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I really really enjoyed the piece[0], but boy, you think this is bad, wait until we're exchanging missiles with a peer military. Hundreds, maybe even thousands,

I really really enjoyed the piece[0], but boy, you think this is bad, wait until we're exchanging missiles with a peer military. Hundreds, maybe even thousands, of missiles[1] in the air at the same time, in a kaleidoscopic dazzle of altitudes, velocities, sensor profiles. Every combat simulation seems to turn into what you might call a "magazine fight" - i.e., who runs out of bullets first. We'll probably burn through the RAM/SM inventory in weeks . . but not before leaving a whole bunch of ships with empty magazines, because they can't UNREP top off their VLSs. We're just now getting a taste of this problem in the Gulf of Aden, and that's in an AoR surrounded by safe/friendly ports, versus a bunch of Iranian second stringers. This is the core reason for the "Replicator" initiative in DoD, but, Pentagon being the Pentagon, their "replicator" systems are on course for being too expensive by orders of magnitude. They need to get focused on cheap commodity DEWS, and do it yesterday; the fact that a teenage youtuber[2] hacked up a kilowatt-class DEWS capable of burning 2-3mm steel at 200m says to me - emphatically - that there is ZERO reason to not have these things ALL OVER THE DAMN PLACE. Having air defense missiles and light strike also being built on commodity would also be dandy, but harder, and also not as critical as getting mass defensive DEWS CIWS up. [0] DoD procurement and business process is . . it's something else. I'm not sure I can communicate it to outsiders. Fighting inertia inside of defense organizations has basically turned into my career focus, although in a tiny little bubble of technical content production, and at the cost of chopping a zero off my salary. I think, at the end of the day, I'm just tired of twenty million dollar PDF files - that are also late, and wrong. [1] I'm including armed UAS in this. They're basically missiles built on dual use chassis - the more fight you fit into commodity UAS, you get exponential returns. China's close link with their dual use industry gives them a depressing advantage here, but that might be a double edge sword in a EW-heavy AoR. [2] https://youtu.be/xNmbvaUzC8Q?si=FZcAwGRTLjyNlrQu https://youtu.be/xNmbvaUzC8Q?si=FZcAwGRTLjyNlrQu

