:some-controversy:
me trying to separate the "China has super advanced missiles, we need a $100 Billion more funding for missiles and interceptors!" narratives from the "China's missiles aren't that advanced, it makes sense to spend $100 Billion on new ships because they're totally not obsolete" narratives to find out if China can actually do a gamer move on the Great Satan.
Hmm, what other system do we know of that requires its enemies to be both weak and strong at the same time?
Starts with an F... Fax Machine? No that doesn't seem quite right :thinkin-lenin:
It is a thing. Trotsky had an armored battle train that helped win the Russian Civil War for the Bolsheviks. Look at this beautiful train. In fact, the Red Army has over a dozen of these bad boys.
In 1918, the Bolsheviks had 23 such armored trains. By 1920, one in every 10 of the the Red Army’s artillery guns rested on one of its 103 rail-borne battleships.
That’s pretty sick.
Would love to see like an Art Deco style train but with massive cannons on it
Trotsky was only based during the civil war lmao
If Trotsky died in 1922 he would've been an immortal hero, an untouchable legend who helped establish the Petrograd Soviet in 1905, steadfast ally of Lenin who knew the Bolsheviks were the only hope for revolution despite being a Menshevik himself, genius organizer who took a ragtag group of disillusioned recruits and turned them into the magnificent Red Army that beat back the Whites and an international coalition of dozens atop wood-burning trains.
He threw a fit that Stalin became chairman and waged a protracted low level civil war against Stalin for over a decade, calling the Soviet Union the time's equivalent for "red fash" and allying himself with fascists to take down the USSR if he couldn't personally rule it. He became a far left communist who said that socialism in one country was impossible, and if you weren't constantly in revolution you were no communist at all. He was later assassinated in Mexico by the NKVD under Stalin's orders after Frida Kahlo stopped fucking him because she became a Stalinist. His followers today sell newspapers.
I mean, they definitely were a thing and maybe still are in some places
I need a photo of the 21st Century Armoured Train, you can't just say that and not show a photo
It was on a Twitter thread posted to one of the first megathreads, and I do not have a link :LIB:
If you want some good armored train content though there is a good WTYP episode on them
(To be clear the :LIB: was directed at me for not linking, not at you for asking)
I've seen the armoured train episode, and I would barely count that Howitzer on a flat car as an armoured train
https://twitter.com/markito0171/status/1500866495827566594
I feel like the more "businessy" sounding like you'd find with bloomberg, wjs, etc. , the "truer" the info is. They are just using statements/facts without justifying themselves ideologically too much and speak directly to the ruling class. I think someone here commented before that Chomsky talks about this and I've been trying read stuff with this in mind. :chomsky-yes-honey:
I just cannot get over how they cite the source "Chinese Internet" for that picture at the top.
just as carriers made battleships useless, hypersonic missile beats carrier. by rock, paper, scissors logics this should signal a return to dominance for the battleship
Which is why I worry about how a war between the US and China could go nuclear fast (US nuking China, I mean). OK so in the span of a week China basically destroys every US carrier group in the Pacific. So what does the US do then? Ignoring the extreme humiliation Americans would feel... what other options would the US have? Can't project air power that far away without carriers. Either end the war or go nuclear, right?
We've known this for a while now, see millenium challenge 2002. Hypersonic missiles have now solidified that position.
Carriers are only useful for projecting power on countries in the global south that can't fight back.
iirc it was guys on speed boats with shoulder fired weapons that was the decisive factor, then they were like nuh uh that's not fair and just didn't count it
I'm really going to need you to start supporting my puns going forward
It's going to be super funny when WW3 grinds to a halt after 72 hours because literally every US and Chinese ship is sunk and every single airplane shot down.
China, Russia, EU, USA all nuke eachother into oblivion and Vietnam stands alone as the world's superpower.
Cuba quietly in the corner pumping out a new vaccine for all the weaponized diseases
Also happens to be sitting on one of the world's largest untapped fossil fuel reserves. And with all the other industrial nations reduced to smoldering ruins and nuclear winter on the horizon, they don't even have to feel bad about using it.
Well no shit. What did people think the missiles were for? Comically oversized traffic cones?
They knew about hypersonic missiles since 2009?
So the Great Satan has their own lot of them, right?
They're trying to make them, but they keep failing lol.
The great satan lacks the material science knowledge to make hypersonic missiles, unless they get SpaceX involved.
