win that one.
We might not win, but we can ensure that China loses too.
Busting that dam should only be retaliatory.
If China does something to put our civilian population at risk (like an EMP strike), then busting the Three Gorges Dam should be on the table as retribution-in-kind.
We have crushed things at the tactical and operational level, it’s the strategic level that our GOs have continually let us down.
The Army promotes tactical leaders (the best brigade commanders) to general. They have strategists, but those are in a sort of restricted line and will not make general. Personnel policy grows personnel, and personnel is policy.
AIr Force is (I thnk) better in this regard, but of course Air Force is not (and should not be) in charge of counterinsurgency strategy. Army and ground Marines lead here, but Army is absent.
Given the flooding in China right now. I'd say they are getting more water than they can use already.
Hallelujah! add in the oil. far, far easier to move armies WEST, than to move em...EAST across water. (nice touch that the Bear is weakening due to misadventures )
Growing a real live large Army right now, their war machine is ramping up production of everything, they have experience in combat with drones, arty, missiles and air supremacy.
They are not getting weak.
They have a great many blooded veteran troops.
We have diversity and soft as a deer skin glove military, nice to look at but thin and useless for hard work.
No reason to invade Russia to get that water. Russia will gladly sell it to them.
how does one say "Lebensraum" in Mandarin?
There is no such thing as being short on water as long as you have a coast line and the means to pipe it from a desalination station to it’s required location.
I was lucky enough to sit in on a meeting with David Kilcullen and a slew of O6-O7’s in Afghanistan in 11’, and they always kept taking about the next war being over water. As soon as folks with common sense pointed out that desalination works and has been done for a long time they got flustered. Side note: Kilcullen was flabbergasted at the Army’s approach to the war.
Army is doctrinal lead for counterinsurgency, but army leadership doesn't 'do' strategy. They grow and promote tacticians. So who is in charge and has a clue?
Maybe you need to read more...
https://gizmodo.com/drought-stricken-chinese-city-proposes-mega-pipeline-to-1793042210
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/07/parched-chinese-city-plans-to-pump-water-from-russian-lake-via-1000km-pipeline
https://siberiantimes.com/ecology/casestudy/news/n0677-ambitious-plan-to-divert-siberian-water-to-china-gets-showered-in-criticism/
Etc...
Perhaps you should stop helping me win my argument. BLUF: if you have a coastline and the means to transport it you’re never going to be out of water. You might want to read more yourself, perhaps other nations experience with using large scale desalination?
https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-95-89.pdf page 7
"The five plants to remain active (Iowa, Lone Star, Milan, Crane, and Pine
Bluff) have a combined capacity to load, assemble, and pack 867,000
artillery projectiles a month during three 8-hour shifts each day for 5 days
a week. According to Army officials, this capacity is sufficient to meet
projected replenishment requirements for all artillery projectiles."
Pay attention to what Kevin posted. 30 years ago, we had a monthly production rate 10 times our current rate. The monthly rate rate was larger than our 10 year 'buy.
We've given Ukraine a million rounds out of a much smaller stock. In 1995 that stock was 25 million rounds
When I served in Germany, we had the Sheridan Recon vehicle that fired a 152mm missile. The bad news was that we didn't have many days of reloads. The good news was that we expected to run out of the aluminum Sheridans before we ran out of missiles.
I don't see 155mm shells as being critical except in a Korean Defense, but lots of longer ange and smarter weapons have dormant prod lines or depend on weak supply chains. We need a top to bottom SC analysis.
It's worse than that. The 2025 max build rate is projected to be 90,000 rds/month, the current max production rate is somewhere between 14,000 and 20,000 rds/month. So 1/40th of the build rate in 1995. How 'efficient', eh?
I wonder whether we can produce enough new gun tubes to replace the ones that get destroyed by the enemy or that wear out from firing all that magically manufactured new 155mm ammo.
Tubes are all made at Watervliet Arsenal. There was an article on Army.mil talking about a test on chrome plating M777 tubes that mentioned that there is a 2-3 year lead time to get the raw material to produce a gun tube. So it'll be fine.
