tbf a child could figure that out
even ignoring recent weapons developments, the PLA is very large and would not have to deal with the extremely extended supply lines that the yanks would face, plus the home field advantageUS reliance on costly, sophisticated weapons leaves it exposed to China’s ability to mass-produce cheaper systems in overwhelming numbers, the highly classified “Overmatch Brief” warns.
They will beat us because we are too smart…
the defence secretary, said that “we lose every time” in the Pentagon’s war games against China, and predicted the Asian country’s hypersonic missiles could destroy aircraft carriers within minutes.
…and yet we have not developed hypersonic missiles
They will beat us because we are too smart…
You gotta love how the US is literally following in the footsteps of German nazis here. I guess it has to do with the fact that they brought a whole bunch of them over after WW2, and they architected much of the US military doctrine after. Naturally, they didn’t see anything wrong with what they were doing. 🤣
I never thought of it that way! Would you know whar German war doctrine (especially the parts the US incorporated) would have prioritised (especially any oppurtunity costs)?
The US selectively adapted many aspects of the nazi playbook after the war.
One of the key ideas they adapted was the concept of Auftragstaktik which translated into mission command. The US Army used to be very rigid, waiting for orders from the top. The German model relied more on a culture of trusting junior leaders out of necessity, was all about telling a unit what to do as opposed to how to do it. NATO planners were imagining a fast, chaotic war where communications would break down. They baked the idea of decentralized initiative into the 1980s AirLand Battle doctrine. It was about deep strikes and agile counterattacks which is a direct mirror of German Bewegungskrieg.
But here’s a huge opportunity cost. By building the entire US Army around this big tank war in Europe, they let other skills wither on the vine. The army became an instrument for fighting the Soviets and almost useless for anything else. They gutted their own knowledge of counterinsurgency and irregular warfare. When Vietnam happened, and later Iraq and Afghanistan, their doctrine proved completely ineffective. All that focus on maneuver warfare meant they deprioritized the human element languages, civil affairs, understanding local politics.
Basically, they took a lot of German ideas on command and deep battle and welded them to American industrial military complex. But the cost was a kind of institutional tunnel vision. They built a rigid army for fighting USSR and were then surprised that it kept failing in messy, smaller wars that their expensive, complex machine wasn’t built to handle.
Thank you - well explained; any book recommendations?
The German Way of War explains Bewegungskrieg influenced western military thinking. Mission Command directly addresses how the US Army adapted German mission command philosophy. The Challenge of Command discusses leadership concepts including German influences on US officer education. Finally, Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era directly contrasts American attrition warfare with German maneuver concepts that the US later adopted.
Thank you! (Starred)
They like to call China a Paper Tiger but I surmise we start calling the US a lead eagle.
Mao:
Now U.S. imperialism is quite powerful, but in reality it isn’t. It is very weak politically because it is divorced from the masses of the people and is disliked by everybody and by the American people too. In appearance it is very powerful but in reality it is nothing to be afraid of, it is a paper tiger. Outwardly a tiger, it is made of paper, unable to withstand the wind and the rain. I believe the United States is nothing but a paper tiger.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-5/mswv5_52.htm
Yeah, then libs and fascists started using it every other sentence when talking about China. I like the idea of an eagle that can’t fly. Just like half the jets the US makes now.
Hypersonic missiles, you could sell those per unit at $100 mil each, but R&R into hypersonic missiles? Ten billion a year easy every year forever, and you don’t need to build any factories or hire workers
Much cheaper to have media and big youtubers create content about “Hypersonic missiles are useless” instead lmao
psychological warfare is also part of a military doctrine in itself
Couldn’t ask for a better economic system
A thing I’ve noticed but haven’t seen talked about a lot:
If you’re a shitty government with shitty economics etc. you’ll want to have more powerful weapons in the hands of less troops. It’s easier to ensure the loyalty of a few thousand people with good pay, perks etc. compared to an army of several million. The more powerful the weapon, the more loyal you want its wielder. Definitely don’t want an F-22 wandering across the border because a pilot’s pay didn’t go through.
Over time, this tendency seems to produce an over reliance on small numbers of technically complex weapons. During peacetime, these machines don’t get pushed to the limit, so their actual combat efficacy is unknown (particularly compared to machines produced towards reliability and mass production).
A little example I remember is from Ukraine, where the Germans sent their modern howitzers. These howitzers could be extremely accurate, but with how much they got used and increased wear on the barrel, they rapidly became just another howitzer despite their increased cost and technical complexity.
What you suggested reminded me (I forgot where I read this and I have not verified it) about when European armies were sent against the new USSR the soldiers would come back as communists.
Same thing kind of happened in the Korean war.
and yet we have not developed hypersonic missiles
This really depends on what is classified as a “hypersonic missile”.
For just reaching over Mach 5, the US was doing this with modified V2s after WW2. The US did plenty of research on maneuverable re-entry vehicles for ballistic missiles during the cold war, and deployed the Pershing-II with such in the 1980s.
