evilgenius wrote:They are using the old Silk Road lessons to establish themselves in the Middle East and Africa. The sea is nice, but it is ruled by someone else. Whatever China is doing in response to the break down of the global order, they will do it on land, most likely, away from the sea.
That's probably why hypersonic weapons will become important. Two or three times the speed of the SR-71. I think that was a minute from horizon to horizon, at so many tens of thousands of feet. They could replace carriers as the means to project power. They could do payloads, or drones. An air force of drones, all of a sudden.
What it would do would be to provide those powers that had the capability to operate such things, with the ability to enfeeble any power that didn't. They could wreck that power's infrastructure, even in far away land locked places, at will. It would actually be far cheaper than colonization, which was always how these things had to be done before.
The US would be suddenly vulnerable because it relies upon a nuclear deterrent for all actions against its infrastructure. But a sudden, wide scale drone attack would not rise up to the same standard as a chemical attack, or an EMP, for that matter. It would be very hard to justify nuclear reprisal. The US will invest in this tech.
A couple of quick points here. Almost a decade ago now China demonstrated the capability of loading standard cargo containers on rail cars in eastern China near the sea and shipping them all the way to Madrid Spain in about 24 days. At the same time a typical cargo ship loaded container with the same destination took over twice as long because for efficiency reason international cargo ships have become ridiculously large. This means it takes longer to load the containers at a specialized deep draft sea port, transit half the world to another deep draft sea port, unload, sort and do secondary shipping to place the cargo in its final destination. This is more or less proven that with modern railroad freight you can deliver your goods twice as fast anywhere your connected railroad system makes possible. Potentially for China this is all of mainland Asia, Europe and Africa though negotiations to connect the diverse networks through Jordan (Asia) to Egypt (Africa) to tie in with the rapidly rebuilding or new building going on over that entire continent all financed by China over the last 20 years.
Second comment. The US Navy discovered way back around 1989 that using swarm attacks any land based opponent with their unlimited capability for storing ready to fire cruise missiles could overwhelm even the largest and best defended USN task force. The math is relatively simple, a task force with 20 ships has at best about 500 dedicated and ready to fire anti missile missiles deployed in their formation. Because most of these SAM systems are designed to expect misses at least 25% of the time even against subsonic cruise missiles like the oldest Exocet and Harpoon missiles from the 1980's they automatically fire two missiles at each incoming target so if the first is a clean miss they have a good chance of knocking down the target with the second missile. In a swarm style attack if the first missile fails to lock onto its initial target and flies past it then it can be retargeted on a second incoming missile by the autonomous defense systems.
So if you are a land based power like India and you take offense at an American task force arrogantly moving down your coast you can for the expense of say 1,000 missiles sink all 20 ships in the task force by launching your missiles in say waves of 50 with 5 minute pauses between launches from different emplacements. IOW you fire 50 missiles and they swarm out all getting knocked down with the use of 75 defensive SAM missiles then another 50 go out right behind the first group from a slightly different angle from a second launch site and these soak up another 80 defensive missiles because by now some of the smaller vessels will be running out of SAM defenses. Your third launch, now 10 minutes after the first volley, send out another 50 missiles and soaks up 85 missiles and this time a few 'leakers' get through to the ships on the outer edge of the formation causing moderate to severe damage depending on the details.
At 15 minutes into your attack you have launched 200 missiles and the USN has used up almost half of their defensive missiles before even starting to knock down your third set of 50. Basically all of the small vessels are now 'dry' and the crews on the undamaged ones are frantically trying to move stored missiles into the launcher racks to help shoot down the next wave. This means the fourth wave only faces 60 missiles and though that knocks down 45 of the attackers the other five get through to the CIWS radar guided Gatling gun defenses and three of those hit their targets again doing moderate to severe damage based on circumstances.
By this time the 20 minute mark has passed and another 50 missiles are inbound with only 50 defensive SAM missiles rising up to meet them in the chaotic battle. This time 10 get into very close range and 6 of those hit their target vessels. This has the USN task force down from 20 ships in less than half an hour to 13 ships, several of them damaged.
