Shrike
3hr ago
Some people say, it's not necessarily a bad thing to have some extra tonnage. It's relatively cheap to build extra steel with nothing fancy inside of it, and it adds room for future improvements to the ship.
My understanding that an issue we are currently hitting with the Burke class is that we basically kept throwing new systems on there (we also increased the size of the ship over time, the first ships in the class didn't even have a helicopter hangar) until we basically tapped out the potential.
Shrike
4hr ago
This also explains the protracted and expensive development of the F-35 and the decision of the DoD to put all of their chips on it: they were very confident the secret sauce would work, whatever it was!
Shrike
4hr ago
The Russians also designated their carriers "aircraft carrying cruisers" due to the Montreux Convention, which is pretty funny, although in fairness the Soviets put substantial anti-ship armament on said ships.
Shrike
4hr ago
Lockheed Martin be like "okay but how do we market...what kind of countermeasure was it again?"
Shrike
5hr ago
I think a lot of people were claiming it had fewer VLS per tonnage than anticipated, but I wouldn't be surprised if we saw some degree of "right-sizing" before it's executed.
If the Navy can get a railgun to really work the firepower will be terrifying.
Shrike
5hr ago
Zumwalt
Man I always complete forget that the Zumwalt exists. Pretty fair to compare them to the Tico, I think, so that is at least a halfway good counterexample and probably a decent illustration of @Lizzardspawn's point.
Although it kinda seems like we should class them as a monitor, given their intended function.
Shrike
10hr ago
I think there's also a habit in some places to classify larger ships that would generally be termed "destroyer" due to their anti-air and/or anti-submarine capabilities as "frigates" because that sounds less scary.
At the risk of dramatic oversimplification, I think in modern parlance (at least in the west) there's been a tendency to use "frigate, destroyer" and perhaps "cruiser" to mean "small, medium, and large" because the trend is for ~all ships to have at least limited multirole capabilities. Unless someone was calling something a "frigate" to be politically correct, I cannot think of any ships in the recent past labeled frigates that were designed to be larger than the contemporary destroyers in their own fleet, and likewise the cruisers have always been larger than contemporary destroyers.
Shrike
17hr ago
If you want to maximize for science, you need more than rationality.
Bouncing off of this idea, I'd also suggest that religion actually does a sort of neat trick when it comes to making science "work" because pure rationality has a hard time really getting out of the solipsism trap, but even if you manage that, science in particular is vulnerable to the problem of inductive reasoning. Having a (reasonable, not irrational) faith that the universe is created by an orderly Being really makes science fall into place easily, since it provides a reason why the universe would be ordered the way that it is.
Obviously that's not the only way to get to believing in an understandable universe, and I am not saying "science is impossible without God," but other ways to do this end up having to take something on faith. And even handwaving the problem of solipsism and assuming the observable world is in some sense real, using scientific reasoning to prove its own validity end up having to argue that we can adequately perceive truth because it's evolutionary advantageous for us to do so, or that "truth just means what works" – a pragmatic approach. Which is all very well and good, but seems (at least to me) mostly to lead back around to pointing towards religion, which "works," pragmatically speaking, and if humans evolved to seek out the truth because it is evolutionarily advantageous, and religion is both something humans have a natural instinct for and something that seems evolutionary advantageous...well, you can do the math.
On that note, I would suggest that freeing science and reason from the fairly tedious business of "proving that we exist and that reality is real" (which, it seems to me, has really bogged down philosophy for a few hundred years) really unleashes them to do their best work.
Shrike
18hr ago
It seems like a bargaining chip. Taking it away from Iran and offering to give it back gives them more of a positive motivation to end the war than just bombing it.
Also, getting them to fixate on whacking Marines on Kharg would redirect their munitions away from more high-value targets.
Finally, it would allow them to test some of the tactics the Marines have been pivoting towards which focus on the need for the Marines to be able to operate within hostile missile range.
Shrike
1d ago
The wellbeing benefits of religious belief, to the extent they're real, accrue mostly to the believer.
This is a bit misleading. A lot of the ways that religion benefits individuals has a positive social effect. Off the top of my head, so I might mess a couple of these up, but regular religious practice tends to be correlated with increased fertility, increased fostering/adopting, decreased crime/recidivism, increased mental health, increased physical health, longer, happier marriages, and an increased history of charitable donations and/or volunteer work.
All of these have positive benefits for society as a whole that ripple beyond the believer.
On the flip side, we've seen that an decline of religious faith seems to generate a bunch of "nones" who don't really gain the supposed benefits of irreligiosity (they still often believe in ghosts, or God, or astrology, or whatever) but they miss out on the very real benefits of regular religious practice.