However, technically, none of those are considered hypersonic missiles, even if they reach hypersonic speeds at some point in flight and have portions of their trajectory that are non ballistic. Hypersonic missiles are usually about sustained hypersonic speeds within the earth’s atmosphere on a trajectory that is not ballistic for the majority of it’s flight, with glide vehicles and cruise missiles. Under that definition, the US Army has the Long Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), also called the Dark Eagle, a hypersonic glide vehicle.
Aside from that, the US has developed lots of hypersonic manned aircraft/spacecraft and “missiles”, hell the first principles of what we know about hypersonic flight come from the X-15 test aircraft that was first flown by the US in the 1960s (essentially a manned hypersonic missile that could land on salt flats), “the most successful research airplane in history” according to Neil Armstrong. The Space Shuttle was also essentially a manned hypersonic glide vehicle. If you look at modern missiles (both interceptors and the ones made to take out targets), they take a lot of design cues from the X-15 and Space Shuttle. From lateral thrusters and thick control surfaces to maneuver at high speed in the thinner air of the upper atmosphere (first pioneered on the X-15, so it’s hard to disagree with Armstrong there), to every second hypersonic glide vehicle looking like a mini Space Shuttle. Then there’s the X-51 Waverider, which achieved over 200 seconds of hypersonic flight utilising a scramjet, for a total flight time of 240 seconds 12 years ago. There are plenty of hypersonic test beds around.
What the US hasn’t developed, aside from the LHRW, is a hypersonic weapons system. This is very different from a test aircraft or missile, for various reasons revolving around force structure and doctrine. The US could, if they wanted to, weaponise the X-51 and have a 700+km range scramjet powered hypersonic cruise missile tomorrow. Over the past two years we’ve seen how Israel was able to weaponise their Sparrow target missiles used to test the Arrow air defence system, into weapons such as air launched ballistic missiles that can take out targets in Iran.
So the US could do that to something like the X-51. The reason they don’t do it is because no one will buy it, not the air force, not the navy. And this is because of questions around force structure and what these branches of the US military want. The air force, in particular, wants a miniaturised hypersonic missile that can be launched by tactical fighter jets, and doesn’t require a B-52 bomber to launch it like the X-51 did and ARRW does currently. The US air force is also not interested in jerry rigging F-15s to carry a single large missile. They want a minituarised X-51, that a US F-15 or Australian F-18 can carry multiple of. That’s what the HACM is supposed to be.
For the Navy, it’s even more complicated, they want a missile that can safely be stowed on an aircraft carrier in existing infrastructure (they do not want to retrofit every aircraft carrier for a new missile) that can target ships, and they Navy doesn’t operate large bombers so it has to be small, the air force still has the luxury of falling back on larger missiles if HACM doesn’t pan out, the navy does not. This means very strict requirements on size, fuels used in the missile, the guidance system for anti ship combat, while still meeting a high enough performance standard to make it worth the money and a leap in capability over existing weapons, like say the SM-6, which can be used in an anti ship role, and carried by F-18 fighters. This is why HALO is in limbo or cancelled, struggling to meet performance requirements and stay in the restrictions.
Wouldn’t unmanned hypersonic missiles as described need a sufficient guidance system to be developed too?
Yes, guidance is very complicated, especially if you want to hit a moving target like a ship. With static land targets it’s “easier”, but getting these high speed missiles on target with a high enough accuracy to do damage, using a conventional warhead or the kinetic energy from a high speed impact is still complicated. Especially in wartime conditions where there will be a mess of electronic countermeasures/jamming to mess with satellite navigation and datalinks. Aside from satellite navigation, a highly accurate inertial measurement unit (IMU) can help a lot, for instance using a ring laser gyroscope like ATACMS uses vs consumer grade IMUs. For hitting moving targets, optical guidance (essentially a camera in the missile), and/or an active radar seeker can be used, with automated target acquisition, the missile can find and hit a target on it’s own. If there’s a datalink between an optically guided missile and an aircraft or ground station, the missile can be manually piloted/guided onto the target by a person, this is called human in the loop guidance or TV guidance. But a lot of this gets complicated at hypersonic speeds, dust on re-entry can blind the camera, then there’s plasma sheaths that could blind it and make a datalink complicated. This may require the glide vehicle or re entry vehicle slowing down just before hitting the target.
This almost happened in 2016 after the Philippine sea kangaroo court. The US carrier groups were planning on pushing right into the SCS after the arbitration. After a high alert, they quietly exited the region overnight as they had been locked on by the rocket force.
And this was back in 2016 when the PLARF/PLAN themselves knew they were not fully ready, but were willing to sacrifice most of their fleet and missile reserve to destroy the carrier battle groups if the US decided to actually invade the region.
Even back in the 90s and early 2000s they tried to plan for almost everything except one, surrender. In the 2000s with no counter to F22s or similar advanced jets, they even considered sacrificing 8 of their J8-IIs per F22 just in order to get close enough to fire a missile.
Paper tigers
