Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea

http://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/battleships-a-ridiculous-but-awesome-idea/

by fogus • 15 years ago

205 157 15 years ago

scottlocklin.wordpress.com

masklinn3• 15 years ago

In the same category, half a century later: aircraft carriers.

Although I'm not sure this qualifies as "hacker", let alone "news".

fraserharris• 15 years ago

Aircraft carriers are somewhere in between. The aircraft they carry are part of maneuver warfare.

latch5• 15 years ago

except they are extremely expensive and hard to defend. They are great for projecting power against countries that can't defend against them, but extremely ineffective against a remotely comparable force. They are an obvious high priority.

Ever see Independence Day or, more recently, Battle LA? Didn't you find it stupid that once the command ship are destroyed, the enemy essentially dies? This is what aircraft carriers represent.

Take the $23 billion dollars it takes to build the first Gerald R. Ford Carrier and invest that into various decentralized, independent, small technologies, and your army is considerably better for it when it comes to any serious threat.

It's like our military planners never read Ender's Game.

johanbev• 15 years ago

However, they are extremely expensive to build and keep running, and (perhaps) even more vurnerable than battleships which atleast had armour. And modern silent submarines, for instance those of the Swedish, German, and Norwegian navies reportedly often "sink" modern US and UK carriers in war games.

Androsynth• 15 years ago

This is an intellectually stimulating article, therefore it qualifies as hacker news.

pragmatic• 15 years ago

The relevant part (to us hackers) is the use of maneuver warfare vs "phalanx" fighting.

Think of Msft, Oracle, IBM, Apple as the phalanx fighters. They lock shields and charge, spending millions (billions) of dollars (instead of soldiers).

The problem is their tactics are clumsy. Imagine all the Microsoft VP's circling the wagons around really bad _implementations_ (the ideas aren't bad) - I'm sure you can thing of some.

If you are lean agile Mongol (hacker) you can easily run around them and attack them from the back.

Your OODA loop is much tighter. You can maneuver and decide much better than a big hierarchical organization.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

See: The Smartphone Wars: Tightening the OODA Loop http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2975

zeteo4• 15 years ago

The phalanx was a really bright idea for its day. The Greeks were able to defeat much larger Persian armies (Marathon, Plataea) with their phalanxes. And the phalanx was a crucial part of Philip II and Alexander's combined arms system and their maneuver warfare. "Phalanx" vs. "maneuver warfare" is, at best, a false dichotomy.

hugh34• 15 years ago

Indeed, this was my main issue with the article. As technology has developed, the advantage has switched back and forth from attackers to defenders, and from big heavy stuff to rapid manueverable stuff.

brudgers• 15 years ago

>"The relevant part (to us hackers) is the use of maneuver warfare vs "phalanx" fighting."

As the author points out, the battleship was the fastest thing afloat which makes it more akin to Stonewall Jackson's foot cavalry and the first principal of maneuver doctrine - "get there fastest with the mostest." It is only in hindsight and perhaps anachronistically that one classifies battleships as the phalanx rather than the mongol horde - or perhaps more appropriately Viking Longship. I will add that the scale and costs of aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines dwarf those of the battleship - there is some evidence that pouring money into holes in the water such as the Alpha and Typhoon classes played a significant role in the collapse of the Soviet Union.

[edit] All this to point out, that the distinction between maneuver and phalanx isn't always obvious and neither is the choice as a matter of tactics - when the enemy masses on your front, digging in and calling for aircover is may be the preferred alternative - even for highly mobile force.

arethuza5• 15 years ago

Having a large battleship collection does allow you to line them up nicely for review:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Fleet

Luc• 15 years ago

I don't think that postcard picture is giving a wholly realistic view of the Grand Fleet at the time. It seems like there's twice as many capital ships in the picture as there should be according to the text.

EDIT: Actually, if you click on the picture, the description does mention it's "likely an artist's vision".

astrodust• 15 years ago

Photoshopped, I knew it!

FlowerPower• 15 years ago

"Just as Western Civilization staggered and faded after the fall of Rome, Western Civilization has never really recovered from the shock of the Great War. Cultures which endured and developed over a thousand years were wiped out, never to return again. Western culture, abstract thought and artistic development: nothing important has developed since 1919; we’re still reeling from the shock."

