Iraq had plenty of first-rate Soviet equipment as well, and even had the luxury of building up before a surprise attack. It seems that they were actually winning pretty decisively in the beginning, before Iran mobilized. Both sides quickly blew through their stockpile of advanced munitions and vehicles.
Those are the ones I referred to as “occupying a vanquished nation”, after the defense of Iraq had been reduced to disorganized irregulars with primitive hand-held weapons. It was no longer “warfare”, modern or otherwise, but a civil police action.
And the thousands of US troops killed was actually smaller than the number who died of non-combat-related accident or injury after they got home. The middle-east wars were safer places for Americans than workplaces, highways and bars in the USA. The per-capita death rate by non-natural causes of the US general population is higher than the death rate in combat of those veterans. The greatest risk to the lives of servicemen may be suicide after they go home.
In WWII, we saw the difference between forces with effective radio communication and those without, such as the Germans used their communications much more effectively than the French and also better than the Soviets in the early stages.
The Japanese radios in their aircraft sucked, and for example, they lacked an effective doctrine for how to coordinate CAP among the carriers. This contributed to their defeat at Midway.
Another difference is that it would be easier to verify kills, consequentially, the requirement for reliance on pilot’s unwitnessed accounts would decrease.
Please provide a reliable cite for the number of civilian deaths.
I can’t see any way of there being a conventional attack on America itself.
I cannot magically produce something that does not exist. The fact that casualties were not precisely enumerated does not mean they did not occur. I said a half a million, there are sources that estimate much closer to a million. They are called “excess deaths”, which means deaths that would not have occurred in the absence of the hostilities, but not necessarily munitions-inflicted.
Look, I was asked my opinion about “modern warfare” and the middle east is pretty much the only example we have, and I described it the best I could in a concise space. The combat dead by the “modern” side of less than a dozen a day barely qualifies it as a “war”. Slaughter comes coser. If winning the war fails to win the hearts and minds it set out to win, then cleaning up that mess afterwards is a whole different matter from waging the war.
Other posters have basically laid out the difference;
- Speed
- Lethality
As war has progressed, it has seen a gradual increase in the speed with which soldiers can engage with one another and the likelihood they could kill each other once they did. Once upon a time campaigns were measured in years because you couldn’t get anywhere faster than a man could walk, unless you were lucky enough to be able to take a boat, and the boats weren’t super fast, either. Horses helped, and railroads helped more, and internal combustion engines more still.
The issue of cost and lethality is such that in an outright full scale conventional war, both armies would lose an enormous percentage of the air forces, navies and heavy equipment within a week, and there would be little to replace it with.
One of my favourite statistics is this; the Canadian government is presently arguing over how to replace its fleet of jet fighters. Having made a terrible mess of its plans, they nopw plan on bridging the gap with an interim purcahse of “Super Hornet” fighters. They plan on buying 18 of them to bolster the existing fleet of old Hornets. The total cost? Seven billion dollars. For 18 planes. The previous plan was to buy about 65 F-35s, at a cost - well, the price was a subject of disagreement, so I’ll go conservative and says $25 billion.
In World War II Canada ended up with one of the largest air forces the world has ever seen. A precise count is hard to find, but the number is in the thousands; I would guess ten thousand aircraft, counting trainers. (They build a LOT of trainers.) Even if you adjust for inflation, the total cost of building those airplanes is less, than it will cost to buy that fleet of F-35s, and even counting high, isn’t much more than those 18 Super Hornets.
Let that sink in for a moment. Sixty to eighty fighters today cost what it cost the country to run a gigantic air force for six years. It’s stunning.
At 60-80 fighters, the Royal Canadian Air Force would run about as thin as it possibly can and still effectively defend Canadian airspace. In a war again a genuinely capable enemy with effective fighters and air defenses, such Canadian assets as could be deployed to the theatre of operations would see rapid losses, and basically Canada would no longer have an effective air force in a week or two - and you can’t whomp up those kinds of planes quickly.
