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On a purely temporal level: The aircraft carrier became the dominant naval warfare tech in 1942, 74 years ago. 74 years before that was just after the U.S. Civi

On a purely temporal level: The aircraft carrier became the dominant naval warfare tech in 1942, 74 years ago. 74 years before that was just after the U.S. Civil War. I wonder how many Civil War technologies remained dominant in WWII; probably not much in the navy. Now that is a very flawed, simplistic comparison. But it makes me wonder if aircraft carriers are obsolete and we just don't know it yet because there hasn't been a naval war since then. And it makes me wonder about other technologies, such as tanks and fighter planes. Many of the technologies used seem to be modernizations of what was used in the last large war, which ended in 1945. Did innovation stop then? Remember how quickly things changed in around 25 years between WWI and WWII: Tanks, planes, and aircraft carriers, to name a few, either didn't exist or were insignificant in WWI, and WWII ended with bombers dropping nuclear weapons (another platform and strategy still in use today).

drdeadringer 10y ago
Arguably, the submarine survives even today from the Civil War. Other than that, I agree that that's pretty much it.
- yareally 10y ago
  Have to go back about another 100 years before the American Civil War for military useage of submarines. Also, rifled bullets/artillery shells, breech loading rifles, cartriges and semi automatic (repeating) rifles first came in mass use during the American Civil War. Trench/defensive warfare was also adopted towards the end of the war for some of the major seiges (Petersburg for example). There's other examples I could list, but I would say it's an understatement to say that the only direct use of 18th to 19th Century weaponary we still use to day is subs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_(submersible) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_(submersible) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus_(1800_submarine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus_(1800_submarine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_repeating_rifle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_repeating_rifle
  - ktRolster 10y ago
    The iron-clad.
  - vacri 10y ago
    Trench warfare well pre-dates the US civil war. They were used at least as far back as the War of the Spanish Succession (1700s). The Maori also used trenches when fighting against the British, two decades before the US civil war.
    - logfromblammo 10y ago
      Vauban [0] designed his first handbook for trench warfare after the Siege of Maastricht in 1673. Prior to that, siege mining and sapping had been used by Rome and Warring States China since about the 4th century BCE. This also marked the first purported use of poison gas in warfare, when the tunnels were intentionally filled with smoke. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9bastien_Le_Prestre_de_Vauban https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9bastien_Le_Prestre_de_V...
linkregister 10y ago
Civil War technologies that persisted to WW2 and beyond: the rifle, trench warfare, howitzers, battlefield surgery. I agree in general with the article (the tl;dr being that carriers are extremely vulnerable to asymmetrically small threats). It omits the reason the U.S. Navy employs them in the first place: force projection. Without a carrier group, an overseas nation has no credible opportunity to bombard a far away theater, engage in air sorties, land troops, or any other expeditionary action. Defense of carriers is a problem that must be solved, or the U.S. would have to accept a military stalemate for naval warfare. This has serious strategic, diplomatic, and economic consequences. Many countries' posturing depends on the U.S. Navy's implied or explicit protection.
- Retric 10y ago
  In air refueling lets counties drop bombs on the other side of the planet. Aircraft carriers are cheaper but that assumes they are not sitting ducks and we can't find a friendly airfield somewhere.
  - newjersey 10y ago
    > Aircraft carriers are cheaper but that assumes they are not sitting ducks and we can't find a friendly airfield somewhere. This is probably incredibly naïve but wouldn't it help us get a "friendly" airfield if we could say something like "you can allow us to use your airfield or we will move in our ships in N hours anyway". Am I missing something here?
    - Retra 10y ago
      Are you suggesting that it is acceptable to force neutral parties into a war? Or are you trying to negotiate with your enemies for the right to bomb them? I'm not sure I say any reasonable interpretation of that proposal.
      - burfog 10y ago
        It's been done many times. The UK grabbed Iceland in WWII, providing a base for transfer of US aircraft. Germany took a trip through Belgium and got the Swiss to allow trains through. When things get serious, thoughts like "I would never do such a thing!" are quickly cast aside.
andyjdavis 10y ago
>But it makes me wonder if aircraft carriers are obsolete It is not quite the same as being obsolete but I suspect that they are far more vulnerable than we realize. Every day missiles get both technically better (faster, longer range, harder to detect) but also cheaper making it more affordable for someone to acquire ever larger stockpiles of them for deployment en masse. Meanwhile developing countermeasures that can deal with barrages of incoming missiles that are getting progressively more numerous and faster seems like a very difficult, expensive proposition.
mcphage 10y ago
> But it makes me wonder if aircraft carriers are obsolete and we just don't know it yet because there hasn't been a naval war since then That's what the article is about. Well, that they're obsolete, and also that they're incredibly expensive.
osivertsson 10y ago
