As the US Air Force fleet keeps shrinking, can it still win wars? | Hacker News Reader

As the US Air Force fleet keeps shrinking, can it still win wars?

defensenews.com

21 pointsjseliger45 comments

IMO unspoken driver Air Force recapitalizaion problems mirrors navy - too many platforms not suitable for indopac theatre. F35 designed for euro theatre, doesn't have non tanking range for indopac. No reason to double down on inadequate hardware when ngad / b21 on the horizon. Hence US trying to plug longer range lo mix f15ex that can serve as missile truck for future hi mix ngad fighters. And drones. Meanwhile current Air Force mix / Force composition enough for other adversaries even with less airframes. In interim, brass of different branches still going to fight for funding even though much of what's available to acquire is not optimal for what is needed.

Boeing just finished construction on a brand-new factory for the MQ-25 refueling tanker drone; they must be anticipating building a bunch of them.

Supporting the F-35 is objectively pro-disarmament.

Which is why I have always been a big fan.

With the rest of the world is frantically arming themselves, we cannot afford to be complacent or pacifist.

how? (help me in my ignorant state)

You can't afford to replace existing systems 1:1, the a/c doesn't have the same range as those it is replacing and it's so complicated it will never achieve the same operational rates w/o extreme expenditures or cannibalizing Human Resources maintaining other a/c.

All this leads to less capability and more risk aversion to wage conflicts. Peace through bankruptcy.

I'm trying to decide what this article really is. I don't have good names for it.

Another article by the same author: https://www.defensenews.com/unmanned/2024/04/24/here-are-the...

So he's fully aware of the loyal wingman projects.

Turkey has the following unmanned fighter jet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayraktar_K%C4%B1z%C4%B1lelma

But the US airforce has this from 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Phantom_Ray

or this from 2003: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_X-47A_Pegasus

EVeryone knows about this drone from 2001: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-9_Reaper

The author damned well knows that the US airforce is simply being overly secretive about their current capabilities.

Robots and drones must be a sign that the modern air force needs reinvention.

Has the US won a war since 1945?

The U.S. military has an unprecedented capacity for destroying organized state power. The fourth largest air force in the world is the U.S. Navy. The U.S. Army has the second most military aircraft amongst military branches of the world.

To your question it depends on how you count “win”. The Gulf War was a win. Same with Panama, Grenada, and the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Was Korea a win? It wasn’t a loss as South Korea still exists. Afghanistan was a loss. China hasn’t taken over Taiwan largely due to the U.S. military’s deterrence. Is that a win? Wars in former Yugoslavia ended as a result of U.S. military intervention.

EDIT: The real “win” of the U.S. military comes from the deterrent effect it has on dissuading nations from attacking our allies and the accompanying amount of political power that comes from that fact. Early in the 2000s the South Korean President made a remark about the U.S. military. Rumsfeld announced that U.S. was considering withdrawing from the Korean peninsula. As a result there was panic selling in the Korean stock market. The Korean President backtracked on the remarks.

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/07/international/asia/south-...

China hasnt taken over Taiwan largely due to their financial stand and least interest in Taiwan. Yes, they want Taiwan but not at the cost of war. They would happily poach in every possible way to get Taiwan unique proposition. They never went to war with India (its only cold war) and there is no US to be feared of.

It is unlikely that Taiwan would still be an independent nation in the absence of the U.S. military. At least as I see it.

China would certainly have ferried troops across the water barrier, in absence of the US military. It would be a major boon to control the manufacturing base, even without the talent who have been running the chip fabs.

China aggression was largely the reason India pursued nuclear weapons.

From Wikipedia:

India's loss to China in a brief Himalayan border war in October 1962, provided the New Delhi government impetus for developing nuclear weapons as a means of deterring potential Chinese aggression.

And of course Pakistan pursued nuclear weapons because India had them. This is how nuclear proliferation works.

Your thinking is dangerously naive. China hasn’t pursued India because of India’s nuclear deterrent.

US guarantees of security for Japan and Taiwan are partially due to an attempt to reduce nuclear proliferation.

US involvement has been critical to Taiwanese independence going all the way back to the 1950’s when China invaded ROC held islands.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Taiwan_Strait_Crisis

The US deployed nuclear weapons to Taiwan during a crisis caused by China in the Taiwan Straights in the 1970’s.

* During the Cold War, the United States deployed nuclear weapons on Taiwan as part of the United States Taiwan Defense Command. In 1972, United States president Richard Nixon ordered nuclear weapons to be removed from Taiwan and this was implemented by 1974. Nuclear weapons are known to have been stored at Tainan Air Force Base.*

I'd argue Afghanistan was an unclear and unfunded set of moving goal posts. There was an objective the US did succeed in; the death of the figurehead for the terrorist group that perpetrated September 11th 2001 attacks.

Forcing a regime change, society modernization (E.G. value women, everyone can vote, have a not-shit quality of life so there's something to stay at home and value), general reforms like that weren't something that was a clear goal for everyone involved. There was far too much corruption, in war profiteering among contractors, political institutions and figures, etc.

