During the 1982 Falklands War, four Argentinian Skyhawks carrying 3 x 1000 lb bombs each attacked HMS Coventry and Broadsword as they defended the landings in San Carlos water. Two x 1,000 lb bombs hit Coventry and you can see the result by watching this dramatization here. The British fleet was doing what the US Pacific did off Okinawa: protecting an opposed landing. In 1982, the British threat was the Argentinian Skyhawks. In 1945 the Pacific Fleet’s enemies were 1,465 human-guided cruise missiles: the Kamikaze. If the navies in each case had been driven off, the entire enterprise would have failed.
The loss of the big type 42 British destroyers off the Falklands came as a shock to the naval world in part because these ships took comparatively much lighter damage than that visited on the smaller US destroyers off Okinawa. Coventry at 4,800 tons went down before 2 x 1000 lb bomb hits. By contrast, the Sumner class destroyer USS Laffey took four bombs, six kamikaze crashes and not only survived the Okinawa campaign, but went on to serve in Korea and throughout the Cold War.
Why were the ships so vulnerable? Because the threats which earlier ship classes were built for were now regarded as unlikely to be encountered. The 1980s were supposed to be the age of open ocean combat against a Soviet Fleet where British ships would sail in company with a giant American carrier. But the scenario never came off. Instead, the Falklands did. Western navies concluded from that experience that armor, damage control and redundancy were still important in the missile age. Those who watch the video link will be absolutely amazed at how little AAA HMS Coventry could employ at close quarters against the Skyhawks. British marines with puny 7.62 mm machine guns and rifles were on the upper decks blazing away at the Argentinians where a destroyer off Okinawa might have 14 x 40 mm and 20 x 20 mm against slower targets. But who in 1982 could have forseen that British ships in combat in the littoral in a modern day replay of the ordeal of the Pacific Fleet off Okinawa.
The Falklands conflict was an example of how history sometimes throws up the very type of conflict that we are unprepared for. Years after the air war over Vietnam had begun F4 Phantoms didn’t even have a gun to counter MIG 17s. The IED and not the Soviet Motorized Infantry Regiment, proved to be the key challenge to Western land mobility. But people mend and make do: adaptations are made. But once the crisis is over people go back to preparing for the same old limited scenarios because not every contingency can be prepared against. Countries buy just enough insurance in the form of military power against what they regard as the most likely threats, and often none at all against low-probability but high impact threats. Some buy no insurance at all and when a terrible thing happens, they simply check into the US military emergency room and demand to be saved. Europe has been underinsuring itself in defense for many decades. This works well enough as long as there are enough resources in the total insurance pool to shift around to meet unforseen contingencies, but nothing can be done if the resource pool is too small.
Captain Clapp writing in the Daily Mail argues that if Britain were confronted by an Argentinian threat today it simply wouldn’t have enough hulls to respond. “In 1982, we had 17 destroyers and sent eight to the Falklands. Now we have only seven – and many of them are engaged in policing waters elsewhere.” The response to the lack of numbers is typified in the class which is replacing the Falkland-era Type 42s is the Type 45 Daring Class, described by the British officials as the most advanced and powerful of their kind. That is a bold characterization which hides the clay feet beneath the brazen idol.
Apart from the fact that there will be only 6 Type 45s other observers have challenged that assertion that the Type 45s will be useful in all except an ideal scenario. Analysts say that while the Type 45s have good radar and fire control systems, they can only pack 48 anti-air missiles. The Type 45 can neither sink engage another warship nor endure a continued and mass assault. It will simply run out of missiles. The key shortcoming lies in its small French built missiles and small launchers, who physical dimensions preclude any expandability. The Defense Industry Daily compares it to other European and US destroyer types. In terms of pure magazine capacity, the Type 45s can pack about third to a sixth of the maximum loadout of a Mk 41 launcher equipped ship — and without a land attack or antiship capability.
The 7,350t Type 45’s VLS holding capacity is smaller than the equivalent American Arleigh Burke Class destroyer’s 90-96 Mk41 cells, and at 48 cells is equivalent to Spain’s 6,250t F100 AEGIS frigates. Its missile array are considered to be similar to, but slightly more capable than, the RIM-162 Evolved Seasparrow/ SM-2 combination found on many other western anti-aircraft ships. The one key difference is that Aster-15s cannot be quad-packed in Sylver launchers the way the RIM-162 can be quad-packed in the popular Mk41 VLS. Whereas an F100 AEGIS frigate could carry a mix of 128 RIM-162 ESSMs and 16 SM-2s, therefore, a Daring Class ship would carry just 32 Aster-15s and 16 Aster-30s in the same number of launch cells.
In a chronically under-resourced system only a crust can be constructed. It works well enough until a saturation point is reached and then it collapses completely. Numbers are good indicator of system fragility. Defence Talk details the history which saw the planned number of Type 45s go down from a planned buy of 12 to their current 6 and asks how the requirement to keep 5 ships at sea can be met with so few vessels. Answer: beat them to death and pay the high maintenance costs. This dilemma typifies the problems which resource starvation are imposing on the British defense establishment. To plug one gap they have to open a hole somewhere else. If they had 12 destroyers, they wouldn’t be able to afford the two planned aircraft carriers of the Queen Elizabeth Class. But if the Royal Navy is to have its two carriers, then there won’t be enough money to fund the RAF, whose abolition has actually been suggested.
Attempting to remain competitive across the board without sufficient resources to accomplish the goal can lead to shambolic attempts in all of them, resulting in a very fragile force or one in which the entire system is nullified by the absence of a key component. It’s almost comforting to think that perhaps the age of aircraft carriers and amphibious ships escorted by anti-air destroyers is over. In that case the fragile system will never be put the to test and Type 45s can sail the 7 seas if there are no CVs to defend. Or maybe the CVs can sail the bounding main without the Type 45s because there is no air threat to defend against. Maybe it will be “alright on the day”.
But as the Falklands proved so many years ago the unexpected sometimes happens and things are not alright on the day. In fact, they are terrible. Then you are down to the last of the things you thought you’d never need. “My kingdom for a horse!” An insurance pool can be reduced only so much; and the designs margins can be trimmed only so far before the systems starts becoming vulnerable that most common of risks: the unforseen. We don’t see, then we see and we forget.
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Don’t worry. China won’t ever do anything bad.
What does England need a navy for? Camels can’t swim that far…
The British isles will not make it though the next war to end all wars. SAD
For a mere $25 million or so, China can profitably supply about 100 silkworm anti-ship missiles to anyone in their growing list of client states. For the cost of one type 45 destroyer, (around $400 million?), China can equip perhaps 20 nations with the means to defeat the entire UK fleet of destroyers many times over again. This effectively neutralizes the UK destroyer fleet from within 100 miles of virtually every shoreline everywhere in the world.
I wonder if China ever becomes a net innovator and inventor of technologies rather than the world’s largest thieving pirate and/or parasite, if they’d be nearly as gentle and impotent as the West has been when our technologies and intellectual properties are stolen wholesale? Somehow I doubt a nation that executes thieves regularly would look as kindly (or insanely, foolishly, and cowardly) as we have in such cases. Ditto with the Muslim world. We give away our best inventions, hoping they’ll become more like us and turn into first world trading partners. They (Muslims, Chinese) take everything we give them, turn them into weapons to destroy us, and largely remain the same thieving despotic tribal brutes, rapists, and parasites they’ve always been.
This is a direct result of TPTB in britian believing that global governance will preclude the need for weapons of war. Only the weapons of population control are relevent to them.
If the Argentines had had an aircraft base in the islands, the British would not have been able to dislodge them – they would never have been able to approach the islands’ horizon.
I don’t guess anyone in Britain would argue with the details or the thrust of your post. I’m sure everyone knows their actual capabilities are now trivial, but are attempting to stay in the game with just their last few chips. Britain not quite as much so as the rest of Euroland, but they don’t believe in guns or violence anymore, and are happy to let the US shoulder any load – and then yell at us for doing so.
The Falkland’s War didn’t last long and I frankly didn’t pay much attention, but I thought that the Brits had assembled a sizable fleet led by two small aircraft carriers. Perhaps someone can explain why carrier jets could not protect and control the airspace above the fleet. . . . unless, of course, the Admiral was listening to Paul McCartney:
Gadfly:
Because the Brit carriers (really through-deck cruisers) only carried a handful of early Harriers. It’s not like they had real carrier air wings.
If Britain were faced with an adversary that posed a real threat, as opposed to an expeditionary venture as a tagalong to the Americans, their options would be limited to folding, abandoning their welfare state to undertake a crash mobilization (if they had time to build the equipment), or using their nuclear weapons to resolve the issue. They do not have the option financially to build a full-spectrum military and maintain it and train it, while at the same time maintaining their welfare state. Europe as a whole could do so, but Europeans do not yet trust each other enough for that.
It looks like tensions over the Falklands are heating up again:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1251901/Falkland-Islands-oil-row-Argentina-warns-UK-complacency.html
Hopefully, there won’t be a round 2.
It makes no sense to pay attention to myriad of unforseens when we can barely do anything about the obvious, e.g. the looming medicare liability. Total US debt (gov, state, local, corp and household) stands at about $57T, not counting future liabilities like medicare. IMO preparing for every contingency (like a $500m warship for fighting stone age pirates in the littorals) IS what’s narrowing our design margin. We are depleting our reserves.
“The 1980s were supposed to be the age of open ocean combat against a Soviet Fleet where British ships would sail in company with a giant American carrier. But the scenario never came off. Instead, the Falklands did. Western navies concluded from that experience that armor, damage control and redundancy were still important in the missile age.”
There’s always tradeoffs – more armor means slower, or else a larger power plant, which means bigger, which means a bigger target, and more expensive, which means fewer, etc.
When it came to their ability to intercept inbound enemy aircraft the RN in the Falklands was right up to date – if it had been 1918. They had no proper interceptors, being limited to the Sea Harrier, and with only a handful of those. They had no long range radar to detect in bound targets. The Sea Harriers were reduced to acquiring the enemy visually. New production Sea Harriers were rushed to the combat, and some had to be manned by RAF Harrier pilots, because the RN had too few aircrew. One RAF pilot lost a kill against two Skyhawks because he discovered at the last moment that the Sidewinder arming switches were in a different place than in the RAF Harrier; he finally gave up searching the cockpit and moved in to shoot one Skyhawk down with gunfire.
The country that was saved by radar and careful fighter control in 1940 seemed to have forgotten all about it.
The RN was saved primarily by the fact that most of the Skyhawks were flown by Argentine Air Force pilots and armed with British-made bombs not designed for attacking ships. The vast majority of the bombs failed to detonate, and since they were British designs the RN knew exactly how to disarm them. Most of the damage was done when the Argentine Navy Skyhawks attacked, armed with USN bombs and flown by pilots who knew how to use them.
After the conflict the British proceeded to equip helicopters with extendable radars to make a kind of simple AWACS (the RAF invented AWACS in WWII, too, by the way) and bought F-4J’s to provide a beyond-visual range defense of Port Stanley from land bases, just in case the Argentines decided to get frisky again.
And perhaps the most thought provoking lesson was that before the war the RN was planning to deactivate and sell one of the two aircraft carriers they used. The most likely buyer would have been the Argentine Navy.
The attraction of nuclear weapons was that they were cheap. They made mass armies unnecessary. One might go so far as to say that the postwar prosperity of the West made possible by the relative cheapness of nuclear weapons. The other thing that nukes did, while they were in the hands of a few, was that they abolished wars of territorial aggression. Conquest no longer made sense when your armies could be nuked.
But now that the nuclear genie is out of the bottle and the world faces a prospect of even low-rent, but aggressive countries like North Korea in possession of WMDs, the old paradigm is in danger of breaking. You might even say that it’s already broken. But the Western publics still mentally remain in the sixties and the attitudes of that era are now thoughtlessly applied to a situation that is radically different.
The fact is that security threats can now break out at two levels: the very sophisticated and the very low end. If you look at a force like the UK’s, they are poorly equipped to face either. In a world without the US, a terrorist petri dish in Afghanistan or the Middle East would be wholly beyond their ability to address. The EU might conceivably band together and make a showing, but with their huge welfare budgets, they would be like fat men trying to dance the tango.
If in fact the West faces a threat in the post-Cold War era, my guess is that it will be poorly prepared for it; not so much materially as mentally. Public policy is stuck in a rut that is at least sixty years old. It’s been modified here and there by concession to the existence of terrorism, and the rise of the non-Western world, but they really haven’t come to terms with it. This continued drivel about Global Warming is a good indication of the fantasy world they are in. Maybe it will be alright on the day. But then again, maybe not.
By the way, Exhelo, one of the way the ways the RN tried to defeat the Exocet missiles was to launch Sea King helicopters and have them skitter back and forth in front of the ship in hope that the missile would lock onto the chopper instead of the ship.
Would you have liked to have that job?
Well, one of the pilots who had to do that mission had a rather famous brother in England named Charles.
This speaks to my comment on the last thread. Ever since WW-II the path to promotion has been through program management and not combat aptitude. There is nothing wrong with missiles. At one time I owned the world’s worst surface to air missile system, BPDSMS. For engaging a small number of high performance, and therefor more fragile, aircraft at a distance missiles are the right answer. They are however expensive and carry a smaller warhead than guns do. For close in defense against massed attacks nothing is better than having many guns. There is nothing wrong with building lighter ships that burn less fuel and have greater endurance at sea. They are however less able to absorb damage than older ships that traveled slower and refueled more often.
What would the US do though if the Chinese built 50 diesel submarines and 500 B-25 bombers and 1000 P-51 fighters, and then proclaimed an ultimatum regarding Taiwan? The US Navy would be unable to intervene without employing nuclear weapons. The Naval surface and aviatian forces are no longer equiped to fight a nuclear battle. So they will serve no purpose in such a confrontation. They are now an enormous bluff and the Democrats will probably announce that they have discovered that and declare their intention to save money by chopping the fleet in half. As with what happened to the Royal Navy this debate over caabilities, threats and budgets becomes a self fulfilling race to the bottom. But we will be told that the new system to be bought with the savings from canceling current programs and mothballing or scrapping “antiquated” systems will be amazingly capable. Like the military inversion of “to big to fail” they will be declared to valuable to risk in combat. Once they have no combat role those programs can be canceled also. Rinse and repeat.
The Chinese and North Koreans have already developed surface to surface missiles that do not mimic the Western pattern of refined rarity but instead serve as long range artillery. While China has announced that they are developing a ballistic missile launched cruise missile for anti-carrier operations I think that the best use that has for them is as a distraction that encourages the Americans to focus on the most technically, as opposed to industrially, difficult threat.
What would change the game? We could in fact simply do differently, it remains only an act of will that is needed. We could cut all non-defense spending by 10% a year for 6 years. We could declare that no one is entitled to entitlements and that no person under 45 years old will receive benefits from Social Security as it exists. We could create a market based system similar to the federal employees Thrift Savings Plan to replace Social Security. We could announce that the only federal health programs will be through the VA or the Public Health Service. The later being for merchant seamen and Indians covered by treaties. Medicare and Medicaid should be phased out over a 20 year period. The immediate effects of such an announcement would be a dramatic inflow of capital into the American system and an explosion of wealth creation that would free up the resources for a military renewal program.
We can do that and the British can do the equivalent. We can build and maintain the forces that can engage and even better preclude a challenge from determined but less creative enemies. America cannot do that while feeding the patronage army of the Chicago graft machine and it’s associated supporters in the teacher’s unions, the trial lawyers associations and the media. The British cannot do it while paying for a stream of solidarity and feel good schemes from the likes of the “Comrades” of Islington Council.
BTW a gentleman who was I believe the Operations Officer of the Coventry came and talked to the our wardroom while I was the owner of that worthless SAM system on the USS Belleau Wood (LHA-3). What he emphasized was the importance of training and good damage control equipment. The British wore flash hoods during General Quarters. Our gear was comparatively antiquated.
MD @ 3: Yes, I meant to post earlier, the threat of cheap antiship missiles from China (or elsewhere) makes fielding a real navy these days very problematic.
“If in fact the West faces a threat in the post-Cold War era, my guess is that it will be poorly prepared for it; not so much materially as mentally. Public policy is stuck in a rut that is at least sixty years old. It’s been modified here and there by concession to the existence of terrorism, and the rise of the non-Western world, but they really haven’t come to terms with it. This continued drivel about Global Warming is a good indication of the fantasy world they are in. Maybe it will be alright on the day. But then again, maybe not.”
I think that our modern political institutions in the West are not up to facing a serious existential threat in any way, which is why I beleve that if a true existential threat arises those political institutions will not last long. They will be suspended and just like the ancient Romans, we will cry madly for our Sulla and give him all the power he asks for so that he can save us. And of course a Sulla always knows that the very first order of business is to quickly execute all of one’s domestic opponents. No trials, no explanations – just get it done and quickly.