I agree that aircraft carriers, tanks, and fighter planes are obsolete in some sense. They fit badly with todays conflicts. Thankfully many engineers don't want to work with innovation in this space. We don't have the global notion in society of competing for resources required for survival against other nations anymore, which would have been a strong motivator in the past.
- vlehto 10y ago
  It's not about engineers. The theory of international relations still maintain that diplomacy between nations is essentially anarchy. The reason why the seven seas are so peaceful today is that the top dog (U.S.) has been favorable to free trade. The reason why regular citizen doesn't have that "global notion of society competing for resources" is twofold: A free trade works. B pax Americana related propaganda has been broadcasted for what, 7 decades now.
knodi123 10y ago
> : The aircraft carrier became the dominant naval warfare tech in 1942, 74 years ago. 74 years before that was just after the U.S. Civil War. I wonder how many Civil War technologies remained dominant in WWII; probably not much in the navy. Fighter planes are that old too. And machine guns, and grenades, and even night vision goggles. But the aircraft carrier of today is very different from the aircraft carriers of WW2, and so is the rest of that equipment. Except the grenade.
- hollerith 10y ago
  The M2 50-calibre machine gun is still very heavily used by the US Army and the US Navy and is a WW II-era design. In fact, I think a lot of the M2 currently in use were manufactured during WW II.
gumby 10y ago
> I wonder how many Civil War technologies remained dominant in WWII; probably not much in the navy. The US civil war was not a particularly maritime war, so indeed not much in the navy. But that war pioneered two interesting logistical elements: first, it was the first war to permit rapid movement of material via rail (a surprising amount of rail was constructed during the war). Second is that it was the first economy vs economy war. By and large the Europeans ignored the lesson, because they figured the details of what was going on in the US just weren't that interesting (big mistake). WWI was an economy-vs-economy and rail war (one problem is that both sides built rail heads to their fronts, so if they could move forward they couldn't supply their new front while the enemy could). The only European power that paid attention was Russia who therefore chose another rail gauge. WWII was economy-vs-economy on a global scale: the US poured huge sums (mostly in kind) into the UK & the Soviet Union so Germany had to battle a large economy on both sides. In the Pacific the trigger for Pearl Harbor was the US cutting off Japanese access to raw materials (what are bizarrely called "sanctions" today) in the hope of ending prior Japanese aggression in Korea and Manchuria: again, economic struggle. Big Napoleonic set piece field battles and ship-of-the-line battles appear to have faded into history, but most of the military spending in the US, Russia and China seems to continue to focus on that obsolete model. These carriers and attack subs aren't that useful in the asymmetric fronts we have today. By the way another good lesson was the American Revolution, which was mostly won via lobbying/payments in Whitehall. Both sides have conveniently ignored that for their own political reasons :-)
- andyjdavis 10y ago
  >In the Pacific the trigger for Pearl Harbor was the US cutting off Japanese access to raw materials (what are bizarrely called "sanctions" today) in the hope of ending prior Japanese aggression in Korea and Manchuria: again, economic struggle. Building on your point about WWII being economy Vs economy and the economic underpinnings of the war in the Pacific, I have a memory of reading a similarly economics-centric analysis of the start of the war in Europe. I do not have a link but from memory Germany had insufficient farmland relative to its population and little access to important resources, especially oil. This set them up to be dependent on their neighbors indefinitely, neighbors who could turn off the food/oil tap at any time. That was not an appealing idea to the Nazis. Not sure how well accepted that theory is or isn't but it certainly seems to hold a lot more credence than "the war in Europe started because Hitler."
philwelch 10y ago
Ironclad, steam-powered ships? Another good counter argument is that there were lots of wars between the US Civil War and World War II between first-class opponents of relatively similar capabilities, including both of those conflicts, World War I, the Franco-Prussian and Russo-Japanese wars. Since World War II, only arguably has the Korean War pitted two relatively equal foes against each other, and even then China had a huge advantage in manpower while the UN forces had a huge technological advantage. If the NBA was dissolved and Golden State periodically faced college teams, 75 years from now they would probably still have a small-ball 3-point-shooting lineup. That's the state of military doctrine today. Outright defeating a nearly-equal opponent is impossible in the nuclear age, so the only remaining problem is how to curb-stomp much weaker opponents as humanely as possible.
- cinquemb 10y ago
  Also in between the time period you mention, and arguably still true today is the varying tactics that are used in war even with opponents of equal numbers of forces/capabilities on paper. If one side couldn't sufficiently protect its population (economy), that could be used to coerce an end on favorable terms to the other side. >Outright defeating a nearly-equal opponent is impossible in the nuclear age, so the only remaining problem is how to curb-stomp much weaker opponents as humanely as possible. I think this is true as of today, but I don't know if this will remain true in the future because people will still seek out the ability to apply asymmetric means on another all else being equal, in ways that would probably be hard to combat. However, such would depend on how one defines what such outright defeat would look like and I posit that the closer that one defines that with something that doesn't look like what usually is conjured up in minds when war is brought up, the more successful one is probably going to be (assuming one would want wage war to achieve some ends and is open to the option of winning such without leaving any trail of bodies in the wake). Not a question for you, but for everyone who's interested, but what would outright defeat look like in the cyber-warfare today and tomorrow as the domain considered to be cyberspace continually expands to compose how we relate with one another and the world, where there will be economic incentive to place nanomachines in living organisms (things that "we" are doing now in research labs) that can communicate/execute complex logic manifested in the behavior of said organisms orders of magnitude faster than humans can even perceive (and have a really hard time even finding/observing now with the most expensive of equipment)?