There was a great set of unfulfilled needs (IMO, offhand): a combination of engineers being free to do what _they_ think is necessary to build a stable and sustainable society, educators and a system of perpetuating that society in place once 'we' pull out, and politicians/diplomats to tackle and fix the social structure issues that aren't clearly objective and correctable with obvious actions, but more that require consensus and emotional support.

Oh, and a lot of funding in public, audited, bookkeeping that has verifiable results.

I'd really like to see the same domestically. The US GAO should produce reports for the average citizen, so they can understand where the funds going into the government come from (both per person, and broadly), and what value is derived from those funds.

It's really easy to say 'blow X up', 'end entitlement Y', 'shutdown Z'; but it's much more difficult to articulate preventative care, investment in the future, and improvement of the commons. Much like misinformation is easy and it's hard to spread the truth.

I think the failure to “win” on the part of the U.S. since 1945 has mostly come down to lack of political will. We could have done what McArthur wanted and dropped 50 atomic bombs on China and won the Korean War. Thankfully we didn’t. Our losses have not come from the inability of the U.S. military to obliterate (in a conventional way) our opponents.

Laughs in Houtni. Word is the US is currently trying to negotiate a ceasefire with them, and they aren’t taking the bait.

Do you think the Houthis can do more damage to the U.S. than the U.S. can do to them? I don’t understand your point. Is it a bad thing if the U.S. doesn’t want to wage war on someone?

It doesn’t matter. Houtnis closed the trade routes and “the world’s strongest navy and air force” shat the bed pathetically trying to unblock them.

Your understanding of the situation is badly wrong.

Are the trade routes open? No? Then my understanding of the situation is exactly right.

Yes, the Cape of Good Hope is open and as traffic through the Suez has declined the traffic through the Cape of Good Hope has increased. The U.S. has made a political calculation on how to deal with the Israeli conflict. That decision has not in any way been influenced by a lack of military capabilities by the U.S. military.

And what “calculation” would that be? To publicly condemn Israel while privately funneling billions in borrowed money to it, and ineffectually expending extremely expensive ammunition in the Gulf of Aden? Was this a part of these “calculations”: https://www-tasnimnews-com.translate.goog/ar/news/2024/04/24...?

Feel free to expand on that if you’re so sure.

The U.S. has made a political calculation on how to deal with the Israeli conflict. That decision has not in any way been influenced by a lack of military capabilities.

The US Navy is using $10 million missiles to shoot down $10k drones. Do the math. They could deplete US Navy stockpiles for trivial costs. They have turned the US Navy's strength into its own weakness.

This reasoning would make sense if it was the case that the U.S. is incapable of doing something else to prevent drone attacks. The U.S. has chosen a course of action but it is not limited to doing just this. There are many other options.

The US navy could glass Yemen in an afternoon.

What people don’t realize is that the US hasn’t actually fought under LSCO conditions since early Vietnam, as regardless of the scale of the deployment the ROI and thus the tactics that can be employed were mostly limited to LIC/PKO.

It's using the phalanx as well. Those rounds are pretty cheap.

Winning a war means achieving your political goals and getting out without creating too many new problems. Winning battles may help you achieve that, but the victories may also be irrelevant to the eventual conclusion.

Every potential opponent knows that the main US weakness is the unwillingness of the civilian population to commit to winning a prolonged war. If the opponent can just survive long enough, there is a high likelihood that Americans will grow tired of the casualties and the wasted billions and give up.

Saddam Hussein operated on similar assumptions about American political will to absorb casualties until his army got blasted in 1990 then desposed in 2003.

Subsequently, most potential enemies will be operating in the grey line between doing some damage to American interests while not so much that it pisses them off to really invade. Conversely, the US military does serve as a deterrent that heavily limits the actions of opponents from actualizing their own goals. Instead they need to engage in decades long asymmetric warfare while their population suffers without a end goal in sight. And even while USA might be unwilling to engage, it dosent stop other opponents like Israel with more political will from performing more direct actions.

Gee I guess I didn't need all of those years studying military history at university after all. Thanks for the crash course.

The last declared war the USA participated in was WWII.

I'll count most of the many conflicts the US military has engaged in since 1945 as wars in keeping with common usage.

Winning a war means achieving strategic objectives. It doesn't mean just blowing things up and killing people. Whether the failure comes from lack of military capability or failure of political will makes no difference when a civilian government controls the military, and sets the strategic (and sometimes tactical) objectives.

The four big conflicts since 1945 didn't go well. Korea drew to a stalemate. True, South Korea still exists, but so does North Korea. The American strategic objective -- preventing communist takeover of Korea -- was only partly achieved. After the war South Korea suffered under military rule and dictators until the late 1980s

The same strategic objective got us into Vietnam, a war we clearly lost. That war sapped political and public confidence to such a degree that the US allowed a horrible genocide to happen in Cambodia. Vietnam had to intervene.