However, it's also worth pointing out that the benefits of mere religious belief are weak. Where you see these tangible benefits of religion is in people who practice it. (This isn't, like, a cheeky tautological statement, it's more that if you want to see the above effect in scientific research you want to look for e.g. frequent religious attendance rather than merely identifying with a faith tradition.)
Now, I am speaking here of the United States. It's entirely possible that things are different somewhere else.
(Interestingly, as I understand it, there's at least some research that suggests at least some of these health benefits conferred by religious belief only benefit the believer in a religious environment, and that stripping the broader religious culture removes some of those benefits. From a utilitarian analysis, I suppose this has harsh implications for people who try to remove that religious culture. But I'm not sure if I trust a what's likely a vibecoded gravestone analysis to get that right.)
Shrike
1d ago
law and regulation is simply too complex for an MP or congressman to learn in the time they have, much less meaningfully edit.
I think this is correct. But I am not sure it is entirely a feature of modern society alone, I am given to understand that older civilizations also managed to generate sprawling legal codes. It seems like an inherent risk of "writing" + "non-expiring laws."
and the DHS is talking about deporting a number equal to all non white people
This was an interesting claim, so I clicked. The post says "America after 100 million deportations" which is a bit shy of the 150 million nonwhites in the States. It's also a bit more than the estimated 10ish illegal immigrants. One must imagine the white supremacist DHS poster to be mathematically challenged.
Shrike
2d ago
There's basically two types of weapons for an air war like this- the high end and the low end.
No, there's three types: Exquisite, Medium, and Upper Medium.
(If it's not clear, I am just making a joke. I don't listen to Trump very often but I think it's very interesting and sometimes very funny when he talks about military stuff, because I'm often fairly convinced he regurgitates exactly what he was told by the brass when they are trying to explain things to him. For instance I would be very unsurprised if he was in a meeting with some general who described JDAMs as "medium, upper medium quality" weapons and Trump just ran with that.)
Shrike
2d ago
Australia, for example, is younger than America and has been more institutionally resilient over the past few decades of populist headwinds than Europe has largely been.
I suspect Australia and Europe are under different pressures though, are they not?
The real reason the US is falling faster towards institutional dysfunction and is more prosaic: its institutions are not well designed.
I am inclined both ways on this question. The US' institutions have arguably survived longer than the ones in most of Europe! If you think institutions have a natural lifespan it's logically possible that they are both stronger than most European ones and that they are just now reaching a point of decay after most of Europe's crashed and burned. But I digress: the Constitution as originally written envisioned a very strong Congress. (BurdensomeCount fingers the strong US Supreme Court but that's actually much more debatable an institution, at least when it comes to original intent.)
I'll just incorporate by reference an older comment I made with my thesis that a lot of Trump's supposed puncturing of norms is due to wielding the accumulated powers of the executive (often delegated by Congress) in the one hand and the inherent, original, sometimes neglected powers of the executive on the other. But what I don't really discuss in that comment is why Congress seems so dysfunctional.
There is a simple (although I think incomplete) theory as to why this might be the case: Congress has not grown with the nation. The House has been capped at 435 members for more than 100 years. This has not kept pace with either population growth or the growth of the government. Put it simply, in this theory, Congress is overworked and isolated - they aren't capable of conducting proper oversight of the massive, sprawling bureaucracy, and they are a smaller, more elite portion of the population. The one thing George Washington cared about was that the ratio of representatives to citizens not exceed 1:30,000, and we blew past 1:300,000 around 1940. Today we're at a worse than 1:760,000 ratio.
This seems like an odd thing to finger as a major problem, but network effects are very real. Of course, increasing the size of the House to, say, FOUR THOUSAND would also have implications for network effects: FOUR THOUSAND or FORTY THOUSAND representatives are, perhaps, too unwieldy to come to consensus on anything. So, to add some extra ammo to your argument: however well designed America's institutions were or weren't originally, we should not expect them to function the same, distorted as they are.
Unfortunately, for all of that, it does not seem that a leaner ratio (In Australia that ratio is about 1:125,000, on a quick Google, and something like a blessed 1:75,000 in the UK) is actually effective at getting the cultural or legal outcomes that I prize. A pity!
Shrike
2d ago
If you are paying the same price no matter the bodycount, why bother reducing it?
Well, I mean, collateral damage isn't ideal and, all things being equal, it's good to kill fewer noncombatants.
But also, it's not equal - smaller precision-guided weapons are much more effective and efficient than large, inaccurate ones.
Shrike
2d ago
Trump enjoys the feeling of using secretive and powerful toys in the open.