bane 10y ago
Carriers are obsolete, but very few nations can field the weaponry needed to kill one reliably. > And it makes me wonder about other technologies, such as tanks In the current, more urban, modern war, tanks were actually demonstrated to be pretty useless. I once spoke to a veteran of the Iraq war who mentioned the thousands of tanks in country sitting useless because they couldn't really be used in a city. Turrets too long, too slow, too easy to disable, big slow moving metal boxes. The military tried to use Bradleys instead, but they were also far too slow and prone to ambush. Thousands also sat mostly unused. The workhorse for years was the so called "uparmored" Humvee (HMMWV), a beast totally unsuited to its task, but just about fast enough, and just about able to be A-Team MacGuyvered into a suitable urban assault rig. The "big armor" was the Stryker, which was designed to be armored, armed and fast. But by the end of the war was surrounded in anti-RPG cages so wide they could barely fit down a major road. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/Stryker_25th_ID_Iraq_DF-SD-05-12693.JPEG https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/Stryker_... However, all of these were fairly useless against IEDs and nobody quite knows what the next workhorse armored vehicle is going to be, but I believe they're probably going to be something out of the MRAP program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRAP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRAP The Humvee is being replaced by 2 or 3 purpose built vehicles. Important to this is that all of the vehicles are built using lessons learned during a very long, mostly urban war. The next time a war starts out in vast open plains, the tanks will probably come into their own again, but to be honest, lots of their mission has been taken over by a variety of flying platforms that can deliver payload more reliably and at less risk.
lmm 10y ago
> it makes me wonder if aircraft carriers are obsolete and we just don't know it yet because there hasn't been a naval war since then. Aircraft carriers probably made the difference in the Falklands war. > Tanks, planes, and aircraft carriers, to name a few, either didn't exist or were insignificant in WWI Tanks played a critical role in the closing years of WWI. Planes were significant (though for reconnaissance rather than attack). > WWII ended with bombers dropping nuclear weapons (another platform and strategy still in use today). Bombers dropping nuclear weapons is barely a strategy that exists today. Some countries retain the capability because if you already have a heavy bomber and a nuclear warhead it doesn't cost a whole lot to make them compatible with each other, but the only serious delivery mechanisms for nuclear weapons are missiles.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  >the only serious delivery mechanisms for nuclear weapons are missiles. And merchant ships docked in your enemy's ports. And trucks. And terrorists. WWIII will start as a cyberwar. Western systems of all kinds are insanely vulnerable to cyberattack. You may not be able to force a Western country to surrender by bringing down its banking and civilian comms systems, but you can certainly make it much less able to fight any other kind of war. How much money is being spent on cyberdefences?
- mcv 10y ago
  > Aircraft carriers probably made the difference in the Falklands war. British carriers are much smaller and cheaper than American supercarriers, though.
  - lmm 10y ago
    True - although I've also seen soldiers claim that full-size carriers would have been much more useful, and perhaps that the invasion would not have happened if Britain had still been operating the Ark Royal. (Most immediately the sinking of HMS Sheffield might have gone quite differently if the British had been capable of operating fixed-wing AWACS)
spacecowboy_lon 10y ago
Ask the RN if they think carriers are obsolete given their experience in the Falklands war. And no having planes flying in form half a content away is not the same as having local assets.
- twic 10y ago
  During the Falklands war, we didn't have very good naval SAMs worth tuppence - the obsolete Sea Slug, and the then-modern Sea Dart, which still wasn't all that good: 40 mile range, can't hit anything below 30 metres altitude, such as sea-skimming missiles, or even low-flying aircraft. We now have Aster 30, which has a range of 120 miles, and can hit supersonic sea-skimmers, ballistic missiles, anything you like. Those ranges are still much shorter than the ~500 mile combat radius of a Sea Harrier or an F-35B, admittedly. But since destroyers are a third the price of a carrier, you can have several and spread them out.
eru 10y ago
Military change tends to be quicker when hot wars are fought. We haven't seen much of that in the last few decades. (Comparatively.) From a historic perspective, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/11773582/Why-Did-Europe-Conquer-the-World-by-Philip-T-Hoffman-review-a-strong-case.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/1177358... makes similar arguments. But looking at the time from around 1200 to 1914, and comparing Europe with India and China.

