Generational Dynamics World View News

[Guest]

I can't imagine what life in America will look like by the end of the year. With all of the defaults, evictions, and looters stealing and burning everything down, the economy will be ash by October. How many of these people are going to vote for the Democrats? In the midst of anarchy and super violent crime waves, are people going to vote for politicians who plan to defund the police?

Most of the people I know are now unemployed. A month ago they were confident they would return to work soon. Now some of them have lost their jobs because their employers have been looted and burned down. They are jobless and near bankrupt. They are facing the real prospect of homelessness. These are the same people who hate Trump and blame him for everything. I haven't asked them if they still plan to vote Democrat.

All the Trump supporters I know still have jobs.

[Guest]

I'm wondering if there are Chinese "sleeper cells" ready to attack and terrorize us. Are they already out in the protests fueling fire?

[John]

This is something that I posted recently in the Financial
Topics thread:

"A black man’s death was blamed on democrat cops in a democrat city
with a democrat police chief and a democrat mayor in a democrat state
with a democrat governor. Then democrats got together and burned
democrat cities. The democrat mayors and police chiefs allowed black
businesses and neighborhoods to burn. Black people died in the riots."

It's all Trump's fault.

[Guest]

This is something that I posted recently in the Financial
Topics thread:

"A black man’s death was blamed on democrat cops in a democrat city
with a democrat police chief and a democrat mayor in a democrat state
with a democrat governor. Then democrats got together and burned
democrat cities. The democrat mayors and police chiefs allowed black
businesses and neighborhoods to burn. Black people died in the riots."

It's all Trump's fault.

The governor of Kentucky said tonight that all the blacks in the state would get health insurance and that "The state would find the money" to pay for it.

I don't have medical insurance.

I'm white.

[Bob Butler]

This is something that I posted recently in the Financial
Topics thread:

"A black man’s death was blamed on democrat cops in a democrat city
with a democrat police chief and a democrat mayor in a democrat state
with a democrat governor. Then democrats got together and burned
democrat cities. The democrat mayors and police chiefs allowed black
businesses and neighborhoods to burn. Black people died in the riots."

It's all Trump's fault.

It is not all Trump's fault. It is the murder cop's fault, primarily.

But the aftermath asks the question, do you agree with the people that police racism and violence should be curbed, or use violence to quell the voice of the people. Trump seems to be leaning towards the latter. Not wise, I suspect.

[Xeraphim1]

Xeraphim1,

I greatly appreciate your points of debate. Shows you have a clear understanding of the issues at play.

It's fun to debate

Here is my “counter counter point”.

First is about Russia and China building their own carriers. Luckily for us, I see this as incredibly misguided. It is a huge waste of resources for both of them, and I am glad they are doing it. It is roughly the equivalent of the German Kaiser building a hugely expensive battleship fleet prior to WW1, which was not only almost worthless, it diverted resources away from the German Army.

For Germany the High Seas Fleet was mostly a waste of resources that should have gone into submarine production. On the other hand, it did distract the RN for quite a while.

Every time there is a technology shift, there is a big debate. The big ship proponents in the US and Japan didn’t slink off into the corner until after Midway (if at all). There was plenty of prewar evidence of the ascendancy of the carrier, yet both countries continued to build huge battleship fleets. Heck, think of the waste of the Yamato and Musashi for Japan (what if they had built another 4-6 carriers instead, which is what they could have done with the resources put into those behemoths).

WWII was a transformative period where the decline of battleships wasn't as clear as it is in hindsight. Had the war come a few years earlier carriers likely wouldn't have had the impact they did. It really took the actions of 1942-43 to make this clear. Note that the US truncated the Iowa purchases and cancelled the Montana's outright. I'll give the planners at the time a pass on this one.

Fortunately for us, the Russians and Chinese are building carriers instead of building modern diesel electric submarines, which would be MUCH more cost effective for them. They have fallen into the trap of building what we have built (like the Kaiser trying to match the British battlefleet), rather than what would be best for them.

Russia has pretty much given up on large ship construction. Kuznetsov will likely continue it's update but only for prestige purposes. Same for the two Kirov's. Even the Slava's will only be updated with no new construction. The Lider class was recently cancelled. The only ships being built now are frigates and corvettes. Well, plus submarines though its mix of nuclear and D/E makes sense. The Russian navy is devolving back into a coast protection force.

China on the other hand has aspiration to be able to project force outside its borders.They are building along the lines of the US Navy because it's had some years to figure out what works. Carriers aren't worthless if you want to project power rather than just deny it like submarines do. The construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea to serve as airbases happened because China did not have mobile airbases, AKA carriers which are much more useful. In an actual war those artificial islands will be sitting ducks for cruise missiles.

Next, about missiles. They used to be wildly inaccurate and cumbersome. Now they are not. They can indeed make it so nothing that floats goes anywhere near a concentration of them. Yes, aircraft are more versatile, but they are also hugely more expensive. And they because of this, there are not that many of them available in the air at any given time.

