• ef9357@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    It’s not like China has to lift a finger, the US government is doing a fine job of destroying the country.

  • Bilb!@lem.monster
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    4 days ago

    I hope that’s true, but this is a common refrain with various adversaries used as the boogie-man.

    https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-117-the-always-lagging-us-war-machine

    The scam goes something like this: A weapons contractor and military-funded think tank publishes a supposedly neutral “report” or a handful “U.S. officials” run to a media outlet insisting the United States is “lagging behind” in a sector that incidentally coincides with said think tank’s funders or government entity’s interests. Credulous American media mindlessly repeats the claims, everyone acts panicked, treating the warning like a work of good faith, sober and objective analysis. Congress then reacts and uses media coverage to rationalize even more contracts to the very funders of the think tank that raised the warning, further bloating the Pentagon, State Department and CIA budgets. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, all the while portraying the U.S.'s gargantuan defense expenditures as paltry and insufficient.

    • ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml
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      4 days ago

      This has to be one of the funniest wiki pages I’ve read in a while

      Over the course of the simulation, heavy constraints were placed on the Red force’s ability to free-play “to the point where the end state was scripted”,[4] resulting in a Blue victory.

      At this point, the exercise was suspended, Blue’s ships were “re-floated”, and the rules of engagement were changed; this was later justified by General Peter Pace as follows: "You kill me in the first day and I sit there for the next 13 days doing nothing,

      The exercise involved both live exercises and computer simulations, costing US$250 million (equivalent to about $437M in 2024)

      • comfy@lemmy.ml
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        4 days ago

        When you think about it, the Viet Cong cheated by not using loud bomber planes and napalm.

  • MarmiteLover123 [comrade/them, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    4 days ago

    doubt

    US generals are not idiots, they’re not going to sail their Carrier Strike Groups (CSGs) straight into a hail of Anti Ship Ballistic Missiles (ASBMs) equipped with either Maneuverable Re-entry Vehicles (MaRVs) or Hypersonic Glide Vehicles (HGVs) as warheads. The Chinese DF-17 HGV equipped ASBM, and the DF-21D MaRV equipped ASBM, have a range of around 1600km/1000mi. So these weapons will instead act as area denial weapons, with the CSGs remaining outside of their effective range during the majority of their operations. Aircraft will rely on mid air refueling and/or external drop tanks to have the required range to conduct missions from this far out. This cof course restricts their operations, but they can still carry out missions. This is also why there’s a huge focus on increasing the internal fuel capacity and range for the US Navy’s 6th generation strike fighter (F/A-XX), and why the F-35C has such a large internal fuel capacity.

    We can see this in Yemen in the Red Sea (where ASBMs were used as weapons for the first time in history), where the USS Harry Truman aircraft carrier spends the majority of time around Jeddah, around 700-800km from the Houthi/Ansarallah controlled parts of Yemen, and resupplies at Yanbu. This keeps them out of range of the Zolfogar Basir MaRV equipped ASBM (700km range) during normal operations, and keeps them out of range of Anti Ship Cruise Missiles like the Abu Mhadi (1000km range) when resupplying.

    Area denial is still a great capability to have, but ASBMs aren’t magic wands that can just eliminate CSGs. They have their own limitations, hitting a moving target such as a ship with a ballistic missile, even one equipped with a HGV or MaRV, is quite complex, especially at longer ranges where you’d have to provide midcourse guidance updates and resulting trajectory changes to a ballistic missile in space.

  • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    4 days ago

    And so you’re going to reduce the military budget and start approaching diplomacy with an eye for mutual benefit and international cooperation, right? anakin-padme-2