The Navy surface fleet is essentially floating airstrips surrounded by air defense batteries, Austin Vernon says:
Floating airfields are valuable where land bases are constrained or surprise/mobility is critical.
Potential flashpoints with China, like Taiwan or the South China Sea, are more expansive than Europe but aren’t the vast Central Pacific. Airfields, aircraft, land-based air defense, and small utility ships can replicate most of a carrier strike group’s capabilities in a war with China. Aircraft are capable anti-ship platforms, they can keep enemy airplanes at bay, and there are plenty of airfields to fly from. But they cannot clear the way for supply ships nor operate persistently deep in enemy territory. The minimum viable Navy has to handle enemy mines and submarines. Adding offensive mine and submarine capabilities is the next logical step.
Minesweeping capability will be critical for supplying forward bases, keeping Taiwan from starving, and gaining entry to the Taiwan Strait later in the conflict, and the following features could help:
Sonar to Find Mines
Most minesweepers have active sonar arrays to find potential mines. There are low-resolution modes for broad searches and high-resolution modes for investigating potential mines. The Navy might have to adapt less capable off-the-shelf sonar and put those arrays on whatever ships they can scrap together.
Charges to Destroy Mines
A brute force option might be launching depth charges at anything that looks like a mine on wide-view sonar rather than confirming with narrow-band sonar, UUVs, or divers.
Better Mine Triggering Methods
It would be ideal if new decoys could simulate ship sounds and magnetic signatures well enough to trigger mines.
Underwater Micro Drones
Some proposals envision launching small unmanned underwater vehicles from motherships to seek out mines and eliminate them – essentially underwater loitering munitions. These are one of the few technologies that might help US submarines fight in the shallows deep in Chinese territory.
The US may not have air supremacy, so the answer for hunting subs can’t be P-8 patrol planes dropping buoys at every likely hiding place:
More Advanced Listening Network
The US tracked Russian nuclear submarines during the Cold War with a network of sensors in the Deep Sound Channel that transports noises for hundreds or thousands of miles. Most waters in East Asia are too shallow for this layer to exist. A network in East Asia will need more nodes or different technology to work effectively.
These capabilities are highly classified, and there have been suggestions that the US and Japan are improving the existing systems. The Navy has also added low-frequency active sonar with a 160+ km range to their submarine tracking boats. These systems perform much better against quiet diesel subs in shallow water.
China has also built listening networks to counter US submarines.
Underwater Seagliders
Seagliders and wave gliders are a class of drones that loiter in the ocean for months or years to collect data. They are hyper-efficient, often using a few watts. The mission can be as simple as collecting oceanographic data or as complex as tracking enemy subs. These gliders could increase submarine detection capability deep in enemy territory. They have to prove that they are stealthy enough to avoid detection/destruction, and software must be energy efficient to avoid running down the batteries.
Expendable Drone Aircraft
Another speculative option is putting sensors like magnetic anomaly detectors (MAD) on small, inexpensive flying drones. You might be able to buy hundreds of these for the cost of one anti-submarine warfare (ASW) helicopter, increasing the coverage area.
ASW Patrol Boats
There won’t be time to build anti-submarine warfare powerhouses like a Perry-class frigate or Spruance-class destroyer. And the current fleet has no dedicated ASW ship. There will be a need for boats capable of escorting carrier battle groups and convoys. The more desperate the timeline, the more ramshackle solutions will be. Grafting on older sonar arrays and torpedo racks is probably the bare minimum.
I can’t understand this focus on the US Political Class starting a conventional war against China. Yes, Our Betters could certainly start such a war — but what assurance do they have that China would agree to keep the war conventional?
Think about the geographic realities. Our Political Class would be sending US girls, transgenders, and (occasionally) boys to fight on the other side of the planet with very long, easily disrupted supply lines. There would be no assurance of local allies — Japan & South Korea would likely choose to sit on the sidelines rather than face their immediate consequences from a destructive war with China. Would Vietnam or Burma choose to fight for the US?