And even if he is nostalgic enough to bring back the old forms when the crisis is past, as Sulla was, his successor won’t.
America’s first black President makes the Dolly Llama take the servant’s entrance in and out of the White House so Massa Banker in Beijing don’t get too upset.
W: But the Western publics still mentally remain in the sixties and the attitudes of that era are now thoughtlessly applied to a situation that is radically different.
After America’s wars, we demobilize our forces, reap a “peace dividend”, and never really ramp up to a war footing until the next war is well underway. First Manassas/Bull Run was attended by picnickers out to see the fireworks. Just over a year later we saw Antietam, the bloodiest single day of fighting in US history, to this day. Lather, rinse, repeat for WWI and WWII, were we really only got going in the last year of both of those conflicts. The character of Anglo-Saxon democracies is very much like a Japanese samurai: In times of peace, we wear pretty soft silk clothes and write haiku about cherry blossoms and tend to our rock gardens. But in times of war we cowboy up, become fierce military dictatorships, and the thing develops its own momentum until you see smoking ruins where there were once cities and cotton fields.
I have coincidentally been reading a novel by Patrick Robinson called “Ghost Force” in which Argentina with Russian help conquers the Falklands and destroys a British fleet sent to reclaim them. It sounds like a plausible scenario. Hope Obama and the Congressional misfits don’t destroy our defense capability to that same capacity.
(sigh)
I’m sure the Brits won’t have to worry about spending all that money on their navy once they’ve fully submitted to Sharia law.
After all, it is the “religion of peace” ™
(did I mention sigh?)
I’m surprised Nelson hasn’t drilled a hole out the bottom of his gravesite, all the spinning he must be doing lately.
Wretchard #13:
And nukes were not only cheap in terms of bang for the buck but led to other cheapness. Like in ship armor. You could not armor against nukes so why bother? The modern RN destroyers used aluminum for armor instead of steel. And they found that if a missile hit them, it not only went through the aluminum but did it so easily that the rocket motor was still burning when it was deep inside the ship. The missile almost did not need a warhead – the motor did huge damage on its own.
And not just ships. None of the U.S. jets used in Vietnam had any armor plate to speak of. The expectation was that a hit it would be by a missile and that would be nonsurvivable anyway. The F-105 and F-111 had bomb bays for carrying nukes, and these proved to be next to useless for conventional ordnance. The F-4 had no guns until the F-4E – the guns had been replaced by the air conditioning units that were in turn displaced from their usual spot by the extra crewmember needed for missile warfare. The F-102 had no gunsight, just radar; they shot unguided rockets at ground troops by guess and by golly when doing rescue support for downed pilots. The F-104 was no good for carrying bombs.
And as you say, nukes led to a certain fatalism in Western societies. If war came then it was all over, so why worry about it? The director of the movie Red Dawn said “Americans think that war will be one big flash and then it will all be over. People in other countries know from experience that will not be the case.”
Josh @5…
The airport at Stanley was being set up for military use but after being cratered by the RAF with Victors it feel into disuse.
—-
The fusing on the bombs had to be changed to immediate upon release. At first the Argentines assumed, from their gun-cameras, that each strike equaled success. It took them days to figure out that the RN was being hit with duds: their fuses were still in safety mode.
By the time this was surmised too many aircraft had been lost. But for this mistake the RN would have been ruined. Most of her front line destroyers sustained critical hits from duds. Naturally, the close-run nature of the battle was not given publicity.
Certain stupidities scale with remarkable consistency.
Many folks starting out in business fall into the trap of spending hugely on the appearance of success – diamond rings, tailored suits, expensive car, upscale office address – all before the first contract has been signed much less fulfilled.
At the local, state, and national scale, politicians – with the applause of their followers – command with pharaonic gestures vast projects to be builded, despite of the hollow echoes in the treasury vaults.
“Make your stinking bricks without straw!” is still the basic fallback strategy of those who see themselves as the Task Masters, foremen, managers, and Lords of the world.
These bullies are pleased with being at the top of the heap in their own world, but they’re ignoring the massed hordes crowding the borders.
Boy o boy, there’s not much satisfaction in seeing the future with unalloyed clarity.
The crooks who have hijacked our culture will without any doubt be among the most glum and disheartened behind the barbed wire fences after the ancient Asian juggernaut comes to collect its overdue loans.
Ah, well… It isn’t the perverted equality the Left has been trying to impose; It’s likely to be an emphatic egalitarianism in the culture of the new Laogai camps.
In 1938 Great Britain was no more prepared to fight a major war than she is now, yet she recovered in time when the danger became imminent and unmistakable. In 1940 the US Army held maneuvers in Louisiana with wooden guns and with trucks covered with large painted signs that read TANK, yet we managed when the time came. Not the best way to do things, but at least it shows all is not quite as lost as it might appear. The Royal Navy has for many decades been betrayed by the politicians, but the spirit of Drake and Collingwood and Nelson is still there. The WWII light cruiser HMS Bristol is anchored in the Thames as part of the Imperial War Museum. On June 6, 1944, the Rangers climbing the cliffs at Omaha beach came under fire from a German gun firing down the beach, and they called for somebody to come in and take out the gun. HMS Bristol answered the call and drove into the beach and took out the gun. Afterward, an American Ranger recounted the incident and said, “That Limey captain took her in so close to the beach we thought the sonofabitch had wheels on her.” I was astonished when our tour guide said she had never heard that story. The politicians might well be on their way to destroying the Royal Navy, but they will never destroy the tradition laid down by the likes of the skipper of a British 38 gun frigate who remarked to his officers as two French frigates bore down on him, that “They seem to want a fight today, and it would be a pity to deprive them of it.” Both French frigates were sent back to Plymouth with prize crews. Not to be too Pollyannaish, but so long as the tradition and spirit lives, ships can be built.
The most effective crew served weapon in Iraq and Afghan is the CAL .50 M2 Machine Gun, designed by Mr. Browning in the beginning of the 20th century. What kills effectively and consistently and reliably in war is GUNS, GUNS, GUNS. And in war you have to kill more of them than they do of you.
Somebody slaps one of these aluminium boats with a serious shock and they’ll lose the load. While they try to get that jet engine restarted, whoever it is will shoot them up like a paper target. All the electronic gimcracks in the world are useless without 400Hz electricity which cant be made without the prime mover.
Id wager that a Navy that can float a series of say 40 ships with a bunch of .50 Cal, 20MM and 40MM and the odd 5IN gun or two, coupled with an effective Fire Control system can address 95% of the surface threats and 75% of the aerial threats available. Back in the day the best idea the USN had for missile defense was a ridiculously high rate of fire gun system that generated a “wall of lead”.
Navy is doing sea trials for the littoral combat ship. Poor thing has one gun that I could see. How they gonna deal with a swarm of jihadi/pirates?
___________________
WRT Britain – Saw a TV piece in the 80′s. Some girl about 22 – 23. Asked how she felt about England, said “Well its not that Im a patriot or anything but I like it here.” They’re dead. They’re just going thru the motions.
My cousin’s husband served on HMS Broadsword in the Falklands, and he will be interested to hear that she was sunk there.
She is currently serving in the Brazilian navy under the name Greenhalgh.
However, the gist of your account of the Falklands is correct. The RN was at that time primarily an anti-submarine navy and supplied the bulk of NATO’s anti-submarine capability in the North Atlantic, with particular stress on the GIUK gap. The last of the British big carriers was scrapped in the late 1970s after the Labour government’s defence review in 1966 had thought it unnecessary to plan for their replacement. In 1982 the USSR’s carrier fleet consisted of two ships of the Kiev class with Yak-38 ‘Forger’ VTOL. The RN’s through-deck cruisers with Harriers (plus the SAM provision on destroyers) were judged to be sufficient defence against both these and long range Soviet aircraft.
It is unlikely that the Thatcher government would have scrapped the through-deck cruisers.
Abolishing the RAF was first suggested in March 1936, a week after Hitler’s entry into the Rhineland, when 114 Labour MPs (from a total of 154) voted for the disbandment of the RAF and Royal Naval Air Service.
Edit Denied.
Walt: The British spirit that WWI seriously weakened was almost killed by WWII and has been smothered by an overwhelming politically correct socialism since 1950. I despair.
FWIW – This tocque thingamabob is not Mozilla friendly. It does work in the spawn of the evil empire, tho.
blert @ 22: never heard that about the safeties!
(and that’s with iron bombs, right, pretty good shootin’ there)
But about the air strip, yes, it was being prepared, just a bit too late, but per your story maybe it still wouldn’t have mattered!
Once the Brits had the Harriers (and others?), and ground-to-air defenses, based on the island, they were able to fend off further attacks, I guess fly in materials themselves.
I was working for my father’s little electronic components export business back then, I recall the RUSH order for more components for another batch of British-produced sidewinders. I don’t guess they needed them at that moment, but they expected to fire themselves dry and needed to restore stock.
Walt,
ships can be built
But can they be built in time?
Yes and no, that is to say in a manner of speaking, no. At the very best what has changed are two things Industrial Capacity and Lead Times. First, the United States and Britain no longer have the capacity to produce steel and construct ships and other devices in the quantities needed to duplicate the construction of the same weapons at the same level of technology produced between 1938 and 1944. Second, the weapons that are planned for now are so complex, largely in their electrical and data systems components that the design and testing phases now take decades. Some of this delay could be reduced by tearing up check lists and repealing environmental or other regulations but not only is there some cost to doing so, but the newer systems really are more complex.
If we wanted to build modern battleships bristling with multiple mag-lev guns that could both survive combat and rain destruction on any location within 100 miles of a seacoast, which is to say over 80% of humanity, and also be equipped with 155 mm Vertical Load guns for shore bombardment and anti-surface warfare, we would have to address both constraints. We would have to spend billions of dollars and several years building the industrial capacity to produce the steel needed and construct the ships. Our current labor force is less skilled for these tasks than were the workers of earlier generations. At both the high end of engineering and design and at the site of physical labor and construction we are not producing people who could do the work. To change that would mean a complete overhaul of the education and employment systems. In addition to design and test workable fire control, weapons and communications systems of the complexity envisioned would take at best over a decade.
This means that what is needed is not simply for the public to recognize a threat and elect politicians who will rally them to step into the breach during the time of combat. That test was faced by the nation in 1864 and it almost failed to meet it before the votes of the troops ensured the reelection of Lincoln. The repudiation of George Bush under relentless seditious assault while he attempted to rally the nation as the troops were engaged in combat proves how far we are from that minimal standard. What would be needed however is even more. We would need to recognize the threat and undertake those reforms needed to reconstruct the armed forces so that they would be ready to meet a threat beginning in 10 to 15 years.
Wisdom consists of planting a tree for future generations to enjoy. Where will we find either the citizens or the politicians with that quality?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Broadsword_(F88)
Righto, does NOT say the Broadsword was sunk:
Broadsword took part in the 1982 Falklands War where, on 25 May 1982, she was providing air defence support to HMS Coventry. A technical fault in her Sea Wolf missile system allowed two Argentine Skyhawks to sink the Coventry.
Oh please Walt, you’re describing a people long dead and gone. The men who scaled the Normandy cliffs are either dead or in their eighties. The men who crewed the Bristol were older, and long dead.
As is Britain. Now, people writing in the Financial Times cannot WAIT to describe how, in the peaceful, post-Cold War world, Britain does not need nukes or a military? What for? There are no threats, and the money can be spent on trans-gendered beings of color seeking housing, or some such nonsense.
And lets be honest. Not filled with the usual evasions, politeness, the “them” or “some say” nonsense. Britain could afford a nice big military, but it does not want it. Because women DETEST the military.
Hell, women in the 1930′s, and during WWII, HATED the military. Feminists like Virginia Woolfe, wrote they would not raise one penny for a British soldier, and in any event found him inferior to the German one which they actually preferred. Woolfe like many feminists found much to admire in the Fuhrer’s Germany.
Let us be honest. Women, shortly after WWI, have been the forefront of unilateral Western disarmament. Women find the military, in practice dreadful, and worse in theory. Women find the Western world completely at fault, and not even worth defending. No less than Cherie Blair champions the Burqua, and no less than Feminist Author Anne Lamott writes approvingly of India’s non-Western poverty.
Thought experiment. Replace every Western woman now in existence with their great-great grandmothers from 1890, magically made whole and young again. What would you see?
Gigantic, inefficient, defenseless Welfare states both destroying civil society and surrendering at home and abroad to Islam and Muslims? Please.
You’d see whacking great Western militaries, a good deal of mercantilism and protectionism, and Western nations astride the globe unabashedly taking what they want, when they want, from a supine and bloodied third world. Because the Western Woman from 1890 had no shame, no disgust, at her own cultural heritage, and dislike for the military, which was viewed as a “fine” career for those not disposed of a commercial or clergy career.
Now, there is a great deal to praise in today’s women, who do not want an Empire nor brutality in dealing with the Third World. But the critical question of why how somehow just magically the Western world turns away from military spending when so many find obvious advantage to it, not the least of which is the ship and plane builders, the steel makers, the arms makers, who would supply a decent, world-class navy and air force …
Well, you should ask yourself how that just “magically happened.” Just because. The tides, the stars, magical rays from the N-th Dimension courtesy of Dr. Emilio Lizardo?
No. It is women and their view that Western society is not even worth defending that informs these decisions. At any rate, Britain is doomed. Their destiny as an Islamic Republic is now unavoidable. Most of British women would welcome this, and indeed converts to Islam in Britain are reportedly rising among educated and professional women. A share of a Big Man is better than all of an ordinary man. Spain, the Netherlands (trying Gert Wilders for upsetting the Muslims), Sweden, Norway, Belgium, and probably France and Germany will follow. As one Swedish Socialist put it, “we hope Muslims will treat us well when we are in the minority.” Most of Europe looks forward to this.
Why fight when you WANT TO SURRENDER?
It is not as though Western society, with its emphasis on cooperation, technocracy, nerdy scientists and engineers, has anything that AROUSES AND EXCITES women. Women don’t find men like a cubicle dwelling materials scientist or engineer arousing. A man like Osama bin Laden, or Khalid Sheik Mohammed? I think you’d find many, many takers among Western women. That my friends is as old as Dracula and Rudolph Valentino.
Herb (.28),
Are you running FireFox on a Windows system?
Vista?
God help you if that’s it.
On a 6-year-old pre-intel iMac w 1Gbyte of Ram, system 10.4, I’m running Firefox 3.5.8.
Occasional glitches posting, but mainly it just takes some waiting.
I have an HP notebook at work with Windows – incredible pain in the nether regions. It’s only 3 years old, with TWO GIGAbytes of RAM, and runs at about 25 percent of the speed of my older, less endowed iMac. I’m NOT just a Mac chauvinist. Since 1985 I’ve worked more or less continuously with Mac, Windows, and Unix systems for computer graphics and animation, using high-end 3D software, and the standard graphics packages- all in all about 25-30 different sets of software, and a dozen platforms and systems.
Every Mac (as it’s been explained to me by engineers at Atari Games and some other places I’ve worked) has graphic support for program displays built in; Windows systems as a rule do not. This is one reason why a low-end Windows system can be sold at a profit for just $400 to $500. For someone who just wants to have email and word processing, it’s enough.
It also means the software for Macs doesn’t have to include all the hundreds of thousands of lines of redundant support code for every single software you install. Windows software has to include the graphic support code, so the memory footprint of all those programs each with its own graphic code eventually account for a HUGE amount of your hard drive given over to just that…
Hey! I could be wrong – I would love to hear correction from someone with more dependable tech knowledge.
LOTM @ 30: Our current labor force is less skilled for these tasks than were the workers of earlier generations. At both the high end of engineering and design and at the site of physical labor and construction we are not producing people who could do the work.
The bad news is indeed that the US has been chasing people out of engineering jobs for a generation, and it is now just about complete. We outsource work or bring in H-1B labor at half price. It is disgusting. Let me TELL you about my current job search – only I think about half the list here are in the same boat as me.
And as you say, we’ve dismantled most heavy industry, for good reasons and bad. In any case, it’s gone.
However, the good news is that with CAD, we can build stuff much better and faster now, as long as we’re not pushing the envelope. I was just thinking about this in regards to Obama’s support of two new domestic nuke plants. Thirty years ago, when the last ones were started, CAD was brand new, and barely a fraction of what we have today. I’m hoping new nuke plants will be MUCH better designed.
(otoh, we had that natural gas plant explosion the other day up in Connecticut, CAD and all. sigh.)
(not to mention the CAD-based re-re-re-designs of the Airbus 380 and the Boeing 787, but it’s not clear if those were technical problems)
–
And yes, the posting and edit widgets are infinitely funky, though they sort of work for me on both Firefox and IE8. Oh, but you did say tocque, which I haven’t actually tried yet, but can it be any less funky than the underlying host?
