Have you read The Secret?
hmm…
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for air-to-air combat, we already have rear-firing missiles. what we need is a missile that can turn 90 degrees right after launch and reach out to 200 miles. that’ll turn a lumbering sub-sonic airplane into a flying battleship.
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i don’t think tank armor will ever become obsolete. you have to arm every combatant with an armor-defeating weapon before that happens. anyone else who finds himself without one and facing a tank should either pray or dig. tanks will survive as long as there is enough air and ground support. the logic is simple. a supported tank force is a lot more formidable and safer than a supported infantry force (even if there were 10 drones for each man.)
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SES warships can already top 90 knots. the only thing a ship that fast has to worry about is an air-launched missile attack (or automatic cannon fire.) so a ship-borne anti-aircraft system that can destroy or deter a plane before it comes within its own weapons range. a carrier than can outrun a submarine torpedo would be cool.
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guns and heavy mechanicals are getting more expensive while missiles get smarter and cheaper. but if a 90-knot stealth ship had a 5-inch rapid-firing gun that can shoot out to 100 miles, it will be something. let one or two of those slip within 100 miles of a carrier task force and that carrier will find itself back in 1944 during the battle of samar.
Overspecialization is way too tempting. It means that you might well do well against the threat it’s designed against (in certain circumstances, on a good day, up to light rain), but if the threat isn’t what you thought it would be you have to scramble while taking casualties, never a good situation. But underspecialisation means accepting in the first place that you won’t have a perfect situation and no losses, which is a bitter pill to swallow when the alternative dangles a carrot in front of you. Not to mention that adaptability isn’t exactly easy to justify on a cost basis.
The obvious point is that whatever approach you do take, a smart and knowledgable enemy is going to fight you in the way that you are least prepared for. Having built your indestructible tanks, your enemy isn’t going to go “Well, we’re fucked. Let’s go load up our tank-vulnerable vehicles and charge them!” unless they have any other choice in the matter. They’ll come up with some method to bypass them.
So what you’ll probably actually see (in terms of the U.S., anyway) is going to be driven by two things; a) how easy is it to justify in cost terms? and b) how easy is it to justify in human life terms? Which means drones, drones, and more drones, as others have said. Given the current situation, necessitated generalisation which will as time goes on ramp up into hyper-specialisation again. Also lots of terrible, broken shit as the various military engineering companies try to desperately prove their worth with untested designs they’d normally have chucked.
Look, all I want are some friggin’ sharks with friggin’ laser beams on their heads!
While we could perhaps cut down a TAD, I don’t see a real problem with more development across the board. Remember – defense research can have a lot of really nice unforeseen civic benefits 5, 10, 20 years down the road. What today is a military communications technology is tomorrow the internet, what yesterday is a horrific new bomb is today clean energy. And that’s the revolutionary stuff, I’m sure there’s been plenty of defense funded research for, say, heat dissipation for stealth or fighter planes that make their way into computers, cars, or commercial aircraft.
remember how, in the 70s and 80s, the USSR was able to out-produce the US in terms of both conventional and nuclear weapons? was quantity over quality. when china eventually exceeds the US in terms of GDP, how should the US keep in pace militarily? quantity and alliances.
Probably something we’re not developing yet or don’t even see a need for. There’s a saying that, “Today’s military is perfectly prepared for fighting yesterday’s war.”
The reason Navy aviators focused on dogfighting again was because pilots kept getting shot down over North Vietnam by MiGs that had gained a rear position. Their kill:death ratio went up by a factor of 3 or 4 after founding Top Gun for fighter training, while the Air Force thought it was SAMs that kept nailing fighters, chalked it up to a technology failing that we needed to throw money at, and so ignored ACM training. Their losses got worse over the next couple of years of fighting.
This is also an argument for a generalist approach to military training, tactics, and technology rather than being overly-specific.
Trends in military tech tend to be a bit cyclic but partially chaotic. That makes certain developments seem inevitable in hindsight, but hard to predict before hand.
Take armor, for example. Body armor fell out of favor from roughly the early 1800s to the end of WWII before materials offering better protection for an acceptable weight started to appear. Now, we’re starting to wear armor that covers large areas of the body again because we’re just getting to the point where it’s not too heavy and offers enough protection to be worth the trade off in mobility, fatigue, and other pieces of kit that you can’t carry due to the extra weight.
As recently as the Vietnam war, “flak jackets” were considered next to worthless, and even in the first Gulf War most soldiers didn’t use body armor most of the time. Just a couple of years ago, people were pissed because our soldiers weren’t being outfitted with full top-of-the-line armor.
In my very non-expert opinion as an outside observer of the problems the military is having, the single biggest issue is information. How do you get good intel? How do you inform the people who need it? How do you verify it? The Iraq debacle was a failure of intel from the beginning, totally aside from the political morass.
The other problem is related to that. In Afghanistan we’ve got something like a 95% kill rate with drones, but we keep killing a few innocents despite our best efforts, and the insurmountable technological edge is pissing everyone off — combatants and non-combatants alike — probably because they feel completely helpless against it.
Here, even if our intelligence is perfect, it wouldn’t matter. We’re outsiders in places where people hate the living fuck out of their neighbors. The only real way to win that kind of fight is not to be there. It’s like being a cop interfering in a domestic squabble; you’re probably going to get assaulted by both parties and no one is happy to see you even if your being there means that someone doesn’t get the shit beaten out of them again.
So what we really need isn’t better ways to kill people, it’s better ways to avoid having to use force. And I say this as someone who likes most of the the shiny technology of killing and who has been interested in fighting and weapons since childhood. We’ve got good shit, but sometimes it seems that since we’ve got all these hammers, we keep looking for some nails that look like they need a good pounding, and if we can’t find some, we’ll damn-well pound on the boards until some come loose.
When it comes to making new military toys, the one change I’d really like to see is a systemic one. Current development cycles in military contracting are supremely inefficient, probably due to lack of real competition. Bidding in the form that it has now is NOT competition. The closest thing to real competition that I see are the DARPA events, and not coincidentally, that’s where most of the really cool futuristic tech seems to come from.
And then it suffers the same fate as all those cool internet startups that are bought by big companies; bought, forgot, or fucked up beyond recognition by the time it eventually gets pushed out of the colon of military development. The wearable computer project that the Army just abandoned in favor of a smart-phone based system was a great concept, but it started in the bloody 1990s, and in much the same way as Duke Nukem Forever, kept getting lapped by much more agile development.
Anything worth implementing shouldn’t take 20 fucking years to reach the front lines. If so, then you’re not just preparing to fight the last war, you’re preparing for wars that happened a generation ago, and that means you’ve just killed a whole bunch of people fighting this generation’s war.
Not only that, but there are also specialized skill sets in building the damn things. If your naval nuclear submarine production facility closes (because of budget cuts), those workers go and find jobs elsewhere. Five years later, when it is decided to build another (or several) subs, you either have to train a different bunch of guys in the art of building them, or you try to entice the old guys back (at a premium). So i would not be surprised if Congress orders more subs and carriers in order to keep those skills and building facilities from vanishing.
The German armored vehicles (PzKw38, PzKw III, for instance) were not that much ahead of France’s or Britain’s. Doctrine made the difference there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_early_World_War_II_tanks