As the empire continues to collapse, losing foreign wars but turning inward upon its own citizens with threats and bluster, its military forces will continue to embarrass themselves. In particular, the US Navy will soon be revealed as a wet paper tiger, boasting a carrier battle group (CBG) force structure designed solely to punish small-state defectors from the petrodollar, rather than having any connection whatsoever to the historical missions of power projection and sea control. When faced with a sufficiently determined “near peer” adversary, the CBG is likely to collapse like a house of cards. This is a fact which has been known through wargaming since the mid-1970s, and through internal DoD studies since the late 1950s. The author’s credentials to make the bold claims in this article are substantiated at the end of this piece. Although the predictions are grim, former provinces (i.e., “states”) of the collapsing empire can benefit from the correct interpretations of these issues. In other words, it is completely unnecessary to defeat, or even combat, the dying empire, it is only necessary to not lose to it.
Carrier Battle Group (CBG) History
The modern composition, theory and public perception of the US Navy CBG is based on a single heavily-biased precedent, that of fighting the Japanese Navy in the Pacific during World War II. This CBG-vs-CBG is an historical anomaly that will never again be repeated. Because of its victory in that war, the US Navy learned the wrong lessons. Every other observant nation learned the correct lesson, which is that the Japanese Navy abandoned its natural maritime aviation (defined later) high ground, to its detriment.
Studies in the late 1950s (think “Rand”) revealed that a CBG was critically vulnerable to a saturation attack in the missile age. Even low-tech missiles, hardly more sophisticated than the Nazi V1 flying bomb, with low-tech terminal homing necessary to hit the broadside of a carrier barn, in sufficient quantity, would overwhelm the defenses of the day. It was these studies which led to the F14 Tomcat/AIM-54 Phoenix fighter/missile combination to hit maritime missile platforms before launching, the Aegis/SM-2 missile combination to hit anti-ship missiles after launch, and the Close In Weapon System (CIWS) concept to catch leakers.
For the last seventy or so years, the CBG has been caught in an expensive race against rapidly evolving missile technology, where each small advance in anti-ship missile technology requires a greater advance in defensive technology and expenditure. Worse, any given anti-ship missile technology, in sufficient numbers, will eventually overwhelm even the highest-tech shipboard defense when the escort ships’ magazines run dry. This article focuses on the gradual and deliberate degradation of the first layer of CBG defense as a reflection of imperial policy; other articles may address the latter two layers. Note that none of these three layers has ever been battle tested against a determined near peer. So, there can be no special hidden knowledge that resides within the naval establishment that has a shelf life of less than about seven decades. Similarly, claims of secret wonder weapons can be safely ignored, especially given the Navy’s demonstrated inability to reliably field new classes of ships with even modest technological improvements, nor does it appear to be able to maintain the systems it has with anything close to the level of professionalism of even a few decades ago (the emerging “rust bucket Navy” concept). To be generous, as would any rational near peer planner, we will assume that the Navy’s existing systems work as advertised 100% of the time, although the author’s personal experience aboard the USS Ticonderoga AEGIS ship in the summer of 1987 (long before the modern era of social engineering and its corrosive effects on readiness) wildly conflicts with this assumption.
The Maritime Aviation Advantage
For purposes of this discussion, let us define maritime aviation as being land-based aviation assets which are applied against forces at sea, as opposed to carrier aviation. Conventional wisdom believes that no nation without a CBG of its own can defeat the mighty US Navy CBG. This is vain absurdity, a point which was already well-known from those 1950s studies, and which became painfully obvious at the fleet level in the 1970s with the advent of the at-first classified NAVTAG simulator, and then by the commercial Harpoon PC game. In the author’s personal experience, NAVTAG simulations at the Naval Academy had to be watered down to the point of absurdity to give the US side even a decent chance of survival.
From a maritime aviation perspective, a CBG’s advantages include maneuverability (a dubious advantage in the real-time satellite era) and no need to obtain host nation approval (an increasing necessity as the empire collapses and former allies defect). However, the more numerous advantages of a sufficiently large and coordinated maritime aviation strike against a CBG include the obvious factors such as a) unsinkable bases, b) the ability to disperse units, making them harder to find, c) employment of large aircraft capable of large missile loads, d) the employment of aircraft of any size or mix from behind a dense anti-aircraft screen and e) the ability to coordinate attacks en-masse against any CBG in range (CBGs out of range of maritime aviation are of little immediate threat).