Of course there are World War II examples; the mighty Iowa-class battleships, for instance, were mighty but rather few in number because the U.S. only had time to build four of them. (Iowa, New Jersey, Missouri, and Wisconsin.) Despite ordering them before the U.S. entered the war, Kentucky and Illinois were never finished because that’s just how expensive and complicated the damn things were. Had some disaster befallen the PAcific Fleet and those four battleships lost, there were no replacements; the Navy would have had to do without them. The price of an Iowa-class battleship in the dollars of the time was about $100 million, at least according to Wikipedia, which is about $1.6 billion today.
By comparison, the F-22 project to upgrade the U.S. Air Force to the best fighter in the world was at least $34 billion just to buy the planes, and it was a dramatically scaled back purchase from the original plan. **So upgrading your air force now is like buying goddamn battleships. **(I won’t even get into what it costs to fly them in peacetime - estimates for the F-22 run as high as $65,000 PER HOUR. Even the relative bargain of the F-16 is well over $20,000 per hour.)
And of course today’s stupid expensive airplanes are likelier to be shot down than the Mustangs and Spitfires of WWII. In World War II you had to actually find the enemy and get close enough to shoot him with a machine gun or cannon. Casualty rates in confrontations between Allied and German forces were usually not very high; it was attrition over time that wore air forces down. The infamous Second Raid on Schweinfurt saw the Eighth Air Forces lose 20% of the bombers it sent - and that was considered a disaster so vast that daylight bombing missions into Germany were suspended for months. A loss rate of ten percent was unsustainably high, and very rare.
What would the loss rate be against a capable adversary? I’m guessing you’d be damned lucky to get away with twenty percent. Faced with a spiderweb of antiaircraft missiles and high quality opposing aircraft - and make no mistake, the Russians make the best SAMs in the world - your planes would be dropping left and right.
No… I didn’t mean ramp up production of actual M60 tanks, but rather M60-*style *, meaning some sort of new or adapted design with things like cast turrets and hulls, diesel engines (likely off the shelf), less demanding fire control/sensor systems, etc…
Less capable than the M1 series, but likely a whole lot faster to produce. Hell, there’s no reason you couldn’t “monkey model” a M1 in that fashion, and take advantage of the existing production lines.
What a complete load of horseshit. As others have dealt with the ridiculous push button military aspects of this, I’ll just comment on the civilian casualties aspect. You seem to be laboring under the delusion that in days gone by civilians were left out of the fighting and that it’s only today that they take the brunt of the losses while the cowardly military hides hundred of miles away pushing buttons and drinking champaign in toasts to victory. That shows a serious lack of historical understanding on par with folks who still contend that we didn’t need to drop those nasty atomic bombs on Japan but only did so to scare the Russians. Look sometime at the civilian casualities in WWI and WWII, or even Korea for a clearer idea of why your assertion above is so wrong. As with regular military casualties, civilian casualties are also far fewer today than in the past.
That sort of goes with the real differences in warfare today than in the past. It’s much more precise and focused, it’s interconnected and networked. The weapons are far deadlier, true, but they are also orders of magnitude more precise in what they hit, so you fire far fewer of them. If you want to take out a factory in 1943 you send over waves of bombers who drop thousands of bombs…and you may need to do it in several raids since you will probably miss many if not all of the bombs on target. Today, you send over a strike group, most of which is designed to spoof or take out the air defenses, leaving the target clear. If they see the target, it’s pretty much dead. If the defenders get a clear shot then some of those in the strike group won’t be coming home.