What a load of bollocks. The author hasnt heard of the situationism, dada-ism, Zerzan or Sartre but for sure the western civilization has.

Further on "The Mongols never had the societal organization the West did, so they could never take advantage of their successes, and their various empires only served to make the Russians and Chinese paranoid, and Eastern European women more exotic looking.".

This is also bollocks, the mongols successfully ruled a vast area from China to Europe, the silk road was again revived, you could travel from Poland to Peking and not get robbed. The mongols collected all the taxes from such a vast region, even after Djenghis Khan died, thats some hell of organization right there.

On manuvre warfare, Alexander The Graeat (or as persions like to call him Alexander the Gay) certanly knew about this.

hernan7• 15 years ago

Or maybe he heard of situationism, dada, etc., and classifies them under "nothing important".

philwelch8• 15 years ago

Frankly, I would too--but in terms of culture and philosophy there were certainly significant advances post-1919.

gwern• 15 years ago

> This is also bollocks, the mongols successfully ruled a vast area from China to Europe, the silk road was again revived, you could travel from Poland to Peking and not get robbed. The mongols collected all the taxes from such a vast region, even after Djenghis Khan died, thats some hell of organization right there.

They successfully ruled.. for a very short period of time even by empire standards, before splitting up into various dynasties and going native and whatnot.

Why did Subutai stop in Eastern Europe, after destroying all opponents and units on par with the best Western Europe could offer, and with every prospect of conquering the Holy Roman Empire and extending the Mongolian empire to the Atlantic? Because Ghengis Khan's successor, Ogedei, had died and the succession process was so ill-defined and chaotic that Subutai had to stop everything and travel a continent back to Mongolia.

Succession and peaceful transfers of power, among other things, was never something the Mongols managed to deal with competently. We can admire them for their military prowess, we can admire individuals like the sinicized Kublai Khan for being good peace-time rulers, but we can't admire them for ruling competently 'from China to Europe' because they didn't.

_djo_2• 15 years ago

This is not exactly convincing. Battleships, far from being a ridiculous idea, were a logical and necessary step for any navy wishing to project power at sea. They were so heavily armoured and gunned that for a long time, from the late 19th Century to just before WWII, the only realistic defence against a battleship was another battleship.

While the Battle of Jutland may seem silly, the alternative would have been a bunch of smaller ships duking it out (probably for a similar result) or only one side possessing battleships and annihilating the other side.

Manoeuvre warfare with a lighter fleet was not an option, as smaller vessels had smaller guns that frequently could not even penetrate a battleship's armour. So a battleship would've been able to pick off opponents at ease while they struggled to cause any damage. It's no good getting inside your opponent's OODA loop if you can't cause any damage.

And the technology that would have permitted another nation to bypass the idea of a battleship altogether and attack it from a different angle just did not exist at the time. It was only decades after Jutland that naval aircraft and aircraft carriers became fast and advanced enough to make the aerial bombing and torpedoing of enemy vessels a real possibility. These days missiles are the great equalisers.

Manoeuvre warfare is fantastically effective when the circumstances allow for it, but the available conditions, technology and personnel can sometimes make it ineffective. For instance, the German Blitzkrieg was extraordinarily effective against the static French defences in 1940, but the same forces and tactics came unstuck in 1941 when faced with a vicious winter and the Russian scorched earth style of defence.

With reference to the hacker context, the lesson is that simply moving quickly isn't enough. You also need to understand what a competitor's real weaknesses are as well as understand which parts of their strengths you're incapable of attacking. If your enemy has battleships and all you have are frigates, then maybe you shouldn't be fighting them at sea.

eqdw• 15 years ago

You've actually got a really good idea. The author touches on it VERY briefly when he says "If the nations of the world had the equivalent cost invested in submarines or destroyers, maybe the same thing would have happened.", but I get the feeling that that is more lip service than him providing (what he thinks is) a legitimate counterpoint.