Further, for this purpose anti-CBG forces can also include sea-based patrol boats (let’s call these “littoral forces”) such as the often-derided Iranian patrol boats, which are reported to number in the thousands and could, if employed in a sufficiently coordinated way, either alone or with maritime aviation, easily deny Persian Gulf entry to the US Navy. A similar approach is practical for Russian, Chinese and Indian littoral forces in their respective waters. Littoral forces also include low-cost, low-tech, short-range diesel submarines. Again, these are highly derided in popular press as being laughable compared to American nuclear submarines. However, Navy planners know that these diesel boats can be very lethal to a CBG, especially if coordinated en masse with anti-ship air and surface attacks. Finally, a smaller near peer CBG can act as an extension of littoral forces. For this purpose, even conventionally powered small carriers lacking long range endurance, or even catapults, but packing a wallop of anti-ship and anti-air capabilities, and despite again being derided in popular press as “not as good as Murican”, is sufficient to assist near peer maritime and littoral defense against incoming US CBGs.
Without belaboring the point, any sufficiently objective simulation will reveal that maritime aviation in sufficient quantity will eventually saturate and overwhelm CBG defenses, and at much lower required cost, levels of training, and technology than required by that CBG to maintain and defend itself. This balance becomes even more heavily weighted against the CBG if the maritime aviation attack is coordinated with a significant littoral anti-ship attack. Destroying an attacking CBG with existing low-tech weapons systems by a sufficiently determined near peer defender is really just a numbers game, no exotic weaponry required. This fact has been known to all but the American public for over a half a century.
Near Peer Force Structure
The US defense propaganda machine, in its magic dirt vanity, will often deride potential adversaries as “near peer”, meaning that they are “almost, but not quite, as good as us”. Although I detest this term, it is useful for this discussion to distinguish from “war on terror” adversaries (i.e., petrodollar defectors), who are too weak to defend themselves against “shock and awe” tactics (thus “weak-state” adversaries in this paper). Three of the four emerging new first world allies, Russia, China and Iran, contrasted to the sinking second-world axis of US, UK, Australia and their NATO colonies (France and Japan wisely deciding to sidestep this collapse) have and always have had force structures indicative of their understanding of the CBG vulnerabilities. Of the emerging first world nations, only India is choosing to attempt to follow the declining US lead; the other three have correctly learned the lessons from World War II onward, lessons which in my experience were readily available to any Naval Academy graduate since the mid 1980s.
National policy drives force structure. Stalin has been quoted “quantity has a quality all its own”. Whether or not this is an actual Stalin quote, the former Soviet Union certainly implemented its own force structure in this way. If a nation’s policy is to punish weak-state defectors from the petrodollar (or equivalently, to intimidate weak-states from defecting), while at the same time maximizing contractor profits and taxpayer liabilities, then CBGs are the logical outcome. If, on the other hand, a nation’s policy is to defend itself from CBGs, the rational cost-effective answer, based on numerous studies and simulations now available to anyone, is a combination of large numbers of low-tech maritime aviation, air defense, and littoral weapons systems. This combination is exactly the approach favored by Russia and China, and now being adopted by Iran, and was the observable policy of the former Soviet Union.
Just as national policy drives force structure, even a secret national policy can be inferred from the observable force structure. In other words, the observable force structures and weapons development of Russia, China and Iran indicate that these nations recognize the power of the maritime aviation/littoral forces partnership against a US Navy CBG (or against their own CBGs if they were inclined to field any as other than a limited extension of littoral forces). These nations, like the former Soviet Union, appear to have little intention to invade the US in any way in which a CBG would be helpful in countering, as indicated by a conventional maritime and naval force structure designed specifically to defend itself from US Navy CBGs. In fact, even if any near peer was successful in wiping every US Navy CBG from the seas, the near peer(s) would still lack the ability to attack/invade the US by sea to any significant degree (nuclear excepted) as they would then be facing exactly the same maritime aviation / littoral forces advantage aimed at their approaching forces. Former imperial provinces, when they arise, would do well to heed this lesson and adopt the far less expensive approach of a maritime aviation / littoral force partnership, rather than exhaust themselves fielding expensive and vulnerable CBGs. Or allow themselves to be coerced into thinking that they are vulnerable without the increasingly leaky imperial umbrella.
This is a lesson that Billy Mitchell, considered the father of the US Air Force, understood about a hundred years ago. Japan’s Admiral Yamamoto, well versed in US naval policy and force structure, was himself caught in a policy death-spiral, to the detriment of the Japanese Empire. A fraction of the resources spent on Japanese carrier aviation and support, applied instead to maritime aviation and littoral shipping, would have gruelingly exhausted the US Navy, and denied the US the Pearl Harbor moral high ground. Stalin’s Soviet Union took note, and so have Russia, China, Iran and India, who can drive to anywhere they care about and can cost-effectively protect their shores from landward, rather than seaward.