drdeadringer 10y ago

Arguably, the submarine survives even today from the Civil War. Other than that, I agree that that's pretty much it.

yareally 10y ago
Have to go back about another 100 years before the American Civil War for military useage of submarines. Also, rifled bullets/artillery shells, breech loading rifles, cartriges and semi automatic (repeating) rifles first came in mass use during the American Civil War. Trench/defensive warfare was also adopted towards the end of the war for some of the major seiges (Petersburg for example). There's other examples I could list, but I would say it's an understatement to say that the only direct use of 18th to 19th Century weaponary we still use to day is subs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_(submersible) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_(submersible) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus_(1800_submarine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus_(1800_submarine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_repeating_rifle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_repeating_rifle
- ktRolster 10y ago
  The iron-clad.
- vacri 10y ago
  Trench warfare well pre-dates the US civil war. They were used at least as far back as the War of the Spanish Succession (1700s). The Maori also used trenches when fighting against the British, two decades before the US civil war.
  - logfromblammo 10y ago
    Vauban [0] designed his first handbook for trench warfare after the Siege of Maastricht in 1673. Prior to that, siege mining and sapping had been used by Rome and Warring States China since about the 4th century BCE. This also marked the first purported use of poison gas in warfare, when the tunnels were intentionally filled with smoke. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9bastien_Le_Prestre_de_Vauban https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9bastien_Le_Prestre_de_V...

linkregister 10y ago

Civil War technologies that persisted to WW2 and beyond: the rifle, trench warfare, howitzers, battlefield surgery. I agree in general with the article (the tl;dr being that carriers are extremely vulnerable to asymmetrically small threats). It omits the reason the U.S. Navy employs them in the first place: force projection. Without a carrier group, an overseas nation has no credible opportunity to bombard a far away theater, engage in air sorties, land troops, or any other expeditionary action. Defense of carriers is a problem that must be solved, or the U.S. would have to accept a military stalemate for naval warfare. This has serious strategic, diplomatic, and economic consequences. Many countries' posturing depends on the U.S. Navy's implied or explicit protection.