Good insight!

crikli4• 15 years ago

"Manoeuvre warfare is fantastically effective when the circumstances allow for it, but the available conditions, technology and personnel can sometimes make it ineffective. For instance, the German Blitzkrieg was extraordinarily effective against the static French defences in 1940, but the same forces and tactics came unstuck in 1941 when faced with a vicious winter and the Russian scorched earth style of defence."

Nah, the reason it came unstuck is because the Germans ran out of fuel and because overrunning Stalingrad became a point of pride with Hitler and the Wermacht...there were not tactical/strategic reasons to occupy the city when they could have encircled and passed.

Encirclement and passage was one of the lessons the American military learned (sort of) from Stalingard that they later executed in the island hopping campaigns of the Pacific. Rather than invading every island, they just bypassed those without strategic value, cut the shipping lanes, and let the occupying forces starve.

_djo_2• 15 years ago

That's a fair point, the pointless focus on Stalingrad was folly and a big contributor to the defeat. But the lack of preparedness for the Russian winter (and the impact it would have on the speed of movement) and the inability to capture supplies as they captured terrain both played big roles as well.

zeteo4• 15 years ago

Encirclement was by no means discovered at Stalingrad! The Germans themselves created plenty of kessels in '39-'43. And the classical example is, of course, Hannibal's strategy at Cannae.

eftpotrm3• 15 years ago

Not just running out of fuel but general supply line issues.

Blitzkrieg (around which the German forces had been designed) was predicated on the assumption that you could quickly overrun a territory before the defenders could react to it. Which works fine in Poland and, to a degree, France (though that was partly due to some interesting internal politics in France at the time) but where's the first defensible border you could run to and hold in Russia? The Urals. Waaaaaaay too far to go. Even if you're starting from Konigsberg (as was then) and aiming at Moscow, that's still further than the whole width of France.

Germany was faced with supply lines that grew too long and a front that rapidly fanned out and thinned their forces. They ended up moving supplies by rail but had to lay their own rails as they went because the pre-existing Russian lines didn't match what they had and could feed from Germany. They needed supplies at such a rate that they couldn't afford the track time of sending cars back, so cars were abandoned at the front instead. The supply lines just became too long to service.

Then partisan campaigns started breaking out in captured territory requiring manpower to keep that land placid enough to support the front. Yet more supply issues.

Then.... winter came. German troops were faced with weather so cold that when they were fed soup it froze on their spoons before they could get it into their mouths. Yet Russian troops would hide in the snow all day and come out to attack by night. No doubt helped by convict armies which had regular army guns trained on them from behind and were under no illusions that returning in any condition to still fight would have them shot by their own side.

I don't believe there's been a single successful western land invasion of Russia since the Vikings. The country has demonstrated itself well able to simply absorb and tire out attackers by going back into the ample available space, safe in the knowledge that if they could somehow overcome the horrendous logistical challenges, they'd be so weak by the time winter came that it woudln't matter anyway. A brutal strategy, but apparently effective.

jxcole• 15 years ago

Ok come on, there was no need for them to go to war with Russia AT ALL, if Hitler had focused on Britain and waited until the West was completely defeated (a few years at the most), he would not have lost. Russia divided the Germans in a way that was unnecessary.

paganel• 15 years ago

> Encirclement and passage was one of the lessons the American military learned (sort of) from Stalingard that they later executed in the island hopping campaigns of the Pacific.

I was just reading Machiavelli's "Discourses on Livy" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourses_on_Livy) last night, more exactly a chapter called "Fortresses are generally more injurious than useful":

> But when the prince has not a good army, then fortresses whether within his territory or upon the frontiers are either injurious or useless to him; injurious, because they are easily lost, and when lost are turned against him; and even if they are so strong that the enemy cannot take them, he will march by with his army and leave them in the rear; and thus they are of no benefit, for good armies, unless opposed by equally powerful ones, march into the enemy’s country regardless of cities or fortresses, which they leave in their rear. We have many instances of this in ancient history; and Francesco Maria did the same thing quite recently, when, marching to attack Urbino, he left ten hostile cities behind him without paying the least attention to them.

You can very well replace "fortress" with "battleship" and the idea is the same.