No one really expected that the assassination of a ceremonial figure in Serbia would lead to the horrors of WWI. Big changes can start in strange ways.
If the Argentinians decided to take their claim on the Malvinas to the UN, they would undoubtedly get the support of most of the General Assembly. Plus the usual slew of anti-oil western NGOs.
The UK would of course veto any resolution in the Security Council, which would just prove to Chavez that the UN was simply a tool of the White Man — and retaliate by stopping the sale of oil to the US. In the meantime, the EU would be falling apart as German Greens attacked the UK’s belligerence. (“They vetoed a General Assembly resolution, for goodness sake”). Mother Russia would be there to wrap concerned Europeans in a warm bear hug. Iran would take advantage of the general confusion. Then China gets involved.
Black swans. They appear when you least expect them. Sometimes, whole flocks of them.
whiskey @ 32: Women don’t find men like a cubicle dwelling materials scientist or engineer arousing.
Cubicle-dwelling is a whoooole other topic.
Do you know that when Microsoft first opened up, one of its claims to fame was that EVERY engineer got an office, with a door. Circa 1980? I’ll bet that went by the wayside sometime circa 2000, if not earlier. OK, Intel had everyone in cubicles as early as about 1975, and bragged about their egalitarianism, or something, and Intel did OK. Ha. Just, ha. And now, most workers live in cyberspace anyway, in their little cubicles, iPod earbuds in, ceiling lights off, totally degraded. Farmed chickens have it better, they get food delivered in place.
In 2002, married to a lady with a little ranchlett, I signed up at a local NorCal high school for a year-long course in Welding and Metal Fabrication.
Great stuff.
The instructor was my age, had worked around the world and flat knew just about every kind of welding, in any position. (Well, he didn’t weld under water…)
Good teacher. Most of the students were farm boys, from 15 – 18 years old. He ran a tight ship, and in the spring they worked on welds for a racing car frame.
That year, Governor Gray Davis announced that on his recommendation the vocational education programs offered by California public schools would be substantially cut. The rationale – (you’re going to LOVE this) – was that computers were taking over the control and actual manufacturing processes in most industries, so it really didn’t make sense any more to train humans to do welding and to operate milling machines and drill presses and such.
Dumb S.O.B.
Perhaps because, as a citizen of the West I was so proud of sharing a heritage with the Brits after what they did in the Falklands in response to the Argentinian invasion; it explains why I am so disappointed and disgusted with what is about to come to pass. Poor Kelpies, they trusted the Mother Country.
UK -v- Argies over the Falklands round 2:
The UK does not have a chance. At all. Short of threatening nuclear strikes or declaring unrestricted submarine warfare blockading all Argentinian ports, and carrying either out if their bluff is called; they have no counter to an Argentinian invasion. But since January 1, defense and foreign policy are under the ultimate control of the EU. No way in hell that the EU would allow Britain to fight back, even if they had the capability anymore, or to fight to win. Britain and the rest of the EU nations are no longer sovereign states. Ask Greece, whose tax collections and national budgets will be under the direct control of Brussels, Berlin, and Paris if the EU gets its way.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/7252288/Greece-loses-EU-voting-power-in-blow-to-sovereignty.html
The council of EU finance ministers said Athens must comply with austerity demands by March 16 or lose control over its own tax and spend policies altogether. It if fails to do so, the EU will itself impose cuts under the draconian Article 126.9 of the Lisbon Treaty in what would amount to economic suzerainty.
Militarily, the First Falklands War was an extreme stretch for the Brits. And they no longer have the ability to stretch.
One of the main enablers from the Argie point of view when they first tried, was that the Brits had scrapped their only full sized aircraft carrier, the ARK ROYAL. If she had been available with her F-4 Phantoms and Buccaneer bombers, the Argies would have been dead meat as soon as she got there. She was scrapped and replaced with the 3 INVINCIBLE class mini-carriers with ski jumps [one of which carried on the name ARK ROYAL]. They each could only carry a few of the extremely short range VTOL Sea Harrier fighter/bomber, which no one believed could stand up in real air combat. The Brits pulled out a miracle. Depending on miracles is not a credible strategy unless you are the head of a religion. It won’t work, but at least it makes sense in that case.
Right now the Royal Navy has exactly -0- aircraft carriers of any type in active service. The 3 ski-jump carriers are mothballed in preparation for scrapping. The Fleet Air Arm no longer has any Harriers, and has been reduced to helicopters aboard ship.
In theory, a couple of years ago Labour promised to build 2 real aircraft carriers in partnership with the French, the QUEEN ELIZABETH class. Someday. Someday never got here and never will; and even the pretense is probably going to go in the about to be released defense budget. In the British press it is expected that in the next few months, to save money, the UK is going to disestablish the Army of the Rhine removing its troops from the European mainland, mothball all but a couple of dozen tanks, which they will keep for training purposes, and abolish the Royal Marines. More ships and aircraft squadrons are going to be scrapped. Right now, every Regiment in the Royal Army is understrength and underequipped [Highland Regiments don't even have a full complement of kilts and they have to be passed from hand to hand.], including the elite units. You could fit the entire current Brit Armed Forces, including reserves, in some US football stadiums.
The conventional bombing raids from Britain during the First Falklands War were carried out by their equivalent of the B-52, the V-Bombers. All of which are scrapped.
While the bloody Argies have modernized their forces, including buying modern warships from France and Germany, the Brits have collapsed. Between their Navy and Merchant Marine shrinking they no longer have a way to transport troops to the Falklands, establish air superiority [or even parity] once there, make an opposed landing, or support the troops if they lived long enough to get ashore. If it wasn’t for their nuclear submarines [which are excellent and have some of the best officers and crew in the world], Britain would not be a sea power at all. And Labour is considering giving them up because they don’t want to pay for the required ship refuelings along with upgrades and maintenance to their missiles and warheads. Plus if they no longer have nuclear weapons, the world will love them.
And that leaves out the implausibility of the concept of anyone in Parliament of any party having the cojones to want to defend Brit territory and Brit subjects when it would be ever so much more “European” to surrender.
The few thousand of Her Majesty’s Subjects in the Falklands had better either prepare to be expelled [and probably Britain will not take them, because it would be too embarrassing], or to become more fluent in the Argie dialect of Spanish and get used to [at this point a series of accurate descriptive phrases outlining their future has been deleted because if the truth is approached with candor, the language will be inappropriate in Wretchard's House.].
This is not going to be pretty, and it may be an sign of our own future if both our foreign and domestic enemies have their way.
Subotai Bahadur
What happened to Tocque? No sign of it on my Mac running Firefox.
Great thread, wanted to give some thumbs up.
I was surprised to see water tight doors wide open. Even hatches were left unsecured and there was not a fire hose shown in the dramatization. WWII Naval battles showed that the difference in attitude towards damage control made the difference in many engagements. The Japanese disdained the purely defensive damage control that the US held in high regard. The Japanese lost carriers at Midway for this reason and the US ships survived at Okinawa because of adherence to rigorous damage control protocols.
I recognize that a dramatization is not real, but still, locking down the ship in condition Zebra would have saved the ship.
Sorry I wrote “Broadsword” when I should have put in “Coventry”. The link was right, but once again, I made an error. Sorry and thanks for pointing it out.
Re ship name corrections, in 1977 when I toured the WW 2 light cruiser moored in the Thames, she was HMS Belfast, not Bristol. I’m aware of no other RN ships preserved from that war, and I wish that weren’t so.
I always thought that the AIM-9 Lima (or Mike?) was the weapon that turned the Falklands air war as it enabled the Harriers to make “head-on” engagements against the Skyhawks.
AIM-9s that the Americans rushed to the battlefield. I was at Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey and we had two Venezuelan officers who were very quiet at each and every victory cheer of good news eminating from our only news source back then – CNN.
I said quiet…seething is perhaps a better descripter of the reaction from our Venezuelan “brothers.”
Topic related, Dutch government falls over pressure to get out of Afghanistan. A declining Labor party is bringing down the government they are in, with the help of the really loony left, so they can make a show in local elections before the blow back from the Geert Wilders trial can push the far right past their center right coalition partners. The center right got so used to splitting the difference for so many years, with the US serving as both indulgent protector and whipping boy, that they have no idea how to respond to a threat from their right flank or betrayal from the left.
To those who pointed out the cruel truth of the military and social situation in today’s Britain, let me say I am as fully aware as you that things, at the moment, look dire. That said, I was a teen-ager during WWII, and was raised on valor and courage that was not all wartime propaganda, and so, coupled with a lifetime of reading military history, I retain faith in the human spirit. People do not just lie down and die, you have to kill them. That is all I am trying to say. A people with a thousand years of sometimes brilliant history will not go meekly, whatever the current political climate. At the same time I am well aware that 1500 years ago there were people like me saying, as the barbarians were battering down the gates, “It’ll be all right, Rome will get it together, we always have.”
#24 Walt & #30 LotM
I also am a pessimist as far as the ability to crank up military production quickly. Yeah, we became the Arsenal of Democracy in WW II. But you have to remember that a) we had a tremendous reserve of unused industrial capacity and a willing and trained workforce. b) that the Roosevelt administration had deliberately used a huge naval build up as a jobs program, with a concurrent bolstering of our heavy industry at all levels. This administration would rather be caught on TV in bed with a live boy or a dead girl rather than either help employ people, build the economy, or horror of horrors prepare us to survive the war., c) from the mid 1930′s our industry was recieving orders for weapons from overseas because the war was inevitable and it hit Europe and Asia before we got involved. We had half a decade head start.
Wars are now “Come as you are”. We will come understrength, underequipped, with a political leadership that is on the enemy’s side, and hampered with political correctness being given priority at all costs over victory . If we are to survive, the first part of the war is going to have to involve dealing with the third and fourth factors and rendering them moot.
Oh, Walt. Isn’t that Brit cruiser on the Thames HMS BELFAST instead of BRISTOL? BELFAST both helped sink the German Battlecruiser SCHARNHORST and was at Normandy.
Subotai Bahadur
Subotai/46
You are correct, she is HMS Belfast. Never publish draft copy. Another story about HMS Belfast. As invasion day approached, Churchill announced to Eisenhower that he was going to watch D-Day from HMS Belfast, and Eisenhower said no, they couldn’t risk it. Churchill then signed himself on as an able seaman, and defied Eisenhower to keep him off the ship. Eisenhower went to King George about it and the king said to leave it to him. A day or two later Churchill glumly told Eisenhower that he had won, that he (Churchill) would not be going aboard HMS Belfast, because the king insisted that if Churchill went, he would go too.
Subotai,
Your command of history is a continual reminder of my sinfully haphazard skimming of the subject.
Britain’s long fall from preparedness to impotence in your impassioned description should make sons of those lands weep where they stand.
And our blessed leaders have been doing likewise to our own country at the same time.
The Franco-Prussian war seems to stand as an example of some sort. I’ve read a number of references of the French Generals’ supreme confidence in the elán and esprit of their men as the crucial factor that far more than any weapon system, would carry them to victory against any adversary.
Seems to me Prussia because of its thick network of railways and compulsory military conscription, was able to field an army of over a million soldiers. They also had high-rate-of-fire breach-loading cannon with longer range, accuracy, and destructive power than the muzzle-loading French bronze cannon. Even though the French had an early form of machine gun, they were seemingly overwhelmed and out-maneuvered.
A French force of 80,000+ soldiers lead by Napoleon III and Field Marshall MacMahon(?) were surrounded in the Battle of Sedan attempting to relieve another embattled French army. They surrendered, and this seemed to take the wind out of French sails. The others continued to fight, but with less than stellar leadership and waning enthusiasm among the poilus.
If I understand the trends right, Germany was coalescing under Bismark as France was falling apart. The loss at Sedan was followed by the Prussian seige of Paris, the re-constitution of French government into a new republic, while at the same time the residents of Paris formed the Commune, that began to teeter off in a completely different direction from the Republic.
I don’t know if that period or those circumstances relate well to current problems. But it sure seems as if countries go through insane pendulum swings from heady self-aggrandizement and self-delusion to gritty self-sacrifice and grim determination. But the time factor works out so that it’s usually one generation that has to take up the slack and put out the blazes that their parents and grandparents allowed to smolder and erupt.
My understanding of WWI comes mainly from the books of Barbara Tuchman, and that of WWII comes from sources even less scholarly, but comprehensive and vivid.
Sorta the Classics Illustrated library on crack. Well, a lot of browsing of a winter’s evening in the volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Maybe you could recommend some titles for us lay-abouts…
Actually these blogs are comprise an amazing source for information AND stimulus to research.
Walt,
It’ll be all right, Rome will get it together, we always have.
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city’s main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don’t our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard
(C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992)
http://www.cavafy.com/poems/content.asp?id=119&cat=1
RWE,
“By the way, Exhelo, one of the way the ways the RN tried to defeat the Exocet missiles was to launch Sea King helicopters and have them skitter back and forth in front of the ship in hope that the missile would lock onto the chopper instead of the ship. ”
Yeah – there were a variety of decoy tactics and equipment that could be used by helicopters to counter cruise missiles; the flight profile and homing systems of the threat would dictate which one to use. We trained for that mission, too, but luckily I never had to use it for real.
LOTM/49
Lovely poem. Thanks for sharing it. Phillies closer of 30 years ago, Tug McGraw, said that in a difficult situation, the guy in the batter’s box was not a problem, he was the solution to the problem. The poet says the barbarians, those people, were a kind of solution. I wonder if the barbarians now threatening us will ultimately become the solution to the current ennui and malaise of the West.
Life of the Mind: Didn’t my treasure map show you the location of the secret naval ingredient that will save us all? No? Well for a modest additional sum I will make up the omission.
Now that I have your attention: It seems to me that carbon fiber construction, such as is used in F22s and F35s would also be very useful on the high seas. An outer layer and an inner layer with the middle being filled with something Kevlar-like ought to be superb armor while being extremely lightweight.
Couple this with fuel-cells and/or mini nukes for generating enough electricity to give them 60 knot economy cruise speed and———.
I know. I know. There are a host of other problems that have to be solved to get us out of this mess, but the naval use of carbon fibers strikes me as a darned good ingredient.
PS: You mentioned Stirling engines. Where can I find some data on those exotic critters being put to shipboard use?
On the procurement front, the solution is to can micro-managed development and (for the most part) adopt a policy of “you build it, we shall buy it”.
Sure those Century-series planes RWE mentioned had their problems and shortcoming, BUT, they did work. And they became available in short order and at (overall) affordable prices.
Before that, we had the bad examples of the P38 and P47. Years and years of work went into them and neither was combat-ready until 1943. In contrast, (and desperation) somebody finally said “We have to have a heavily armed and armored lightweight single engine fighter that will fly and fight with the best of them and which can escort bombers extraordinarily long distances. God Help Us, if somebody will actually build one, we will buy it and hang the cost.” 112 days later the first P51 was showing its stuff. And with necessary refinements, the Mustang was combat ready just as soon as those two older fighters.
Just tell folks what is needed and they will get it to you C. O. D. in short order.
For anyone wishing an inside history on D-Day and Operation Mulberry try: The Far Shore by Rear Admiral Edward Ellsberg.
Of note is the amazing level of Allied co-operation and just how close we came to a total fiasco.
…..
It is painful to reflect on Allied boners:
Aachen could have been taken as an open city — but the US Army sent no patrols forward in time. Hitler Gestapo’d the ‘surrendering’ German MG and the campaign diverted into the Hurtgen. Think Stalingrad West — but in the forests.
Halting the armies to chase Monty’s dream: the German Army was completely broken in the west — tossing rifles right and left — but after a week’s repose completely recovered its morale.
The Allied Armies never really ran out of logistics due to distance — Ike shut off the Americans to feed Monty; and Monty shut off the front to surge towards Market-Garden. ( At this point my father was in the Red Ball Express and the gas was piling up at the French end of PLUTO. The tank farm was completely over flowing within days. This is where the diary-rebellion of Patton and Bradley flowed from. They knew that the halt was folly.)
There were five invasion sectors but only ONE was CRITICAL: Omaha Beach. The extremely flat tidal zone there proved equal to three times the port capacity of Cherbourg.
In the days of wooden ships dry-dock meant anchoring in the shallows at high tide and hustling upon the repairs.
At Omaha it was quickly determined that the fantastically flat sandy bottom was VERY suitable for supporting Liberty ships and what else.
So the Allies improvised: BOTH Britain and America started feeding their troops from ‘grounded’ Liberty ships via Hwy 13 after the super storm. ( The cliff was converted into a highway on ramp.)
BTW, my father was in the leading ships heading for Omaha Beach that day. Three abreast they steamed. For some unknown reason, he was nervously pacing the deck while most below were catching there last winks. And then: bam! The Germans had set acoustic-magnetic mines at the right place and the wrong time. His ship took a blast and then another. The second was aft. Those acoustics really love the engine room. Anyhow he was lifted twenty feet into the air as the decking buckled — wave-like towards him.