Buckaroos: The Dogfighting Canary in the Maritime Aviation Coal Mine
The studies in the 1950s onward, and the simulations in the 1970s onward, were not lost on the naval establishment. A separate piece will address naval corruption in particular, but the policies and procurement decisions of the naval establishment indicate that they have recognized the vulnerabilities of the CBG. One need look no further than the evolution of the F-14 Tomcat to see the patterns emerge. Both the Navy and the Air Force can be indicted by their respective fascination with the dogfighting mythology, but let’s focus on just the Navy’s approach to this mythology to reveal their own decades-long hypocrisy.
Dogfighting, also known by the clever term Aerial Combat Maneuvering (ACM), has long been a purely American vanity to appeal to the Old West gunfighter ethic. An enormous portion of aviation procurement is driven by the idea of “dogfighting”, but the US appears to be the only nation that considers dogfighting to be a modern necessity (versus “interception”, which is a related but more cost-effective approach). Once upon a time, a brash USMC 2ndLt referred to pilots as being either glorified truck drivers or glorified weapons system operators, an assessment which indicates their role on a larger team, rather than being individual divas. A favorite movie scene is from the predictably “Team Murica” Tom Clancy techno-thriller “The Hunt For Red October” where Soviet Captain Ramius refers to the American sub captain as a “Buckaroo” for wearing a pistol (later justified by the contrived plot line, but that is beside the point). The term rings true as it reflects a stereotypical “me me me” diva attitude that weakens cohesiveness.
If we focus on only near peer conflict, then a simple fact of life is that if a carrier pilot finds himself in a dogfight, then his team is already losing the larger battle. This brings us back to the history of the F-14, greatly simplified here. As mentioned above, the Navy’s classical approach to CBG defense involved three layers, the one of interest at the moment being the F-14 Tomcat/AIM-54 Phoenix system. The interested reader can do their own web research, but the theory behind this interceptor/missile system was to shoot down large numbers of maritime planes before they could launch even larger numbers of missiles against the CBG. The relevant Wikipedia article is deceptive in that it mentions land-based jet missile platforms, but a greater threat was from large numbers of cheaper and reliable turbo-prop bombers (ex. Tu-95 Bear) with heavy missile loads. The F-14/AIM-54 concept allowed a squadron of planes to carry up to six heavy long-range interceptor missiles each, take them out to the edge of the CBG air-defense envelope at supersonic speeds, fire them, and return to the carrier to reload and repeat, no dogfighting required or desired. In this context, if an F-14 engages in dogfighting, it isn’t doing its main job of being this advanced missile platform. The F-14 was never intended, or at least never advertised, as a buckaroo fighter. The more appropriate term for this system would be “interceptor”, but Americans want to be called dogfighters, which is why the F-14 wasn’t the “I-14” as the latter sounds like an interstate highway. Clearly, F-14 crews (pilot plus radar intercept officer) were originally intended to be glorified supersonic truck drivers hauling their missile payloads out to the launch points, an image that just didn’t seem sexy enough to prospective naval aviator buckaroos.
However, as the F-14 was being developed, the experience of the US Navy in Vietnam was that relatively low-tech Soviet planes, operating as integrated teams including SAM and AA envelopes (this topic can be an article on its own), were racking up a more than acceptable rate of American losses. Rather than take a step back and decide that the fighter concept was outdated, Americans doubled-down and amped up the buckaroo dogfighter mythology. The Navy, in particular, founded Top Gun, formally named the Naval Fighter Weapons School (NFWS), at Miramar in 1969 to address this misplaced need. So, by the time the F-14/AIM-54 system was actually fielded in the 1970s, even though the Vietnam war was over, the buckaroo ego prevailed over the advertised CBG defense. Ink barely dry on the Top Gun charter, F-14 crews began to cycle through learning the latest in buckaroo techniques against imagined hostiles who would never materialize in reality. Meanwhile, F-14s would so rarely fire an expensive Phoenix that to do so would become a major event, requiring weeks of planning and preparation, mirroring the similar hype and pomp of the rare SM-2 missile shots from an Aegis ship.
Here is where the first round of naval establishment hypocrisy rears its head: “We need an expensive interceptor to carry this heavy and sophisticated missile to defend the carrier battle group against the low tech maritime aviation threat, but we’re going to spend most of our training time and money practicing everything but that role because the saturation implications are too horrific to admit.”
The very existence of dogfighting training as a major syllabus item for F-14 crews means that the Navy has known for decades that the maritime aviation threat from a determined near peer could not be countered, rendering the CBG effective only against weak states, the only context in which dogfighting might possibly be justified (and not even then in reality).
