4 ms·
The US military maintains plans for invading Canada, defending Puerto Rico against alien attack, and flooding the Netherlands to deny them to the militant Tibet
by mapt 6y ago
The US military maintains plans for invading Canada, defending Puerto Rico against alien attack, and flooding the Netherlands to deny them to the militant Tibetan Buddhist cult which has discovered an effective indoctrination-hypnosis video and is conquering Europe. Plans are just plans. Lots of them are stupid. Planning officers often make strategic plans as simple exercises in considering all factors. You can be assured that Soviet invasion of the US mainland was hardly one of the more farfetched ones, as such things go, though the conditions never came close to presenting themselves.
Nuclear weapons make most military plans "fanciful to the point of being stupid". We've been in a state of unavoidable mutually assured destruction since the late 1960's. This hasn't stopped weapons development. Being able to move large amounts of soldiers and weaponry around at high speed is a generally useful thing.
- mannykannot 6y agoBut you do not develop a new weapons system just to run a speculative planning exercise. If this was not just a military-industrial complex boondoggle - which I suspect it was - I imagine there were some somewhat realistic plans around what it might actually be useful for.
- mapt 6y agoI'll give you one right off the bat where something like this might be useful, in antiship or transport roles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Straits_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Straits_crisis Russia has a lot of inland lakes, and has always defined its empire with non-negotiable geopolitical requirements for blue-water ports on all sides. The countries that pose a threat to those ports generally have a lot of vulnerable coastlines. Fly an ekranoplane empty to a staging area, fill it with a regiment, fly it in boost mode over any land obstacles, and you can rapidly drop significant troop numbers at any point on the coast without control over the body of water. Larger ekranoplanes that can operate higher off the water are more useful as transports, and things plausibly get much bigger than the KM.
- Yizahi 6y agoIncompetent bureaucracies do exactly this - "you do not develop a new weapons system just to run a speculative planning exercise". One of significant reasons why USSR failed as a state.