dmoy 3y ago
> because they can't UNREP top off their VLSs Wait, for real? That seems crazy to me. Lot of those ships minus the vls are pretty useless. I guess they rely on bases all over
- jdougan 3y ago
  A lot of the original thinking that lead to that design was the Cold War use-it-or-lose-it carrier group defense a'la Red Storm Rising.
- Tuna-Fish 3y ago
  One of the less intuitive results found in RAND wargaming is that no ship needs more than 4 anti-ship missiles when fighting against a foe that's roughly matched in quality. Either you have sufficient advantage that by the time you've spent 4 everything on the other side is sunk, or the enemy has sufficient advantage that you don't get to spend 4 before being sunk. The Navy took a look at these results, and doubled it to set the allocation of missiles per ship to 8. Similarly, ships carry more defensive missiles than they can expect to be able to fire. No defensive system anyone uses has a 100% effectiveness; Burkes have sufficient stock of ESSM and Standard that you can expect there to be leakage and the ship to be taken out before they run out. But all this assumes a fairly mirrored matchup, with both sides using weapons of similar quality. If one side uses a lot of cheap, attritable munitions, it might not work out the same.
  - mrDmrTmrJ 3y ago
    Can you link to a .pdf of the report?
BlueTemplar 3y ago
Same as for : > My solace is that in a real conflict, all of that red tape would be put to the side and people can get about building things. That's just not going to happen. A real conflict would involve nukes, and the war would be quickly over. I doubt that something close to Vietnam can happen again either. (And even for a 2nd Vietnam, I doubt that any significant artillery would be used when, as you point out, missiles are an option.)
- MilStdJunkie 3y ago
  I might be a hopeless optimist, but I don't think a USN/USAF/USMC vs PLAAF in SCS/Taiwan situation would escalate to nukes. At least, I don't think it's likely. Definitely a nonzero chance, maybe a coin toss, but Taiwan isn't core territory for either Power. Invasion, now . . well, there's the magic power that comes with having 'em. No one invades you, ever. Also,outside factors could change the math here, like a megavolcano under the west antarctic ice sheet or something that raises ocean levels by meters. That redefines "back against the wall". If your country loses all access to fresh water, well, you might as well be under occupation or destroyed, so you might use your nukes aggressively. Just don't accidentally drop them in the water you're trying to get.
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    But that only means that the US would give up on Taiwan before the fight would get any serious (from USA's point of view). I also kind of doubt that China is going to try, at least in the next decade or so, because those so far irreplaceable chip factories are almost certainly booby trapped and are a critical piece of the global economy, so China would be sabotaging itself first. (And Xi has probably a long way to go for Putin-like mistakes.)
    - rasz 3y ago
      China is steadily funding Fab R&D. They already managed to get from zero to somewhat modern ram and NAND (YMTC). YMTC is bad https://goughlui.com/2023/10/10/psa-ssds-with-ymtc-flash-prone-to-failure-check-your-ssds/ https://goughlui.com/2023/10/10/psa-ssds-with-ymtc-flash-pro..., but _very_ cheap so eventually will improve and start taking over more and more volume. In couple of years China will get to the point erasing UMC/TSMC does give them advantage.
15457345234 3y ago
I don't see how anti-missile technology isn't basically perfect by now - if a CIWS radar can track literally the (relatively) tiny bullets it's firing then it's trivial to track a missile (and you can always fall back to optical/IR); if it's trivial to track a missile then just scale the system up and build a megawatt chirped-pulse 'blaster' (outputting through a phased array so you can track and retarget instantaneously), that causes EMF above and beyond anything that's shieldable, you can only make a missile so heavy after all.
- MilStdJunkie 3y ago
  I'm relatively sure the search/track radar doesn't go with individual bullets, but yeah, you have a high PK (percentage of kill) when defending against one, two missiles. But that's not how they'll be employed - your problem is attack mass and engagement time. You'll have maybe a swarm of cheap drones, a few dozen Mig-21s revamped for drone control, a few incoming guided ballistic missiles at mach 7, fifty or so subsonic sea skimmers, maybe a dozen supersonic sea skimmers, plus maybe some airplanes somewhere out there waiting for a hole to shoot your AWACS or tankers. If your defenses are just amazing, and you take out one every three seconds, you're still going to run out of time. You're on the right track with "firm kill" DEWS though. Gotta be a little careful with those, because the engagement range for DEWS is always going to be short, due to attenuation, mist/fog/spray, dust, and good old line of sight. Also, it's quite surprising how little it takes to shield electronics from even nuke-class EMP. But the short engagement range means you have even less time.
  - nradov 3y ago
    Towards the end of WW2 the US Navy got pretty good at anti-aircraft gunnery. The Japanese responded by sending their "guided missiles" (kamikazes) to attack in column formation. By the time the target ship shot down the attacking aircraft at the head of the column the others shielded behind it would be that much closer. Often the last one would get through to score a hit. The weapons are faster and more lethal now, but similar tactics would probably still work to an extent. The Navy has run some computer simulations but they've never done an all-up fleet exercise of a realistic saturation attack that requires emptying the magazines. So, no one really knows for sure how well the defenses would hold up. There would probably be some nasty surprises.
coeneedell 3y ago
YouTuber yes, Teenager no. Drake has been working with lasers for more than a decade and pursued a PhD on the subject.
- MilStdJunkie 3y ago
  Dang, you're right. How the years go by. I remember watching old videos of his and thinking, "the kids are alright"
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rob_lh 3y ago
I'm delighted you enjoyed the piece so much. Honestly, I expected to get 20 views on the whole thing, as I felt like a crazy person researching this area for like 6 months. That collapsed in the belief I probably can't do much to help, at which point I just wanted to get it out there for anyone else in the wilderness. I did speak to a few missile manufacturers facing the same thing, including DOD's lack of urgency, which I interpret as Congress' lack of urgency. In the nightmare situation of a hot war in the Pacific, that attitude would change on a dime, and I still think Operation Warp Speed is the primary example of how we would respond to direct threats. Similar to COVID, I would much rather deter such a situation with bold action now than wait until we're certain we'll need them, which will cost many more lives. And I've heard dubious things on Replicator too, but thankfully, smart defense private money is going to truly disruptive dual-use tech that is autonomous, resilient, and ultimately attritable. That combination is the best answer for democratic countries that care about soldiers' lives vs. authoritarians sending human waves.
- MilStdJunkie 3y ago
  I'm sort of charmed the author directly replied. Thank you for your work. I'm not an arty or missile SME, but, speaking as humbly as possible, I am one in the realm[0] of technical publications, IETMs[1], specs and such. [0] I keep my sanity by staying grounded in lightweight markup and developer tools - there's really nothing you do in the Big XML world that you can't do in vanilla Asciidoc on standard tooling. [1] Real hard for me to not put that acronym in quotes. The IETM as a thing is a bit of an open joke. Each IETM implementation is basically a completely nonstandard, homebrewed content browser. Think if you went back in time to Ted Nelson's Xanadu, and then just had every single hardware manufacturer go absolutely nuts making their own idea of what that means. Then you make up "IETM Levels" of capability defined by total non-sequiturs.