Buckaroo Part Deux: Strike Fighter Tactics
Once the Navy decided that near peer CBG actions were untenable, it decided to go all in on the weak state petrodollar intimidation mission and introduce the second round of naval establishment hypocrisy. Following on the heels of Desert Storm, and now no longer concealing weak state operations on the wrong side in Kosovo, the Navy establishment abandoned any pretense of carrier defense by revamping the F-14 and team training to include ground attack. In 1996, Top Gun was renamed as the Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor (SFTI) program. All those expensive carrier defense aircraft were now going to be trained in ground strikes, with a nod to the buckaroo ethic by still calling them “Strike Fighters”. Anything to keep that word fighter in the name.
Now imagine this scenario as if you were in charge of a carrier battle group around Y2K. You have a limited number of F-14/AIM-54 systems available to defend your carrier. If you believed there was any risk of a near peer maritime aviation threat, would you risk even one of those irreplaceable systems and their highly specialized crews on ground attack? No, you would not. Neither would a reputable naval establishment.
The very fact that near the end of its service life the F-14s began to be repurposed in a ground attack “fighter” role means that the Navy itself was not imagining a near peer conflict as a credible threat at that time.
Buckaroo III: Super Hornets and Lightning Bugs
The F-14/AIM-54 system was in service for about three decades. In that time, technological advances allowed the Navy to turn its dollars and attention to the multi-role F/A-18 Hornet, culminating in the Super Hornet. Advances in missile technology allowed lighter long-range air-to-air missiles to replace the AIM-54. This one-stop shopping (anti-ship, air-to-air and air-to-ground missions) returned some refreshing honesty to naval planning and procurement. However, the emphasis on dogfighting remained even with the slower F/A-18 (Mach 1.8 versus 2.4 for the F-14), with the ground strike role designed in from the start, a feature only useful in weak state actions versus the CBGs role as a near peer missile sponge. The fact that the extra 0.6 Mach CBG defense capability no longer mattered is an important indicator that the naval establishment no longer believed its own near peer hype but was instead fully embracing the weak state intimidation mission.
Remember that integrated team of low tech fighters plus AA/SAM? The typical defense establishment answer to that problem is “send in stealth” (yet another weak state concept which falls apart in the near peer environment). For decades, the Navy grew dependent upon Air Force stealth to handle the Suppression of Enemy Air Defense (SEAD) mission, with near peer systems becoming sufficiently agile (another large topic) to be able to defeat anti-radiation missiles and stealth itself.
To break its dependence upon Air Force stealth, the Navy, in its now third round of hypocrisy, has committed to adopting the problematic and expensive F-35 Lightning II, with all of its attendant bugs. At a top speed of Mach 1.6, even slower than the Hornet, the Navy has moved even farther away from CBG defense against near peer maritime aviation threats. To be clear, CBG defense from maritime aviation threats is not a stealth operation, it is a high volume missile launch operation. By definition, the bad guys already know where you are, and know you are coming. The only option for CBG defense is to get as far forward as fast as possible, launch as many missiles as possible, and get back to reload as fast as possible. And hope that aviation maintenance in the emerging rust bucket Navy can handle the interception operational tempo with a fighter well-known for numerous breakdowns.
Recruiting Versus Reality
There is no question that the buckaroo dogfighting image is valuable recruiting fodder. Not just prospective pilots, but also many young sailors and airmen join for the chance to touch the hem of the latest fighter (in addition to lucrative avionics and aircraft maintenance specialties given the post-service opportunities to dip into the buckaroo budget). Even the recruiting flicks (“The Final Countdown” and “Top Gun” as two examples) play up the weak state mission while totally sidestepping the near peer CBG defense problem. Admittedly, it would be difficult to use this for recruiting: “Near Peer Command and Control!” would make a boring movie, since CBG defense is boring. Until it isn’t, and then it gets exciting very quickly.
This article, long as it is, merely touched the high points of the advantages of maritime and littoral forces defending against an incoming CBG, and contrasted these to the US Navy’s fascination with “fighters” or “strike/fighters” versus outer layer air defense interception. This apparent paradox between the weak state and near peer mission profiles for a US Navy carrier battle group reveals that the empire has completely abandoned any pretense that it has any real-world naval mission other than weak state intimidation. Near peers already know this and, having focused their more limited defense spending for decades on air defense, maritime aviation, littoral forces and team-oriented interception versus dogfighting or their own globe-spanning CBGs, are well-suited to defeat any US carrier battle group wet paper tiger which approaches their territorial waters by simply overwhelming the latter’s more sophisticated defenses.
Quantity does indeed have a quality all its own. To reframe a famous WWII quote, “scratch one empire”.
Additional Resources
Interested readers can access additional resources on the web which address the technical aspect of the topics addressed in this article.
Ward Carroll’s YouTube Channel
Ward Carroll, a Naval Academy graduate, is probably the most famous F-14 Radar Intercept Officer on the planet. Not surprisingly, he is closely affiliated with the US Naval Institute (USNI), the public-facing information arm of the naval establishment. Interestingly, the USNI’s publications include “The Hunt For Red October”, which as mentioned previously, features the buckaroo image as a valuable plot point. Ward’s YouTube channel has a wealth of establishment-friendly F-14 information.