Anyway, I highly recommend the book, and you're mentioning somth about the US Army learning from the Germans' mistakes. Well, I can tell you that they certainly did not learn anything from reading Machiavelli, otherwise they wouldn't have trusted Karzai in Afghanistan (there's a chapter called "How dangerous it is to trust to the representations of exiles"), not to mention trying to conquer peace by bribing everyone involved in ruling present Afghanistan (there's also a chapter for it: "Republics and princes that are really powerful do not purchase alliances by money, but by their valor and the reputation of their armies") or not doing anything about Abu Ghraib ("How dangerous it is for a republic or a prince not to avenge a public or a private injury").

Here's the English translation of this great book: http://oll.libertyfund.org/simple.php?id=775

masklinn3• 15 years ago

> They were so heavily armoured and gunned that for a long time, from the late 19th Century to just before WWII, the only realistic defence against a battleship was another battleship.

German U-Boats demonstrated battleship's obsolescence during very early WWI (U-9 sank 3 battleships in under an hour in September 1914...), and this was confirmed in the early 20s with aerial torpedoing (which Admiral Percy Scott had predicted would end battleships in 1914).

The only thing which let battleships "survive" into the 40s were navy brass conservatism and inertia, and the lack of military conflicts.

zeteo4• 15 years ago

Yes, submarines managed to sink a few battleships when they had the element of surprise on their side. As soon as anti-submarine tactics adapted, the battleships were again reasonable safe against torpedo delivery systems. (Even in the 1890s, battleships had been vulnerable to torpedo boats, a challenge surmounted by the adoption of secondary, quick-firing armament.) It was only with the arrival of strong naval aviation that battleships lost their supremacy.

Symmetry3• 15 years ago

And the author overlooks the long, long history of bigger ships with bigger guns bringing victory to European forces.

In the Battle of Lepanto the Christian alliance was able to use big ships with cannons mounted on them to crush the Ottoman force before the Ottoman's flanking force was able to get in position.

In the European expansion into the Indian Ocean large boats with big guns were able to easily defeat hordes of smaller, lighter ships that they faced letting the Portuguese, then the Dutch and English take control of some of the most valuable trade lanes in the world.

In the Opium War the British were able to easily win because of big guns that could out-range anything the Chinese had and fast steam engines that let them set the pace of engagement.

And if things at Jutland had gone just a little bit differently it might have been the Germans who had won the war.

stcredzero6• 15 years ago

Battleships, far from being a ridiculous idea, were a logical and necessary step for any navy wishing to project power at sea. They were so heavily armoured and gunned that for a long time, from the late 19th Century to just before WWII, the only realistic defence against a battleship was another battleship.

Or, playing the "wolf card" amidst the fog of war and a resourcefully laid smokescreen with a bunch of smaller ships. (Causing the enemy commander to think, "They must have larger ships back there." This was destroyers vs. cruisers, not battleships, though.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_off_Samar

I suspect that the future belongs to drones. Autonomous Air Independent Propulsion submersible drones would be far less expensive than an aircraft carrier, but very likely to be able to lie in wait for a carrier and torpedo it.

EDIT: Correction -- one could actually say those American destroyers engaged the Yamato, which was the biggest, baddest battleship ever.

ramchip• 15 years ago

> Autonomous Air Independent Propulsion submersible drones

Isn't this basically an electric torpedo?

Unseelie2• 15 years ago

Not just drones, but -swarms- of drones. I make that point because its important to differentiate between what could be massive, battleship (or, likely, crusier) sized drones, and collections of very small drones.

There's reasons this makes sense, even in the context of a fight against battleships (please assume similar technical capability, since a WWII Battleship would likely not fair well against a 2020 drone swarm..) A battleship, even a big automated one, has a series of weak points, such as sensors, removal of which can cripple the ship, and a swarm doesn't lose effectiveness at a blast from heavy weaponry...it may get a hole punched through it, and have only a few drones taken out...

werpon2• 15 years ago

Big warships could accomodate bigger cannons. Bigger cannons could deliver bigger shells further, enabling your warships to hit the enemy while keeping out of their range.

These capital ships aren't being built today because missiles and fighter planes suddenly negated their advantage, not because they weren't a good idea to begin with.