Retric 10y ago
In air refueling lets counties drop bombs on the other side of the planet. Aircraft carriers are cheaper but that assumes they are not sitting ducks and we can't find a friendly airfield somewhere.
- newjersey 10y ago
  > Aircraft carriers are cheaper but that assumes they are not sitting ducks and we can't find a friendly airfield somewhere. This is probably incredibly naïve but wouldn't it help us get a "friendly" airfield if we could say something like "you can allow us to use your airfield or we will move in our ships in N hours anyway". Am I missing something here?
  - Retra 10y ago
    Are you suggesting that it is acceptable to force neutral parties into a war? Or are you trying to negotiate with your enemies for the right to bomb them? I'm not sure I say any reasonable interpretation of that proposal.
    - burfog 10y ago
      It's been done many times. The UK grabbed Iceland in WWII, providing a base for transfer of US aircraft. Germany took a trip through Belgium and got the Swiss to allow trains through. When things get serious, thoughts like "I would never do such a thing!" are quickly cast aside.

andyjdavis 10y ago

>But it makes me wonder if aircraft carriers are obsolete It is not quite the same as being obsolete but I suspect that they are far more vulnerable than we realize. Every day missiles get both technically better (faster, longer range, harder to detect) but also cheaper making it more affordable for someone to acquire ever larger stockpiles of them for deployment en masse. Meanwhile developing countermeasures that can deal with barrages of incoming missiles that are getting progressively more numerous and faster seems like a very difficult, expensive proposition.

mcphage 10y ago

> But it makes me wonder if aircraft carriers are obsolete and we just don't know it yet because there hasn't been a naval war since then That's what the article is about. Well, that they're obsolete, and also that they're incredibly expensive.

osivertsson 10y ago

I agree that aircraft carriers, tanks, and fighter planes are obsolete in some sense. They fit badly with todays conflicts. Thankfully many engineers don't want to work with innovation in this space. We don't have the global notion in society of competing for resources required for survival against other nations anymore, which would have been a strong motivator in the past.

vlehto 10y ago
It's not about engineers. The theory of international relations still maintain that diplomacy between nations is essentially anarchy. The reason why the seven seas are so peaceful today is that the top dog (U.S.) has been favorable to free trade. The reason why regular citizen doesn't have that "global notion of society competing for resources" is twofold: A free trade works. B pax Americana related propaganda has been broadcasted for what, 7 decades now.

knodi123 10y ago

> : The aircraft carrier became the dominant naval warfare tech in 1942, 74 years ago. 74 years before that was just after the U.S. Civil War. I wonder how many Civil War technologies remained dominant in WWII; probably not much in the navy. Fighter planes are that old too. And machine guns, and grenades, and even night vision goggles. But the aircraft carrier of today is very different from the aircraft carriers of WW2, and so is the rest of that equipment. Except the grenade.

hollerith 10y ago
The M2 50-calibre machine gun is still very heavily used by the US Army and the US Navy and is a WW II-era design. In fact, I think a lot of the M2 currently in use were manufactured during WW II.