If you only have time to watch one Ward Carroll video, this is where I would start:
In the above video, Ward unintentionally supports the thesis of this paper by illustrating how restrictive dogfighting training rules are. These restrictions are rationally imposed for aircraft and crew safety. However, under the “fight as you train” principle, these restrictions mean that not even “top guns” are getting close to the performance envelope, revealing an essential gap if the buckaroo model was itself realistic.
Grim Reapers’ YouTube Channel
The Grim Reapers are a bunch of gamers, led by SuperCap, whose YouTube channel presents a large number of gaming-based simulations using Digital Combat Simulator World (DCS World). For example, they have an entire series of simulations regarding attacking US and other CBGs which mirror the results of the aforementioned 1950s studies and 1970s+ in-house Navy simulations. Spoiler alert, the determined near peer maritime aviation and littoral adversary wins, even accounting for simulation inaccuracies. Before being critical of these guys for just being gamers, they have as much real-world near peer CBG defense experience as any current US Navy carrier battle group staff, meaning zero for both groups. And they have far more relevant high mix near peer simulator time than any Naval Academy graduate, Navy Surface Warfare Officer or Naval Aviator, and can muster more Command Post Exercise (CPX) participants than most fleet command and control agencies. You can see their tactical thinking and teamwork evolve over the years of their videos toward the team-oriented command and control framework favored by near peers, and less toward the American buckaroo mentality. Someone has been doing their homework.
If you only have time to watch a couple of Grim Reapers videos, these two are where I would start:
In the above video, the Grim Reapers simulate an attack on a CBG in the Persian Gulf with low-tech Silkworms. Now imagine a higher number of incoming missiles.
The above video simulates an attack on that same Persian Gulf CBG with low-tech gunboats. A subsequent rematch allows the US to attack with cluster bombs, but this change really only reflects the artificial clustering of the gunboats themselves. Now imagine hundreds of gunboats at once, with the fire discipline to not waste their ammo on aircraft, but instead reserving their gunfire for large and soft superstructure targets. Then imagine some inexpensive handheld anti-aircraft missiles (MANPADs), keeping the defending US aircraft at altitude during the run-in. It gets worse than that, but this is enough for now.
More on these topics later, including the implications for Taiwan Strait or South China Sea operations.
Author’s Credentials
Tom Baugh is a 1988 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (“an Annapolis man” or “ring knocker”), graduating in the top 3% of his class with a degree in Control Systems Engineering from the then-named Weapons and Systems Engineering Department. After graduation, he was then commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps where his MOS was 7208, Air Support Control Officer. A Desert Storm recipient of the Air Medal, where as a First Lieutenant he served as a Senior Air Director for the USMC Direct Air Support Center (a position normally filled by a more senior officer), he is well-acquainted with the command and control systems of the USMC and Navy, and familiar with those of the Air Force and Army. After Desert Storm he served as the Operations Officer of Marine Corps Recruiting Station Cincinnati, where he accumulated formal training and experience in sales and sales management. He also holds a Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech earned as an Air Force Laboratory Graduate Fellow. After receiving that degree he was hired as a Principal Engineer in McDonnell Douglas’ Advanced Electronic Systems group in the Product Development Directorate where he received patents for his work on communications and maintenance platforms. He has also written flight planning software for the Army 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (a la “Blackhawk Down” fame). His consulting company later designed dozens of ultra-low-power microcontroller development tools, software and processes, which were purchased by thousands of companies world-wide spanning about ten thousand engineers and other end users who have provided unique insight into various industry trends. His personal design experience spans multiple industries including aerospace, banking, medical, automotive, consumer products, energy, communications and public safety. His company continues to assist with new product designs from napkin-sketch to production, and his personal specialty is rescuing in-extremis projects on the verge of collapse.
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20 Comments on "Wet Paper Tiger"
That was really interesting
Please post follow on articles if you have the time
Thanks
This all rings true to me given our woke command and crew operating our carriers and McHales Navy lessor ships. But I would like to hear the other side of the argument before final judgment. What really scares me is the hubris and lack of imagination and flexibility in the Pentagons butt kissers.
An old Carrier aviation sailor, i.e., Ranger, Hancock and Enterprise.
Imagine an attack on an aircraft carrier with a hypersonic weapon… but before hand read up on the weapon concept of “rods from God” and you’ll get an idea of what such a strike would look like.
No laser weapon–nor anything even in the concept stage of development could stop a hypersonic projectile streaking in like a photon torpedo out of Star Trek. It’s surface temperature would be glowing white hot as it came in almost vertically from over 100,000 feet. It wouldn’t even have to have an explosive warhead–a kinetic penetrator would do the job.