It’s very similar to automation. The military these days is comprised of far fewer things…fewer ships, planes, tanks, artillery pieces, APCs, etc. The US is considered the pre-eminent military power in the world today with its massive budget and…around 1.3 million personnel (all branches), 8000 tanks, 1300 MLRS and maybe 3000 artillery pieces, 15k fighters, etc (all of these are by memory so sorry if I’m off…the point is that it’s a pretty small force for being so dominant) . Now, that’s a lot more than just about everyone else, but that’s nothing compared to the numbers in WWII (IIRC, the US built something like 50-60k Sherman tanks during the war, and that was just one type). We can do more with less today, though a combination of better weapons, better materials and the fact that our weapons are weapons SYSTEMS, interconnected and networked together and also back to pretty much all levels of command via secure satellite and fiber optics networks. All of those things are huge force multipliers, allowing precision that those in WWII or even Korea and Vietnam couldn’t even dream of.
Again, we can look at the Arab-Israeli wars for a rough guide, as well as the various US aerial raids since then. Assuming that AAA and countermeasures have roughly kept pace, we should expect similar loss rates, I’d think.
You’re still wrong, IMO.
It eventually took “boots on the ground” to achieve the results we have in Gulf War I, Gulf War II, and Afghanistan.
Airpower and missiles drove the opposing forces into cover, made movement and communications extremely difficult, but it didn’t force the “enemy” to sue for (overall) peace.
Discounting the followup phase as “not war” is wrong, as the desired goals of the victor still have yet to be achieved. The goals may be political (regime change, for example), they may be economic (seizing resources), they may be strategic (destroying stockpiles of material or facilities to forestall future misbehavin’), but the “war” continues until there is no more killin’.
Yes a lot of the comments either focus on the difference in equipment on the assumption one side has certain equipment and the other doesn’t. That’s a very limiting assumption. When both sides have certain equipment, or technology to both build and counter new equipment, the net impact on the ‘warfare’ on the whole might be a lot less. As in ‘great comms’ without considering ‘great jamming’ or ‘great cyber’.
Then a lot of comments focus on industrial capability of the US relative to its existing forces now v say 1941. That’s an interesting issue, but again somewhat narrow. Other combatants in earlier wars and now have less/more capability to replace losses than the US did or does 1941 or now. That’s not a completely universal trend, although it’s true modern weapons platforms like planes and ships are costlier per unit compared to general price levels and take longer to make. But everyone has fewer.
For example in the major Arab-Israeli wars (up to '73) the two sides had next to no capability to replace equipment losses themselves, but potentially very high capability to receive replacements from their backers, or not as events turned (the first time the Egyptian AF was largely destroyed on the ground by British, French and Israeli strikes in 1956 it was replaced almost immediately; fairly soon after Israel did it again in 1967).
Also ‘modern warfare will have much higher losses’ isn’t necessarily universal depending how well matched are the opponents. Israeli AFV and a/c losses especially early in the 1973 war were at a very high rate, in contrast to lopsided outcomes in parts of that war and which had generally prevailed in the two previous ones. And again the North Africa fighting of 1940-43 saw very high loss rates for AFV’s. Both sides would typically be down to a small fraction of their initially deployed tank forces within days. Sometimes (the Allied side) had a lot of fresh units to add, but a given tank unit would be whittled down just as fast as in the 1973 war (albeit mechanical losses with a bigger factor then). Same would be expected on both sides in a truly peer armored desert campaign in 1991…the 1991 Gulf War simply wasn’t one. No problem there from coalition POV, the whole idea is to win if possible avoiding a fair fight. But fair fights might happen in warfare in general, and IMO some of the comments may mistake the lack of evenly matched opponents for a trend in warfare caused by technology.
Then the big real issue is nuclear. For decades military planners and enthusiasts have what iffed peer combat between major powers, meaning nuclear powers, ‘but let’s assume they don’t go nuclear’. This has some actual potential usefulness (in conventional forces part in deterring conflicts, a separate debate but potentially true). But it’s not very realistic IMO. Or in any case the threat of nuclear would strongly effect the nature of any direct conventional conflict between nuclear powers, more than changes in conventional weapons technology would. That’s a real difference in ‘modern’ warfare, arguably explaining the general* lack of direct conflict between nuclear powers, but it’s been around for decades.
