We can play “bring me a rock” but that game got old for me long ago.
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Road to 350: What Does the US Navy Do Anyway?
- Thread starter Randy Daytona
- Start date
I'd argue that shows just how delicate they would be (are) as a weapons system.
Well, yeah. That's like arguing that your robotic vacuum at home lacks speed and payload capacity for repurposing to be an indoors death drone. It's a peacetime design.
If that was the only way for drones to navigate, if there were no GPS-denied methods that exploit vision, ultrasound, or a bunch of other means, you'd be right. They do the displays that way because it works and it is too cheap & easy.
Duffelblog...
WASHINGTON — Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced earlier this week that the USNS Harvey Milk (T-AO-206) will be renamed USNS James Earl Ray, but after a different individual with the same name.
“This ship will honor someone significantly less gay,” Hegseth said in a video message from his office, sipping sweet tea with a slice of lime. “Naming a ship after a Naval officer who served with honor during the Korean War is a disgrace to the Navy and its strong reputation for heterosexuality. From now on, T-AO-206 will be named USNS James Earl Ray, but not after the guy who shot MLK.”
It's because you state things that have no factual basis in reality. Not because it's old. You quite often post things that are out of your depth. It's okay to assert things out of the norm, but at least have some credible sources to back up your claims.
Ok yes… we used more complicated self contained forms of navigation in the Tomahawk cruise missile as well. My father in law started his career in the Air Force doing radar navigation as an entire occupational speciality, so we’re aware those forms of guidance exist.
The point is you don’t get to have it both ways. Either you build a device for all contingencies which inevitably grows in exponential cost spirals, or you get cheap democratization of basic advanced precision targeting but only 1 or 2 levels deep in the obstacles it can solve for and be effective.
You don’t get to do both. You can’t build a 90 dollar cardboard and 3D printed weapon for a 22 year old to lob across a tench line, that can also solve for all the possible trons and HPM environments, fly with no link, and go hundreds of miles to where it’s needed. You damn sure done get the fully autonomous Hk terminators the people saying they are the future are promising. Telling us you can build a smarter sexier JASSM that does its own thinking is great, but you aren’t doing it for tens of dollars. Likewise, things like the lasso replaced the Javelin… and to a small extent the 81 and 120 mortars. It didn’t suddenly make artillery or armor obsolete.
It's making all my stonks go crazy.....its definitely real AND functional AND relevant!!!! LIKE ME!!!! LIKE AND SMASH SUBSCRIBE!!!
Lawman hit the high notes, but I'll say this... If we go into a true near-peer conflict anytime soon, my posit is that large swaths of the battlefield will quickly turn into a Vietnam-era level of technology, at least from the air delivery side of things. IMO, we've had too many military hardware victories over the last 30+ years that we've become complacent on letting our tech do a lot of the work and potentially, that may not be an option...at least for a portion of the conflict.
False dichotomy
What you get to do with these cheap point solutions, is very rapidly change those designs to specific missions or in response to enemy capabilities. Evolve these things inside the OODA loop of the opponent, while "quantity is its own quality"-ing them.
Indeed AI. Strap in, shipmate.
Automation is software loaded into controllers, and where I work, huge portions of software are now AI-generated. It is scary how well it works today, and that stuff is getting better daily at a scary fast rate.
Drone designs and similar are very often assemblies of pretty well-known tech into unique configurations that give unique capabilities. Guess what is really good at configuring?
Heck, go back further. Who'd have thought we'd have trench warfare again, ala WW1? At the same time as we have flooded the skies with the most modern tech.
A LOT of stuff, across the board, ain't going to work pretty quickly in a 'near-peer' conflict. Some of it might not be a surprise but some will be. When your 'near peers' have had over 30 years of focusing solely on you and your capabilities that you've used repeatedly in that time, they're going to find vulnerabilities to what makes things work for us.
Add to that the supply chain disruptions to all the inputs that make those cheap off the shelf components.
Nobody has fought a war where both sides infrastructure is actually threatened by opponent combat forces since WWII. We specifically avoided doing it during Vietnam and the same today with the Houthis. That reason to have a navy is gonna get pretty important pretty damn quickly when the container ships full off all those “off the shelf components” start exploding.