IMHO it's an overwhelming act of condescension pretending to be smarter than thousands of admirals and military advisors, many of them with lots of real world experience fighting wars and stuff.

jhamburger• 15 years ago

I don't think it's necessarily condescension to second guess decisions made 100 years ago. I can think of plenty of examples of clearly horrible decisions agreed upon by the consensus of elite thinkers 100, 50, 20, 10, or 5 years ago...

isleyaardvark• 15 years ago

> IMHO it's an overwhelming act of condescension pretending to be smarter than thousands of admirals and military advisors, many of them with lots of real world experience fighting wars and stuff.

I thought the same thing, but then I remembered that the military leadership and tactics during The Great War were pretty damn lousy (e.g. trench warfare). For some reason it seems like it's surprisingly common for wide varieties of armies to repeat history.

hugh34• 15 years ago

then I remembered that the military leadership and tactics during The Great War were pretty damn lousy (e.g. trench warfare)

What's so lousy about trench warfare? I mean, yes, it sucks, but it's a Nash equilibrium given the technology at the time (very good machine guns, lousy tanks and aircraft). If your enemy has trenches, you need trenches too. What else would you have done?

stcredzero6• 15 years ago

Big warships could accomodate bigger cannons. Bigger cannons could deliver bigger shells further, enabling your warships to hit the enemy while keeping out of their range.

In hindsight, if the ability to deliver more ordinance a longer distance was the thing, the aircraft carrier should have been a shoo-in.

smallblacksun2• 15 years ago

The problem was that until WWII-era bombers, airplanes couldn't deliver ordnance with enough accuracy to actually hit enemy ships reliably.

crikli4• 15 years ago

I've observed a principle that militaries build to win the last total war they fought. This is why guys like Billy Mitchell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell) were ignored about the importance of air power leading up to WWII. The status quo was to gear up for another WWI, complete with entrenched and barely mobile front lines.

But of course the German Blitzkreig, a brilliant archetype of maneuver warfare, overran these emplacements, the fixed system of defense built by the French being the best example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maginot_Line).

The US military has been developed for the last 60 years to re-win World War II; even the Cold War was really just the US and Russia building to re-win WWII until Russia ran out of cash.

As one can see given the issues that the US military has had in Iraq and Afghanistan the WWII methods of battle, which have devolved back to phalanx warfare, are struggling (again) to defeat maneuver warfare.

Symmetry3• 15 years ago

But it was the Siegfried Line[1] in WWII that let the Germans concentrate their whole army against the Poles and defeat them before turning west, and that let them attack where the French weren't rather than have to defend the current border. So German tactics in WWII were dependant on the same static defenses that the French used, but they took that and added a maneuver component instead of replacing it entirely.

Manuever warfare often relies on a static force to pin the enemy in place while the mobile elements do their thing. Saying "Maneuver good, static bad" is just as silly as the reverse, whats needed for success is to understand the advantages and disadvantages of the various tools available and intelligently choose the right tool or combination of tools for the task at hand.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Line

jcnnghm• 15 years ago

I was thinking exactly this. As I recall modern tactics call for suppressing fire to pin the enemy down while friendlies maneuver. It would seem that static and maneuver warfare are intertwined. Additionally, I believe the rule of thumb is that it takes five times as many people to capture a position as it does to defend a position. Like many things, there is probably an element of balance here.

eftpotrm3• 15 years ago

The Siegfried Line was made enormously more effective by general malaise in the Western armies (then under French command) though; in spite of being relatively weak and unfinished it went largely untroubled. There were some small incursions into western Germany but they weren't substantial.

