Ron Paul: "We Spent a Billion Dollars Fighting the Houthis…and Lost'
(ronpaulinstitute.org)
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Any Navy vets care to weigh in on wtf is happening in the Red Sea?
a sm2 (standard missile 2) is I think right around $1mil a shot.
we just can't afford to really do anything about it. we're bleeding into Ukraine and Israel now. we really can't afford either, let alone another in addition.
our navy isn't really all that great. we ordered a bunch of mostly useless and fragile ships in the early 2000s. they were supposed to be modular but none of that actually worked out. it's taken us over 10 years to build and commission our last aircraft carrier. we just sold another USA shipyard to SK just this week. our logistic support ships are like at 55%. that was the result of the last war gaming. supposed to be at 85%+.
everything is fucked. we have faggots, jews, and women running things. nothing works. everything is breaking.
I keep hearing this from various professionals. Perhaps giving up gunnery in favor of high tech ballistics was a mistake?
How dare you question the high priests of the Military-Industrial Complex? Shun the unbeliever, shun. Next you'll be wanting an effective infantry rifle and a tank made this side of the Ford presidency.
Our tank is still the best in the world, it's fine as is. No need to make a new fuck up if the current thing works great.
Main battle tanks have the specific role of fighting other main battle tanks.
Air superiority of a modern air force makes a MBT redundant. They are slow, hot targets and very vulnerable to missile strike.
The advantage of a MBT is that they are a lot cheaper to field than an aircraft. That said, a modern mobile howitzer with the right support (scouts for fire control) is much more effective when used correctly. Check out the Archer Artillery System. Longer range and much better at hiding from hostile aircraft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archer_Artillery_System
It is amazing how many warthunder players upvoted you and downvoted me. Internet warriors that have no fucking clue.
Tanks are flexible and direct fire. Artillery is not. Tanks are essential in any theater where air dominance, not air superiority, isn't assured. Tanks are also essential in theaters where we have AD if the goal isn't just "bomb everything and leave" because planes can't take or hold ground.
Your planes still being in the sky don't matter anymore when the enemy tank commander is eating breakfast in your cafeteria.
You may as well say infantry is redundant because we have nukes. Airforce makes MBTs redundant is such a stupid statement, boiling war down to a rock paper scissors equation of who wins in a fight between two isolated assets.
Look, you are right. Every point you made is correct.
However, unless there are tanks fighting tanks, all of those roles can be fulfilled by a medium tank or a light tank, which is faster, doesn't destroy roads and gets better fuel economy. For example the entire continent of Australia doesn't need a MBT because no one is ever going to land a MBT. If they do the Aussies will send sappers (combat engineers with explosives) and SAS to blow up their diesel tankage.
I misspoke when I said that a modern air force makes tanks redundant. The situation of air superiority makes them a big fucking target, and then on fire. See Gulf War 2, etc. The specific example I gave of a modern howitzer is because they are much better at "shoot and scoot" to evade attack by aircraft.
Frankly, I think we're better off building a new Ontos.
Always found that odd, shouldn't computers make aiming guns easier than ever?
Pretty sure guided missiles require more expensive (and expendable) resources than most ballistics alternatives.
Not only do you have the fuel and payload, but also the circuitry, computer bits, sensors/guidance systems, communications, etc etc.
Especially when considering the ranges that naval vessels are usually firing from compared to say, tanks or infantry. Likely has to reach a moderately higher quality threshold than your average computer-controlled setup.
it just seems like a completely retarded waste to put a computer in a bomb. it's not like all that shit grows on trees.
It does make sense for specialized precision scenarios, but now they seem to try putting it in just about every kind of non-small arms ordinance.
career politicians in charge.
it's not even a uniquely military thing...
that being said, I don't see our modern military gangster leaning a warship anytime soon...that would take inventiveness and leadership...
A tool is only as good as its operator.
There are literally pre-made tools to make it extremely easy to lock on to a target and click. I don’t see how anyone could fuck that up
We have subhuman apes that can't beat video games without an easy mode. Now imagine these inept cretins are under pressure and there are actual consequences for not beating the Cuphead tutorial.
Like the atomic bomb, missiles trump guns when your enemy doesn't have them. You can hit them while they can't hit you.
Our peers have it too, so it's not great.