China, on the other hand, would be fighting on its home territory with short supply lines, four times the US population, an incomparably larger industrial base, a larger well-trained military, and commanders selected for competence rather than for Woke DIE necessity (Diversity, Inclusion, Equity).
The outcome of US Political Class conventional aggression on China’s coastline could hardly be in doubt. And if China decided not to play by Our Betters’ rules and responded to a conventional attack with nuclear strikes on the Continental US, remember Mao’s old saying — China could lose half its population in a nuclear war and still be twice the size of the US now.
The only beneficiaries of our Political Class’s desire for war is the Military-Industrial Complex.
“I can’t understand this focus on the US Political Class starting a conventional war against China.”
I can. They’re idiots.
Their weird fantasies about war with China are only the latest examples of their catastrophic stupidity.
The chicoms have their own forms of bureaucratic bullshit to deal with, but even still, in the annals of ideological derangement nothing beats those idols men in the occident are heretofore obliged to propitiate by their officially unofficial imperial theocracy.
Gavin: “The only beneficiaries of our Political Class’s desire for war is the Military-Industrial Complex.”
Show me this Military Industrial Complex. Show me.
The “Big 5″ Defense Firms earned total $246B in 2020. Walmart alone earned $523B. Alone.
60% at least of DOD’s budget is personnel, Gavin. And with all that it’s 15% of the budget, and no baseline they must fight for every penny. Would you claim the military personnel then are the beneficiaries? The soldiers, marines, sailors?
It’s tertiary remark in Eisenhower’s farewell speech of a *possible* problem, that never quite happened. The closest was WW2 when the war cost 37% of GDP.
It’s a MYTH, and Eisenhower regretted every saying MIC, far more real was the warning about government co-opting science, or deficit spending.
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwight-d-eisenhowers-farewell-address#:~:text=This%20evening%20I%20come%20to,peace%20and%20prosperity%20for%20all.
The “non-nuclear assurance” is the same as it ever was, it merely enters the next phase of development.
It remains difficult to imagine one nuclear power engaging in an invasive totalenkrieg against another, as did the merchant United States in 1939 conduct of the martial Germany and Japan. It remains substantially less difficult to imagine a proliferation of metaphorical Ukraines, in which two nuclear powers go about grinding each other down in mutual honest demonstration of purely attritive logistical supremacy. It becomes especially easy to imagine this sort of conflict playing out on the high seas, on whose world maritime stage a vast fleet of globalist tankers presently crisscross unmolested.
We may yet live to find that the existential logic of nuclear weaponry does not, as has been commonly assumed since 1945 or so, necessarily preclude the possibility of intermittent or continual, low- to medium-grade, sub-existential, military-industrial “jousting”.
Will history remember that between 2022 and 2024, in the Ukraine of Russia, an Eternal Anglo-Jewess and Slav implicitly conspired to break, and did break, the True Nuclear Taboo (T.N.T.)?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiJeSSzu9Bo
Isegoria,
The AV character is a joke. I could understand you putting up clickbait if you had ads, but you don’t.
The usual trend of history is the gay thalassocracy gets its shit pushed in by the based land power – Sparta defeats Athens, Rome defeats Carthage – and for some time afterwards a multigenerational golden age follows.
The Great Distortion of the 20th century was the bucking of this trend, where The Man of The Hour was sadly unequal to the task of steering the Ship of State through the rocks of Fortuna.
In absence of any significant external competition to impose discipline, the gnostic underlordship went all in on their number one objective, liquidating their neighbors, in the form of Legacy Americans, and all peoples of relation to them elsewhere on the globe. This, of course, has been an unmitigated catastrophe for said Legacy Americans. The upshot though is that such were also the peoples said gnostic underlordship depended on for the power to achieve supremacy. By actually succeeding in doing what they always and already wanted to do, our incumbent solipsists and their later-day ‘inheritors’ have at the same stroke rendered themselves powerless to do aught else. A vacuum in which resurgent powers grow and expand into.
The recent boondoggle in Ruthenia represents a return to the historical norm. The GAE can inflate however many numbers it likes in its digital accounts; but it has nothing to buy with it.