this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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If that's true then the last advantage of US Navy, their huge nuclear submarine fleet, would be in great danger.
Aren't there 11 US aircraft carriers each of which can topple a small nation? IDK if id say nuclear subs are the last advantage lol
Yes, they can topple small nations (though not really, it never actually happened), that's what they have been designed to do, to work as the XX-XXI century gunboat diplomacy, not to actually strike alone but to make terror threats of destruction.
But their usefulness is currently around zero in a peer combat against Russia or China, hypersonic missiles are hard counter for them. And note that US is even reluctant to post them nearby Iran because Iran also have some dangerous to them weapons like supercavitating torpedoes.
US Navy surface fleet is therefore pretty vulnerable to PLAN which got close to force parity in defence scenario, but nearly all PLAN ships are more modern and will have advantage in defense because being on the other side of Pacific.
So the only real and big advantage US Navy have is their submarine fleet which is much bigger than Chinese and make exclusively of nuclear submarines which in itself is advantage especially on area as huge as Pacific. No wonder China put some serious money and brainpower to this research.
Also consider that in a fight with China over Taiwan or the West Pacific the US surface fleet will have to also deal with shore based aviation and ballistic missiles.
The old adage that a ship should never try to fight a shore battery probably holds true to this day.
Indeed, also the whole AUKUS thing that's estimated at a third of a trillion dollars at the start, and reaching the working capacity of “blocking China’s sea with submarines” by 2040, turns out to be stillborn. By 2040, these ancient huge submarines will be easily detectable, and will be destroyed by a swarm of underwater drones.
This is a similar situation to how vulnerable tanks are to FPV drones. US clearly didn't consider the impact this sort of tech will have on the future of warfare, and doesn't have any clear response at the moment. Funny part is that US is now starting to fall behind technologically, so they don't have symmetric capability to detect Chinese or Russian subs.
Only if the purpose of the fleet is to win wars. That's 16 years of purchase orders. Look at the F-35.
I don't actually know anything about AUKUS but I don't see the problem.
Oh yeah, US will fleece the shit out of Australia with this project.
The real military capabilities were the profits we made along the way.
I very much agree, now that US transitioned to a largely financialized economy, the mechanisms for doing domestic industrial capitalism are no longer present. The whole political and economic system would need serious restructuring to do that.
That's the beauty of it. The first baby step they would take to undo the past forty-fifty years would reveal the paper beneath the tiger face paint. The joy that I get from watching the west collapse is going to help keep me warm as my life in the west becomes unaffordable lol. Silver linings and all that.
This is one of those cases where you have a clear and obvious problem, but no clear solution within the system.