There's a whole very technical conversation to be had here. The Navy developed and then abandoned a class of "littoral" combat vessels in the mid aughts. These ships would have been designed to handle exactly what is happening in the Red Sea. The problem is that these vessels would have to be "fighting" ships. They would have had to rely on a combination classic naval guns for offence and CIWS guns for defense. Its a workable system but not perfect. They would not have been "superior" and I think thats why they were abandoned in favor of more "modern" fleet solutions.
That's what the Iowa class battleships were before they were mothballed. Had the big guns and Tomahawks
As much as I love the Iowa class, there's a whole lot of design space between an old school battle ship and a design for an modern in shore fighting frigate(?).
The point is that they knew it could work, they just didn't do it because gotta spend da money.
Plus, maintenance costs are going to be vastly higher for a battleship than a frigate or a cruiser, almost regardless of what kind of weaponry it's fielding.
A classic battleship have huge amounts of armor. Modern navel engagements don't require a ship to be able to shrug off 20mm cannon fire, they require surviving a Harpoon missile.
...meaning the politicians in the top brass found a petty flaw to give them plausible deniability when they killed the project so their arms dealer buddies could keep raking in money on one-size-fits-a-few solutions, right?
Seems like that's how it usually goes...
Actually no. Gunnery shouldn't be eliminated, but the key here is range and stealth. If you can't have stealth, then you need raw numbers.
Our anti-ship missiles are fucking terrifying for their range, for their stealth, and their cost isn't terrible. The Chinese don't have the stealth for their missiles, so they went with raw numbers on the cheap (like most chinese goods). So far, we have the advantage in that fight.
Gunnery, however, just can't get around range. You can't reasonably shoot a gun 200 miles, even a battleship sized rail gun. You can't win a dog-fight with a Gen 5 fighter if you can't get to it, let alone see it. These are insurmountable problems.
Missiles are the current king. There's no way around it. The issue is that some idiots think that means that guns are irrelevant. They're not, they're just not as useful as they once were.
Just hand out TOWs to merchant ships. Or let them install some automatic deck guns. Might fix the "refugee" boat problem while we're at it.
This is why Article 1 of the Constitution allows congress to give private ship owners Letters of Marque.
I wonder, is it not still technically legal anyways? (ignoring NFA restrictions for the moment...) What is the exact law here? A company can have armed security at their port terminal, and at the docks. Can they not have an armed boat?
On the other hand there's a big difference between "it's ok to use lethal force in self defense" and "you can shoot at dangerous looking ships at your discretion and maybe proactively sink them if they keep harassing you."
Its why russia isnt intercepting all missiles and drones that is shot at russia. They determine if the incoming thing is hostile or not, what it is and its trajectory to see if its worth firing a 2 million dollar anti-ballistic missile to intercept the incoming thing.
The navy is in better shape than you give it credit for, and we are well ahead of everyone else, so much that even if we were in as bad of a state that you describe, we'd still be ahead.
Frankly, I think that's exactly the reason we are fighting these wars. China is looking for a Taiwanese invasion; and causing American attrition in Israel, Ukraine, and Yemen helps a lot. Lucky for us, the Chinese are more retarded than we are.
we're not willing to actually solve the houthi problem.
the second they started threatening shipping is when a serious country would have reduced their cities to ash.
And none of this 'nation building' garbage afterwards.
You're talking like they have legitimate cities to level.
This is like saying you want to bomb Mogadishu to stop Somali pirates. These pirates probably don't even live in the city, and don't care.
Not Navy but Army.
It's cost effectiveness, combined with the fact that muslims don't care about their own lives.
It costs a tiny fraction to attack of what it costs to defend and counter attack. The Navy's battle doctrine assumes air superiority, but worse assumes infinite resources.
I'm not sure I buy this. "I'm willing to die to fight the outlander" is not the same as "I don't care if I live or die." Particularly when the Yemenese Houthis seem to be achieving their goals.
Make no mistake, I don't care about what are essentially 21st century privateers (Iranian letter of marque, as it where), but a Navy's job is not to go fight the other guy's navy. Navies exist to protect commerce. Why is a US carrier group unable to do this in the Red Sea?
I'm sure about it. I've seen them strap bomb loaded backpacks onto little kids, and then tell them if they go hug the Americans that we'll give them candy.