gumby 10y ago

> I wonder how many Civil War technologies remained dominant in WWII; probably not much in the navy. The US civil war was not a particularly maritime war, so indeed not much in the navy. But that war pioneered two interesting logistical elements: first, it was the first war to permit rapid movement of material via rail (a surprising amount of rail was constructed during the war). Second is that it was the first economy vs economy war. By and large the Europeans ignored the lesson, because they figured the details of what was going on in the US just weren't that interesting (big mistake). WWI was an economy-vs-economy and rail war (one problem is that both sides built rail heads to their fronts, so if they could move forward they couldn't supply their new front while the enemy could). The only European power that paid attention was Russia who therefore chose another rail gauge. WWII was economy-vs-economy on a global scale: the US poured huge sums (mostly in kind) into the UK & the Soviet Union so Germany had to battle a large economy on both sides. In the Pacific the trigger for Pearl Harbor was the US cutting off Japanese access to raw materials (what are bizarrely called "sanctions" today) in the hope of ending prior Japanese aggression in Korea and Manchuria: again, economic struggle. Big Napoleonic set piece field battles and ship-of-the-line battles appear to have faded into history, but most of the military spending in the US, Russia and China seems to continue to focus on that obsolete model. These carriers and attack subs aren't that useful in the asymmetric fronts we have today. By the way another good lesson was the American Revolution, which was mostly won via lobbying/payments in Whitehall. Both sides have conveniently ignored that for their own political reasons :-)

andyjdavis 10y ago
>In the Pacific the trigger for Pearl Harbor was the US cutting off Japanese access to raw materials (what are bizarrely called "sanctions" today) in the hope of ending prior Japanese aggression in Korea and Manchuria: again, economic struggle. Building on your point about WWII being economy Vs economy and the economic underpinnings of the war in the Pacific, I have a memory of reading a similarly economics-centric analysis of the start of the war in Europe. I do not have a link but from memory Germany had insufficient farmland relative to its population and little access to important resources, especially oil. This set them up to be dependent on their neighbors indefinitely, neighbors who could turn off the food/oil tap at any time. That was not an appealing idea to the Nazis. Not sure how well accepted that theory is or isn't but it certainly seems to hold a lot more credence than "the war in Europe started because Hitler."

philwelch 10y ago

Ironclad, steam-powered ships? Another good counter argument is that there were lots of wars between the US Civil War and World War II between first-class opponents of relatively similar capabilities, including both of those conflicts, World War I, the Franco-Prussian and Russo-Japanese wars. Since World War II, only arguably has the Korean War pitted two relatively equal foes against each other, and even then China had a huge advantage in manpower while the UN forces had a huge technological advantage. If the NBA was dissolved and Golden State periodically faced college teams, 75 years from now they would probably still have a small-ball 3-point-shooting lineup. That's the state of military doctrine today. Outright defeating a nearly-equal opponent is impossible in the nuclear age, so the only remaining problem is how to curb-stomp much weaker opponents as humanely as possible.

cinquemb 10y ago
Also in between the time period you mention, and arguably still true today is the varying tactics that are used in war even with opponents of equal numbers of forces/capabilities on paper. If one side couldn't sufficiently protect its population (economy), that could be used to coerce an end on favorable terms to the other side. >Outright defeating a nearly-equal opponent is impossible in the nuclear age, so the only remaining problem is how to curb-stomp much weaker opponents as humanely as possible. I think this is true as of today, but I don't know if this will remain true in the future because people will still seek out the ability to apply asymmetric means on another all else being equal, in ways that would probably be hard to combat. However, such would depend on how one defines what such outright defeat would look like and I posit that the closer that one defines that with something that doesn't look like what usually is conjured up in minds when war is brought up, the more successful one is probably going to be (assuming one would want wage war to achieve some ends and is open to the option of winning such without leaving any trail of bodies in the wake). Not a question for you, but for everyone who's interested, but what would outright defeat look like in the cyber-warfare today and tomorrow as the domain considered to be cyberspace continually expands to compose how we relate with one another and the world, where there will be economic incentive to place nanomachines in living organisms (things that "we" are doing now in research labs) that can communicate/execute complex logic manifested in the behavior of said organisms orders of magnitude faster than humans can even perceive (and have a really hard time even finding/observing now with the most expensive of equipment)?

