i think the govt would just take over these companies and force the data out
I think that’s optimistic. Sure, this would eventually happen, but it would be tied up in the courts for years because the ruling ideology that the profit motive is an ontological good is too deeply ingrained.
In 1944 there were 256 flags for 6,084 ships; today there are 359 flag officers for 280 ships.
Swarms of small, cheap boats shooting cheap missiles are extremely effective against larger, more expensive targets. The problem with that model is that you can’t do “force projection” with 200 guys on 100 jet skis as well as you can with 200 guys on one big boat. By that, I mean you can’t sail from Iran to Hawaii in a jet ski.
So, you start looking at corvettes and coastal patrol craft, make a ton of compromises so it can do a ton of different missions on paper, and end up with garbage like the LCS that doesn’t do anything well. Those fuckers can’t even make it from San Diego to Hawaii on a single tank of gas because they wanted to squeeze a few more knots out of it.
I think, ideally, you have a wide range of vessels that can cover a couple different types of missions each, concentrating most of your effort on domestic coastal patrol craft that can prevent enemy infiltration of your coasts and corvettes that can take the fight to the enemy. If you intend to engage in ground combat overseas, you’ll need a fleet of amphibious landing ships. These I would split into two categories: the smaller category focuses on carrying landing craft that can establish a beachhead, and the larger category focuses on ships that can get really close to shore and deliver large quantities of troops and materiel at a time. The second category can be converted civilian ships, and thus you don’t need to maintain an inventory, just a thriving domestic cargo transport economy. The rest of your naval budget goes to submarines and hospital ships (as hospital ships can actually do good things unlike every other navy ship).
A side benefit to having lots of small ships vs a small number of expensive big ships is that you develop more effective leadership skills in more junior officers, as you can have a Lieutenant (I’m using US Navy ranking structure out of convenience) captaining a coastal patrol craft with a few dozen crew, which then translates to more effective senior officers. In my ideal socialist navy, there wouldn’t be an officer/enlisted split. You would just have different career paths
As a veteran of the US Navy, who attained some rank and stayed in far longer than I should have, I know enough to say: lol, sure
EDIT: to be a little less dismissive and memey, there is nothing in the US Navy’s inventory that can reliably kill a hypersonic ASM, and their best ASM is the fucking Harpoon, which is about forty years out of date.
The information that the Navy operates on about their own weapons systems, from the top to the bottom, comes from the manufacturers’ Developmental Testing, and is highly inaccurate about real world suitability and effectiveness. The Operational Testing data (real world testing, where you put a weapon system on a real ship at sea and shoot it) is largely ignored because most of the Navy doesn’t even know they do OT, or what OT even is. The metaphor I like to use is:
You’re shopping for a car. You see the MPG listed on the data sheet taped to the inside of the window, and that’s the DT data. The MPG you actually get is the OT data, and it’s always worse.
Thanks for the correction. I forgot that NNSY is in Portsmouth, VA and I always confuse Norfolk Naval Shipyard with Newport News Shipbuilding, which is where they build aircraft carriers (privately owned, of course).
As I’ve posted before:
The day of the aircraft carrier has definitely passed. The only thing they’re really good at is bombing poor people. Submarines are, without a doubt, better at naval warfare.
However, missiles don’t have unlimited range, and you have to get them within range of the target somehow. A surface ship can carry more missiles than a submarine and can replenish faster.
Also, much like you can’t win a war with aircraft, you can’t win a war with submarines. In order to take and hold ground, you have to land ground troops, which you can only do with surface ships.
Combined arms win wars, not wunderwaffen.
The US Navy has more admirals than ships lol.
The vast majority of US Navy shipyards were sold off between world war 2 and today. As an example, the Brooklyn Naval Shipyard is now luxury condominiums. The US government owns four shipyards total: Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Virginia, Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Washington, and Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard in Hawaii. Every ship in the navy is built at a handful of private shipyards, and the capability to expand naval shipbuilding isn’t available. With neoliberalism in full swing, the number of skilled shipyard workers is kept as low as possible, with massive layoffs happening every few years, further reducing the inventory of skilled shipbuilders.
This is likewise true with aircraft manufacturing, as well as other manufacturing capabilities. There are no typewriter factory equivalents to retool to make tommygun equivalents.
The bottom line is that the US cannot sustain medium term or long term peer or near peer warfare and, as someone who was in defense acquisitions in a previous life and in manufacturing now, the capabilities of extant materiel isn’t sufficient to justify being the most expensive military in history.
That’s a death squad
That’s gotta be like $100m expended to defeat like $1m of equipment
It’s gonna be some #RESIST bullshit where they send anonymous letter to the press that talk about how righteous they are for disagreeing with the top leadership while still doing what they’re told.
They would quickly run out of ammunition and all of the parts that aren’t chassis.