The U.S. Navy’s Big Mistake: Building Tons of Supercarriers
The military&#x27;s job is to make people we fight want to stop fighting. That&#x27;s it.<p>If you keep strategy simple and easy-to-understand, you can stay on mission.<p>Unfortunately, that&#x27;s not where we&#x27;re at. The military is used for all sorts of things -- famine relief, nation-building, geo-political force projection, and so on. This is the problem with aircraft carriers. They might be lead weights in the event of an actual shooting war with a major superpower, but right now we&#x27;re using them for mobile airports. And mobile airports are useful for all kinds of things.<p>If you get rid of the mobile airport, then what&#x27;s going to take their place? Who&#x27;s going to show the flag in the Taiwan Strait or the Persian Gulf? Who&#x27;s going to support some U.N. humanitarian mission that&#x27;s urgent, remote, and requires CAPs?<p>The more capability you develop, the more you can&#x27;t imagine doing without that capability. So our floating airports are here to stay -- until somebody sinks them.<p>Which means we have to support both those <i>and</i> figure out how to do our actual job, which is making people we fight want to stop fighting.<p>We see this same pattern of behavior in platform after platform. When you get to a certain rank at the Pentagon, you feel it&#x27;s &quot;your time&quot; to bring a big change to the services. And that means big bucks, big capabilities, and so forth. Nobody wants to be -- or gets rewarded for being -- a wise and crafty caretaker of an ever-shrinking pile of money. (Yes, I&#x27;m sure there&#x27;s lip service paid to all of this. I&#x27;m simply making an observation as an outsider watching DoD for several decades.)<p>Quick tempo lethal aerial force projection is going to have to be submersible. Otherwise hypersonic missiles make mincemeat out of your task force. No matter what kind of radar-controlled gun you have, you ain&#x27;t stopping something coming in from directly overhead at Mach 10. The kinetic energy alone is sufficient here. Got a lot of other thoughts on this, but on some topics on the net I&#x27;ve learned to keep my mouth shut :)<p>ADD: No matter what, Congress needs to re-sort out DoD. We need one service for police force work, nation-building, and humanitarian aid. Another force for space. One for cyber. Then leave the other ones alone. I might would peel off strategic missiles from the Air Force because strategic missiles have nothing directly to do with flying around.<p>Re-split the money. Then reduce senior staff by 20-40%.