*the Soviet and USAF’s conducted a large scale air-air conflict over North Korea 1950-53, but could deny this was happening or that they fully knew it was happening, respectively (and it’s not 100% clear how accurate a picture the US had of the situation, ‘probably some Russian instructor pilots’ as secret level documents said v the reality of mainly regular Soviet AF units as the opponents, higher level still classified docs might show fuller knowledge of that fact).
This is horseshit. It’s quite obvious that you will be unable to find a cite from any reputable military expert who would back up a single word of this, so I’m not even going to ask.
That troops are better protected today than they were in World War II is perfectly obvious, due to technologies like body armor that are commonly in the most advanced armed forces. But the idea that war is now a video game is total and complete nonsense.
In the near future semi-autonomous drones might supplement fighters: one can envision a single manned fighter serving as a “shepherd” to a drone “flock”. Presumably drones are less expensive than a manned aircraft of the same capability, and the manned command plane would have a greater chance of escape if things turned sour.
Shoulder-fired SAMs mean that infantry now have about the same capability against low-flying aircraft that RPGs give them against tanks; though again drones might make scouting and soft-target attacks less costly in gold and blood than manned aircraft.
Speaking of drones and cheaper tanks: unmanned armor is now under serious consideration. As played out on the WW2 Eastern front, when survivability isn’t an issue, you can crank armor out a lot faster.
Night vision goggles now make infantry combat (even more of) a 24-hour nonstop engagement. Battles will end when one or both sides simply can’t stay awake any longer.
Communications- and hacking same- will be a vital element of the war, with invisible cyberwar victories deciding entire campaigns.
As has been pointed out upthread, modern military forces are now equipped with “smart” weapons that confer much higher probability of hitting the intended target. The well-known tradeoff is that they’re much more expensive than comparably-sized munitions from WW2.
So how does the economics work out?
A Tomahawk cruise missile reliably delivers a 1000-pound warhead, with a price tag of about $1.4M.
How much did a shell for a battleship’s 16" gun cost, and how many would I have had to fire to have a probability of hitting my target that matches the Tomahawk?
It used to be that melee was the main, most decisive form of attack and ranged attack was the less immediately effective but safer way to attack; Think sword vs bow. Then ranged attack became the most decisive form of attack and indirect fire became the less immediately effective but safer way to attack; Think rifle/canon vs artillery. Is there some form of attack which might now/soon be the less immediately effective but safer way to attack?
In what way(s) are they the best SAMs? Note that I’m not asking “why” but “how”.
Note that this would underestimate the cost of doing it the WWII way. Let’s take a modern destroyer firing a Harpoon anti-ship missile vs a WWII battleship firing 16" shells. A Harpoon may cost 1.2M$ and a 16" shell, say, 100 times less. However, it’s not just a question of munitions. An Arleigh Burke destroyer has a complement of about 300 personnel while a WWII battleship could have about 3000. Personnel costs in the US military are about 100K$/person/year which means a saving of about 270M$/year which represents 225 Harpoon missiles.
In the same way, the marginal cost per destroyed target may be higher with Tomahawks launched from B-52s than dumb bombs from B-17s but then you have to look at the bomber acquisition, operations/maintenance and labor costs of having so many WWII-style bombers. Conscription makes labor look cheap only because it hides the cost.
It can end up being cheaper to use more expensive munitions and platforms if it means you need far fewer munitions, platforms, consumables and personnel. I don’t know if, at some point, 90% of the budget will be in munitions.
Sorry about double post, missed this:
At least one of them would lose an enormous percentage within a week. I’m not sure it would apply to both. Keep in mind that how much is lost depends on the enemy too; If the enemy is suffering severe losses, its ability to inflict losses is also diminished. Hence, it could be that instead of having enormous losses on both sides, one side would quickly get tipped over and come apart.
For example, if most of the early warning radars and comms relays get knocked out/jammed in the first few hours of the war then SAM batteries will have to rely on their own radars only which means that they become both less effective and more vulnerable to anti-radiation missiles/jamming/sneak attacks.