Two massive strikes and she was done. My father spent the rest of the day recovering survivors. The formation was destroyed.
Subsequently he was transferred to a most unusual outfit: landing mat detail improvised to support the RAF. This made him one of the rare soldiers to chronically visit both the American and British zones.
He was there to construct the first tactical airfield in France — right above the bluffs at Omaha. Not withstanding its primacy — all of the bombardment delayed its completion and IIRC a strip in the Utah sector beat it to first flight. After but a short time it was renumbered from 1 to 19 IIRC. Its first flights were consistently mercy flights. Not withstanding its title as a tac air strip the dang thing belonged in the medical corps.
When the political class decides that defending their own country is obsolete or distasteful, its the sign of the End. When all is said and done, there are few legitimate purposes for having a national government at all if it isn’t geared toward protecting the security of its citizens.
There are many theories concerning the fall of the Western Roman Empire, but it seems to me that the essential and basic problem was that the ruling class no longer had any concern for protecting the common citizen. They shifted from perimeter defense to defense in depth to ensure their own safety, and the borders were eaten away. Towards the last Rome was no longer the capitol–it was moved to Ravenna because it was more defensible. The citizens who provided the taxes were just useful insects. The thought of running out of them was inconceivable. No need to protect them. No need at all.
And so it is today. For the current political class “governing” is an end in itself, not the means to an end which it is in any healthy society. Underneath the facades of Utopia (Democrats) and Utopia-Lite (Republicans) there is an ugly, foul infection. I hope, for the nation, that it isn’t gangrene.
“I’d wager that a Navy that can float a series of say 40 ships with a bunch of .50 Cal, 20MM and 40MM and the odd 5IN gun or two, coupled with an effective Fire Control system can address 95% of the surface threats and 75% of the aerial threats available.”
Yeah, that’s true (/sarc)…if you don’t mind beginning to engage at 3/4 of a mile and having your ship repeatedly sprayed with high velocity frag if you manage to get a kill. Remember Sen Proxmire and his Golden Fleece?
The 5in/54 with it’s 16-18 RPM and HECVT or RAP might work…maybe, since you can begin your engagement at 12 miles. But you gotta carry a lot of ammo, and resupply becomes a problem.
And the probability is that you COULD get a kill, or two or maybe even three if you were lucky (you do FEEL lucky, right?) – against muliple axis attacks in the littoral, but then you would be out of ammo. And in the meantime, those high speed, large warhead, incoming while manuvering missiles would overwhelm you.
Best way to kill them is as far away as possible, preferably before they leave port or the runway. Subs, too.
http://news.google.com/news?sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft:en-US&oe=utf8&q=chavez%20argentina&rlz=1I7GGLL_en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wn
Just a gance at the headlines tells a lot of the backstory re the Arg/UK flare up.
My memory of the Falklands war was that Argentina at the time was under the mis-rule of a Right-Wing Military Junta. They’d been running the country for something like a decade, after the economic disruptions of the Peron duo (Juan and Eva, remember? Imagine Bill and Hillary with even less self-control and grace, but more photogenic,,,) alternating with a circus bill of blundering repressive regimes from all points of the political compass.
Anyhow, it seemed at the time – even to the usually comatose news organizations – that the primary reason the Junta attempted to wrest Las Islas Malvinas from Britain was to distract the Argentine public from the long torment of its “Dirty War” against the left. I particularly recall the Junta’s embarrassment at demonstrations of little grey-headed abuelas with their shawls and placards in the streets demanding information about their “disappeared” grandchildren, mainly college students and teachers and young professionals.
Of all the South American Continent’s sovereign countries, Argentina has attracted a much larger and more diverse community of European immigrants, and a distinct hostility to Soviet communism. Since before WWI, Argentina has experienced violent conflict and bloodshed as the Left and Right have fought for control.
It’s a common gambit for governments in trouble – a military adventure meant to focus the attention of domestic opponents on external adversaries. It’s so common, we might expect the EU to pull something, or even certain amateurs of our own…
The problem usually is that the rascals have spent so much of their time analyzing the vulnerabilities of the cookie jar, they have neglected the art of estimating the military capabilities of actual enemies who have no reason to keep weapons holstered. The experience of intimidating their own countryfolk, who mostly are unwilling to take up arms in response to the oppression, convinces them that their domestic success is from their strategic genius, that they can deal successfully with any antagonist.
Obama and his pus-bag rabble don’t have a clue what disasters they are setting in motion.
#43 – RCM “I was at Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey and we had two Venezuelan officers who were very quiet at each and every victory cheer of good news eminating from our only news source back then – CNN”
RCM – what curriculum, if I might ask. I was there, too, at that time. Mine was Natl Security Affairs.
blert: Most of the inland problems including the near-disastrous halt can be laid at the feet of Ike’s worst mistake, his logistics chief, General J. C. H. Lee. ‘Twas said that he believed his initias stood for “jesus Christ Hisself. At any rate, he was no kin to Marse Robert.
Old Salt: Didn’t know you were here or my #52 would have been addressed to you as well.
BTW: I googled “Stirling Engines on ships, hit lucky and got a 2005 study on same from a couple of Japanese. Most of it beyond me, but I think I have sort of a general idea nos.
Buddy: Paul Johnson has written quite a bit on the ups and downs of Argentina. Firend of mine confirmed Johnson by looking down old rifle barrels.
Whenever Johnson said Argentina was squared away, the rifles from that period had bright shiny bores. Whenever Johnson said Argentina was in the grip of socialism, the bores were cruddy. Good representation of the prevailing mores of the time.
The worst rifle are from Peru. Peruvian army never used a cleaning rod for anything but toasting tostadas. Best ones are from Chile. Always well-maintained. Allende period was too brief to change things.
Why Chile so squared away? Faith and Begorrah, My Dear O’Larsen! Bernardo O’Higgins had a navy. Huge difference in how the Chilean Revolution got conducted.
(marymcl; you listening? )
Dave/53
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the P-38 was designed by Kelly Johnson and the Lockheed Skunk Works, and was a fine airplane, though no dogfighter. The P-47 was an updated version of the Republic P-36, so it came on line fairly quickly. As for the P-51, I don’t know about the 112 days thing. Working strictly from memory, I believe the North American XP-51 flew before we got into the war, and was part of Roosevelt’s free airplane program to the French and Brits. The French settled for free Curtiss Hawk 75s (P-40s) and the Brits took some P-51s, (among other types), which they called the Mustang. The General Motors Allison engine (rated at 1800hp but never delivered more than 1200), did not give it enough performance to fight the Bf109, so the Brits used it for ground attack until some Brit ground crew guy had the inspiration to see how she would handle with a Rolls Royce Merlin engine, and the result was the best piston engine fighter of the war. They eventually found space behind the pilot for an additional 70 gallons of gas and that enabled it to fly to Berlin and back.
Er, Walt: I’m the P38 fanatic here. Buddy is right behind me. You can google up my natural father’s unit. 82nd Fighter Group. 548 Confirmed. 88 Probable. 227 Damaged. 9 ships sunk. 126 locomotives and assorted rolling stock
destroyed. 1 Ploesti refinery dive-bombed.
The Allison 1710 was limited by law to 950 horsepower initially. Jumping it up to max HP
after Pearl Harbor caused reliability problems. Final production runs were at 1475 HP. The Rolls-Royce Merlin was initially limited to carburator-fed and in English versions I don’t think it ever did get adequate superchargers. It was the Packard-produced version that was fitted to the P51. Both engines are good examples of micro-management IMO.
AMSM the P36 was a radial-engine version of the P40. A36 was P51 rigged as dive-bomber.
XP51 was (technically) a Brit request early to mid 1942. Initial low-level limitations were US export ban on superchargers (more micro-managment) and when it comes to carrying a bomb load for ground support P47 much superior.
Enough of my rattling. But if you put your google on images and type in 82nd Fighter Group there as well, you will see P38 Billy Boy dive bombing Ploesti. Note the flak damage to the starboard vertical stabilizer.
In spite of that, Billy Boy counted coup on ME110 on way home.
Billy Boy is Mr Bill Mason of Denver. His Dad named the plane after him. And Ben Mason is still with us. Turned 98 in December. Know both of them along with other 82nd types.
Oh. And see if you can find poem called “An Escort of P38s.” I daresay you will be impressed with the poetry.
As so many times before when I come to BC, I’m inspired to think of Kipling.
The Islanders, 1902
NO DOUBT but ye are the People-your throne is above the King’s.
Whoso speaks in your presence must say acceptable things:
Bowing the head in worship, bending the knee in fear-
Bringing the word well smoothen-such as a King should hear.
Fenced by your careful fathers, ringed by your leaden seas,
Long did ye wake in quiet and long lie down at ease;
Till Ye said of Strife, “What is it?” of the Sword, “It is far from our ken”;
Till ye made a sport of your shrunken hosts and a toy of your armed men.
Ye stopped your ears to the warning-ye would neither look nor heed-
Ye set your leisure before their toil and your lusts above their need.
Because of your witless learning and your beasts of warren and chase,
Ye grudged your sons to their service and your fields for their camping-place.
Ye forced them glean in the highways the straw for the bricks they brought;
Ye forced them follow in byways the craft that ye never taught.
Ye hampered and hindered and crippled; ye thrust out of sight and away
Those that would serve you for honour and those that served you for pay.
Then were the judgments loosened; then was your shame revealed,
At the hands of a little people, few but apt in the field.
Yet ye were saved by a remnant (and your land’s long-suffering star),
When your strong men cheered in their millions while your striplings went to the war.
Sons of the sheltered city-unmade, unhandled, unmeet-
Ye pushed them raw to the battle as ye picked them raw from the street.
And what did ye look they should compass? Warcraft learned in a breath,
Knowledge unto occasion at the first far view of Death?
So? And ye train your horses and the dogs ye feed and prize?
How are the beasts more worthy than the souls, your sacrifice?
But ye said, “Their valour shall show them”; but ye said, “The end is close.”
And ye sent them comfits and pictures to help them harry your foes:
And ye vaunted your fathomless power, and ye flaunted your iron pride,
Ere ye fawned on the Younger Nations for the men who could shoot and ride!
Then ye returned to your trinkets; then ye contented your souls
With the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals.
Given to strong delusion, wholly believing a lie,
Ye saw that the land lay fenceless, and ye let the months go by
Waiting some easy wonder, hoping some saving sign-
Idle -openly idle-in the lee of the forespent Line.
Idle -except for your boasting-and what is your boasting worth
If ye grudge a year of service to the lordliest life on earth?
Ancient, effortless, ordered, cycle on cycle set,
Life so long untroubled, that ye who inherit forget
It was not made with the mountains, it is not one with the deep.
Men, not gods, devised it. Men, not gods, must keep.
Men, not children, servants, or kinsfolk called from afar,
But each man born in the Island broke to the matter of war.
Soberly and by custom taken and trained for the same,
Each man born in the Island entered at youth to the game-
As it were almost cricket, not to be mastered in haste,
But after trial and labour, by temperance, living chaste.
As it were almost cricket-as it were even your play,
Weighed and pondered and worshipped, and practised day and day.
So ye shall bide sure-guarded when the restless lightnings wake
In the womb of the blotting war-cloud, and the pallid nations quake.
So, at the haggard trumpets, instant your soul shall leap
Forthright, accoutered, accepting-alert from the wells of sleep.
So, at the threat ye shall summon-so at the need ye shall send
Men, not children or servants, tempered and taught to the end;
Cleansed of servile panic, slow to dread or despise,
Humble because of knowledge, mighty by sacrifice. . . .
But ye say, “It will mar our comfort.” Ye say, “It will minish our trade.”
Do ye wait for the spattered shrapnel ere ye learn how a gun is laid?
For the low, red glare to southward when the raided coast-towns burn?
(Light ye shall have on that lesson, but little time to learn.)
Will ye pitch some white pavilion, and lustily even the odds,
With nets and hoops and mallets, with rackets and bats and rods?
Will the rabbit war with your foemen-the red deer horn them for hire?
Your kept cock-pheasant keep you?-he is master of many a shire.
Arid, aloof, incurious, unthinking, unthanking, gelt,
Will ye loose your schools to flout them till their brow-beat columns melt?
Will ye pray them or preach them, or print them, or ballot them back from your shore?
Will your workmen issue a mandate to bid them strike no more?
Will ye rise and dethrone your rulers? (Because ye were idle both?
Pride by Insolence chastened? Indolence purged by Sloth?)
No doubt but ye are the People; who shall make you afraid?
Also your gods are many; no doubt but your gods shall aid.
Idols of greasy altars built for the body’s ease;
Proud little brazen Baals and talking fetishes;
Teraphs of sept and party and wise wood-pavement gods-
These shall come down to the battle and snatch you from under the rods?
From the gusty, flickering gun-roll with viewless salvoes rent,
And the pitted hail of the bullets that tell not whence they were sent.
When ye are ringed as with iron, when ye are scourged as with whips,
When the meat is yet in your belly, and the boast is yet on your lips;
When ye go forth at morning and the noon beholds you broke,
Ere ye lie down at even, your remnant, under the yoke?
No doubt but ye are the People-absolute, strong, and wise;
Whatever your heart has desired ye have not withheld from your eyes.
On your own heads, in your own hands, the sin and the saving lies!
As he was in 1902, he’s still right: on our own heads and in our own hands the sin and the saving lies. Nothing makes me more fearful than the fact that America could elect an Obama as President. Even with a failure to prepare we might, with sufficient determination, be able to catch up. Far more dangerous is the incredible lack of judgement shown in electing such an obviously America-hating scoundrel. That is more indicative of a deep-seated canker that may have rotted out the core of the nation.
Sad as it makes me to think so, I’m absolutely certain the British are even worse off. They may well be beyond saving.
all this yapping about the spirit -don’t worry about the material-the japanese thought their spirit would carry them over the americans too.something else we’ve got in common with the japanese is the victory disease.theirs lasted 6 months until the US navy brought them back to reality, ours has lasted 60+ years but i do believe reality will soon reassert itself.
Why should the British keep a globe straddling navy when they no longer have an empire to run? The Americans made a big show of being opposed to the pretensions of the British Empire when it suited them. They do not have the resources to maintain their armed forces at the level that would satisfy the warriors here. There is no shame in that, they have played their role and have left the scene. On the hand the British have been loyal allies of the Americans, following them into Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan. We might yet see what the American alliance is worth when the Falklands imbroglio heats up.
Walt, Dave, Buddy, et. al, relative to the P-38 – P-47 – P-51 discussion, the most important part of the story had to do with aircraft engine supercharging. The USAAF was the only service in the world that focused on high altitude combat as part of its basic strategy from the early 1920’s on. This resulted in the USN adopting a focus on high altitude performance as well. The success of the P-51 largely came from an Englishman coming up with a stunningly simple but brilliant innovation, and incredibly, one that no one else adopted.
I could go on for several thousand words, and in fact I already have. Get a copy of the Nov 2001 issue of Airpower magazine if you want to read most of the story. Unfortunately that magazine went out of business, so I have no place to sell the rest of the 10,000 or so words it takes to describe all this. But suffice to say, almost everything people think they know about this subject is wrong.
The best investment of banks the last four years, has not been in housing, or bonds, or the market. It’s been in the politicians and political party reelection funds. Check the banks who got the TARP funds and those that didn’t.
The best investment the Brits have made in the last years has been in Iraq and Afghanistan. If the Argies make another try again, London can play the NATO card on the US. An attack on one, is an attack on all. After all, at great expense and political capital they have made the commitment to America’s war. NATO either dies or America takes another hit south of the border. Given that President for Life Hugo is eying the Dutch islands nearby, doing nothing will only invite more adventures. With amateur hour in the White House and usual suspects at State, this could be very interesting. And the years of clean up many.
Falklands belong to Argentina since the end of 18th century, English settlers were allowed as the islands was a stage for the whales hunters, and for the ships that need to raise water and oil. Though English settler became more numerous than the Argentinians’ and an english style of living was developped. This is with the argument that the ground belong to the people that lives on it, therefore English, that Margareth Thatcher retaliated. Like Argentina right wing government, that undertook the war for restoring its image among its population, we can say it was the same for Thather, UK was in bad economical situation too, with the unions strikes, and its devasted coal basin.
The funny thing is, according to Thatcher, then Falklands are european too !
Nowadays, such a war would have no chance to find a positive support from any western nation, probably that it was allowed in the early eighties because the Argentinian military junte had such a bad reputation.
Falkland will return to Argentina soon or later, it’s in its geopolitical logic.
Now, America, could you lighten us from Martinique and Guadeloupe ?