August 2017 article:
"Given the long lead time to procure raw stock materiel, the arsenal will begin delivery of the chrome tubes for the Army and the Marine Corps in 2019 and will complete both orders by 2020."
[Critical Drinker voice]
It'll be fine.
[/Critical Drinker voice]
That's the way I read it
The Army did away with large numbers of 155 tube units with the advent of smart shells and missiles, so there are tubes in stockpile
We gave the USMC ones to Ukraine, not sure what else. I noticed that the most recent picture of Sierra (from before Ukraine) don't show the vast park of towed artillery - which looked like M198.
Every organization needs a billet I would define as the instructional skeptic. In his book “Up the Organization”, Robert Townsend described this person as the one person is the group that could cry “BS !” at any time and in front of anyone he wanted to, and not get fired. It seems DoD needs a whole raft of those folks.
20+ years ago and only a few years after I was discharged I was at a startup doing windows software and medical device compliance. President wanted to know when product would be shipping. Hardware said 8 weeks, software said ready in 6 unless hardware changed. I told the president 6 months if everything went well, perhaps 9.
He unloaded on me for negativity, but apologized a few hours later. He said "I'm sorry; I just don't understand why it takes so long. You're the only one who's usually in the ball park; I just hate it."
We shipped in 8 months.
My Ph.D dissertation was on DoD cost overruns. That was my Plan B. My plan A had been to study DoD delivery delays. The problem with Plan A was that too many program managers were either clueless about the difficulties of their task, or afraid to tell the truth, so they lied about delivery dates until the last possible second. All of that gave me too much bogus data for a legitimate study. So, on to Plan B, which had the advantage of actual costs expended vs. original cost estimates.
Unfortunate that Plan A was undoable. A military that lies to itself will have great difficulty prevailing. Once the martial institutions become more bureaucrat than warrior things eally go south.
Amen. A parallel example exists in the martial arts world. Once a discipline becomes a rules-controlled sport, it begins to fade as an actual martial art until it becomes pure sport. But like the holdouts in some martial arts (I once saw a legit takedown of a very large, trained man by a small Tai Chi practitioner completed in four seconds), we can hope that a few acquisition project managers still understand that projects delivered late become obsolescent if not obsolete by the time they are in the fleet.
It’s encouraged to lie, watch O3’s be told to “spruce” up their sitreps and story boards for submission to the JOC. It only gets worse the higher up it goes.
Gut the Officer corps now.
I am pretty sure that billet would be a terminal assignment, one way or another.
At the batallion or squadron level, those are chiefs, master chiefs, and sergeants major. Or are they all politicians now?
In higher staffs, those folks would be hard to come by. An old, curmudgeonly civilian chief engineer who has developed a few systems in his day would be good to have around.
The job absolutely needs someone who has nothing to lose in terms of income or social prestige, but is double-loaded with love of country and its sailors.
That is a powerful number.
Still gotta hire the second and third shifts. I doubt they are on the payroll at the moment.
According to the Merchant Marine, during WW II American shipyards' troopship production was 2,710 Liberty ships between 1941 and 1945 (an average of three ships every two days).
Yeah. Our shipbuilding is now in Korea.
China exceeded the US in steel production in 1992 and has never looked back. Hard to fight a war without steel, copper, aluminum, oil, and silicon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dnM-RQI23Y
Luckily we can always make bullets. Oh, right, we can't mine lead in the US because EPA.
A friend melts down wheel weights to cast bullets, but that's just for his own reloads.
Well, I'm sure the 31 LRASMs the navy bought last year will be enough. That's what, one per F-18 and P-8 squadron?
Well given the P-8's ahem "capabilities", I'd say give them all to the F-18 squadrons.
I got tired of being patted on the head and told to be a "good boy and shut up" on this topic back in 2003.
My gosh, when will they learn to listen to the "Iron Majors?" We do Powerpoint, and know stuff. Then they hire us as ORSA-pods and ignore us again. But the money spends.
"Dear Colonel Boyd,
Kindly STFU and color inside the lines.