What makes this particularly galling is relative strengths of the two armies at the time; the Allied forces in northeastern France had significantly more tanks (for example) available there than the Germany army had in total, let alone defending the western front. It's far from impossible that a serious, concerted attack on western Germany in the 1939-1940 'phoney war' period could have had enough success to significantly alter the course of the war and turn it significantly into a land war in western Germany for much of the period.

icarus_drowning2• 15 years ago

I don't know how much I agree with the statement "even the Cold War was really just the US and Russia building to re-win WWII until Russia ran out of cash". Not that it matters for this discussion, because I think its clear that the U.S. military is still trying to design itself for a Cold War scenario, and encountering huge problems when faced with asymmetrical opponents.

lupatus2• 15 years ago

I think the USA are doing smashingly well against their current crop asymmetrical opponents. Wikipedia has the GWOT American casualties count (military and civilian) at 8800 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_terror#Casualties). Far more American citizens than that died the last time we faced a serious asymmetrical opponent (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_Wars).

quickpost• 15 years ago

Fascinating stuff - thanks for posting. :)

nickpinkston• 15 years ago

Looks like The Battle of Jutland actually had 78 torpedo boats on the German side - didn't they get the maneuver memo?

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jutland

zeteo4• 15 years ago

"in their heyday of displacement speed vessels, [battleships] were the fastest things on the high seas"

Cruisers and destroyers were always faster than battleships (they had to be), displacement hull and all. It gives no confidence when you start the article with a glaring factual error.

"The idea of battleships duking it out in the high seas is pretty ridiculous when you stop to think about it. It never really happened unless you count the Battle of Jutland."

If you write such an article, you should do a bit of research and be at least dimly aware of the battles of Tsushima, Heligoland Bight, Moon Sound etc. etc. etc. Battleships were indeed a bit slower, but when they showed up they instantly dominated the field with their range and firepower. Even in WW2, when the carrier greatly reduced their importance, battleships fought a few very important engagements, e.g. Denmark Strait and second battle of Guadalcanal.

It's easy to deride things you don't understand as "tumescent penii". But the historical fact is, for about half a century after 1890, battleships were indeed the most effective (and also expensive) naval weapons system in existence.

lionhearted2• 15 years ago

Actually a pretty good article, despite the inaccuracies noted here in other comments. The author uses some hyperbole and makes some errors, but still an interesting discussion regarding phalanx vs. maneuver warfare.

While we're picking on individual parts, though -

> For missile silos, just target the enemy’s silos with lots of missiles and you can duke it out and win (just like the phalanx). If he puts his missiles on rail cars, you haven’t got a chance of hitting them all.

Technically that's true, but I think the reason countries use missile silos and stationary bases is actually for ability to protect key installations and arms during domestic unrest and rioting, which is a statistically much more likely problem for a world power than getting hit with a first strike from another major world power without any warning or preparation time.

Still, even with some errors and exaggerations, it was quite an interesting read.

bluekeybox3• 15 years ago

> I think the reason countries use missile silos and stationary bases is actually for ability to protect key installations and arms during domestic unrest and rioting, which is a statistically much more likely problem for a world power than getting hit with a first strike from another major world power...

You are very mistaken. The only reason domestic unrest is a more likely danger for a world power is because the country we are speaking of already has missile silos and stationary bases in the first place. Ownership of missile silos with nuclear warheads reduces chances of attack by a foreign power by such a huge amount that domestic unrest becomes a more realistic threat.

lionhearted2• 15 years ago

> You are mistaken. The only reason domestic unrest is a more likely danger for a world power is because the country we are speaking of already has missile silos and stationary bases in the first place.

Actually, I think you're mistaken, but let's think this through -

There's 200 countries in the world, roughly. Call the current world powers America, China, UK, Russia, and maybe a couple other European countries.

In any given year, there's a lot more chance of any given country having a riot/unrest than there is an attack by America, China, UK, or Russia. Like, much higher. And usually, there's considerable advance warning before attacks so you could prepare.

If you like, you can add in places with a decent mix of either high troop strength or very technologically advanced military - even adding in places like North Korea, Iraq before losing its various recent wars, and Israel doesn't seem to change the numbers that much. The chance of serious unrest in any given country in the world is much higher than the chance of attack by a militarily powerful nation.

We could check actual numbers if this isn't convincing, but the number of domestic insurrections every year are much higher than attacks by a major world power. And also, those usually come with more telegraphing beforehand than domestic unrest does.

william42• 15 years ago

I don't see how the argument is circular.