JJRedfan
Bismarck a proud leader bred by volkism ideology, undertook the reunification of the german populations under one banner, Germany, and was eagering to take Alsace-Lorraine from France, as they were also german speaking too. So his government forged the EMS telegram, it was the provocation. Contrary to Hitler, he had no ambition to remain in France, just to gain our 2 eastern provinces. Also during the Paris siege he made sure that the Parisians got some food.
Sirs,
Excellent thread !
Quantity has its own quality. Increasing the “quality” of USN ships while decreasing the size of the fleet will ultimately result in two hulls (PacFlt and LantFlt) constantly deployed with Blue & Gold crews. More with less, and less, and l e s s . . . We’ve been “building down” for too many years. Now a 300 ship Navy is nothing but a distant memory never to be seen.
Just because some Admiral might have been a good stick, does not make him a good program manager. In truth, most of them suck at the job, but the only penalty is an early retirement (at flag rank) and a long term sinecure with a company that builds the same.
BTW- Why do we need combat survivable ships? Today the USS Cole represents over a BILLION in costs. Pride. Go down with the ship and all that rot. Aircraft pilots don’t go down with the jet, they punch out. Navy ships should be expendable platforms, build cheaply and highly expendable. Look at some of the fast cats that have come out of Australia. Small, very small crews. LOTS AND LOTS of automatic guns and missiles. Make them containerized and transfer to another platform when the hull wears out or needs refit. Panamax all but the CVNs.
Screw redundancy, at this point in time, I’d rather have three or four (or more) cheap platforms, than one that cost as much.
Beyond even the incompetence of USN shipbuilding is the advent of the X-47 (http://www.as.northropgrumman.com/products/nucasx47b/index.html) The Navy is trying so hard to be relevant, it wants to be just like the Air Force, hence this disastrous idea to launch attack UAVs from CVNs. YGBSM! Didn’t work for the Rs when they tried being Dem light. Won’t work for the USN to be USAF light. Only thing it will do is reduce our CVN inventory, when Congress sez we don’t need both the USN and the USAF doing the same thing. Hell, if the USAF can fly Predators over Afg and Pak from Nellis, what do we need CVNs for (plus the 5K crew). Nothing short of an internally generated Pearl Harbor is the X-47. The Admirals who agreed to this idea should be keel-hauled.
@ 35 Kinuachdrach: With regard to the United Nations,
which is struggling with what it believes is an antiquated facility on Turtle Bay, move it to Haiti.
Lock, Stock, and Barrel.
In Haiti, the entire world can bring the best of its talents on post-disaster reconstruction, mentoring, education, health care etc. How could the world not respond if its diplomats must live and conduct diplomacy in Haiti? More, just having the United Nations in Haiti would result in a multi-year jobs program in building and maintenance. The jobs created to keep the UN in a life to which it has become accustomed would probably employ directly 10% of the Haitian population, indirectly another 20%. Without something dramatic like placing the Headquarters of the United Nations in Haiti– “Haiti, District of the World” or “Haiti, D.W.”–nothing will change. The U.S. is starting to pull its official hand out of the bucket of water known as Haiti, and the nation will revert to the catastrophe that is was before the earthquake, if not worse.
@32 Whiskey – Interesting. You don’t know my wife, but she’ll kick any johnny jihadi’s ass from here to mecca, and castrate him as well. I do recall after Sep 11, how women were –rediscovering– “real” men like firemen and other first responders. There’s lots of spine in Afghanistan now, just ask the USMC and army. There’s still a core out there and that core will help pull America back from the brink, as they become civilians.
@33 MF @ 28 Herb: BTDT with Windows for a decade, used MACs for two years (great hardware), now completely OSS with UBUNTU (on any platform) and available apps for over a year. Get UBUNTU. You won’t look back.
@52 Dave – lots of good new, and exotic ingredients that can be brought to the fore. Think of GM spider silk from goat’s milk. Google it. There are already hulls using carbon fiber, you won’t hear about.
Take good care,
Sandy
Specific to #67: A good book is “Not Much of an Engineer” autobiography of Sir Stanley Hooker.
Another good book is “Secret Weapons of World War 11″. Author: Gerald Pawle, with fore word by Nevil Shute. BTW, Nevil Shute Norway was a British aeronautical engineer.
Ivan 66, if you think that the measure of the US alliance with Britain will be measured by its response to some hypothetical conflict over the Falklands, you don’t have much of an appreciation for history.
Clark C. Griffith @40: As a former USCG radioman (a rating that has long been extinct), I also noticed the lack of “Dog Zebra” in the dramatization; just don’t know if that part was historically correct.
Second point: In an amateur and intermittent reading of military sniper doctrine, it seems that after each conflict the lesson of snipers as force multipliers needed to be relearned. In these days of stand-off weapons and remote controlled UAV’s, etc. what could be more politically incorrect than looking an enemy in the eye through a riflescope and ending his life? Hopefully, (despite the infantilization of our society) the decades-long War on Islamic Fascism will be of sufficient duration that the lesson will not be forgotton this time. I bought some optics mounting gear from a Texas company called LaRue Tactical, and with the order received two bumper stickers: “God Bless Our Troops…Especially Our Snipers”. One’s on the bumper of my pickup now. It’s good for an occasional “thumbs up” here in NH.
I think the UK will flip to the right very quickly. There’s a groundswell of discontent, and it may well sweep the BNP into contention, where their mix of extreme right social AND left economic policies may be the antidote to Britain’s current malaise. Not a perfect antidote, but probably better than the current batch of lefties in power.
As for the changing character of the British people, I think that inborn aggression and drive is still there, but channeled differently. Given the emasculation of the military by the left as a career path, and the social welfare system, is it any wonder british youths have not much recourse but to express their aggression at football matches?
“If in fact the West faces a threat in the post-Cold War era, my guess is that it will be poorly prepared for it; not so much materially as mentally. Public policy is stuck in a rut that is at least sixty years old. It’s been modified here and there by concession to the existence of terrorism, and the rise of the non-Western world, but they really haven’t come to terms with it.
Well I think we have a huge ‘Ray’ of hope to clutch in the coming years. A country that has en mass rejected radical Islam in both the Shi’ah form of Islamic Revolutionary and Sunni reactionary Al Qaeda. They have even peacefully thrown one set of bums out of governing positions.
I know it was not a naval engagement, but the trials of that war were just as daunting and just as desperate as any faced in the second world war I think. A tribute to the common men and women who conduct themselves with uncommon valor. General O is getting ready to retire, and the clip from the Gallant Hour seems fitting.
Ivan @ 66: Why should the British keep a globe straddling navy when they no longer have an empire to run?
The question is not whether they need six carrier groups, the question is whether they have even one, and apparently, they don’t.
I suppose they don’t need a carrier group to defend the channel, but they might want one to contribute to defending their link to the US and Canadian east coast, if nothing more. And they might want to keep such a force intact, and still have more than a loose ship or two to send on special missions, to the middle east persian gulf, into the mediterranean sea, or defend the sea lanes for their own transport all the way to Australia. The empire is gone, but the world is more connected than ever, and the ocean is no smaller than it used to be.
No threats on that scale, you say? Not even in prospect? Well, good. But do threats ever really go to zero? The problem is, your ability to defend can go to zero, and then even small surprises turn nasty. Like, the Falklands.
What kept those cans afloat while others sank? Damage Control. Our fleet is the finest at it, bar none.
Josh: The A’s ran Pucaras, twin engine light attack craft on scene but it was rough strip capable and I don’t believe it had the legs or the teeth to threaten the fleet.
Josh again: I can vouch for the cubicles, ours (at big insurance) got smaller in 2001 and the latest craze has been what I refer to as “free range analysts”. Open environments, with a breadbox sized locker to hang your coat. No more family pictures or drawings colored by your kids hanging on the now extinct walls. Have to go to the bathroom to scratch your nose now, too unless you can find a topiary large enough to hide in.
Tcobb, Whiskey: “When the political class decides that defending their own country is obsolete or distasteful, its the sign of the End.” Yes, the end of the political class. Whiskey, what get from your posts is a message of hopeless odds and a waxing opposition. I would agree, but only as the rules and mechanics are defined today. When those rules shift, there will be a return to balance. Many things can cause that shift to occur and I don’t know what they will be, but I anxiously await the opportunity to remind the chattering classes and tax eaters who and what really makes this nation functional.
@78 LFMayor
“Have to go to the bathroom to scratch your nose now, too unless you can find a topiary large enough to hide in.”
You owe me a new keyboard! Seriously, that describes my current office enviro to a “T”. When I started with the company (not THAT company) in the late 80′s, the building was a single level with more bona fide offices than cubicles – those offices were gradually removed over the years, and were replaced with cubicles… interestingly, the cubicle walls seemed to get shorter each time the office was reconfig’d… time was I couldn’t see over them (I’m 6 feet tall), whereas today I can see all the way across the building… Today, the only offices left are a bit like a bread crust – outer wall only – and everything else, save the breakroom and bathroom facilities, are “cubicled”. Personally, I never cared for a 360 deg horizon.
Agree with LFMayor @ 78. Default is NOT a dirty word and it may flush some of the current elite away, much like World War One did for the prewar European elite. Let’s just hope the fleet planners are right and there won’t be another Big One as a ‘war Keynesian stimulus’ aka break all the windows and pay people to put them back together again.
Josh #36
Do you know that when Microsoft first opened up, one of its claims to fame was that EVERY engineer got an office, with a door. Circa 1980? I’ll bet that went by the wayside sometime circa 2000, if not earlier.
When I last contracted there in 2008, that was still the case, although sometimes you had to double up until the new buildings got finished.
I sure do hope that the other information you base you comments on isn’t as fanciful (“I’ll bet”) as this one was.
cubicles
LFMayor @ 78: I was objecting loudly to the “free range” concept in 1976. There is nothing new under the sun.
And you think you’re so clever and classless and free,
But you’re still foocking peasants as far as I can see,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
When I interviewed at Yahoo Burbank circa 2006 they had just moved into a brand-new building, and their CHOICE of environment was one huge room and not so much as a cubicle in it – just forty-foot benches, and you had about six linear feet, and not so much as a file drawer, just a little mesh basket. I’m not sure there were even individual phones. And they were putting senior (and junior) developers, PMs, and analysts in this environment. They didn’t offer me a job, but I could not have accepted if they did, on that basis, and elsewhere I have received six-figure job offer(s) and turned them down, where the physical environment was ridiculous.
But, I have also seen individual techies SEEK these kinds of environments, and recommend them in print, as “collaborative”, or saving money for what really matters, more RAM and bigger monitors, etc. People are fools. Unless every aspect of human factors as it was taught to me back when has suddenly reversed, some degrees of privacy, space to put collateral materials, etc, directly relate to productivity. But then, I have seen top-notch programmers who don’t know how to use SCREEN space also, for editors and whatnot, preferring to edit (like this primitive blogging interface!) in tiny windows on largely empty screens.
So what am I ranting about, if anything? That it takes education to teach people how to use the tools at hand, it takes education – and respect – to build an effective organization. Otherwise, massive waste or foolishness can take place in plain view, and nobody even sees it. Which is why we have market capitalism, and creative destruction, winners and losers, and all that.
Ha, and I still haven’t really directly engaged whiskey’s comments about women not preferring cubicle guys, though I guess my point is there, which is to agree with whiskey’s opinion and the women themselves. But then, John Lennon had it right, too.
RO @ 81: If what you say is still true across Microsoft, good on Bill Gates, and I’ll just have to chalk that bet up as a loser. And maybe that’s why Microsoft still wins, to the extent they still do.
But doing contract I’ve worked easily ten shops in ten years, and interviewed in closer to 100, and in corporate IT and Internet companies, they don’t do offices, violently the opposite, as I’ve said. Come to think of it, couple of my friends in a little engineering shop did have offices, but that was pre-2000 too, now that I triple-think about it. Tempus fugit. We’ve all moved on, I haven’t seen their current workspaces, maybe I’ll send an email and ask!
Sam W #72: Yep, I have that book, among many others. An aerodynamicist wanders into employment with an engine company and ends up saving everyone’s arse. No wonder they knighted the man
LFMayor #78: Last year I read “At War With The Wind” which explained that the USN WWII damage control techniques were the result of a few prewar reserve officers who were firemen in civilian life and brought modern fire fighting techniques to the USN just in time for WWII. The full horror of the kamikaze attacks cannot be appreciated without reading that book. And I must admit that I kept thinking “Where the hell were our fighters?” We could just about carpet the Pacific with Hellcats and Corsairs but there were damn few available to help out the destroyers and smaller craft on picket duty. Talk about a target rich environment! They should have told the Air Force that they could generate 5 to 10 new aces a day over picket position RP1.
Re programmer offices versus cubicles:
Don’t go dark
IMHO, the key paragraph is:
Rule #30 is directly followed by a related rule, Rule #31: Beware of a guy in a room.
Specialist developers who lock themselves away in a room, who go dark for long stretches, are anathema to shipping great software on time. No matter how brilliant a developer might be, don’t give the developer a significant assignment unless he or she understands and buys into the type of development program you intend to run. The brilliant developer must be capable of performing on a team, making his work visible in modest increments and subjecting it to scrutiny as it matures. Some people find this intolerable, and although there is a role for people of this disposition in the software world, it is not as a part of a team devoted to shipping great software on time.
Triton’s Polar Tiger,
Remember WKRP? The ultimate expression of the trend is Les Nessman’s office outlined by tape on the floor.
With determination, you could mirror the outline in tape on the ceiling.
Maybe use a strip that sends up a stream of bubbles like killer whales use to corral salmon in the frigid waters of Alaskan fjords…
Or for drama, some sort of miniature array of searchlights as in Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will…”
I’ve usually been pretty comfortable with cubicle, except when they actually restrict the torso for breathing. From a business owner’s point of view, irrationality can easily swamp the practicality of module-based cubicles. I worked for one Silicon Valley start-up just at the tail-end of the so-called bubble, in which the just-started-shaving principals bragged to us artists that they’d paid an architect almost $200,000.00 to design the cubicles to upgrade a warehouse space in anticipation of the regiments of “wrists” they intended to hire.
Money ran out before the big recruitment drive.
To RWE at number 84: well, that engine company was ROLLS ROYCE.
Nevil Shute Norway wrote a good account of aeronautical engineering events after WW 1. “R 101 ” I think, but I have mislaid my copy.
History still has something to teach for those who are open to learning.
Dave, I bow to your superior knowledge re the P-38. You are also correct, of course, that the P-36 was the antecedent of the P-40 not the P-47, whose antecedent was the Seversky (later Republic) P-35. The overview is mostly clear, but the details sometimes a little fuzzy. I had always been under the impression that the P-38 was originally designed specifically to be a long range bomber escort, capable of fighting off enemy fighters when it got there, all in conformity with late thirties doctrine of the “Destroyer” fighter. The Germans built the Bf 110 to ME 410 series and the Brits built Beaufighters and others. The only successful fighter to come out of these programs was the P-38, a tribute to Kelly Johnson and the Skunk Works.
RWE
Who was that Englishman and what did he do that no one else did? Where can I find out about it?
RWE: I spent some time on the USS Buttercup putting to practice what those men figured out the hard way. Invaluable lessons, how to cut and install shoring, plugs, box and jubilee patches while the water rises around you. It was actually pretty fun stuff. I might be a bit weird but I really didn’t mind General Quarters drills on board either, it at least was something to break the monotony up. Sailing with 7 million gallons of liquid cargo underneath might have helped make receptiveness to the training all the more, too.
The whole division at GTMO, the Fleet Training Group, were still going strong when I left in 1994. Those guys might have been cursed by many a sailor but I think they knew it was worth it, they did an outstanding job getting crews into shape damage control wise.
Old Salt:
It depends who toure fighting. I agree with what you say WRT a first or even a second world threat. Cole was hit by jihadi. an active .50 would have protected her. ROE do matter but the ship needs the equipt to make it happen. My argument is with an over dependence on technology. The million dollar missle laid in the ten dollar tent.
A littoral ship as I casually understand it is to function as the old gunboats or small combatants. (Note pirates or market time shipping, smuggling and infiltration.) Sensors yes, but do they need a $200MM weapons system?
**************
Its FF 3.5.8 on XP
The confusion comes in about the P51 ancestor because the airframe was derived from the “A-36″ Apache or Intruder. It carried the A-36 designation as it was intended as a dive bomber ground attack plane.
http://www.military.cz/usa/air/war/bomber/a36/a36_en.htm
IIRC after the Falklands War, and the reports on the missile damage to the Brit destroyer circulated with in the US Navy, a number of Captains went on a search and strip of flammables that had built up on the ships during the “peace times.”
Paint storage, linoleum on decks, and paper work, lots and lots of paper files. Paper work to keep track of the paper work. There was a suggestion to tow a barge for the paper work.
programmer @ 85: Yes, that has the word “office” in it, and it’s just about that level of logic that leads some places to say, “Ve Vill Have No Offisses!”