The other 7 ships are already sunk or in the process of sinking. In essence once a cruiser/destroyer/frigate is hit the first time it takes more than 5 minutes to get the weapon systems back up and running so ships damaged in wave 2 or 3 tend to be sunk in wave 4 or 5.
At 25 minutes the land military launches another 50 missile wave and this one only faces 30 defensive missiles because several of the smaller ships were sunk before their storage missiles could be moved to the launch systems and used which from the offense viewpoint is even better than those missiles being fired and missing their targets.
Somewhere between wave 2 and 3 the navy commander turned his task force away from the land and went to max speed which also means damaged ships fall behind and take the brunt of the next attack. The biggest target is the Aircraft Carrier which is a huge radar target despite the best defensive electronic spoofing systems can do to deceive the attacking missiles and the next wave in has 25 missiles unscathed by the SAM volley weakly defending the surviving ships. With 13 targets and a 55% hit rate thanks to close in defensive guns this wave sinks another 5 Navy vessels leaving just 8 survivors half an hour into the battle.
At this point the survivors have all either been hit and are frantically trying to restore defenses and engines or they are effectively out of SAM missiles because only the three Aegis cruisers carried more than a score or so. After fighting down or being struck by 250 relatively cheap subsonic cruise missiles the task force is effectively dead. Though still floating the carrier has damage that prevents launching or landing fixed wing aircraft making it a 'mission kill' even if it miraculously escapes. The smaller the vessels the worse the damage from even a single hit and the 8 surviving but damaged ships are doomed when the 300th missile arrives with 25 missiles actually hitting their now barely defended targets. Being very large the carrier absorbs 8 missiles from this wave while 6 of the remaining vessels are sunk or rapidly sinking. By this tame the senior surviving American commander is frantically trying to surrender but his 2 remaining ships are badly damaged and basically sitting ducks. By the time the land based power knows the ships are no longer any sort of threat, whether that fire off 10 missiles to complete the elimination of the task force or not is a political decision but given that they initiated hostilities I will say that with 310 missiles they sank 20 USN surface ships. The carrier alone cost around 7 Billion dollars counting ship and aircraft. Figure another 3 Billion for the other 19 ships in the task force and the direct cost ratio works out to less than 500 million spent by the land force or a 20:1 return on the investment.
That was with old slow 1980's era cruise missiles. Using modern supersonic or hypersonic missiles means you need fewer missiles to sink the task force but the expense of each individual missile is also several times more expensive. No matter how you measure it however it has been known since the 1982 Falklands war that a land power willing to spend the money on one time use cruise missiles could cause multiple times the expense in losses to the naval force. Unless someone invents a force field like they use in Star Trek Shields or Phasers able to shoot down incoming missiles without running out of defensive ammunition this equation of death is pretty much reality. Heck way back in 1945 the Japanese launched around 350 Kamakazi aircraft at allied naval forces and they sank outright 81 ships with another 195 damaged. If the Japanese could have built and manned more aircraft they could have in a very practical sense lengthened the war by preventing the USN from building the forward supply base needed for the invasion. They would have still lost simply because the North American industrial capacity was out of range of retaliation and would eventually overwhelm their capability to continue building and manning Kamakazi aircraft. By 1945 the USN alone had over 3,000 military ships and hundreds more under construction. A WW II task force was more like 80 ships though the average size of individual ships was much smaller than 2022 sizes. I come from a navy family with my father and two of my brothers having served in the navy but looking beyond tradition the usefulness of the surface fleet against a technologically advanced opponent became irrelevant 70 years ago hen the first radar homing missiles were developed. No ship can survive repeated missile hits over a short time period and even a simple radar homing circuit is good enough to hit a slow or unmoving ship.
I hate to say it but our surface Navy is a pure luxury costing trillions of dollars simply because we choose to do so. Homing torpedoes and homing missiles made our surface navy pretty much obsolete by 1952 yet here we are 70 years later pouring ever more money down that rat hole. Submarines and shore based aircraft still have useful roles for naval defense, but for the rest of it the Navy is less useful than the Coast Guard.