I'm sure that's true, but
- I doubt Trump is personally instructing US pilots to go to war reserve mode, and
- There are that we know of probably at least one, maybe three classified aircraft with operational capability right now that he hasn't paraded in front of cameras (the RQ-180 stealth recon aircraft, the SR-72 high-speed recon aircraft, and the Penetrating Stand-in Electronic Attack aircraft).
Shrike
2d ago
I can't think of any example where a nuclear-armed nation has deliberately aided a non-armed nation's nuclear weapons development programs
My understanding is that Pakistan is widely considered to be the Saudis nuclear weapons program, and there's decent reason to believe Israel assisted with South Africa's development of nuclear weapons.
Shrike
2d ago
The Lusitania was attacked, and that was a national tragedy and an affront to American sovereignty
And this was due to a coordinated propaganda effort to get the United States into the war; Lusitania was carrying munitions which as I understand it made it a pretty uncontroversial target and the controversy had more to do with the fact that the Germans did not give the passengers the chance to get into lifeboats before sinking her.
Pearl Harbor was a "day that will live in infamy," it was a bad thing that Japan did that, despite the United States taking explicitly anti-Japanese policy positions in the Pacific prior Pearl Harbor.
Well yeah - it's always bad when you are attacked. Do you expect politicians to give a neutral account of their actions?
I would argue that your reply to omw is basically wrong - for instance, Laos was an ostensibly neutral country during the Vietnam War; the North Vietnamese used that neutral territory to move munitions (secretly, because it was supposedly neutral), and as a result the US bombed Laos (secretly, because it was supposedly neutral). As precedential evidence goes it supports the theory that states that violate their neutrality become fair game.
Similarly, if memory serves, MacArthur wanted to attack China during the Korean War, and, as I understand it, what stopped this was prudential judgments about expanding the war, not concerns about international law.
The reason proxy wars don't always degenerate to large armed conflict is because the relevant powers fighting the proxy war think the proxy war is a better way to engage in the contest than escalating to armed conflict, not because they cannot or "are not allowed."
Shrike
2d ago
Trump and Hesgeth are taking the approach of actually using our more powerful tools instead of holding them in reserve for a peer conflict.
I actually am skeptical this is entirely true. There are wheels within wheels of military operational security, and while the US military likes to test and refine new weapons in combat, there are ways to do that without disclosing all of their capabilities.
For instance, you can confine your theater ballistic missiles to a lower-than-maximum launch range. Or, for another example, tactical aircraft radars have a "war reserve mode." It's quite plausible to me that, given the low air threat that Iran poses, that all of our latest and greatest aircraft are buzzing around using the exact same radar modes they do routinely overseas. Stuff like this lets you test tactics and operational planning without telling adversaries what precisely you are capable of.
I believe this is just convenience, not because of some iron rule of civilization - if you are aiding one side (even with simply intelligence or war material) then you have violated the duty of neutrality. I'm sure you can marshal many counter-examples in international practice - for instance, Hitler cited US violations of neutrality in his speech declaring war on the United States.
Shrike
2d ago
At this point I think that the US doctrine should change to using many dumb bombs.
Smart bombs like JDAMs are so much more effective for hitting most targets that I think it would actually cost us significantly more to do this, or we would have to accept a massive reduction in combat effectiveness.
Shrike
3d ago
This is all irrelevant to the technical point I am making about mass bombardment capabilities. If you're following this thread as a whole you will see that I am skeptical about the efficacy of using mass bombardment by itself for regime change. That's a separate question from whether or not the USAF can still manage "WWII scale" bombing.
Why does this matter? If you get the facts wrong on little things like "US offensive munitions stockpiles" you can more easily misunderstand how a tactical situation will play out, which can cause you to misunderstand a strategic situation, which can cause you to misapprehend the geopolitical situation.
These things are hard enough to understand even if you do have a security clearance and are kinda autistic about them (I don't have a security clearance and uhhhh I throw myself at the mercy of the Motte on the second question) and one of the things I appreciate about the Motte is that people on here are willing to correct me or call me out if I am getting something wrong. Please forgive me if I come across as pedantic, but I find this stuff interesting.
Yeah I am disappointed that they don't seem interested in putting reactors in. I guess there are good reasons, with the new propulsion methods, not to do that, but it makes sense to me to have a class of nuclear-powered cruiser escorts designed to accompany carriers. And if railguns and/or lasers Become Real, it would be simple enough to reload their munitions at sea.
(You can reload VLS cells at sea anyway, it's just painful, but a larger ship would probably be able to do that regardless if you wanted it to.)
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