bane 10y ago

Carriers are obsolete, but very few nations can field the weaponry needed to kill one reliably. > And it makes me wonder about other technologies, such as tanks In the current, more urban, modern war, tanks were actually demonstrated to be pretty useless. I once spoke to a veteran of the Iraq war who mentioned the thousands of tanks in country sitting useless because they couldn't really be used in a city. Turrets too long, too slow, too easy to disable, big slow moving metal boxes. The military tried to use Bradleys instead, but they were also far too slow and prone to ambush. Thousands also sat mostly unused. The workhorse for years was the so called "uparmored" Humvee (HMMWV), a beast totally unsuited to its task, but just about fast enough, and just about able to be A-Team MacGuyvered into a suitable urban assault rig. The "big armor" was the Stryker, which was designed to be armored, armed and fast. But by the end of the war was surrounded in anti-RPG cages so wide they could barely fit down a major road. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/Stryker_25th_ID_Iraq_DF-SD-05-12693.JPEG https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/Stryker_... However, all of these were fairly useless against IEDs and nobody quite knows what the next workhorse armored vehicle is going to be, but I believe they're probably going to be something out of the MRAP program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRAP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRAP The Humvee is being replaced by 2 or 3 purpose built vehicles. Important to this is that all of the vehicles are built using lessons learned during a very long, mostly urban war. The next time a war starts out in vast open plains, the tanks will probably come into their own again, but to be honest, lots of their mission has been taken over by a variety of flying platforms that can deliver payload more reliably and at less risk.

lmm 10y ago

> it makes me wonder if aircraft carriers are obsolete and we just don't know it yet because there hasn't been a naval war since then. Aircraft carriers probably made the difference in the Falklands war. > Tanks, planes, and aircraft carriers, to name a few, either didn't exist or were insignificant in WWI Tanks played a critical role in the closing years of WWI. Planes were significant (though for reconnaissance rather than attack). > WWII ended with bombers dropping nuclear weapons (another platform and strategy still in use today). Bombers dropping nuclear weapons is barely a strategy that exists today. Some countries retain the capability because if you already have a heavy bomber and a nuclear warhead it doesn't cost a whole lot to make them compatible with each other, but the only serious delivery mechanisms for nuclear weapons are missiles.

TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
>the only serious delivery mechanisms for nuclear weapons are missiles. And merchant ships docked in your enemy's ports. And trucks. And terrorists. WWIII will start as a cyberwar. Western systems of all kinds are insanely vulnerable to cyberattack. You may not be able to force a Western country to surrender by bringing down its banking and civilian comms systems, but you can certainly make it much less able to fight any other kind of war. How much money is being spent on cyberdefences?
mcv 10y ago
> Aircraft carriers probably made the difference in the Falklands war. British carriers are much smaller and cheaper than American supercarriers, though.
- lmm 10y ago
  True - although I've also seen soldiers claim that full-size carriers would have been much more useful, and perhaps that the invasion would not have happened if Britain had still been operating the Ark Royal. (Most immediately the sinking of HMS Sheffield might have gone quite differently if the British had been capable of operating fixed-wing AWACS)

spacecowboy_lon 10y ago

Ask the RN if they think carriers are obsolete given their experience in the Falklands war. And no having planes flying in form half a content away is not the same as having local assets.

twic 10y ago
During the Falklands war, we didn't have very good naval SAMs worth tuppence - the obsolete Sea Slug, and the then-modern Sea Dart, which still wasn't all that good: 40 mile range, can't hit anything below 30 metres altitude, such as sea-skimming missiles, or even low-flying aircraft. We now have Aster 30, which has a range of 120 miles, and can hit supersonic sea-skimmers, ballistic missiles, anything you like. Those ranges are still much shorter than the ~500 mile combat radius of a Sea Harrier or an F-35B, admittedly. But since destroyers are a third the price of a carrier, you can have several and spread them out.

eru 10y ago

Military change tends to be quicker when hot wars are fought. We haven't seen much of that in the last few decades. (Comparatively.) From a historic perspective, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/11773582/Why-Did-Europe-Conquer-the-World-by-Philip-T-Hoffman-review-a-strong-case.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/1177358... makes similar arguments. But looking at the time from around 1200 to 1914, and comparing Europe with India and China.