I wonder how submarines would fare against aircraft carriers since those two types of ships seem to be prominent in blue sea warfare.
Do we have any educated guesses about the achievable speeds for both of those?
Could you go on about that? I’m quite curious.
The obvious example would be the Panavia Tornado, which did not perform as well as hoped; its accuracy was initially very poor and six were shot down, in part because the aircraft was designed for low level attacks which work great if you’re fighting in a place with hills and stuff, which make detection difficult, as of course the original plan was, since Tornado was designed with killing Soviets in mind. It’s not as great when you’re flying over desert. A few weeks into the war the UK had to deploy Buccaneer aircraft to laser-spot the Tornado’s targets so they could reliably hit anything.
All Allied systems proved to be woefully short in the area of IFF identification, leading to way more friendly fire incidents than really should have happened. A rather sobering number; 20 M2 Bradleys were destroyed during the war… 17 of them by Allied fire.
Conversely, the M1 Abrams performed above all expectations. The difference between the Abrams and its opposition was much greater than anyone could have hoped. While its armor and gun have been mentioned, it was facing T-72s in many instances, which are also well armored, heavily gunned, and are to boot a bit smaller and harder to hit anyway. What made the M1 near invincible was not primarily its gun or armor, but its sighting equipment; the Abrams was firing at ranges, and through haze and smoke and darkness, previously unheard of in warfare. Thganks to their modern thermal imaging equipment, American tank crews were granted a ludicrous advantage. The T-72 has a powerful gun that can seriously screw up an M1’s day but over and over they were taking deadly fire before even being aware they were in battle. It is noteworthy that the Marines used both M1s and M60s and found either tank’s gun could destroy any Iraqi tank, but the M60 was inferior simply because they did not have the sighting apparatus to engage at extremely long ranges. Post-war Marine battle analysis noted that M1 crews effectively never engaged Iraqi vehicles at anything short of extremely long ranges (2 kilometres and up) and always through use of the thermal imaging sight.
But the Abrams are revealed a huge strategic fault in American force planning; not enough heavy lift capability. The USA simply did not have the carrying capacity to get as many tanks as they wanted into the theatre and then around the theatre. (You don’t even want your tanks driving around out of combat if you can avoid it.) Pactically every Allied nation was called upon for some kind of help in getting the tanks into the war. Following the war, that need was swiftly addressed.
Everybody has learned by now that you can’t mass your armies in the open and fight a war of maneuver without suffering unsupportable losses. The next big war will be the battle of Stalingrad x 50 with the defenders digging deep into their cities and the attackers having to reduce them to rubble slaughtering thousands of non combatants and the whole thing playing out on social media 24-7 until the whole rest of the world cries stop! Look how hard it is to dig 3000 Isis toughies out of Mosul, think how bad it’ll be when Trump is trying to dig a heavily armed Quds Force division out of Bandar-E Abbas.
Wishful thinking?
The first thing that comes to my mind about modern combat?
No fog of war, The element of surprise no longer comes as advertised.
Hard to move much anyplace with out being detected by modern systems.
Many of the operations carried out in WWII could never happen today.
D-Day could not take place today as it did then, you’d know who was coming where, with what.
I found one datum here: Rockets galore
A 70mm rocket with a guidance kit costs 28 000$. When using unguided 70mm rockets (1000$ each), standard practice is to use two pods of 70mm rockets for a cost of 38 000$. This still underestimates the utility of guidance because doesn’t include the cost of the number of targets per sortie/pilot/support crew/facilities and the lower risk of collateral damage or friendly fire.
The Spike missile is said to cost 5000$ each: http://www.uasvision.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/spike_pooley.jpg
Remember of course that a tomahawk missile has utility that a battleship shell just doesn’t have. The range of the missiles allows them to support operations far from the coast line. For example right before the war began in Iraq the government found out that there was a meeting of all the top bath party leadership in their headquarters. So they launched a few tomahawks at it including one which landed on the room they were all meeting in. No big gun ever built could have hit a building in Baghdad from the Persian gulf.
Also the faster and farther away you can blow up enemy ships the fewer repairs are required on your ships.
I think we’ve moved back to the WWI model. Attacking an enemy’s production in a major war will be off the table due to nuclear weapons.
Suppose the United States and China fought each other in Korea or the United States and Russia fought each other in Poland. There would be a lot of attacks against enemy forces in the theater. But both sides would refrain from attacking production facilities back inside the enemy country itself. If we bombed cities in Russia or China or they bombed cities in America, there would be a huge risk of the war going nuclear in response even if the initial attacks were conventional. And neither side wants to risk that.
Total wars no longer happen for world powers. World powers fight each other or fight lesser powers in regional wars. And if they lose the regional war, they accept the defeat rather than taking the risk of elevating to a general war.
I think the answer is “depends”. If you are fighting other modern main battle tanks, going with fast cheap tanks would result in a situation similar to what the allies faced in WWII pitting their Shermans against German Tiger tanks. Lots of lost tanks and crews. If you’re fighting a less capable military, cheaper vehicles like the Stryker personal carrier or Humvees armed with TOW missiles would probably be fine.