But read the next sentence at your site:
This is easier to deal with in the workplace, because you typically have some kind of (theoretically) rational project management in place, and everyone works under the same umbrella. It’s effectively impossible to go dark if you’re practicing any form of agile software development.
Agile or not, it’s the process that governs, not the office furniture. If you strip everybody naked and tie them together, it does not improve either teamwork or productivity.
Sandy, if women are “rediscovering” fireman, soldiers, etc, why do we see popular articles like:
How to Leave A Soldier just in time for Valentine’s Day. Woman dumps her deployed husband to shack up with a Marxist Studies Professor. That in itself is merely one data point, the larger one is that it got published in female-skewing Salon and had many approving letters.
Soldiers are low status, the latest guy out of some emo band with guyliner has more pull and attraction for women (of all ages) than a Spec Ops high speed, low drag operator.
Watch what women consume in the media: it’s “exciting” guys, like the guys they dated in College (i.e. only about 20% of all pre-selected, College men). Women don’t like it, but they will share their men with other women, and tolerate infidelity. Heck Tiger Woods and John Edwards are more popular with women NOW than before their scandals.
This is because women, in the West, have a general sense of security and invulnerability. It is not acceptable for men to even contradict women, publicly, on any topic they feel like speaking on. The power of PC and Multiculturalism and “polite Liberal opinion” is so strong. But women don’t recognize that it is indeed an eggshell.
Not even the BNP can save Britain. Which is not even the Confederacy facing Sherman in Tennessee. [Sherman also likened the Confederacy to an eggshell with the same strategic lack of defense in depth.] When some massive attack comes, Britain and the British people will abjectly surrender. The type of people the British have become, chronicled by Dalrymple and others, including the photos of drunken British folks passed out in garbage and snow, don’t fight. They surrender. They already want to.
This is the paradox of modern successful nations. In order to provide wealth and security, lights reliably turning on because power always flows, computer systems working, sewage not flooding the streets on monsoon season, relatively safe and efficient transit, supermarkets filled with food that is relatively safe and won’t kill you, at affordable prices … all that requires two things.
One: A decent, well established place for women so that they are economically productive, adding value to society as well educated, free, and independent members of society, who create vast amounts of wealth on their own.
Two: Men who cooperate, get along, do the job, toil away, don’t complain (much), and do the boring, unglamorous, unexciting, and tedious jobs that keep civilization running and that women find distasteful.
The disdain women feel for the men this society creates is palpable. Just watch any ad on TV with a doofus White guy. No wonder! The men are just not the exciting, socially dominant, “Big Man” women long for. Which in turn creates the eggshell.
Modern Western societies are simply not capable of defending themselves. There is no possibility of “recovery” because they cannot trade time and space as Stalin did, and even that created the loss of 20 million Russians and the Demographic collapse we see now. China of course has different problems — coming mass competition over women by the 24 million men without wives guaranteeing collapse of most male cooperation and women hoarding, sex trafficking, and reducing women’s ability to operate freely and independently as economic and social producers.
The most successful social model though I loathe it is Islam. It remains unchanging, it “solves” the problem of female hypergamy by putting women in purdah, the Burqua, and harems, it does not want or need male cooperation, and does not want or need technical innovation, preferring mass attacks and manpower attrition to overcome Greek Fire and UAV assassin robots or heavily armored crusaders. No Muslim people has ever become “un-Muslim” the way Christian nations became post-Christian.
What would be the effect of a nuke destroying London? British surrender, within a week or two, to Sharia. Women would demand it. Men certainly would not fight against it (would YOU fight for British women?) The same can be argued for Madrid, Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm, Paris, and Berlin.
Italy, Poland, and Russia alone are different matters. Decentralized enough, with a corrupt government, large crime syndicates, and not much social space/status for women, that their very dysfunction as normal nations protects them from collapse if their capitols are decapitated. America too I think fits in this template, with many regional alternatives making a fight possible, Australia also.
Herb: I remember reading that there were in port watches manning the forecastle and fantail on the Cole. These watch standers are who gave the account that the attackers “stood at attention” as the motorboat made it’s approach.
In my day those watches carried M-14′s, or in the case we were anchored at Bahrain the M-2′s were atop their hard mounts fore and aft with ANPVs scopes mounted on top. Our “quickdraw” team even had two M-60′s for portable spot application amidships. I think the problem with the Cole was that the PC mindset had progressed enough that the sailors were forbidden to even lock magazines in place and (God forbid!) load the rifles.
We’re a long way from the days of that finest of Machinst Mates, Steve McQueen a la The Sand Pebbles.
Toad: yes sir, I too recall doing scans of spaces looking for unathorized flammables that weren’t returned to the flam locker. I’ll go one better though… before I left ship we were actually collecting plastics and storing them on board rather than dumping them with the rest of the trash, this the result of some idiotic treaty the US entered into.
Ivan: …the British have been loyal allies of the Americans, following them into Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan. We might yet see what the American alliance is worth when the Falklands imbroglio heats up.
They might want to hold off until our current one-term TOTUS is gone, he is distinctly Anglophobic. And I’m not sure playing the NATO card would be a slam dunk when it comes to a British outpost in the Western Hemisphere, there’s always the background of the Monroe Doctrine. Gibraltar, sure. Falklands, not so sure. If Argentina wants to make a play for Las Malvinas they might do well to wait until the oil wells start producing, and let the Brits bear the up-front costs of exploration and drilling. If they come up dry, then the UK won’t even be breaking even on the costs of stationing four warships and a thousand troops there.
#43 RCM & #59 Old Salt:
I never did get my original career goal of being a Naval Officer [could not pass the physical due to bad eyes and scholiosis, ended up wearing a badge] but being at the NPS is something most people not only never do, but it is a place most people never heard of. I visited there in the ’80s for some USNI seminars. Strange how a little known place can be a common point in a number of lives here.
#66 Ivan:
No, Britain does not have an empire to run anymore. But, to the degree that it claims to be sovereign, it still has interests in the world that have to be defended when threatened. Its role has shrunken from being the power that ensures freedom of the seas on its terms. But it still has interests in parts of the world that are hostile to those interests. They can be commercial, diplomatic, or simple survival; but they are there. Britain, if it is to be in fact sovereign; has to have sufficient force of some kind [it may not be necessarily military] to protect its interests. If it cannot, then those interests can be and eventually will be lost.
One of the absolute attributes of sovereignty is the ability to protect your citizens/subjects/nationals and territory under your government and flag from attack by foreign powers. A nation that considers such to be a vital interest would be prudent to maintain a force sufficient to have a chance to do so. Or it will be forced to give up that most vital interest. 6 CVBG’s? No, that is beyond the needs of Britain in terms of the threats it faces. One carrier, escorts, and an air group sufficient to seize and hold local local air superiority would not be, nor would the ability to muster and transport a military force sufficient to reclaim lost territories and citizens, or at least credibly throw that possibility into the calculations of any hostile force. The transport forces do not need to be naval. In the First Falklands War, most of the shipping was what they call STUFT, Ships Taken Up From Trade. In the almost 3 decades since the First Falklands War, there are not enough ships left under the British flag to take up.
A mismatch between requirements to defend interests, and the forces available to do so will inevitably resolve itself, as it has through history. Such resolution may not be to the benefit of the British or the world.
#66 Ivan & #68 Don51:
respectively:
We might yet see what the American alliance is worth when the Falklands imbroglio heats up.
London can play the NATO card on the US.
The British alliance ultimately is with the American nation. That does not bear any weight with the regime that currently controls the American state; said regime having contempt for America’s allies second only to its contempt for America’s people and their nation. It is a very weak reed for the Brits to lean on. We helped, gladly much to the discomfiture of RCM’s classmates, in the First Falklands War. I, and most Americans, would have been happy to see us not only give intel data, AIM-9Limas, and logistical support; but also arrange the loan of a flight deck for real naval combat aircraft [and maybe the odd F-4 which the Brits used to have when they had the real ARK ROYAL]. Today, the regime reflexively sides with tyrants and aggressors. There will be no help as long as they are in power.
As far as NATO is concerned, that card has expired. It is just that all the players have not recognized it. Here and other places I have discussed the nature of sovereignty. As of January 1, instant, the Lisbon Treaty took effect imposing the EU Constitution. The simultaneous creation of an EU President and an EU Minister of Defense and Foreign Affairs removed those from the control of the signatories of the Lisbon Treaty. Already having lost powers over immigration, trade [internal and external], border controls, internal lawmaking, and taxation; the sovereignty of those signatories can be defined primarily by its absence.
NATO was an agreement between sovereign nations. Their agreement is becomes void when they no longer are competent to fulfill its terms. There is sufficient overlap between the EU and NATO to reduce the sovereign membership of NATO below an effective quorum.
Instead, many in the EU regard NATO forces as the core for a EU military under the control of Brussels. The status is in transition. NATO troops are in Afghanistan in service of an alliance that is now ambiguous at best.
If the Brits call upon NATO, under the terms of the NATO treaty it will be because of Article 5.
Article 5
The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security .
Leaving aside the detail that the Falklands are not “in Europe or North America”, which even if NATO holds would absolve any of the NATO signatories from being required to render aid; it is noteworthy that if Britain calls upon NATO based on an attack on the Falklands, it is just as incumbent on the French, the Germans, the Belgians, the Dutch, and the Italians as it is on the United States. What are the odds that any of the countries listed, or any member former nation-state of the EU will come to Britain’s aid? And what opprobruim will attach to those European countries who decline, compared to the US? Ah, different rules for different nations, perhaps?
Le dernier acte est sanglant, quelque belle que soit la comédie en tout le reste.
Subotai Bahadur
Walt #88:
The guy was Sir Stanley Hooker (the Sir came after he saved all the arses) and he took an engine that was too small in displacement, the Merlin (which was even smaller than the too-small Allison), took the supercharger from an utterly failed engine they had given up on, stuck that on the front end of the Merlin intake, all to produce a cheap and fast back-up engine – the Merlin 61 – for another concept that was also in itself a waste of time. And that RAF concept was in response to a similar German concept that also proved to be a waste of time and resources – very high altitude bombers.
Then he did something absolutely brilliant. When you stick two superchargers together in series you have a large increase in temperature, which defeats the purpose of supercharging since it thins out the air and also produces all sorts of other engine problems. Everybody but everybody used an air-to-air heat exchanger to get rid of the heat. And that in turn produces lots of drag and also presents a challenge to control the temperature of the air as you go through high and low altitudes and different weather conditions. This was a really major problem with all airplanes, but especially with the P-38. But Hooker used an air to liquid heat exchanger, which enabled him to keep the engine profile nice and tight and also eliminated the need to figure out how to regulate the temperature – you can do that with a $3 thermostat with a liquid heat exchanger.
When the FW-190 came along the RAF was shocked – it was much superior fighter to the Spitfire V. So, in desperation they took the Merlin 61 with 2 stage supercharging, stuck it on the Spit V to make the Spit IX, lowered the altitude rating by adjusting the engine controls, and created a model Spitfire that the Germans never bested.
And it was not long before they got the idea of putting that same engine on the Mustang Mark IA, and the rest was glorious, roaring history.
Much of this is explained in the Book “Not Much of an Engineer” – but writers and pilots typically not being much of an engineer either they have never explained the real technical reason. Or the brilliance of using an air to liquid heat exchanger, which for an aerodynamicist like Hooker was really Thinking Outside the Box.
Most people simply say “they took that puny Allison out and put in that big Merlin.” In reality the Merlin was much more complicated, more costly, harder to maintain, and much heavier than the Allison. And it was smaller in displacement, not larger. But Hooker’s simple idea made it perform like an engine that was much larger.
And the Merlin P-51B was not based on the A-36. They were both based on the original Mustang Mark 1, which the USAAF never used.
“the latest craze has been what I refer to as “free range analysts”.”
Back when I stated with North American Aviation that’s how we were housed-they were called bullpens. Each engineer and first-level supervisor had a 5 ft x 5 ft space for his desk and chair. The desk behind each engineer had a knockout in the center to hold what notebooks he needed. We did manage to design the B-70, among other technical triumphs.
You guys are spoiled.
We set blind watchmen on the ramparts, sightless sentries on the wall.
We slept untroubled through the night, for few there were to sound the call.
Old England lay behind her moat – and slumbered till the hour was late – to wake with Hitler at her throat – his armies at Calais gate.
No wonder nations wept to see the twilight of our ancient power – yet with God’s help, we rose at noon – and rising, lived our finest hour.
(Yet… by Patience Strong)
Will they awaken to the threat to the Falklans or the threat of Londonistan?
clap clap clap
Subotai bravo, what a theatrical speach, quelle emphase !
pity we can’t hear your voice !
It remind me the old discourses of the mid XXth century
A bet, there will not be a new Falklands war, UK has no more means, nor envy to fight for a roc island, besides Argentina is a democracy, and it will not send troops there again, just that the reversion to argentinian rules will occur with new population, uh the Brtits prefer to live in Spain and in France nowadays.
Probably that you regret their empire time, it din’t do any good to your taxes then though !
We did manage to design the B-70, among other technical triumphs.
At a price, Ugati, at a price.
And just how did that B-70 work out?
OK, that’s unfair. For that slide-rule, pop-rivet point in technology, that the B-70 got off the ground, flew the mission, and got back in one piece, was amazing. And the like has not yet been seen since … at least publicly.
I’m sure the slaves building the pyramids were not given separate offices, either, but perhaps we’ve wandered from the point here, which is only, how to you maximize quality, productivity, and output? Lots of things are done bass-ackwards, but done nonetheless.
RWE/97
Thanks. Have just ordered it from Amazon.
Whiskey, that Salon piece was a picture of the cultural divide wasn’t it? The woman to me is a self absorbed twit who deserves her Campus Commie and he her. The letters are pretty evenly divided between those who empathize with her (the left, the morally ambiguous, the wild and reckless, the narcissistic) and those who find her behavior appalling (those who still believe in sacrifice and freedom and manhood). Interestingly one Cook supporter nailed it; in her world it is impossible to define “valor” and “honor”. Amorality and moral relativism have won the day. Never the twain shall meet.
Regarding whiskey’s link to “how to leave a soldier”, what is the moral of that story?
Wife lost patience after twelve years, but had she waited another five, she would have had it all.
Did she have reason to lose patience? Well, when she fell in love with the uniform, did she know it meant she too would serve, and not just for one enlistment but many? Did she live up to that, “for better or for worse” thing? Nope.
Did she shoot for the opposite, once she broke lose? Yup.
Did she invent divorce? I don’t think so.
Is the article offensively tasteless? Certainly.
Should conclusions be drawn?
Hmm.
Perhaps that wars have cost, and it’s possible the Pentagon should pay more attention to the families of career soldiers.
Beyond that, eh.
I love this site.
Yup. Learn something new every day.
Back after Desert Storm wrapped up, I was part of a group that gave a briefing aboard the HMS Gloucester (Type 42). We got a tour of the ship and were shocked to see how few Sea Dart missiles it could hold, at least in comparison to similar USN ships. When we asked why it was so few, the response was that the RN’s analysis showed that the ship was unlikely to survive long enough to shoot more than that. So, any additional missiles were a waste of space and weight. We found that very interesting.
Ask someone to explain to you the difference between “some” and “all”. As in, some women are idiots, like the author of that despicable article, but that doesn’t imply that all women are.
It’s pretty basic.
Exocet,
The same logic would say give the pilots enough fuel to go one way. Think of the money saved. It is for the children.
Josh,
At one time the Navy put some effort into walking the line between being touchy feely and overbearing in demonstrating that they cared about the family separation issue. If done wrong it results in the Captain’s wife playing queen over the other wives but if done thoughtfully such efforts can help. John Lehman once made a famous presentation before Congress, complete with charts and graphs, about the importance of Retention and the impact on retention of tehcritical quality known as NIBWM, pronounced Nib-wham. He was detailed thorough and passionate in his testimony and at the end some distinguished person threw up their hands and said words to this effect, “Mr Secretary you win. We are all convinced. Now just what in hell is NIBWM?” Mr Lehman looked up and smiled and answered “Nights in bed with Mama Sir.”
Subotai Bahadur,
My only addenda to your fine post is that for reasons of operational efficiency and cost optimization it really does make sense for a nation of Britain’s size to build three CVBGs. One will always be in repair and one in training but available to surge. If you only have one or two you are inviting an attack when you are unable to respond. Ideally the EU would provide for another 3 Carrier Battle Groups. The do not need to build a navy as large as America’s because it is reasonable for them to invest more at this time in their ground forces. Of course we know that they intend to build none of this.
Teresita,
the UK won’t even be breaking even on the costs
That depends on what they value in the Falklands. Remember that the English do like Handel’s Messiah.
