You wouldn’t see much from geosynchronous orbit, so you’d need a constellation of low orbit satellites. They can’t always be in the right place at a given time (unless you have a lot of them, very pricey, and other branches/missions will be wanting their own capabilities) and their orbits are going to be fairly predictable to their prey as well, which gives the prey the knowledge of when to start evading. If you’re doing wake following and a carrier battle group splits up, will you necessarily know which part has the carrier? You could try and use radio emissions or radar returns, but I’d bet you there are some Fletcher-class destroyers with electronics suites that can make them sound just like a Nimitz-class carrier.
Certainly there would be no strategic surprise in a hypothetical future U.S. - China war, but there are still difficulties with achieving perfect tactical situation awareness.
Historically it was the bigger ships that mounted the bigger guns. The ship with guns of the longer range always won. It could stand off further than its opponent could reach and pound the opponent with impunity. This was the total game changer wrought by the battleship.
Missiles make this obsolete, to a point that comparisons with old campaigns are useless.
We don’t know how things will play out. There just isn’t the experience. But we do know that missiles make life for ships miserable and potentially very short. We do have enough experience to know that.
Submarines are a wildcard. Only a small number of attack subs may be needed to render a surface fleet useless, either by deterrence or simply by sinking it. The arms race in anti-sub warfare is not something that gets in the news. But one would imagine it is intense.
Missile technology an even greater wildcard. One side may have ship killing missiles that the other has no counter to. More likely both sides have this capability and any battle is short and totally devastating for both sides.
Overall we are back facing a time when everyone is best served by not getting to point of wanting to find out.
As does the author of the Proceedings article which was the basis for the CNN report.
It’s interesting to read the various studies by the service branches in the wake of WWII as they were facing severe budget cuts. For example, one air force study showed that a force of 1,000 fighters in 10 mutually supporting bases in the Philippines would have prevented the defeat there and could have prevented the war.
The dire peril caused by the lack of ships in the USN has been a talking point by (some?) conservatives for at least a dozen years and was brought up in the Obama – Romney 2012 debate where Mitt stated that the US had the least number of ships since WWI. Obama’s answer was the classical retort and the author of the Proceedings article is still trying to find good reasons to get around that.
Shortened by me. My WAG is that article is written more for a funding request than a rigorous academic study. Although he has interesting points, it’s hard to see the value of comparing modern warfare with ancient conflicts.
Perhaps this is possible arguments based on lessons from the war in Ukraine, where a smaller, but more technically superior force (thanks US and Allies) is having success against a numerically larger army. The author explicitly states that it’s possible for land armies but is trying to make the case that it’s different with navies.
Yup. There was a better case against the Soviets because on the intensity of the Cold War, where the PLAN isn’t going to be in a position to directly threaten the States for a long, long time.
IMHO, it would be more cost effective for the US to commit to the defense of Taiwan and place US military resources here on the islands.
Ooof, certainly more cost effective in dollars, but less cost effective in political problems. I wouldn’t want to be a diplomat if that happened. It seems it would cost less in political capital to sell Taiwan F-35s and whatever other systems they wanted.
You can see plenty from nearly twice as far away as geosynchronous, with the right optics, and in fact a lot of spy satellites do their observations from there. And the US, Russia, and China, at least, all have enough satellites to keep constant surveillance on all navies. Probably some other nations, too, but by that point, it hardly matters, because in any smaller conflict, at least one of those nations is going to be supplying the belligerents with intel. It is, indeed, really really easy to know when your opponent has satellites overhead, because the answer to that is “always”.
I think more of a pause comes from the fallout. Russia should give China a pause.
I saw an economist article once that described the Chinese situation as “riding the tiger”. The unspoken deal after Tien Amen was “you let us do the governing and we will make you rich.” This process has proceeded almost unbroken until now. The fear is that any economic downturn could have severely disruptive internal consequences for the government.
Now consider Russia. They assumed that there was no way the Europeans could get by without Russian oil and gas, so they would look the other way while Russia took over Ukraine in a cakewalk. Instead, they have been pretty much shut out by the west.
China is even more dependent on the west to sustain its economic success. They have seen the west promise to endure significant disruption to limit adventurism by Russia - can they afford to alienate the customers that provide the jobs and incomes to their own population? After all, the same logic applies - does it stop here? Will they attempt to make Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar vassal states, with the same bully tactics already in use in the South China Sea?