You can never convince me that they care about their own lives.
Besides that, the answer to your question is simple. Their armament can reach shipping in the straights, with incredible cost effectiveness. Even if you invent some kind of high tech thingedy thing that can somehow snipe their rocket infantry before they fire, they don't care. All you've done is kill Omar and maybe destroy one rocket. They have a million more rockets and a million more Omars.
Turns out globalism isn't economically viable.
It's "if I die, I can be replaced" writ large.
"Who cares if I lose one kid? I can make five more."
Pretty much.
Fair enough. I guess the answer to my gripes it that modern tech require a "land war" when it come to control of the Red Sea.
That's why dependence on international shipping is so stupid.
At modern scale you might have a point, but international shipping has been a thing since the 15th century.
Dependence not just commerce. Commerce is fine.
But we import just about everything except food. It's good that we do export food, everyone needs that. It's bad that we crippled our domestic manufacturing capabilities and handed it over to the Red Chinese. Or to Taiwan, same difference these days.
Fragile supply lines are stupid. Self reliance is not.
thats not "not caring about their own lives" though, thats them "not caring about someone else's kids' lives". and thats a scale the west isnt that far away from them on.
See, I wasn't making the distinction before, but since you have I'll entertain it.
It's worse.
Throwing away their children just for the chance if killing us, is far worse than just being suicidal. It's a level of savagery that makes even the noxiously amoral Chinese look good in comparison.
So I reiterate. You cannot convince me that their lives have even the smallest value, because they sure don't think they do either.
is sending them to instant death beter or worse than looking away while they get raped and tortured by some baboons you invited into the country to virtue signal?
i think both are subhuman behaviors, but at least one of them is honest about it
Except whoops, the only people raping children in their country... is still them. Funny enough they're the ones running around raping people in my country too.
Odd, that.
"to the shores of Tripoli" in the US Marine Corp anthem refers to the victory over Barbary pirates lol
I know. That was kind of my point. Surely an MEU and a naval support could hit Houthi ports and surrounding facilities then return to the carrier group? Its how we used to fight. Are the joint chiefs taking such exercise off the table?
Isn't the red sea maybe a little too shallow for a carrier to operate in?
Don't forget that Biden can't will reelection if oil prices spike before the election. Expect the US military to be a giant bitch for the next 6 months (at least).
Damn, that's three wars lost in a single term. Can we get a fourth before November?
Hopefully not as that war might be either Taiwan or Venezuela, both bad as you will quickly feel the impact in America.
The former because MOST of your chips for all your tech comes from there, the latter because that might send an EVEN bigger wave of..... possible refugees but definitely illegals to your border.
If only the Strategic Petroleum Reserve--our emergency reserve of crude oil--wasn't drained before the 2022 midterms for political reasons
Feeling the pain from war here would be a good thing. America has become soft, hence faggot flags everywhere you look. Weak men are creating hard times, this is just an unavoidable part of the cycle.
The fact that Silicon Valley doesn't produce Silicon Chips drives me up a fucking wall.
"Doesn't matter, global trade" doesn't mean you should make sure to bulldoze all of your ability to make the things.
Taiwan Semiconductor just finished building one fab in Japan and is ready to build a second one by the end of 2024. Meanwhile, production in the Arizona plant is delayed until 2025 and the company can't find anyone to hire except low-IQ, CHIPS Act-mandated DEIversity™.
We don't make anything in this fucking country, and the few shit that we do are literally falling from the sky. America's main industries are paper-pushing (a.k.a. finance, law) and rent-seeking (a.k.a. tech, services). We're a post-developed economy of grifters and con artists trying to grift and con other grifters and con artists.
Sounds like we ran out of stuff because we already shipped it to Ukraine.
Not only that, but I think the military's been dumping a lot of funding on overbloated, fancy, new, and "high tech" equipment for the last couple of decades, especially in the Navy and Air Force.
Unsurprisingly, this does not end up being especially cost effective compared to what a bunch of persistent 3rd worlder pirates are going to throw into the mix.
What boggles my mind is why we haven't bothered to at least maintain a tiny little combat group with the flexibility and cost effectiveness to properly deal with enemy combatants using more (or less?) conventional means.