… and we like sheep …
toad,
Captains went on a search and strip of flammables
That possibly helped produce the “Paperwork Reduction Manual” which killed many a tree and was kept in a cabinet with the dangerous in the hands of an Ensign “FOD Manual.”
Sandy Daze,
Why do we need combat survivable ships?
Because it is a long swim home.
Old Salt,
Best way to kill them is as far away as possible
In the Stone Age, hope I am not revealing anyhing at this point, I took a Combat Systems test that went something like this:
1. The best way to engage an enemy surface threat is?
a) With guns at close range.
b) With missiles at medium range.
c) With an aircraft at a distance.
2. The best way to engage an enemy air threat is?
a) With guns at close range.
b) With missiles at medium range.
c) With an aircraft at a distance.
3) The best way to engage an enemy subsurface threat is?
a) With torpedoes at close range.
b) With ASROC at medium range.
c) With a another submarine or an aircraft at a distance.
I learned to love Navy exams like that. The only way that my ships could have attacked a submarine would have been by throwing trash over the fantail. It does make sense to me that the Navy build real gunboats, with 6″ (155 mm) guns both to support the Marines and to pacify recalcitrant regions as described by Joseph Conrad. The Navy does need more high end true Cruisers capable of independent operations to establish presence and respond to immediate contingencies. Low end ships like the LCS class have a role in escort duties in pirate infested regions but the costs must be kept under control. If a full flight of 30 were built then the contractor would have to make it a reasonable expense. Otherwise the drive to a smaller Navy continues.
To be blogged under the title “Nautical Knowledge.”
#90 – Herb:
“It depends who (you are) fighting. I agree with what you say WRT a first or even a second world threat. Cole was hit by jihadi. an active .50 would have protected her. ROE do matter but the ship needs the equipt to make it happen. My argument is with an over dependence on technology. The million dollar missle laid in the ten dollar tent.
A littoral ship as I casually understand it is to function as the old gunboats or small combatants. (Note pirates or market time shipping, smuggling and infiltration.) Sensors yes, but do they need a $200MM weapons system?”
I take your point. And, thinking narrowly, I agree with you – if all you want to do is a low end mission, then any low end ship will do it.
It’s those medium and high end missions that are a problem.
COLE was hit by a jihadi because the ship was ordered into port to take on fuel…and the crew wasn’t alert or alerted to the existant known threat. Seems to me we wanted to spend some money in that country, and we didn’t have the oilers out there. She didn’t have to be there, we chose to send her there.
We’ve lost more ships since WWII to mines than to any other reason.
Ships will always take hits. We seem to be losing that mindset.
It’s always comes down to a high/low mix. We can’t solely build billion dollar hulls and afford what we need, we can’t solely build low-end hulls because we’ll lose in a war at sea. We sure as heck can’t fly everything we need to fight overseas…cargo ships carry 95 percent of the material needed, and they have to be able to get there, where ever “there” is. Low end ships ain’t gonna do squat in that regime. (I’m not addressing intelligent swarms here).
#107 Exocet “When we asked why it was so few, the response was that the RN’s analysis showed that the ship was unlikely to survive long enough to shoot more than that.”
And, as Sailors often find out, the analysts are usually wrong because they’ve never actually =been there=. Hence: the ship runs out of missiles because the designers built in crew comfort, and the nation loses ship, crew, capability and presence.
Who was it that said “Give me a fast ship, for I intend to go in harm’s way”? We seem to have forgotten the “go in harm’s way” in many of our thought processes.
#109 LifeoftheMind “In the Stone Age, hope I am not revealing anyhing at this point, I took a Combat Systems test that went something like this…”
Yes, ours were like that, too, though at sea we often were just an ASROC or helo torp drop away…or sometimes even closer…(the ship had tubes, too!)(grin)
59. Old Salt:
RCM – what curriculum, if I might ask. I was there, too, at that time. Mine was Natl Security Affairs.
Masters in Finance or Financial Management. 837 was the curriculum code. My Venezuelan officers were 1 Marine Captain and one very senior Navy Captain. They were great guys, but the Falklans War really put a crimp on our everyday chit-chat.
Old Salt,
The USS England (CG-22) was a Leahy class double ended Terrier (SM2-ER) shooter that had the old 3″ guns removed and Harpoon installed, that our CO disconnected when transiting the South China Sea. That meant that it had essentially no guns capable of engaging a small craft except for possibly an M-60 machine gun and the M-14 rifles in the Armory. God help us if we ever had to use the ASROC or the torpedoes. The ship had no meaningful ASW command systems and when I asked about the sonar I was told that we’d be lucky if we found a submarine by running over it. Once I did attend a basic ASW school at Point Loma, and found it the most boring thing imaginable, but they assured me that if I was on a real sub hunter they would teach me a more interesting class. On board the ship we never conducted ASW drills that I remember.
The AAW capability was excellent and I loved the NTDS interface. During a simulation I shot down more attacking aircraft than I launched missiles. Now that was a good drill.
After I left the ship the Navy put a fortune into upgrading the entire class under the New Threat Upgrade program to a standard that would potentially help support the ABM mission. Almost immediately after installing the new systems the ships were decommissioned.
Escuadrón Fénix
Some interesting tidbits on the use, by Argentina, of both military and civilian Learjets during the Falklands war for reconnaissance, as pathfinders and as decoys.
I had thought that the reason that programmers are kept in an open pit workplace was to make life easier for the cleaning staff and also to make sure that no one was hording all the Jolt Cola™. Otherwise doesn’t the guy in the locked office end up looking like this?
All in jest friends.
To be blogged under the title “Systems Architecture.”
I have to think that the UAVs that are turning land warfare upside down are going to have an even bigger impact on naval warfare and that totaly unarmored surface ships of the kind that are being built today are going to be extremely vulnerable to these small hard to detect birds and their light weapons loads. Any charge big enough to take out an armored tank would turn pretty much any ship in any western navy into a torch.
Imagine land or sea launch UAV’s being used for target acquisition and then a swarm of these little buggers comming after a surface ship. Not a pretty picture and unlike a silkworm a UAV could be sent far out into blue water.
Aristide @ .114,
Take a look at Google Earth, for the address:
Base Aerea “El Libertador”, in Venezuela just west of Caracas, near the extreme eastern edge of Lake Valencia.
Latitude: 10°11’2.42″N
Longitude: 67°33’26.89″W
Besides some 9 or 10 C-130 Hercules hulls, you will see four or five types that seem to be Canberra bombers…
It’s mighty interesting to see the aircraft that are kept operational by some nations. They must be powerfully useful.
#119 Mad Fiddler:
Do you have any indication that these planes are active? My data indicates that while the Canberras Venezuela had were based at Base Aerea “El Libertador”, the last of them went out of service sometime between 1990-1995. Could they be just parked and junked? Other than a few in private hands, I believe that the only two Canberras still flying are two WB-57′s that belong to NASA.
Subotai Bahadur
Mad F,
Operational Canberras? For real????
I saw a (privately-owned) one fly at a Boeing Field air show some years back. What a nice airplane.
Subotai Bahadur,
Concur, people forget that Google images are not in real time. A coworker who had been out of the Air Force for about 4 years once killed time in the office by looking up his old address in Hawaii, and saw his old car parked outside. That fits in with my comment on the next thread about the accuracy of archived knowledge.
The wiki (cough cough) said there was one Canberra that flew at air shows for a museum in Australia and implied that some others may be available for private charter in England. Sounds like a remarkably successful aircraft.
Subotai,
My recollection is that the one I saw was of Australian origin (e.g. English Electric not Martin built.) The wiki page for B-57 seems to think the only 2 Martins still flying are the ones you mention with NASA.
62. Walt:
I thought the extended range of the P-51 was due to the implementation of disposable drop tanks. They allowed the fighters to go all the way to…and back…eith even a little time for some 109 and 190 hyjinx over the target.
Fuel stuffed behind the pilot would have given me the heebeegeebees!
RCM @124…
Due to handling issues the rear tank behind the pilot HAD to be the first one drained.
Ike flew in a modified P-51 which deleted that tank and gave him a ride. That plane was unique IRRC.
The German FW-190 went through the exact same range extension logic, as well.
During much of the Falkland Islands War I was unlucky enough to be IN Venezuela –eastern Ven, wildcatting in that Orinoco area which was among the first Chavez ‘nationalized’ (“stole”). i was doing a little drilling fluid work for Fluidos de Perforacion, under contract to CorpoVen, which had a habit of running a handful of foreign trainees out to whatever rig i was on –i was ‘spose to be breaking ‘em in on the basics. while the Falkin’ island (the instant joke) fighting was going on i had several days with 6 or 8 ‘foreign’ trainees among them at least two Argies (including one Hitler Youth-looking guy whose dad must’ve Odessa Filed from the old country) and a loud, red-headed Brit national. Yes, it was sticky –we talked shop only and kinda nonchalantly kept our eyes on each other.
Now for the P-51 story from a year or two earlier than that falkin’ war. We’re (a bunch of oil patch fellers coming and going) in a commuter prop plane, i think it was a deHavilland but no matter, which has an engine running rough so we put down at a small military strip in Guatamala for a few hours and i guess some spark plugs. We were pretty much kept around the plane by the Guatamalan troops so i never did get to climb around on ‘em, but there was at least half dozen camo-painted Guatamalan flagged brand-spanking new looking P-51 Mustangs –bubble canopies –parked up and down that strip –and this was early 1980s. Man, what a gorgeous plane. i think it coulda flown on looks alone, no need for an engine –
Several thoughts on W’s original post and a possible future Falklands conflict between the U.K. and Argentines:
If the current twit on Downing street has the fortitude to dispute an attempted invasion by force of arms, just the Royal Navy’s fleet of nuclear submarines and infiltration by a few companies of SAS, Royal Marines, etc. could win such a war, if the political will were there.
The Argentines have EXTREMELY limited effective ASW assets against Trafalgar class SSNs, to say nothing of Astute class SSNs.
The Falklands are hundreds of miles from the mainland. Any Argentine invasion without sustained resupply by sea would effectively strand however many light infantrymen they chose to send. The Falklands are large and rugged enough to swallow 100,000+ infantrymen without achieving any effective tactical control.
The RN submarines can easily impose a quarantine on the the Falklands area.
The Royal Navy Submarines are equipped with Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAM). That means that any barracks, command and control, strong points or depots established by the Argentines on the Falklands are likely to go ‘splode’ with alarming regularity while SAS and Royal Marines cause the same to happen to people and places using mortars, C-4 and .50 Cal sniper rifles.
British snipers have demonstrated impressive “real world” accuracy at long range sniping in Afghanistan recently. I doubt the Argentine military has any idea how quickly troop morale can be devestated by intermittant deadly accurate sniper fire from 2000 meters away that can’t be stopped or even found in most cases.
In addition, the TLAM equipped SSNs could target critical facilities in Buenos Aires or anywhere else within several hundred miles of the coast. This could take out oil refining, electrical power, military command and control, El Presidente’s scheduled speeches (& El Presidente), critical rail & road bridges, television & radio towers, and airports. There are relatively few Argentinian airports with large storage fascilities for jet and aviation fuel, and all those fuel fascilities can be made to go away in the first week or two of a conflict. So much for Argentina’s air superiority then.
With the use of RAF L-1011 and VC10 refueling aircraft, RAF Typhoon fighters based from Ascension island could conceivably strike targets in and around Beunos Aires. With the retirement of RAF bombers, any Argentine forces in the Falklands no longer need fear aerial bombardment until the Royal Navy brings one of their two light aircraft carriers into range.
The British have the means to sink the entire Argentinian navy if they’re foolish enough to leave port, and to destroy critical Argentinian targets using TLAMs and Typhoon bombing runs. Argentina has no military means to sink the whole Royal Navy, or target London, or South Hampton, etc.
The British have the means to control the marine battle space, the Argentinians do not. The British can attack Argentinian centers of gravity. I don’t see how the Argentinians could possibly return the favor.
For the U.K. to lose, the politicians would have to surrender or hamstring their army, navy and airforce with idiotic ROE, not that I’d put that beyond the possible for the current resident of 10 Downing St.
The alternative to expensive conventional forces is arming with lots of small tactical nukes, intended not as deterrent, but for actual use at battlefield in small and medium scale conflicts. Such missles were built earlier, like Davy Crocket, for range of dozen miles and launched from a truck. They are versatile enough to use in wide range of conflicts and possible scenarios.
The Brits have no intention to make war with Argentina, but to discuss the deal for their ships to cross the argentinian waters, a guess, might be some oil cooperation on the air
Well, sure the Canberra is a lovely plane. So is the F-86 Saber. So is the P-51. But that doesn’t mean that any of them is viable in modern air warfare.
————–
Something of the same applies to the idea broached above of returning to WWII AA gunnery. Seriously? A quad Bofors against ASMs? Good grief, the .50 Browning, while a noble weapon supporting grunts, was inadequate for shipboard AA even in WWII- not enough range- and was phased out in favor of the 20mm Oerlikon.
The threat from ‘swarm’ attacks, or what we used to call a saturation attack, is real- but let’s get some perspective. The nightmare scenario used to be a multi-regiment Backfire strike, launching so many missiles that the CVBG air defenses would be overwhelmed. This was why we developed AEGIS at enormous expense- because the old Leahys and Belknaps and nuke cruisers were constrained to directing two outbound birds at a time, no more. We even retired the first four Ticos despite being AEGIS, simply because the Mk 26 launchers were too slow compared to VLS.
There was once a plan to convert some of the Spruance DD’s to sort of ‘auxiliary DDGs’ by pulling the ASROC magazine and dropping in a VLS (this option had actually been designed in)- while possessing no AAW suite, nonetheless the birds could be slaved to the control of an AEGIS ship in company, increasing missile numbers still further.
Someone brought up armor: well, keep in mind that all your sensors and guidance etc are necessarily on the outside: armor won’t defeat a ‘mission kill,’ where the ship is afloat but impotent. Sure you could armor up like a heavy cruiser- if you think Congress would actually pay for an 18,000 ton AEGIS Long Beach. Not bloody likely.
It’s worth observing that the Perry-class Stark, one of the flimsiest ships in the fleet, nonetheless survived an Exocet attack and made port under her own power, albeit with multiple casualties: and the Perrys were designed as throwaways. The Burkes with their steel superstructures and Kevlar around key spaces are decidedly tougher.
Besides, what are the air threats currently? The Russians are starting to rebuild, but currently they aren’t nearly what they used to be. The Chinese are the major threat, and they could do some real damage, and moreover are building up a bluewater capability. But none of the rest of the likely adversaries (Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, maybe a Taliban-run Pakistan) can mount any sort of nontrivial air threat.
I remember back in ’85 we were on Gonzo station and the Ayatollah solemnly announced that he was assembling a kamikaze force of Pipers and Cessnas to “sink the US Navy in blood.” So we duly rigged the Ma Deuces- hey, that’s one target a .50 really would shoot down!
Sergey:Technical Note:
The Davey Crockett was a bazooka-like shoulder-fired wpn. The jeep/truck mounted one was the LaCrosse. BTW, both were taken out of service not for reasons of becoming technically obsolete, but for the fact that wiser heads had second thoughts about putting the decision to launch such wpns in the hands of Junior officers and enlisted men along with the general unreliability of secure battlefield communications at the time in order to both transmit & verify the launch msg from higher HQ–as well as very real worries about such forward-deployed wpns being overrun in combat and being captured and used against us.
130) “I remember back in ‘85 we were on Gonzo station and the Ayatollah solemnly announced that he was assembling a kamikaze force of Pipers and Cessnas to “sink the US Navy in blood.” So we duly rigged the Ma Deuces- hey, that’s one target a .50 really would shoot down!”
And they put M60 mounts in the cargo door of the H-3s, and we trained with having Marines on board manning them, to be used for those types of targets.
#120, 121, 122
If anybody wants one for their very own there is a Canberra in RN markings at the Melbourne, Florida airport. Early model RAF type, fish bowl canopy. Gorgeous, but needs TLC.
I think you could have it for free or a very nominal charge. They want the ramp space back.
Sergey/128; that’s actually your country’s new doctrine –beginning last December. See ‘leading Russian military expert’ Vitaly Shlykov here:
http://en.rian.ru/valdai_op/20090914/156124823.html
(partial quote of text in fourth Q&A set in this interview:)
“… nukes are the replacement – and mostly tactical nukes, because strategic nukes are a political weapon. The tactical nukes are actually the replacement for those reserves….”
One of my regrets is what has happened to Old GM, which was owned by the stockholders.
I started in ’66, and it was still “pretty damn good”.
Although not nearly as good as the WWII “Arsenal of Democracy”.
My favorite story of that time was how Grumman could not make enough of their Avenger torpedo bombers.
GM engineers “visited”. And, drawings were forwarded home to GM.
Along with a single “exemplar” plane.
Avengers were rolling off the GM lines in about one year.