The strike hitting anywhere on the ships hull would cut said vessel cleanly in two. Imagine a cannon ball strike on a water melon. The ship would fly apart in a mist of shredded steel and go down just as fast as did the HMS Hood during WWII.
If you are on a carrier, or any surface ship when a modern war breaks out between Russia of China–you are doomed.
Thanks for the comment, but the point of the article is that nothing exotic like that is required for a near peer defense against a CBG. Low tech, in quantity, is all that is needed.
True–low tech is all that is needed. But There was talk about ‘carrier battle groups’ and I doubt that swarms of low-tech will be used. The Chinese and Russian will use the high-tech stuff, from a great distance, from the onset.
What’s needed is a realistic assessment of our simulator training scenarios, and someone willing to testify before Congress if realistic, fact-based wargame data suggests that we are kidding ourselves about our ability to defend against massed anti-ship attacks. BTW, also a former 7208/7202…. MASS-1 back in the 90’s.
Damn fine write up! Especially the numbers have a quality all their own. Question is- what good is a carrier battle group, if it can’t get close enough to a “near-peer” tgt country to even launch it’s aircraft? What good is a carrier battle group that doesn’t have enough missiles on hand to address 50 missile loaded bogeys inbound, at one time? What good is a carrier battle group that has no fleet component of troop transport, material transport, etc. to take, and hold the ground won, if the CBG was successful? Look at a MEU battle group? It has the same defensive requirements as a full CBG, but no Navy numbers to provide the protective capability. What good is a MEU making a landing, with no naval gunfire/artillery missile support capability? In/for a protracted battle, ground forces need air support. Air support equals hundreds of C-1 capable aircraft, and thousands of bombs, and missiles. Both surface to air, air to air, air to ground, and surface to surface. Our total current all missile inventory is not big enough to steamroll a “near-peer” tgt inventory. And heaven forbid if the adversary launches a flock of cheapo drones at a CBG. Drones that we can’t detect, or have enough ciws ammo to adequately service. And don’t even get me going on an end run around our CBG to attack the U.S. with drones, conex missiles, etc.
Excellent piece.
However…while the world was transfixed by the bright shiny trinket of Kabul…
…this happened:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/08/inflation-skyrockets-us-russia-saudi-arabia-sign-agreement-ending-petrol-dollar-putting-us-dollar-economy-risk/
Appears the ‘petrodollar defector states’ in the piece are now moot…by Jobama’s act of Hari-Kari.
We shall see.
Hello Tom, from an OLD tin can sailor. Great article.Our hubris will be the death off us. Still trying to starve the beast.
A neighbor in Vidalia,
You must have meant… “the petro-ponzi-dollar.” These countries realize our money is no better than cereal box-tops.
The Phoenix was only ever useful against mass bomber formations. Against a maneuvering small target they are essentially useless. Once the F-14 started to get old, the maintenance time and money to keep it flying became too much (more than 15 man hours per flight hour).
F-14s were pretty good as bomb trucks, and they could carry the larger one thousand and two thousand pound version of LGBT without much issue.
Fun fact: The last two F-14 squadron I deployed with, VF-143 and VF-11, got to shoot a dozen Phoenix off on the way to the gulf in 2003, and another dozen on the way back in 2004.
Carriers have .50 mounts all around the ship, now, for small boats, but they are all fired by hand, and accuracy at range is poor. The USN really needs to replace all the .50 mounts with CROWS stations mounting 25mm bushmasters, but that wont happen until Iran peppers a carrier with dozens of RPG hits.
Thank you for the thought provoking article. I served aboard five SSBN’s back in the day, with a distinctly different mission than a CBG.
Recently have been reading some accounts of war in the Pacific, including the use of PT boats. When reading your description of Iranian gunboats, the thought “PT boat” popped into mind. Don’t the the Iranians sponsor Russia have some superb torpedoes?
Thanks for the comment. PT boats add another dimension to the littoral defense that I had overlooked. I’m not familiar with the latest torpedo developments, but I imagine saturation would be even easier with low tech torpedoes than low-tech missiles. A PT boat would necessarily be larger and heavier than the Iranian boats, particularly for long-range torpedoes, but could be a significant force multiplier against the CBG.
Why can’t we deploy our own PT type boats from
a supply ship assigned to the CBG as an escort.
Make them long range fast attack fan boats for
a more stable platform with computer guided
.50 gattling guns and miniature torpedoes.
They could be deployed off a stern slip and off
the sides for mass defense. A problem known and
some Yankee ingenuity should be able to solve
that part of the puzzle. Have Darpa get off their
butts and develop a plasma shield for defense.
