68 Comments
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Mar 19
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They are because of government accounting.

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Mar 19
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We would lose half of Congress and most of the Executive. UNK on Judicial

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I find your terms to be acceptable.

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lol

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I hope that is a nervous laugh, cause this ain't funny. Our politicians have been double/triple dipping for entirely to long...

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My comment was on Jack's phrasing, not the content of this topic.

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The latest edition of "Rules for Thee" is coming out soon. I'm told it pretty much posits the thesis that we were never a nation of laws but a nation of political will and political expediency.

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Attack submarines. Play your silly surface sea and air games. If I can lock you into underground sea pens with a real threat of sinking all your surface ships...war is over and I win. Expensive? Yeah. Effective? Until someone learns to find submarines without hacking into comms systems to find them and get notice when they sail, yes.

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Can’t get them fast enough. What can you get in theatre, in numbers, to make a difference?

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The other problem with SSNs in the TWN fight. 1. The strait is narrow and not very deep, so you will have to launch torps from the edges in. It would make ops difficult. 2. If the PRC owns the airspace and water space around the first Island chain and in. Then you put the subs as tremendous disadvantage from crappy but numerous PRC airborne ASW and it only takes one to get lucky. Finally, you have time / distance issues. Guam is going to get clobbered but you don't have hardened shelters there like the PRC has for their subs, so it will not take much to cripple a few at the pier. While hopefully the US can reenact the final stages of the WW2's strangulation of the Japan in a future conflict, it will not be in the first couple of days until you attrite some of the PRC assets from a distance and fully protect Guam.

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"While hopefully the US can reenact the final stages of the WW2's strangulation of the Japan in a future conflict..."

Our current ahistorical GOFOs might put such a statement on a PPT slide. Title is "Hope as a strategy". A island chain is not a expansive country on the continent of Asia. Despite massive battles on their western front, the USSR never faced a risk of strangulation the way that Japan did.

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I would concede the strait to PRC. The geography forces the PRC out of strait to land forces anyway. Airborne ASW is...how do I say this?...not a significant threat. We may need to use Adak to re-supply subs (with torpedo's, at least).

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Noumea

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remember how quickly we lost our torp stocks at Cavite in Dec 41

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Not like those Torps would work anyway... how long did it take for the BueWeps to fix them... 43-44?

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agree.

My point is about protection of forward deployed stocks

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This assumes they don't simply sink something in the harbor blocking the single entrance to the outer harbor or the single entrance to the inner harbor. Taking the port out creates a huge humanitarian crisis that could well be a major distraction.

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This is the unfunded list. Attack submarines are funded. The problem is the lack of shipyards to build more of them, faster.

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Or repair them..... look how many are still waiting for there turn dockyards.

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Again funded, but lack of shipyards and shipyard workers to complete all of the requirements. Also lack of subs plays into this because someone needs to be on patrol when these other boats are in the yards.

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There was a book out in 2015, "Ghost Fleet" that suggested that the mothball fleet could be used to cover the massive losses of the operational fleet and victory might still be possible. (LOL!) It would take years getting the mothballed ships operational. Not gonna happen.

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All good. 'ept where you gonna' your spare torpedoes and reload?

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Drones and missiles.

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Clandestinely delivered mines should be #1. Nothing else matters if we don’t get that post haste.

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If they are not delivered pre-Day 1, it better be "Clandestinely delivered mines with a deliverly system of 500 NM or greater."

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agree #7 and #10

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Any mine not in the water by D-5, probably won't ever make it out of storage. They're important but not as important as MST/LRASM and DOG.

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Q routes provide natural choke points for the enemy to become saturated with other weapons. They are the MOST VITAL weapon of all. I would posit that your D-5 estimate is actually really optimistic...it is actually orders of magnitude to the left of that.

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I try to stay on the sunny side of life. The problem is the trade off between operational cuing confidence and getting your mines destroyed in the barn. No one wants to be killed on the sideline but then again no one wants to mine a strategic chokepoint on false indications.

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depends on the kind of mines you are using. Also read: covertly / clandestinely

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Planting those ahead of Chinese kinetics is a risk our naval leadership won’t take.

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Agree. Mines are for a planned and layered defense. d+1 mines won’t matter.

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COCOMs don’t fight anyone. They do staff work. Expect they still have more policy folks than OSD Policy does. The services are building a force for a future COCOM who’s probably a O-4 or O-5. The force the COCOMs have to “fight tonight “ reflects force development efforts over the last few decades. How long does it really take to deliver something they want? Probably at least their entire tenure and that of their successors. Perhaps, reducing the sheer volume of senior leaders might create a more integrated effort.

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Did the COCOMs ever fight? They were created after 1986. Even INDOPACOM which has roots going back to the Cold War never "fought" its a major command that does staff work and puts out strategic guidance, LOEs and intermediate objectives to its service commands.

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Stormin Norman fought.

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Uh excuse me I have it on reliable authority that diversity is our strength so dei needs to be number one on that list. We're going to girl boss the Chinese into submission.

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Mar 19
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They think very highly of it. The administration is doing exactly what it's paid and directed to do.

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The PLA is very weak due to lack of women, diversity, and LGBTQ.

(Xi laughing jpg)

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Laughing MAO

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Nice double.

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I assume Guam goes up in smoke at: Time plus 1, or less. When I look at my little piece of the puzzle, over there, I fret a bit.

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And camp butler and all Japanese based forces.

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Yea, I look at Camp Covington and Shields and shudder a bit.

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Without putting real money into our forces, we are “all hat, and no cattle”, as my friends in Texas would say.

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Friends? Who trusts America seeing how we abandoned Afghanistan and now appear to be doing the same to Israel. The president is now in favor of a two state solution - Michigan and Nevada.

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I have nothing useful to add; I just want to point out that according to Rep Hank Johnson, Guam will tip over if too many forces are added to it.

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After squandering trillions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Ukraine we now confront imperial overstretch. We are broke.

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We are so broke we don’t have enough money to change our minds.

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Look at INDOPACOM # 29, operational planners of the world. Therein lies your future. All that critical thinking that goes into Mission Analysis, COA development, and COA analysis is about to move out of your realm and into AI. Shortly after that, OPORDs become AI written with human checking.

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"I'm sorry Dave. Your country does not have the logistical capacity to execute my winning strategy for INDOPACOM."

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Who needs operational assessment when you can program the computer to tell the COCOM that "We're ON PLAN."

"I'm sorry Dave. I don't care that all of the measures of performance and effectiveness are red, mark the objective green."

We might as well be studying bird guts.

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If you employ what is referred to as "deep learning," which often entails various forms of neural network architectures, you are still going to have to train up these networks for the conditions which they're expected to be relevant for purposes of being a substitute to what humans do - "sense - act - think"??? To the best of my feeble knowledge, training "data" based on the real deal and sufficient for their volume and quality would seem to be a worthwhile consideration vs. feeding a neural model a bunch of synthetic data that reflects things peculiar to the Navy but for which real world data is lacking... as in say the operational conditions for a CSG requiring defending against repeated & massive swarms of high mach PGMs in the age of ubiquitous ISR? That little question would seem to have some relevance to the whole "unfunded" question.

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So many unfunded. Lots of cyber requests.

We need warheads on foreheads. This post reminds me of going to a diner and asking for something on the menu and finding out it’s not available.

https://youtube.com/shorts/OCGx3-zNxaw

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After Defense of Guam, all of the stand off missile funding programs should be lined up sequentially. The fact that DOG or LRASMS/MSTs are even on the unfunded list is an indictment of our leadership.

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I'm going to say it is probably a lot further to the left than that.

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