The First Gulf War, a police action to protect Kuwait from invasion, went well except the US failed to follow through and disable Saddam Hussein's ability to fight another day, which led to a second war predicated on lies and no clear strategic objective. The USA did topple Hussein, but destroyed the country and its infrastructure in the process, and set the stage for ISIS and other terrorist groups still operating there.

Afghanistan didn't have clear strategic objectives, the justifications changed repeatedly. And the USA lost.

The Kosovo War ended by NATO action. The USA led by President Clinton intervened. Strategic objectives met, we can call that a victory.

Grenada and Panama were minor rescue operations and police actions; I hesitate to call those "wars." Panama was invaded to depose and arrest a single man, Manuel Noriega, a former CIA puppet who (like Saddam Hussein) turned on his former patrons. I think of those as Bay Of Pigs type small-scale actions, except the US succeeded in Grenada and Panama.

You left out Somalia, another UN/USA operation that ended with the US evacuating.

I agree that a lot of potential conflicts -- Taiwan, Iran, North Korea -- have not erupted because the United States does have tremendous military capability, reaching around the world, and that has a real and effective deterrent effect on nation states. It has not deterred Russia, though. It has less value deterring terrorists and non-state actors such as ISIS, the Taliban, Houthi rebels, communist rebels in the Philippines, and Mexican drug cartels.

Whether the failure comes from lack of military capability or failure of political will makes no difference…

In my opinion it does make a difference when the discussion started with the article in question. The U.S. military definitely can obliterate any organized state power (possible exception is China) in the world today.

I should note that I was not attempting to give an exhaustive list of “wars” the U.S. has fought since 1945.

I don’t see how Operation Just Cause does not qualify for a war. A country was invaded and its government replaced. That’s a war. I’m from the Canal Zone and at least one former PDF member I spoke with considered it a war.

The US hasn’t fought a war since 1945. The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 made war illegal. This pact was the basis for the war crimes tribunals after WWII, because Germany and Japan were signatories they were deemed to have violated the treaty by waging war. Likewise Congress has the sole authority to declare war, and this authority hasn’t been used since December 1945.

International law is weird.

As the term “at war” is commonly used the U.S. has definitely been at war many times since 1945.

" The pact had no mechanism for enforcement, and many historians and political scientists see it as mostly irrelevant and ineffective."

Regardless of international law (which is for the most part, not particularly effective at changing the behavior of nations) war has been waged throughout the 20th century and into the 21st

The US airforce is one hell of a deterrence - I'd argue that it's a more effective deterrence than the nuclear threat. The nuclear option is just too nuclear.

You should ask the Soviet Union that question.

Absolutely, people fixate on Korea and Vietnam while ignoring that the US has won many ”fast” wars since 1945. Operation Desert Storm is a perfect modern example.

The US doesn’t lose wars, it loses interest

A fast war is long enough to shake the bugs out of new toys. Even Grenada revealed deficiencies.

The Gulf War was absolutely a US victory

> has the US won a war since 1945?

has humanity ever won in wars?

Obviously the US military has absolutely crushed their enemies as far as not having their hands tied by politics has allowed. And that is important, whether for better or for worse.

In at least 70% of the major conflicts since then, US has absolutely failed in almost every respect in terms of reforming the countries they go to war with, and in bringing about any objective benefits for others or for themselves.

But, until now the deterrent effect of the US military just existing has undoubtedly saved many countries from being overrun by a neighboring thug with despotic tendencies. It is trivial to think of several plausible scenarios for the last 80 years that are far darker than what actually transpired. So that deterrent effect is by far the most important one, and an excellent reason for the US military to remain strong as we move into the future.

Yes, in Lebanon, the Dominican Republic, the Korean DMZ, Grenada, Libya (twice), the Persian Gulf, Iraq (three times), Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Haiti, Serbia, Pakistan, and Uganda.

But the bigger question might be, how many wars has NATO prevented since WWII? I believe the answer is: a lot.

The US has nukes. It has a fleet of B-2 Spirits which are essentially unkillable and can deliver nuclear weapons anywhere on the planet. Does it need to win anything? If it ever loses, it could just nuke everybody out of spite and call it a day.

Its victory over Japan in WW2 was a foregone conclusion due to sheer industrial output. There is literally nothing Japan could have done to avoid being utterly defeated, it was but a matter of time even without the nukes. The US would just keep spamming war materiel and personnel at the enemy until the enemy was destroyed. It's truly mind boggling the scale of it.

Now factor in the fact that America is basically asleep right now. More or less deindustrialized, in world boss mode, it views itself as the highly paid managers of the other shithole nations where the cheap manufacturing actually occurs. And it still projects absurd amounts of power by just sending carrier groups to random places. Imagine what's going to happen once they start reindustrializing.

They don't even need to win anything, they have people like the CIA and NSA making sure that winning is not even necessary to begin with. You don't need to actually get americans killed if you can get your enemies to kill each other by destabilizing their nations.

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