We do, it's just the combat groups keep dying in "training accidents." No, you may not see the body.
We spent a billion dollars not fighting the Houthis, so of course we lost.
Yeah because you aren't actually going out there and killing them or putting a stop to their supplies.
Duh. I thought we were supposed to have a military?
I thought yelling "MUH NOOKS" at them was enough to get them to surrender. You mean it didn't work?
The important thing is to divert as much money as possible into the hands of their friends and (((puppet masters))) while pushing Our Greatest Ally's geopolitical interests. So operation was a resounding success.
This is the correct answer. Others here don't seem to understand the grift that is government.
There's simply no way to beat swarms of drones and anti-ship missiles without having unlimited interceptors or mounting a massive ground invasion and killing all the guys who aim the drones and missiles. We opted to spend billions of dollars emptying out all our stockpiles for Ukraine to drive into minefields and shoot at schools in Donetsk instead of developing better drone stoppers.
Why hello there, Curtis LeMay. By your logic, the Mongols, Assyrians, and Ottomans should still be here. They ain't.
"Well, just kill civilians" doesn't actually do much. In a lot of cases, you just strengthen the legitimacy of the government you're fighting.
Those WW2 & Korea tactics barely worked at the time, and were one of the reasons we lost in Vietnam. We dropped more bombs in Vietnam then in both theaters of WW2. LeMay leveled the entirety of North Korea. Literally all of it. Literally: you had Raiders looking for random barns to bomb because every standing structure had already been hit. All it eventually did was provoke a response from China, causing a draw, and a war that isn't even officially over yet.
As for WW2, not only were the daylight bombing campaigns really only for accuracy's sake, but the their casualties were enormous. Switch to night-time bombing campaigns, and you lose the accuracy. Despite us having no reservation against bombing civilian targets, it was predominantly to stop the factories from getting workers. Even with all of that, German records indicate that the bombing did very little to stop German production. The NatSocs on this board will claim that that allied blockades and bombing were what caused the famines that Germany plundered Europe to stop, but none of it's true, according to the Germans themselves. The greatest economic damage done to Germany was done by Socialist policies. The total war bombing campaign against Germany and Japan was generally ineffective at achieving the strategic level victories that were needed. And that is the most successful Total War bombing campaigns we've ever had. It only gets worse from there.
Total War, typically, doesn't actually help your cause, doesn't secure your victories, and doesn't gain you anything in the end. If you want to fight an offensive total war, you might as well just not fight. It's cheaper and you're better off.
Funny how America's basically losing to a gang of well-funded islamic pirates. This didn't happen the last two times when 'bomb them to rubble' was reasonable tactics.
>implying we won Afghanistan or Iraq
Everyone knows we rolled up the militaries of both countries in record time. "You break it you buy it" was the big problem there. Certain people may have actually wanted us to be involved in protracted ground wars.
Oh nah, I was referring to the first and second Barbary Wars.
The thing with the Gaza pier is also somewhat amusing...
From what I've seen, their is a gravel/dirt pier right next to where they've attacked the floating one. It admittedly doesn't go out very far, but you would think, you would think that, at the very least, they could attach the floating one to the end of it somehow, or make use of it to tie the floating one to the shore, instead of burying the end in the fucking sand, around 100m away...
I'm sure I'm missing something, there, but, to me as a lay-person civilian, it does seem... Utterly bonkers, the way they've put that together.
I'm not even clear that we are fighting the Houthis, as much as we are giving weapons to the Saudis to fight them.
The sea-borne operation was mostly to just give us a reason to shoot shit.
The true solution to piracy has always been counter-piracy or armed merchant ships. Everyone has always known that, but the 19th century Empires thought that privateers could be ended if each of the Empires worked together to end it among all of the monopolized trade that they had. And that worked, for a time.
But the Empires are gone and trade is quite open nowadays. Piracy will return. In fact, I'd expect it to be a much bigger problem going forward in this century.
The Constitution is very clear on how to deal with pirates since American cities were founded in the Age of Sail, and Charelston, SC was a major port during the time.
Allow Americans to have their own warships and engage against pirates by providing them with Letters of Marque.