No, x M-60 era tanks vs 1 M-1A2 would generally result in x number of destroyed tanks. I don’t think their guns can even penetrate the armor on an M1. Even if they could, most likely your platoon of M-60s would be spotted by a Predator drone and destroyed by Hellfire missiles fired from an AH-64 Apache long before they can engage with the tanks.
You have zero probability. The range of a Tomahawk is like 1500 miles while a 16" gun’s range is like 20 miles
Such is the nature of modern warfare, compared to WWII. It’s not like Command & Conquer or some other videogame where each new generation of weapon basically looks cooler and has a few more hit points. First of all, these weapon systems don’t act independently. They are integrated with other systems that weren’t even conceived in WWII. And these new systems allow tactics that older weapons systems wouldn’t be able to adapt to.
What happens next would largely depend on geography. Two nations connected by land might then enter a long stalemate period of low-intensity guerilla warfare. If one country has to project its forces a long distance by sea, such a loss of material would effectively result in a “loss”
Not the front armor; the back armor, for sure. Tanks aren’t as heavily armored in the back, and the M-60’s L7/M68 gun is quite powerful.
[QUOTE=MichaelEMouse]
At least one of them would lose an enormous percentage within a week. I’m not sure it would apply to both. Keep in mind that how much is lost depends on the enemy too; If the enemy is suffering severe losses, its ability to inflict losses is also diminished. Hence, it could be that instead of having enormous losses on both sides, one side would quickly get tipped over and come apart.
[/QUOTE]
This is also quite possible. The precise outcome of a full scale, balls-to-the-wall war between adversaries with different weapons systems that have not previously been used in such a war is very unpredictable. The result may prove to be wildly unbalanced. Some systems may prove near-invincible and some alarmingly useless.
In such conflicts as we have evidence for in modern timnes we have seen quite shocking results. The Falklands War provide illustrative examples; for one thing, a country equipped with nuclear attack submarines enjoys complete naval supremacy against a foe without them. HMS Conqueror’s sinking of ARA General Belgrano - the first time a nuclear submarine ever fired a shot in anger - pretty much put the Argentine Navy in port; they had no defense against Conqueror at all. But at the same time, the Argentine Navy’s Exocet missiles proved terrifyingly effective; they had only six missiles in their entire arsenal and sank two ships with another seriously damaged. If Argentina had had 60 missiles, either they would have won the war or the British would have had to extend the war to attacking Argentina’s mainland airbases.
Similar shocks were seen in the first Gulf War; some Allied military assets proved ludicrously effective, while others performed disappointingly.
You’re overestimating how many Apaches, Predators and Hellfires will be lurking around, and discounting the fact that your own side presumably has equally effective countermeasures and anti-helicopter weapons to pop that attack helicopter long before it even gets a chance to shoot at the tanks.
And anyway… I wasn’t saying “can 5 M60-ish tanks beat one M1?” The question I was asking was more like “If I have X dollars to spend, is it militarily more useful to have 5 lower-capability tanks 30% faster than 2 M1A1 tanks?” Commanders will never have ALL the tanks (artillery, aircraft, helicopters, smart munitions, etc…) that they want to have, so would they rather have more less capable tanks or fewer more capable tanks, or even some kind of high/low mix? In the case of protracted wars, these questions would need to be answered.
The Russians and Chinese doctrine calls for long range guided missiles to be employed against fixed bases, so unlike the Gulf War there won’t be a safe place for Allied Airpower to refuel and rearm.
Incidentally this is how the Me262 was neutralised ; the plane was basically unbeatable in the air, but the Allies went after bases and put them to the sword.
OK, there are no sources to back up your numbers so you can pull anything out of your ass? Don’t stop at a half a million, claim 6 million!
Not only are you demonstrating your ignorance concerning warfare, your lack of knowledge about history is also apparent.
Check out the civilian deaths in WWII. Then come back.