Sincerely,
Washington"
(probably)
No shit, there I was. In a meeting discussing compatibility issues between JBC-P software upgrades and the M1A2 SEPv2 tanks it was installed in. I told the SES Dep G3 (retired O7) that the JBC-P software had been tested as compatible with the M1A2 SEP v3 NOT the v2. I was then informed that there were no computers on ANY version of the M1A2 tank. I was also told needed to address the problem and not speculate about causes. I mean, I only been a tanker since 1998, WTF do I know about it? Force Management is institutional lying at it's finest.
I think you didn't get the memo about putting cover sheets on your TPS reports.... :)
Why has the President not invoked the Defense Production Act, and pushed for emergency production of ammunition?
He's busy trying to decipher which shoe goes on which foot.
and counting Chinese money
Because Biden. Oh!!!
He's been paid to look the other way on China.
"I’m having a pessimistic moment today"
Ukraine will probably collapse by the end of the year, the French are getting run out of Africa & rating agencies down-rated US debt.
It's always darkest before it goes totally black.
Well, the French will find a way back into Africa.
Africans are finding a way into France.
you beat me to it
Wanna get dark? Let's get dark.
When China launches a preemptive strike on our POL storage, refining, and production nodes, how do we intend to fill our Navy's remaining conventional ships with go juice? When China launches EMP strikes, how long do you suppose our lovely "mostly peaceful" cities will continue before their denizens start killing each other en masse (especially in winter)?
USN combatant vessels with reactors will be fine, but how do you conduct a war west of Wake (or even escort a CVN) when your Aegis cruisers and destroyers are all blinking on "E," and so are all your gators and landing craft and tanks and APCs and helos and strike aircraft?
How do you mobilize an economy to fight a war when the freight trains have no diesel and neither do the eighteen wheelers on the highway?
We need beans, bullets, bandages. We need fuel, power, comms, medicine.
WE ARE FRAGILE. Take out our fuel system and deliver a few EMP strikes at high altitude, and America will implode.
1, maybe 2 companies trained in taking out infrastructure, no need to worry about nuclear retaliation. Take out some compressor stations, smash some control panels for canals and railroads, and shoot transformers.
More guys? Take out National Guard tanker and transport aircraft.
And even if the Chinese forego EMP strikes, a sympathetic squad of Antifa goons with simple hunting rifles and scopes, and who know which fragile transformers to shoot, can black out an entire region in a day. In winter. Yay.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/attacks-plots-similar-north-carolina-power-grid-attack/story?id=94574765
The PRC probably already has sleeper agents here to do just this. Not like they can't just walk across the border...
If they don't, they are stupid. I don't think they are.
I really need to fix my main generator!
Not probably. Yon has documented proof. Numbers are likely in the hundreds of thousands. Yes. Hundreds of thousands.
China will absolutely use an EMP and first strike on CONUS military bases. From Hood to Pearl.
A comment here about this a while back made me curious. So I took an afternoon, and after looking at things- a handful of folks equipped with. A hundred bucks worth of Harbor Freight widgets and a couple pickup trucks could end the output of Bonneville Dam, and put a good chunk of the NW in the dark. Likely for months...
This is why we don't leave junior sailors unsupervised!
:)
This is also why my friends and I used to play the bad guys, and "win" the security alert drills... 😁
I'd imagine:)
How hardened are to control centers for Starlink and Viasat? Would a van with a 120mm mortar and a few dozen guided HE and WP rounds be able to cause some minor issues for our network of the future command system?
If there's only one Starlink command center, well ...
A squad of trained marksmen and saboteurs can take out our grid substations and cause absolute cascade. Colonial pipeline ring a bell? North Carolina substation?
Don't forget the limited number of places we can load the ammunition.
"When China launches EMP strikes, how long do you suppose our lovely "mostly peaceful" cities will continue before their denizens start killing each other en masse (especially in winter)?"
Forstchen's book One Second After may be a little dated, perhaps less than optimistic, but I think he's overall pretty close. When the power goes out for a couple months, you'll have people farming (herding) and eating people within the first two months.
He ain't the only one. He just extends his timeline farther than most and has a better grasp of reality and how the world functions--in detail.
They don’t need to do that. Read the “Assassins Mace” on their mine warfare capabilities. It’s crazy how easily they’ll be able to hem us up and how easy and relatively cheap it’ll be too.