I gave the AI some points and it summarized it thusly:
The evolution of modern warfare tactics and the strategic landscape has indeed been shaped significantly by the development of anti-aircraft capabilities. Initially, when anti-aircraft systems became more powerful than the aircraft they were designed to counter, military doctrine shifted towards combined arms theory. This approach integrates various arms of the military to achieve complementary effects, with missile range often being a critical factor⁸⁹.
However, the Houthis in Yemen have demonstrated that traditional combined arms theory isn't the only effective approach in modern warfare. They've shown that asymmetric warfare tactics, such as using drones, missiles, and guerrilla strategies, can challenge conventional military powers¹²³. The Houthis have effectively used a mix of Iranian and homemade weapon systems to exert influence and disrupt their adversaries, despite not having the same level of technological sophistication or resources¹.
This highlights a current strategic threat: the potential underestimation of "old-fashioned know-how and weaponry." In conflicts like the Russia-Ukraine war, we've seen a blend of new and old technologies, where both sides utilize advanced weaponry alongside traditional methods of fighting⁵⁶. The use of drones, anti-tank missiles, and even trench warfare shows that a mix of high-tech and low-tech approaches is shaping the battlefield.
The strategic threat today involves not just the hardware of warfare but also the tactics and strategies. The reliance on advanced technology without sufficient understanding of traditional warfare can be a vulnerability. Modern militaries must balance the pursuit of new technologies with the retention and understanding of conventional tactics and equipment to be prepared for a wide range of conflict scenarios⁵⁶. This balance ensures that forces can adapt to the unexpected and leverage the strengths of both new and old methods of warfare.
Source: Conversation with Copilot, 23/06/2024 (1) Multi-Domain Battle: Evolution of Combined Arms for the 21st Century .... https://www.tradoc.army.mil/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/MDB_Evolutionfor21st.pdf. (2) Combined arms - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_arms. (3) Under Fire in the Bab al-Mandab: Houthi Military Capabilities and U.S .... https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/under-fire-bab-al-mandab-houthi-military-capabilities-and-us-response-options. (4) How the Houthis Built Their Arsenal: Defense and Intelligence .... https://www.counterextremism.com/content/how-houthis-built-their-arsenal-defense-and-intelligence-procurement. (5) The Houthi War Machine: From Guerrilla War to State Capture. https://ctc.westpoint.edu/houthi-war-machine-guerrilla-war-state-capture/. (6) Both sides in the Russia-Ukraine war are using new and old technologies .... https://theconversation.com/both-sides-in-the-russia-ukraine-war-are-using-new-and-old-technologies-for-warfare-225451. (7) How technology, both old and new, has shaped the war in Ukraine so far. https://www.popsci.com/technology/technology-russia-ukraine-war/. (8) What Marines may be learning from Houthi tactics in the Red Sea. https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2024/04/30/what-marines-may-be-learning-from-houthi-tactics-in-the-red-sea/. (9) Lethal AI weapons are here: how can we control them? - Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01029-0. (10) The Recent History of Combined Arms | The Cove. https://cove.army.gov.au/article/recent-history-combined-arms. (11) Closing the Army's Tactical Air Defense Gap - Modern War Institute. https://mwi.westpoint.edu/closing-the-armys-tactical-air-defense-gap/. (12) The Return of Tactical Antiaircraft Artillery: Optimizing the Army .... https://mwi.westpoint.edu/the-return-of-tactical-antiaircraft-artillery-optimizing-the-army-inventory-for-the-era-of-small-drone-proliferation/. (13) Anti-Aircraft Warfare: Safeguarding the Skies from Aerial Threats. https://defensebridge.com/article/anti-aircraft-warfare-safeguarding-the-skies-from-aerial-threats.html. (14) Soldier Swarm: New Ground Combat Tactics for the ... - Modern War Institute. https://mwi.westpoint.edu/soldier-swarm-new-ground-combat-tactics-era-multi-domain-battle/. (15) Adapting Air Defence: Reemergence of Anti-Aircraft Artillery in Modern .... https://casstt.com/adapting-air-defence-reemergence-of-anti-aircraft-artillery-in-modern-warfare/.
No offence intended, but if your going to post the output of a language model, why not offer a defense or criticism of the out put? To my understanding, a LLM's output is, at best, a conglomeration of the posts of redditors and urinalists.
I do like the sources being attached at least. The LLM, of course didn't really use the sources.
What AI?