Yes the counter to missiles (SSMs and ASMs for surface to surface and air to surface missiles) are better. But the tactic is to overwhelm the defense with more targets than it can handle at once. The idea is to fire HUNDREDS of SSMs at once. Even if you take out 80% of the incoming, 20% still hit. And the reason I used the Falkand’s experience is to point out that even a single missile hit is catastrophic for a modern warship. They have no armor.

The trick is to be able to fire hundreds of them at once which isn't that easy unless the enemy does something completely stupid. Carriers, being mobile, have the ability to control when such an action is possible. They also have the ability to strike those launchers while remaining outside their range.

Next point is that the defense against the missiles requires many many aircraft airborne at the time of the attack. Keeping huge numbers of aircraft on station is very difficult as it requires late wartime effort (when you actually have huge numbers of aircraft on hand). It also requires radars working optimally and the targeting working well. This gets into a whole lot of radar vs countermeasure debate that is way too deep for this forum.

You don't need to keep anything other than AEW and CAP in the air at any given time. Naval radars are usually working full time anyways.

I will just point out that every time there is a new major war, both sides are pretty unprepared for what is going to happen as the militaries do not understand the implications of their new weapon systems.

But I am pretty confident that things will look quite different from WW2.

Agreed.

Lastly, the DF21 threat is not a fact, it is conjecture. However, the USN has stated that it doesn’t have a good response. I am not sure how the anti missile tracking and interception would work at the speeds involved. But I agree that a couple of dozen SSM hits would make any carrier pretty inoperative anyway.

DF-21D is known to be in at least limited service. The problem is in target acquisition for it though China has been building satellites to support ASBM activities. There is also a version under development that could be launched from H-6K bombers though that is still some years away.

Lastly, I would agree that the article is a lot of hyperbole. But it is what I could find quickly that had pictures of the missiles. The point to take away though is that while you needed a big ship to have viable anti ship weapons in WW1 or WW2, you can now put the weapons on any floating platform. Yes, they have to be controlled by something with good target acquisition, but the idea here is that you have a way to put hundreds of these things into the air simultaneously, and from multiple vectors against your intended target.

All of this is of course the debate I alluded to at the start of my original post. This debate will continue well into the next war. But I think the repetitive lessons of history will support what I am suggesting.

Except that no one is putting bunches of missile launchers on commercial ships. The closest we have to that is the Arsenal ship concept which has been promoted and turned down for decades now and even those tend to have copious SAM's on board.

The death of carriers has been projected for decades now yet countries keep building them because there are good reasons to do so. I think that's likely to continue for decades to come.

[Xeraphim1]

I also wanted to weigh in on some non-military subjects.

Frankly, I think Trump will start shooting with the Iranians, or some other misguided affair, to try and gather support. I think this will happen within a couple of months of the election. It will backfire and we will have much more difficulty. A Trump reelection will cause the left to become even more unglued. In any case, I think domestic turmoil will embolden our foes, and make it much more likely for someone to miscalculate that war now is a good option.

I'm not so sure about this. Despite occasional saber rattling Trump really hasn't been excited about starting any new conflicts while he's tried to pull back from current ones. There is little need to attack Iran since it's being crushed by sanctions and Covid. The Iranian downing of a RQ-4 would have been a perfect opportunity to hit Iran but Trump turned it down. I really think he'd prefer to not fire a single shot since he doesn't care that much about international issues.

[Xeraphim1]

I don't see Japan getting involved unless the US did and that's by no means assured. Though Japan would not be declaring war but supporting an ally which allowed under the new reading of the Japanese constitution.

Japan would go to war to help Taiwan because the Japanese know that they would be next. You don't understand how the Japanese think. Even Japanese leftists would support a war with the mainlanders in the event of an attack on Taiwan.

There is no treaty to support such an action and the general Japanese populace is pretty pacifistic. It would be in Japan's long term interest to intervene, but countries often make decisions contrary to those interests for various reasons. I wouldn't consider it to be assured.

[Xeraphim1]

This is something that I posted recently in the Financial
Topics thread:

"A black man’s death was blamed on democrat cops in a democrat city
with a democrat police chief and a democrat mayor in a democrat state
with a democrat governor. Then democrats got together and burned
democrat cities. The democrat mayors and police chiefs allowed black
businesses and neighborhoods to burn. Black people died in the riots."

It's all Trump's fault.

#OrangeManBad.

[Xeraphim1]

The governor of Kentucky said tonight that all the blacks in the state would get health insurance and that "The state would find the money" to pay for it.

I don't have medical insurance.

I'm white.

Beshear can say whatever he likes but the rest of Kentucky's government is controlled by Republicans so good luck getting it done. He barely won and that only because Bevin was so incredibly disliked.