InclinedPlane2• 15 years ago

He misses the point entirely with missile silos. The backbone of the modern nuclear arsenal is the ballistic missile submarine. Far more mobile and far harder a target than any railborn missile.

eru5• 15 years ago

Rails are quite easy to sabotage.

rdtsc2• 15 years ago

An intermediate solution are land mobile launch platforms:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT-2UTTKh_Topol_M

They have randomized patrol routes, so it is hard to track them, but they can launch thermonuclear MIRV warheads.

Yeah subs are a lot better but also a lot more expensive...

jrdrake• 15 years ago

I think missile silos are stationary is pretty easy to understand. They're easier to guard and if you look at when they were built rather than their current functional use (its debatable if there is one when looking at SLBM and B-52/B-2 dropped nuclear weapons). In the 1950s, when ICBM projects began, the threat was not thermonuclear weapons, but fission weapons. It was thought that the silos might survive a direct/indirect attack on a facility.

After the advent of the hydrogen bomb, no harden target can really be called safe. Coupled with modern military GPS and you have a super-precise, super-powerful weapon.

gaius4• 15 years ago

And accuracies measured in hundreds of metres.

Tuna-Fish7• 15 years ago

The silo parks in USA are still nuke-proof. Because they are far enough apart that you can't get more than one per hit, and it has to be a low or groundburst, but close enough together that the first hit causes a cloud of dust that the subsequent missiles would have to go through to hit their targets. And a nuclear warhead in re-entry has no chance of surviving hitting that dust cloud.

This means that the silos are protecting each other -- you'd need to wait hours between hits to be able to land nukes on all of them. (Or hit them all within the minute.)

DifE-Q• 15 years ago

The previous and current nuclear strategy consists of a concept called TRIAD. Land, Sea and Air nuclear weapons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_triad

They all have their advantages and disadvantages and strategic uses. Taken together they are a complete package of nuclear strike capabilities. Nothing about it is obsolete as the author suggests.

Battleships also are hardly obsolete and also have advantages and disadvantages. For instance, when the Missouri class battleships were retired in the 90's, it was met with a great deal of opposition by the marines. No other weapon in the military arsenal could provide beach bombardment like the battleship; and certainly not for the low cost. The marines were promised a replacement - they are still waiting.

dolvlo• 15 years ago

I don't find this article applicable to hacking at all. Maybe running a business, but I don't follow the necessary relationship between hacking and business.

burke• 15 years ago

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

lefstathiou• 15 years ago

I believe the article misses the point that America, through it's complete dominance of the air and seas, has made naval warfare largely irrelevant for 99% of countries - hence their lack of will or desire to build them. The world saw centuries of naval proliferation up to WW2.

icarus_drowning2• 15 years ago

He also misrepresents the view of Victor Davis Hanson-- I think he's referring to "Carnage and Culture", which has a much more nuanced (and thus far different) argument.

neutronicus• 15 years ago

In my admittedly ignorant opinion, he uses the terms "maneuver warfare" and "phalanx warfare" so broadly as to make them almost meaningless.

StuffMaster2• 15 years ago

The Mongols could defeat regular armies because they had many thousands of men who lived their lives on horseback, with bow in hand. It's not that they were smarter, it's that they had the option.

troutwine• 15 years ago

It's also worth noting that the Mongols were turned back by the Germanic tribes because, well, compound bows simply don't work in damp European forests whereas francesca _do_. Phallanx tactics versus maneuver, as the author has it, is meaningless in the face of the inability or unwillingness to adapt to your environment.

nl2• 15 years ago

Reference?

The Mongols easily won the Battle of Legnica in Poland: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Legnica

That's really the most Western of their major battles, and they were turned back by choice, not by losses in battle.

Were there any cases where they had anything other than skirmishes with Germanic tribes?

sedachv• 15 years ago

Mongols? Germanic tribes? Damp forests? You have a very interesting view of that period of history.