No, really, 13 years later they have to eventually been able to design something; and it's not like they started developing something like that after China announced they have done it, the idea is probably very old.
So, then what? The US kept it quiet? Is it possible to do that?
They have one but it keeps blowing up in testing lol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-183_ARRW
Testing.
A booster flight test of ARRW took place in April 2021 at Point Mugu Sea Range, off the coast of Southern California but did not launch successfully;[16] this was the eighth test for ARRW.[17]
Another test in May 2021 for the ARRW's avionics, sensors and communications systems, was successful. The test did not use any of the ARRW’s systems but instead used a B-52 based system. On a flight to Alaska from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, the B-52 was able to receive target data from over 1,000 nautical miles (1,900 km) away.[18]
In July 2021, a second flight test at Point Mugu Sea Range, again being dropped from a B-52 bomber, was a failure as the rocket motor failed to ignite.[19][20] On 15 December 2021, the third flight test failed to launch as well.[21] On 9 March 2022, Congress halved funding for ARRW and transferred the balance to ARRW's R&D account to allow for further testing, which puts the procurement contract at risk.[22]
Do the great Satan have much use for hypersonic missiles? China and Russia doesn't rely on aircraft carriers the same way the great Satan does.
Maybe you can put those hypersonic missiles on boats, or in US puppet countries.
The comments are pure :copium: and it's making my day:
Isn’t this like saying, “ships currently have no defence against meteor strikes?”
Since when is ballistic missile guidance in any way capable of homing on a moving vehicle? If there’s anything more innovative to this technology than Russian-style military “not having analogs in the world” pot-beating, it would have been worth an analysis in the article.
Come on, this weapon is plasma stealth all over again – does not and never will exist in any usable capacity, except buzz. Homing seeker electronic sensors don’t survive re-entry, end of story. The Harpoon is NOT a ballistic missile!
Escorts can shoot down incoming BMs in their terminal phase until their SM cells are empty; they can carry far more SMs amongst them than China could lob at a CVBG. Something coming down fast and hot is easy to shoot down.
By the way, has no-one mentioned the Standard SM-3 Block IIa yet? True, it’s untested under war conditions, but it is an anti-ballistic missile defence that has the virtue of actually existing, as opposed to this Chinese superweapon that, at the moment, is about as real as The Red October.
:frothingfash: :rage-cry:
What fucking dumbass was assuming a ship can’t be sunk or blown the fuck up by missiles?
Defense contractors love selling missile defense systems. I assume someone at the Pentagon actually believes their marketing hype.
One that wanted funding so they had to seem like a better investment than they actually are
You don't even need to sink a carrier, just damage the flight deck enough that planes can't take off or land.
it's actually a lot harder than you'd think. materials like steel are honestly strong af.
i thought this was common knowledge going back to the early (pre-9/11) days of the bush presidency when we thought his pet issue was gonna be CHINA not TERRAH
If there was something on a body of water that was dependent on not having any holes in it, I would think even a small explosion could sink that thing.
In theory, one of the upshots of the Millennium Challenge was the recognition that these asymmetrical attacks can and do work against larger and higher-value targets. And its not like Van Ripen was the last guy to use these tactics. Somali pirates operate the same way when targeting large merchant vessels. The Houthi Rebels have been extracting an enormous price from their Saudi-backed Yemen overlords through asymmetrical warfare. The US has conducted plenty of war games since, and we've developed a host of countermeasures - primarily in the fields of drone warfare and electronic espionage - to extend both our sensory range and power projection capacity.
There's still a question of range, positioning, targeting, and all the countermeasures to the above to be considered when talking about taking out a high value naval target. Its not like the US Navy is just going to beach a frigate or carrier and let the enemy take pot-shots.
That's not to say a nation with as sophisticated a military as China or India or even Iran couldn't pull this off. And there's a ton of risk in concentrating so much value in such a fragile piece of hardware. But the power-projection capacity of a floating fortress can't be underestimated. The US projects much of its power internationally through its network of military bases. And carriers are, at their heart, floating military bases.
Even as simple support craft, they offer a huge benefit to an invading or defensively reinforcing operation.
I mean, you can fire multiple missiles at the same group. No one is stopping you
Was there really no question about what happens when hypersonic misses exist..
then the follow up question which is what happens when hypersonic missles exist and can be manufactured cheaply and small enough to put in the global south hands..