An attempt to take over Taiwan would inevitably result in the TSMC facilities being destroyed by one side or the other during the fighting or as a retreat maneuver. The USA is already pushing ahead with plans to ensure this manufacturing capability is coming back onshore. They certainly would try to limit any trade with an aggressive China. Can China afford to pretend the USA is not involved? Unlike Ukraine, the USA has pretty much said they will defend Taiwan without formally saying so. The only limitation I assume (hope) is that the USA cannot use missile launches from within the country if it wants to avoid justifying retaliatory strikes. Any other power non-nuclear can be used, and possibly the USA would be willing to inflict whatever damage it can on Taiwan where any Chinese troops are embedded. (Unlike their reluctance to add better weapons to the Ukraine conflict).
That’s what I was thinking; satellite observation is only so useful at sea; at best you get an update every what… 90 minutes or so, for a fairly narrow stretch of sea.
If you know where your enemy is, then it’s probably not that tough to track them, but if you don’t, then finding them is still going to be problematic. And if you know where they are, there are better ways to track them than satellite.
There must already be naval surveillance algorithms that can scan hundreds of square miles of empty or near-empty oceans from high above, look for ships of a known configuration and, upon finding them, figure out how far, at most, they can sail before the next peek.
The February Issue is out in print but isn’t up on their website yet. There’s two replies to the article, one sort of kind of ‘pro’ in the sense that the author concludes that:
The Navy must reverse its current policy and accelerate the construction of cruise missile-armed warships and the recruitment and training of sailors to man those ships.
What he doesn’t say is that the US Navy needs to grow larger than the Chinese Navy because “the bigger fleet wins”, he just disagrees with the Navy’s plan to retire the Ticonderoga-class cruisers and half of the littoral combat ships “with very few frigates and destroyers under construction.”
The other reply is longer and points out the flaw in focusing on numbers by comparing the Anglo-French attempt to force the Dardanelles in 1915 and its failure to succeed despite having the much larger fleet because “the Ottomans and their German advisors were able to cobble together a primordial antiaccess/area-denial (A2/AD) network along the Dardanelles” concluding that:
We must remain tightly focused on developing the joint capabilities - particular in space and cyber - that will enable us to attrit China’s A2/AD network above all other naval priorities. If we cannot address that challenge, adding 50 new hulls will not meaningfully impact the outcome of a war with China. A too narrow and parochial emphasis on the “fleet size” as the primary metric for assessing national maritime power benefits neither the Navy nor the nation.
I’ll link to the full articles once the February edition is available online if I remember to.
They’re the first two comments in the comment & discussion here by LCDR Shane Halton, USN and OSC(SW/AW) John M. Duffy, USN (Ret.) responding to Bigger Fleets Win.
Anyone with military experience feel free to correct me, but this bit in particular:
FEBRUARY.
(a) All AMC aligned personnel with weapons qualifications will fire a clip into a 7-meter target with the full understanding that unrepentant lethality matters most. Aim for the head.
In particular, the section advising airmen to “fire a clip” and “aim for the head” was widely criticized by airmen.
One Air Force C-17 Globemaster III pilot under Air Mobility Command, or AMC, who spoke to Military.com under condition of anonymity because they’re not authorized to speak to the media, said Minihan’s comments were unrealistic.
“I am not aware of a single incident where an aircrew member has shot someone in the head,” the pilot told Military.com. “His direction completely misses the mark. AMC moves cargo; we are not SEAL Team 6.”
The Air Mobility Command officer who voiced concern that the memo would alarm airmen under their command said fellow airmen noticed Minihan’s use of “clip” instead of the proper term, a magazine, was “inaccurate” and that the advice to “aim for the head” was seen as “dramatic.”
Additionally, marksmanship training in the military does not typically teach service members to aim for the head in combat but, rather, to aim for the center mass of a target to increase the chances of landing a shot.
“Someone sarcastically joked, ‘Aim for the head. Spoken like a true marksman!’” the officer recalled.
General officers are vulnerable to the informal fallacy that because they’re good at something (like commanding a military transportation command) they’re good at anything (small arms marksmanship and tactics).
The underlying principle being articulated is still sound: the aerial truck driver in the poopy suit is still a sworn combatant in the armed forces of the United States and should be ready for and competent at basic combat.
There are full horizon-to-horizon orbiting radar stations constantly scanning the entire sea. Other multi-satellite constellations are listening to every radio or radar transmission. Others are watching in the visible and IR spectrums. Plus of course the sea-bottom listening systems.
The idea that there’s one orbiting telescope peering through a soda straw at a tiny patch of the ocean as it goes around its single orbit every 90 minutes is sooo 1970s.
I don’t remember the exact details, but the loss of the Spanish Armada, at least the popular conception of it, might fit. The way I remember it being taught is that a fleet of large galleons and such was beat by an even larger fleet of smaller but more maneuverable ships.
the elephant in room when it comes to war is intelligence., and more specifically tech–if China can subvert/jam our infrastructure, etc they can cripple us