StuffMaster2• 15 years ago

>nobody wanted to risk their big expensive battleships in such an engagement again

This is his only proof that they're useless? Sorry, I need a lot more than that. Anybody who's played Civilization will know that you keep your battleships safe due to their cost, but they're supremely powerful nonetheless.

akdubya2• 15 years ago

Any battle tech that's an order-of-magnitude cheaper to kill than to produce is destined for obsolescence. You can see this happening now with main battle tanks, which are easily knocked out by IEDs and increasingly sophisticated man-portable missiles. It will be interesting to see what happens to the manned air superiority fighter over the next couple of decades now that unmanned drones are being deployed on a wide scale.

gaius4• 15 years ago

Probably nothing. Remember that unmanned drones were used in combat in Vietnam. They were quite short ranged of course, and could only be used for one mission: Sidewinders.

smallblacksun2• 15 years ago

Few M1s have been destroyed or badly damaged by insurgents in Iraq. Their use has declined since the invasion not because they are too vulnerable, but because they are less useful without enemy tanks to engage and using them against infantry in urban environments risks heavy civilian casualties.

philwelch8• 15 years ago

Also, they're harder to fit on the streets.

akdubya2• 15 years ago

I was thinking less about the conflict in Iraq than the conflict in and around Israel, where small groups of insurgents have over the past decade mounted increasingly sophisticated attacks on Israeli armor in the open. The deterrent factor here is just as important as the ability to blow stuff up.

joeburke• 15 years ago

Interesting article but the grammar and the typos... ouch. Especially when he's trying to use some uncommon words.

cafard• 15 years ago

a ridiculous and not especially awesome post....

Jd2• 15 years ago

I don't think anyone has pointed this out in a comment yet...

What is better with very expensive but obsolete machinery than to people use their machinery to duke it out. Will things explode and sink "at great cost" ? Well yes, that's sort of the point. It is even more costly to keep them afloat and maintained.

To those who think this is cruel, European powers periodically fought wars with each other for thousands of years before 1914, they just never were quite as catastrophic (enter chemical weapons and, later, nukes). Hell, the Catholic church tried to ban jousting many times since... you guessed it, people frequently died trying to poke each other with sticks for the sake of scarves from pretty ladies.

Hooah!

bitwize• 15 years ago

If he puts his missiles on rail cars, you haven’t got a chance of hitting them all. So it was, metaphorically, with the actual battlewagon; when it was at the peak of its capabilities, it was overcome by the manoeuvre warfare tactics of the aircraft carrier (which is itself probably made obsolete in real modern warfare by the cruise missile, the internet and the satellite).

Don't forget robots! Man, you think the guided missiles in the first Gulf War were cool? Now we can kill people entirely by electromechanical proxy, staying out of the line of fire and incurring little to no risk ourselves! Man, we're living in the future! What a bunch of pussies we are.

Like Bill Hicks said, why can't we use this technology to shoot food into the mouths of hungry people instead?

rubergly• 15 years ago

I had a very hard time taking the article seriously after reading "penii". I hate when people try to sound smart by incorrectly pluralizing this word.

Jd2• 15 years ago

I had an interesting conversation with Martin van Creveld not long ago about fighter jets. Since he is one of the more famous military historians out there, he often gets asked for advice by senior defense personnel. Lots of European governments asked him if they should purchase F22s, etc. from the US. His advice, get UAVs, fighters don't matter any more (He just wrote the definitive book on the history of Air Power, btw).

Anyways, no one actually takes his advice. Acquisitions are always busy buying supplies for the last war. Surprise, surprise.

gonzo• 15 years ago

He seems to have forgotten about the Bismarck http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_battleship_Bismarck

true fact: my wife's great uncle, Tuck Smith, is the US pilot who spotted the Bismarck, back when the US (supposedly) wasn't involved in WWII.

http://www.navytimes.com/legacy/new/0-NAVYPAPER-1642064.php

(Interesting fact, he was flying over Wake island on 12/7/41)

nl2• 15 years ago

Some guy called Napoleon seemed to know a little bit about maneuver warfare, and he was around before battleships. There was this little thing called the Battle of Austerlitz[1] that the author may be interested to read about.

Napoleon kind of knew what he was doing. His use of position and movement is actually mentioned in the Wikipeda's article on maneuver warfare [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Austerlitz [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuver_warfare#Napoleon.27s_u...

JabavuAdams• 15 years ago

> Western culture, abstract thought and artistic development: nothing important has developed since 1919; we’re still reeling from the shock.

Information theory? Software? Modern quantum mechanics?

Yeah, I know there's been no important stuff except that important stuff.

Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea

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