Ron Paul: "We Spent a Billion Dollars Fighting the Houthis…and Lost'
(ronpaulinstitute.org)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (84)
sorted by:
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.
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.
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(?).
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.