All the killing on D-Day at Normandy could have
been avoided with a little fore thought by
military planners on how to get our guys off of
the landing craft safely. But the problem there
was there wasn’t any Generals disembaking into
the face of a led/lead wall.
Your computer guided Gatling gun concept is a sneak peek regarding the “It gets worse” part of the Iranian gun boat problem lol. Nice touch!
All the killing at Normandy was a feature, not a bug. No holds have been barred when it comes to depleting the best stock of Western civilization.
CBG are the Battleships of Pearl Harbor. No longer relevant to the coming battle.
Tom, it’s Attrition Warfare, battles of attrition, your talking about when you get down to the crux of it, isn’t it?
Seems attrition always has been the weak link of BCG operations, force projection and strategy. Everything has to subsume to this inescapable reality no matter anything else?
You have finite resources on board. You fight with whats directly on hand. Thats it. There is no high tailing it across the terrain, there is no cover or concealment to use to live to fight another day, or ready resources to run to. Winged weapons have only one tiny place to recover to, and a million things that must go right and work for the whole system to remain functional. It’s risky business like no other.
As in long as effects of attrition is avoided or minimized everything invested is more or less relatively safe from failure and catastrophe.
Now I’m seriously a laymen on War, combat, and levels of warfare. But being a citizen soldier by dint of my druthers and doing all within my resources to understand 4th G war and insurgency warfare, fundamental concepts of Boydd’s OODA Loop, get training and equip myself, I’ve gained a certain level of understanding.
Number one, how highly important understanding the lessons history is and what it teaches, and good folks like yourself Tom who offer a priceless myriad of insights and knowledge to American’s such as myself os foundational.
With that said, there appears to be a constant dynamic throughout here, which is clearly evident even if it is subtle truth within your essay.
Have to kind of sneak up on it here, so please bear with me.
Seems the weakness of the Pax Americana police state posture/projection, ie, the whole PTB/cabal complex and its underlying objectives of globalist power, a weakness not only for the CBG, but on many levels of regime use of force, from CBG’s and other .mil mainstay military resources, since its that political entity which has created this state of affairs, its a reflection on its state of being, its actors mindsets and perceptions.
One truth is it eventually comes down to the domestic 4G warfare COIN level, as what the monkeys do on foreign soil against small state actors and indigenous true grass roots insurgency, inevitably is brought home, used on domestic threats to its power, never mind direct resistance to its power, it is a truth, a constant, a unbroken characteristic more and more evident as events unfold involving never ending war and learning about 4G Warfare and the underlying war for legitimacy.
It strikes me as relatively reasonable to contend Attrition War is the foundational weakness of the present police state controlled military paradigm. Not just it’s CBG’s. Put another way no matter the particulars and actors, attrition war, and even battles of attrition, is the vulnerable underbelly of CBG’s, so to those who created the problem. The moment the Navy has to fight attrition warfare it is kaput and so to is something else, politically speaking.
CBG’s are not like proxy insurgencies that large nation states sponsor, and are safely far away enough they operate without threat of direct conflict and consequences in their proxy warfare. How is this relative to the discussion?
I often speculate on this, and wonder if the actors and their minions within the political/ideological-corrupt/cabal machine has practical understanding of the real world problems inherent in war outside the marxian style of political war, levels of what they ideologically refer to as “Protracted Struggle”, which to them is waging war of political attrition warfare on the unconventional warfare level. So you might think they are understanding of attrition warfare. Point is, question then, do these same state actors who hold sway and control politically and financially, over the nature and structure of the US .mil, understand attrition warfare outside the marxian ideological protracted struggle paradigm?
Is the “ideology trumps strategy mindset” which seems to be a characteristic, a factor in the protracted struggle/long march thru the institutions war, which has usurped our entire system of government, whats driven the current state of the capabilities of the military, and NAVY CBG’s in particular?
I figure its mostly a philosophical question. Yet, war is politics by other means too. It seems an important question from the perspective that yeah, indeed, we are talking about a wet paper tiger here, there ain’t much for it other than in one way or another whats driving it is an institutional order, facing a crisis of legitimacy within on the one hand, and on another hand as history shows, all such power fails. That even though it’s grip on the levers of power appear very strong, once that grip loosens eventually it collapses completely. And being the Navy has been from the beginning of the republic, for good or bad, it is traditionally the force projection of the political power of the republic’s executive, unlike the army, so is it possible that as the Navy goes so does whatever whomever it is thats running shit. The Navy fails, The State follows?
Or in some fashion precipitates the collapse of the institutional order?
Not talking the Navy fails in its mission involved in small state actor operations as you describe it, but say for instance in a larger conflict in the South China Sea, possibly in concert as allies with or assisting Japanese Defense forces and Taiwan defend themselves from commie Chinese expeditionary forces, where the Navy suffered defeat, particularly due to it’s shortcomings you describe the CBG suffers from?
