Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

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..."The development and deployment of armed forces specifically equipped and trained for COIN operations."

Right now, the US has too much of that. Wars against peer or near-peer enemies need less counter-insurgency operations and more heavy equipment.

The US has become used to operating in environments where air superiority was total, and secure base camps were possible. That's over.

The US Army takes this seriously. Read Parameters, the War College journal, which has many articles on this subject. Here are two.[1][2] It's a major argument within the US military.

There are some serious mismatches in preparation. The USMC has a great concept of a MAGTF - a Marine Air Ground Task Force, usually carried in an amphibious assault ship. This is great for COIN - the ship can go somewhere in a hurry, park offshore, and send out landing craft and air support, while acting as a mobile base. This works great against an enemy with nothing capable of attacking such a ship. Less well against an enemy with truck-mounted anti-ship missiles.

The Army has too many vehicles intended to resist improvised explosive devices, and not enough heavy artillery and tanks. The Army is also used to being able to set up rear area bases in the open, and fortified fire bases in hostile territory. Those now look like soft targets.

The USAF is used to being able to fly cargo planes such as C-130s into combat zones. This now looks suicidal where everybody has anti-aircraft missiles. Today, if it flies over a combat zone, it had better be able to dodge, jam, and fight. Or be expendable, like a drone.

One of the lessons of the Ukraine war for the Navy is that you can't bring naval vessels near a hostile shore any more. Not since the Moskva.

[1] https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol46/iss4/3/

[2] https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol47/iss1/13/

Sounds like being able to launch a swarm of killer drones from a submarine is the next evolutionary step to superiority

That's something that's been around since the 1950s. Since a sub can't be expected to meaningfully recover a drone it launches, there's no functional difference between a 'drone' and a 'cruise missile' in this scenario.

Do cruise missiles have the ability to loiter very long before target acquisition? In my limited observation that has been one of the game changers in the war in Ukraine.

To me it looks like we’re rapidly nearing the point where we can target off of a shared coordinate system instead of painting targets or seeking RF/heat at which point the loitering munitions become much more useful even with small warheads.

Little loitering munitions like Switchblade don't have the range to be usefully fired from a sub; which wants to be hiding in deep water. Bigger UCAVs like Shahed or Bayraktar are essentially small ground-attack planes and behave like one, so if you're launching them from a sub what you're really making is a submarine aircraft carrier. All the evidence suggests that nobody wants a submarine aircraft carrier.

Take Bayraktar and try to fit it into a VLS cell so a sub can launch one: you first have to make the wings smaller because that wide lifting body won't fold up into the allowed diameter. But now that you've made the wings smaller, its optimal cruising speed is going to be higher, but you can't add a second engine or make the existing one bigger, so that means replacing the prop engine with a turbofan. And you've just designed Tomahawk.

>what you're really making is a submarine aircraft carrier. All the evidence suggests that nobody wants a submarine aircraft carrier.

The Japanese thought they wanted one in WWII: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-400-class_submarine

Can't use GPS much in war zones any more. Too much jamming.[1]

[1] https://ops.group/dashboard/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/GPS-S...

this thing is kinda interesting (though maybe not for sub use):

https://www.anduril.com/article/anduril-unveils-roadrunner-a...

I would be careful conflating the fate of the Moskva with the ability of the USN to survive an ASCM attack. The USN has been working on this particular issue since the 1960s. And the Moskva was an old, poorly maintained and poorly operated ship.

It's only in war that you truly find out what is poorly maintained or poorly operated. That said, the USN had multiple incidents of ramming other vessels down to basic failures in seamanship, so I'm not sure I'd be entirely as confident as you are..

There’s a similar debate about how to fix the industrial complex, when shown to be lethargic at 155mm artillery and small missiles.

Eg, this.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/rebuilding-us-inventories-six-...

And when this was written in 2001, we had the opposite problem.

No doubt there's a cuneiform tablet somewhere with a priest complaining the generals are always preparing to fight the last war instead of the next?

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