Looking like it's time to maximize Patriot, Standard, ESSM, Tomahawk, NSM, 5-inch, and 57mm production.
And keep at least 5 years at max production rate of imported components stored away.
It was that time a decade or two ago.
The analogue to 155mm is ships and anti-ship missiles.
I still think war can be avoided, at the decision point the PRC has to decide whether it's worth giving up its hard-won prosperity. For that reason, harsh rhetoric, pinprick economic measures, sanctions affecting the Chinese middle class which travels, and attempting to exclude China from international institutions are counterproductive. Speak softly and build a big stick.
If it kicks off and our luck isn't good in the initial days, I hope there is a plan to know when to fold 'em and live to fight another day.
I expect that China would use a nuke. Probably a torpedo against a US SSN to make a discreet statement. Then what do you do?
China's antiship ballistic missiles are certainly nukes imho. Several good reasons, like CEP against a moving target. And their usefully ambiguous 'no first use' policy ... unless defending 'China' ... oh wait, they say Taiwan IS China ... is wonderfully consistent. AND, they have copied the old Soviet 'correlation of forces' model and anti-carrier strike package almost slavishly. That system calculated the number of nukes per CV and was how it was gonna go ... fjords would'a been very hot and windy ya' know.
We are not a serious nation. Hubris.
On the other hand China is also limited by budgetary constraints and is appearing to reshuffle her aviation assets in both doctrine and tactics. Frickin PDF. Cut and paste if you wanna see.
https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/CASI/documents/Research/PLAN_Aviation/2023-07-31%20PLAN%20Aviation%20Reorg%202023%20Clean.pdf
Nothing we haven't talked about before. The Peace Dividend writ large and stupid: We decided we can 'manage' the amount of stores we have on hand using the assumptions of the finest minds in DC - that have never fired a round.
Instead of deciding on how much is just right (just enough), we should be filling every square foot of every storage facility - and when those are filled, start replacing the old ones, FIFO.
Of late, it appears the "finest minds of DC" are for more concerned with keeping the people in this country in line and under control than they are with any external defense, and I'm starting to think it'd been that way far longer than I'd like to admit.
The finest minds predate McNamara's 'whiz-kids', certainly.
The push to shape the modern military into a “corporation” over the last (realistically) 30+ years has come to fruition and shown the weaknesses to this approach. Process Improvement techniques like AirSpeed, Lean Six Sigma, Toyota Kata, and bringing in an evolving door of consultant groups in the quest to improve efficiency were futile in this effort.
Oh sure, the Excel sheets and 3M summary reports in the areas of ship, aircraft and mission readiness looked good-in theory. But the actual results are abysmal and anyone looking at the situation of our military with a clear-eyed objective view can see that we are nowhere close to being ready for a conflict with a near-peer adversary.
Anybody else remember TQL, where they took Demings Total Quality Management and did a cut and paste to "leadership" because "we're leaders, not managers, you know" and made us train on it?
You mean “They Quit Leading”? That TQL? Yea I remember it. It’s on the shelf with my habits of highly effective people…..
LOLOL. Yep
How much of this is because of the shutdown of the GOEX black powder plant. Although black powder isn't used as a propellant anymore it is used in primers and detonators. It is supposed to be running at full capacity sometime this year.
Sadly, not because of GOEX being off-line. It's about producing the projectile and cartridge casings, ensuring enough explosive filler, and having labor.
With artillery it seems to be forging the actual projectile out of steel. Though there have been studies using cast iron, we don't use that.
Howitzer barrels are also forgings, made on a set of machines in Watervliet Arsenal.
The South Koreans are ‘lending’ the US 500,000 rounds of 155.
Nixon's greatest achievement was to separate China from Russia. Biden's biggest blunder was to drive Russia into the arms of China.
Now. Imagine an all out simultaneous assault in Eastern Europe, the Persian Gulf, Korea and Taiwan.
Our policies are so irrational that I almost wonder if there is not some hidden agenda because no one in DC and London could be so stupid.
They do know the problem. If they didn't they'd be handing Ukraine more even faster at this point.