Old GM lost that kind of capability in the early ’70′s.
“New GM”, Gettlifinger Motors ( or is it Government Motors ) could never even comprehend that was possible.
PS
My Dad, gone in 2007 with military honors, was a P47 pilot in WWII.
He hated flying. His duty and orders, you know. But, he loved that plane.
In a world without the US, the terrorist petri dish would not be wealthy enough to make so much trouble. A still-vital British Empire would have sensibly stolen all the middle east oil wealth so the “Clash of Civilizations” would be over before it started.
Armageddon Rex – You cannot control territory without boots on the ground. Argentina will control the air resupply will not be a problem. A couple of companies of SAS on the island without resupply, medevac, air support would be hunted down and captured or killed. The UK might not come under direct attack but its interests throughout latin America might well.
Yeah a couple of nuke subs could probably operate pretty freely and Argentina might not have much if any ASW capability but they only have to get lucky once to take out a billion dollar sub which Britain could never replace.
I don’t know which way the politics and diplomacy will play out but Argentina could take and hold the Falklands unless the Brits want to heavily garrison it. Not sure that would be a good idea but if it were to happen my money would be on the Argentinians.
Plus I doubt strongly the UK would have much support in the US. The liberals hate all wars and as far as a lot of conservatives are concerned the UK are just another bunch of socialists – especially the Labour party while the Conservatives are so wet they are just Labour Lite.
Joe Hill:
I agree that boots on the ground are essential to controlling territory. I will add that insuficient boots for a given situation doesn’t result in control, just opportunities for lots of casualties.
The Falklands is huge, about the size of Northern Ireland, and the terrain is simillar. It’s mostly rocky, hilly, grass and brush covered pasture land with boggy wet lowland and frequent sleet and rain. How many troops did the U.K. have in Northern Ireland at the height of the troubles? Did they ever control it? How good are the Argentinian army vs. the Royal Marines and SAS who are fresh from repeated tours in Afghanistan?
I believe the extremely well trained SAS and Royal Marine Commando teams would be right at home on Falklands for a 2-4 month operating period, resupplied, extracted and replaced by fresh teams via submarine. I’m not suggesting they pull a Rambo and assault fortified Argentinian Army positions. There are some two dozen or so settlements to cover, and many of them are much harder to protect than Stanley. I don’t believe Argentina has the reasources necessary to hold and control all the vulnerable points. If Argentina puts lots of infantrymen on the ground they’ll provide lots of target practice for British snipers and laser designated mortar teams.
Please examine the air order of battle for Argentina. How many “tactical” transports do they have? How many will they lose to block IV TLAMs while they’re sitting on the tarmac at Stanley? How many civilian transport planes will catch fire and burn up from incindiary armor piercing .50 cal bullets punching holes in their wings and fuel tanks?
Last time, Maggie decided to play nice and not attack Argentina or Buenos Aires directly. If the U.K. is in a tight spot, and now has accurate weapons like TLAM and JDAMS at their disposal so they can destroy the critical targets without inflicting much, if any collatoral damage, why wouldn’t they disappear every major electrical power generating plant in Argentina over a 60 minute window.
Here’s a list of all major petroleum refining fascilities in Argentina:
La Plata Refinery (Repsol YPF) 189,000 bpd
Buenos Aires Refinery (Royal Dutch Shell) 110,000 bpd
Lujan de Cuyo Refinery (Repsol YPF) 105,500 bpd
Esso Campana Refinery (ExxonMobil) 84,500 bpd
San Lorenzo Refinery (Refisan S.A.) 38,000 bpd
Plaza Huincul Refinery (Repsol YPF) 37,190 bpd
Campo Duran Refinery (Refinor) 32,000 bpd
Bahia Blanca Refinery (Petrobras) 28,975 bpd
Refineries are fragile things. I’m betting the Royal Navy would spare the Shell and Exxon refineries and all the rest would be out of commission for years after being hit by 3 or 4 Tomahawks each. How is the Argentine population going to feel about cutting petroleum consumption by 70% over the next 2-5 years? What will happen to the Bolsa de Comercio (the stock exchange) in Buenoes Aires if that happens?
Here are a list of major suspension bridges that connect Argentina to neighboring countries via highways and provide primary interconnection between provinces within Argentina:
General Artigas Bridge,
General Belgrano Bridge,
Libertador General San Martin Bridge
Paso de los Libres, Rosario-Victoria Bridge,
Salto Grande Bridge,
Zarate-Brazo Largo Bridge
I may have missed a few. All of them will be out of commission for months or years after a Tomahawk or JDAMS strike. Some would probably need to be rebuilt from scratch at enormous expense.
How long could the Argentine government continue an extremely painful and unpopular war over some rocky islands while their national infrastructure is taken apart week after week, they being unable to fight back effectively at all?
Non Nuclear regional powers shouldn’t mess with nations that can really project power… It’s messy, expensive, and tends to end badly for the regional power.
I believe you’re examining all this from an excessively American a perspective. The U.S. isn’t the end all, be all of military might. The only support the U.K. would probably want from the U.S. in such a war would be to restock their supply of TLAMs as they expended them.
Wretchard,
Captain Clapp is correct about the British not being able to do a Thatcher era amphibious operation.
It does not mean that the British would fail to win a rematch.
Time and technology have changed. Consider for a moment that the British do have a strategic bomber. It is called the C-17.
It would take about a week to 10 days to develope the off-load racks to properly fuze, program and arm 40 X 2000lb JDAMS for C-17 weapon release.
Then they could just open rear door, kick out said JDAMS and scratch any runway or Argentine military field fortification in the Falklands of Argentine mainland.
JDAMS outrange any Argentine air defense gun or missile.
Use some RAF L-1011 and VC10 refueling tankers with 2-4, AIM-120 AMRAAM armed, RAF Typhoon fighters and 1-2 E-3C AWACS based from Ascension island as long range anti-fighter escort, and no Argentine ground target within the near unlimited range of this group could survive.
There are also now 1000lb, 500lb and 250lb JDAMS that the RAF could buy from US stocks with minimal time lag and use in multiples of that 40xJDAMS number above.
The fun part will be watching the Argentines try the same tactics as the last war under the satellite communication guided SkyWarrior/Raptor/Globalhawk UAV’s the USA would sell to the Brits.
Several other points.
First, the C-130J, of which the UK is buying several in addition to it’s five C-17, are also air refuelable. Think about the implications of really long range airborne operations.
Second, GPS guided air drops are being very heavily used by American and NATO troops in Afghanistan.
Third, the British invented the lightweight 155mm gun and are currently using it to fire American made Excalibur GPS guided artillery shells in Afghanistan.
Fourth, the British infantry are currently using organic at infantry battalion level Raven class small UAV’s and American Javalin anti-tank missiles.
When you put this together, the British could immobilize any Argentine garrison on the Falklands via UAV/JDAM bombing of Argentine logistics, paradrop a light infantry battalion with Javalin missiles and four 155mm guns plus several tons of Excalibur shells anywhere within 25 km of Port Stanley.
The UK would then be in a position of dropping UAV directed, GPS guided ballistic ordnance on top of any Argentine military position in range, and there is damned all the Argentines could do about it, except die or surrender.
Re: Canberras
Sorry guys, my security clearance restricts me from passing along any…
ferget it. I just saw the things on Google. But they are parked on what appears to be a flight line with a bunch of more modern craft. If they were junked, logic whispers to me that they woulda been pulled off to some remote region.
But I don’t have videos of them cruising menacingly at 10 kilometers over Grenada or Bogata.
Armageddon Rex – so you are going to drop a couple of companies of Royal Marines and SAS off on rocky windsewpt rainy icey Falkland Islands? How are they going to get around these Northern Irelands sized islands with their mortars and sniper rifles and 50 cal machineguns? Are the bringing humvees and gasoline and helos and food a medical supplies in those subs along with enough TLAMs and torpedoes and cruise missiles to reek all that havoc you have in mind? And what makes you think the Argentine military is the second coming Corporal Shultz. In case you are unfamiliar with Patagonia it ain’t much different than the Falklands so there is no reason to believe that a good hunk of the Argentine army won’t feel right at home there.
Oh and while we are at it you ever try to get one company of Royal Marines on a submarine let along a couple of them with weapons, equipment, ammo, food, tents, radios and medical supplies for a four to six week field campaign? Good luck with that and I hope it don’t snow.
The paras who won the Battle of Goose Green, having lost their helo mobility when the Argie flyboys nailed the helo carrier, simply marched overland to Goose Green –whereupon they mounted an uphill frontal attack against twice their number of entrenched and heavy weapon-equipped enemy. The British troops had no air nor arty –courtesy the Argentine air force again –so they made it a night attack –across the unfamiliar local terrain. Probably because they kept coming, the Argentine units must’ve realized that their enemy fully intended to win, which caused, once the paras began closing on their positions, the Argies to surrender, laying open the Port Stanley landward approach, and bringing on the final phase.
Joe Hill @141:
The Royal Navy has 8 nuclear attack submarines, and four boomers. 3 light aircraft carriers, 7 Destroyers and 17 Frigates. The also have two Albion class landing platform dock ships each capable of carrying 950 Royal Marines or other “passengers” and a great deal of equipment including artillery, main battle tanks, helicopters, etc.
Just for the sake of gaming it, I would set up 4 attack subs each in their own kill box to secure the waters South, West and North of the Falklands. A fifth attack sub would be dedicated to shuttling troops unto and off of the beach each night, a couple platoons at a time.
One task force built around HMS Albion or her twin HMS Bulwark would stand off the Falklands to the East, to stay out of range, as much as possible, of Argentinian air, particularly the six P-3s belonging to the Argentine Navy, yet at a distance compatible with two round trips per day for the Trafalgar class sub used for commando insert, extract and resupply. That group would consist of HMS Albion, HMS Arc Royal, one destroyer, five frigates, and an Echo class survey ship,
A second task force built around 2 destroyers and 5 frigates, and an Echo class survey ship.
Task force one would serve as floating base of operations for commando operations. Task force two would serve as the protective screen for task force one.
Using four attack submarines to secure only three sectors should allow one T-boat, on a rotating basis, to slip up to the Argentine coast line to either plant mines, sink Argentine naval vessels, or launch Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAMs), while maintaining a choke hold on sea access to the Falklands. Please remember the U.K. will be tracking movements by any large Argentine naval combatant or supply vessels via satellite.
As to how the U.K. commando forces would get around, I would land them relatively close to their intended targets, on the coast using inflatable ridged boats, at night. From there they would walk. I never said anything about .50 cal machine guns. I’m talking about .50 cal sniper rifles and one well placed shot at a time. Mortars, carry them! I’ve humped the base plate for a mortar up and down hills in Korea, and it aint fun, but it can be done. Once control of the sea lanes surrounding the Islands is established bring in frigates to land several platoons near one another at one time, and provide naval gunnery support as well.
High priority would be given to taking out the paved runway and all aviation fuel fascilities at Port Stanley to prevent it’s use as a base for Argentine P-3 and fighter aircraft. Without the Port Stanley airfield, only the six P-3 could threaten most of the British fleet. If the several thousand U.K. military folks garrissoned now on the Falklands have their crap together, they are ready to heavily crater every runway over 500m long on the islands on 10 minutes notice. Hopefully they also are ready to destroy all equipment capable of runway repair at the same time. I would be if I were the commander of RAF Mount Pleasant. It would be my number one priority after ensuring the four Typhoons permanently stationed there escaped to Ascension Island.
The only naval threat the Argentines could pose to the Royal Navy come from their submarine force. They have two world class diesel electric boats, the Santa Cruz and San Juan and one old type 209. I’d give high priority to take them out as well using JDAMs or TLAMs while they sit docked, as the first British shots fired in the conflict. Even if these three boats get to sea I don’t put much faith in them either locating and sinking Trafalgar class boats, and as for them going up agains a task force with multiple U.K. destroyers, frigates, and ASW helicopters, forget it! They would have to get extremely lucky to do great damage, and their chance of survival following an attack would be very small.
I don’t see the Argentines as Sgt. Shultz militarily, I have just looked at the order of battle for each country. I know the Argentines haven’t really been in combat for over a century except for the spanking they received at Britains hands thirty years ago. The Argentine Naval Air Force conducted itself extremely well, and got lucky! The rest of Argentinian forces, not so much…
The British Navy is second only to the U.S. Navy in capabilities. Their submarine commanders may be the best anywhere. The Trafalgar class submarines are as good, tacticaly, as any submarine anywhere. Royal Navy ASW is as good as any on earth. Royal Marines and SAS are as good or better than any similar forces anywhere on earth, and have accumulated tons of recent experience in Afghanistan.
If the U.K. has one weakness it is inability to project airpower. They no longer have bombers capable of hitting targets that far away without local bases. Their carrier born aircraft are only adequate for ground attack against third world losers, but will be wiped out in a stand up fight against even a tertiary power like Argentina. The only use Ark Royal and her air wing will serve at the start of any conflict will be as protection from P-3 attacks on the British fleet.
You like to talk about boots on the ground, well Argentina will have an airpower advantage and troop advantage. The U.K. will dominate the sea and we are talking about an island after all. The UK can elliminate both advantages by refusing to be stupid and attack head on. They can place U.K. assets out of range of nearly all Argentine attackers, and cut off all Argentine boots on the ground.
I still don’t see how the U.K. could lose such a conflict unless that silly git at #10 forces the Royal Navy, RAF, and Army to act stupidly.
Armageddon Rex,
The dead thread can be interesting. The big problems with your scenario is that it is assumes a nice level of two things;
1. political leadership that is competent and experienced,
2. operational readiness and reliability of all equipment when and as needed.
Neither is ever the case, not even in Israel. We did not win WW-II by planning for unreasonable standards of efficiency. Leaving aside all the human elements let us just talk about the equipment. You said that the British are supposed to have 3 carriers and 7 destroyers so you plan a campaign accordingly. Life doesn’t ahppen that way, especially in military operations. The use of the armed forces falls into two categories. Those are planned events and contingency operations. When the call comes at 3 AM you will hve to fight with what Rumself called the Army you have. If you want three carriers available then you need to pyrchase eight or nine ships.
Lifeofthemind:
I do know about refit, upgrades, repair, R&R, running aground, and other things that cause major naval combatants to be “unavailable” when they should be.
That is why the force I gamed with above uses about half the attack sub, destroyer, and frigate assets available to the UK on paper. The Albion class landing ship docks are both fairly new, and as of earlier this month, they are both out on manuevers, so they’re fully functional.
The aircraft carriers are probably the Royal Navy’s most prized posessions for various reasons and thus receive very high priority on funds, parts, technical expertise, etc. to keep them functional when a need is perceived. Heck, even the Invincible is only in mothballs, and could be reactivated if the need arose. The Brits really can hustle and cut through red tape when they’re up against a wall!
You may have noticed I only specified one carrier and one landing ship dock as well.
I think if it gets nasty, and that socialist panzy twit @ #10 Downing wanted to prove something, the Royal Navy could certainly put the forces I described above in the field. They may need to pull their ships out of nearly every other deployment on the planet, but it can be done!
Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
#’s 139, 141-144.
Events are going to play out as they will. We are at the point where it is a matter of waiting for events. I am not trying to start anything, just making a note:
The quality, or lack thereof of any British response to any Argentine attempt to seize the Falklands by coup d’ main is going to depend on a number of factors, including:
1) the political will or lack thereof of the government of the UK.
2) the actions of the EU to allow or disallow a response [since the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty].
3) the notational forces available to the UK.
4) the actual forces available to the UK, taking into account manning, readiness, logistics, etc.
5) the cooperation, or deliberate lack thereof, by that which we poor Americans are forced by evil circumstances to refer to as our government. Support in the matters of Logistics [especially ordnance], intel, usage of space assets, etc. will be dependent on the whim of Buraq Hussein Obama. Last time I looked, he seemed far more disposed to Latin American states who are threatening aggression against their neighbors than specifically to the UK. It, sadly, is not completely beyond consideration that Buraq will offer aid in those terms to Argentina.
You will note that I am carefully not including as factors the will and desires of the population of the Falklands, of the subjects of the United Kingdom, or of the citizens of the United States.
To the concept of denial operations by the forces stationed there, I would add the concept of caches and stay behind gear for those not placed in the bag and for those “Kelpies” who I assume by now have volunteered and who might “go bush” in the event of an invasion. If not combat, combat support and intel would be something they could do with effect.
Subotai Bahadur
I am in the sad position, I fear, of being right about the US not backing Britain over the Falklands. Depending on any help if hostilities commence may not be wise.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7040245.ece
US refuses to endorse British sovereignty in Falklands oil dispute
Washington refused to endorse British claims to sovereignty over the Falkland Islands yesterday as the diplomatic row over oil drilling in the South Atlantic intensified in London, Buenos Aires and at the UN.
Subotai Bahadur