But, how would this same CBG fair against say, an enemy armed with basic small unit infantry combat weapons and minimal training, an indigenous leaderless resistance that has no airpower, no anti-air, or even naval capability to speak of, less than say the Iranian small fast boat fleet?
Such CBG’s be king of the hill is what.
My motives behind in asking you Tom got nothing to do with the politics or the strategic/tactical situation of the Navy, though it’s certainly fascinating in every way. My motive involves trying to understand the monkeys, because they eventually, actually are, turning inwards domestically projecting their use of force against it’s only real enemy which exists; Us good folks who constitute the citizenry who will never bend a knee to the sonofabitches.
That it seems clear if history is a guide, what they do outside American sovereign soil they bring home to use it here. The question then is, as events play out on the high seas, how that has bearing on events on home turf?
As a for an example regarding the question, COIN weapon technology and systems, drone and standoff sensor tech and tactics, developed directly from experience in the endless war paradigm, is here now in operating in many forms, and is undergoing integration with domestic based military forces arrayed against the threat seen as true, open source, grass roots organic resistance and insurgency. For instance while the F-35 probably is not the survivable wonder weapon its proponents claim, as you point out against peer to peer actions, yet, with its high technology sensor/digital fusion system integrated with advanced COIN technology, its something to be taken serious as a heart attack employed against American’s on American soil running around with not much more than infantry combat rifles and citizen soldier training.
Since the monkeys already have all of us under vast almost inconceivable surveillance and coverage, and as you know very well far more than most the all but incomprehensible scale and scope of the gangstalkers and the network with its glowies, and its coverage of everyone and the shit they pull to fuck with us, integrating this infestation of the domestic surveillance state, it’s state-state to federal fusion centers, with COIN weapons and systems developed in Afghanistan and other theaters, seems a no brainer. A match made in hellmouth. After all, the panic-demic is just a step on the ramping of objectives of America’s destruction. At a certain stage use of force, power to hurt, is inevitable. All that weapon technology, from energy beam weapons to UMAV platorms, all the counter insurgency systems and weaponry, its a given its gonna be set up and used on home turf. Ain’t no lack of signs of it being deployed. And the purges underway on the rank and file cadre of all the .mil, they will have the useful dupes and sycophants needed to unquestionably deploy and use these weapons directly on Freefor and all undesirables.
Possibly top that off with the pragmatic use of said present Naval capabilities, lets say for arguments sake, parking CBG’s off the coast line and employing these CBG’s as relatively safe operational bases from which arial COIN warfare systems and intell op’s can be run to interdict domestic resistance forces such as all the evil white raycists and domestic terrorists whom pose such an existential danger to democracy.
Naval operations stationed offshore safe from threats and dangers of 4G land warfare?
I mean, ain’t that what they presently are most suited for, and have been deployed to perform in numerous instances these long years since at least 9-11?
America very very long coastline, be nothing to run resupply operations to the CBG’s, from both strategic and tactical police state position, how can you go wrong? And you have all the land air bases to boot. And no other state actor threats large or small to cramp your operations, no need to operate more than a couple miles offshore, feet dry in a couple minutes, land based tankers, provisions, and weapons stores just a radio call away.
I’m not writing any if this to be a bugaboo, nor have I a spec of resistance is futile in me. Far from it. I believe us good folks win and win big in the end.
It is the number one dictum of war isn’t it, that you must first understand your enemy, then discover what he holds most dear, along with planning for the worst the enemy is capable of doing, then when he falls short of that, if you are to fight him you more easily win.
Your a highly educated guy Tom, obviously with considerable understanding of military history and systems. I mention this because I always hold your insights and knowledge in the highest regards, and see this question I put to you as the singular most important critical issue of our time, next to the almost inconceivable lack of prudence of all those running things, and probably at least half of the people in America.
Never mind, it lands on all of us good folks, to have to figure this insanity out, its nuances and dangers, the inherent threats, fight and win. Ain’t nobody else. We is all we got my friend. But I’m not telling you anything new there.
In any case, appreciate you, Tom. Thanks. Always great and to read your words.
Lets Win!
Hi Doug, good to hear from you again, my brother. As usual, your insight is on the nose. You are correct, the weakest state against which the globalists will eventually employ the CBGs is the American people itself (evidenced by trial balloons such as Cindy Bronson). However, empires fail in predictable ways, and this one is rapidly heading along that path. It is a race between staff upheaval in the military, including insuring that those ships are crewed with politically reliable woke drones, and the rise of break-away provinces. History shows us that the provinces win and that once imperial defection starts, it proceeds very quickly. More to come…
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