dmoy 3y ago

> because they can't UNREP top off their VLSs Wait, for real? That seems crazy to me. Lot of those ships minus the vls are pretty useless. I guess they rely on bases all over

jdougan 3y ago
A lot of the original thinking that lead to that design was the Cold War use-it-or-lose-it carrier group defense a'la Red Storm Rising.
Tuna-Fish 3y ago
One of the less intuitive results found in RAND wargaming is that no ship needs more than 4 anti-ship missiles when fighting against a foe that's roughly matched in quality. Either you have sufficient advantage that by the time you've spent 4 everything on the other side is sunk, or the enemy has sufficient advantage that you don't get to spend 4 before being sunk. The Navy took a look at these results, and doubled it to set the allocation of missiles per ship to 8. Similarly, ships carry more defensive missiles than they can expect to be able to fire. No defensive system anyone uses has a 100% effectiveness; Burkes have sufficient stock of ESSM and Standard that you can expect there to be leakage and the ship to be taken out before they run out. But all this assumes a fairly mirrored matchup, with both sides using weapons of similar quality. If one side uses a lot of cheap, attritable munitions, it might not work out the same.
- mrDmrTmrJ 3y ago
  Can you link to a .pdf of the report?

BlueTemplar 3y ago

Same as for : > My solace is that in a real conflict, all of that red tape would be put to the side and people can get about building things. That's just not going to happen. A real conflict would involve nukes, and the war would be quickly over. I doubt that something close to Vietnam can happen again either. (And even for a 2nd Vietnam, I doubt that any significant artillery would be used when, as you point out, missiles are an option.)

MilStdJunkie 3y ago
I might be a hopeless optimist, but I don't think a USN/USAF/USMC vs PLAAF in SCS/Taiwan situation would escalate to nukes. At least, I don't think it's likely. Definitely a nonzero chance, maybe a coin toss, but Taiwan isn't core territory for either Power. Invasion, now . . well, there's the magic power that comes with having 'em. No one invades you, ever. Also,outside factors could change the math here, like a megavolcano under the west antarctic ice sheet or something that raises ocean levels by meters. That redefines "back against the wall". If your country loses all access to fresh water, well, you might as well be under occupation or destroyed, so you might use your nukes aggressively. Just don't accidentally drop them in the water you're trying to get.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  But that only means that the US would give up on Taiwan before the fight would get any serious (from USA's point of view). I also kind of doubt that China is going to try, at least in the next decade or so, because those so far irreplaceable chip factories are almost certainly booby trapped and are a critical piece of the global economy, so China would be sabotaging itself first. (And Xi has probably a long way to go for Putin-like mistakes.)
  - rasz 3y ago
    China is steadily funding Fab R&D. They already managed to get from zero to somewhat modern ram and NAND (YMTC). YMTC is bad https://goughlui.com/2023/10/10/psa-ssds-with-ymtc-flash-prone-to-failure-check-your-ssds/ https://goughlui.com/2023/10/10/psa-ssds-with-ymtc-flash-pro..., but _very_ cheap so eventually will improve and start taking over more and more volume. In couple of years China will get to the point erasing UMC/TSMC does give them advantage.

15457345234 3y ago

I don't see how anti-missile technology isn't basically perfect by now - if a CIWS radar can track literally the (relatively) tiny bullets it's firing then it's trivial to track a missile (and you can always fall back to optical/IR); if it's trivial to track a missile then just scale the system up and build a megawatt chirped-pulse 'blaster' (outputting through a phased array so you can track and retarget instantaneously), that causes EMF above and beyond anything that's shieldable, you can only make a missile so heavy after all.

MilStdJunkie 3y ago
I'm relatively sure the search/track radar doesn't go with individual bullets, but yeah, you have a high PK (percentage of kill) when defending against one, two missiles. But that's not how they'll be employed - your problem is attack mass and engagement time. You'll have maybe a swarm of cheap drones, a few dozen Mig-21s revamped for drone control, a few incoming guided ballistic missiles at mach 7, fifty or so subsonic sea skimmers, maybe a dozen supersonic sea skimmers, plus maybe some airplanes somewhere out there waiting for a hole to shoot your AWACS or tankers. If your defenses are just amazing, and you take out one every three seconds, you're still going to run out of time. You're on the right track with "firm kill" DEWS though. Gotta be a little careful with those, because the engagement range for DEWS is always going to be short, due to attenuation, mist/fog/spray, dust, and good old line of sight. Also, it's quite surprising how little it takes to shield electronics from even nuke-class EMP. But the short engagement range means you have even less time.
- nradov 3y ago
  Towards the end of WW2 the US Navy got pretty good at anti-aircraft gunnery. The Japanese responded by sending their "guided missiles" (kamikazes) to attack in column formation. By the time the target ship shot down the attacking aircraft at the head of the column the others shielded behind it would be that much closer. Often the last one would get through to score a hit. The weapons are faster and more lethal now, but similar tactics would probably still work to an extent. The Navy has run some computer simulations but they've never done an all-up fleet exercise of a realistic saturation attack that requires emptying the magazines. So, no one really knows for sure how well the defenses would hold up. There would probably be some nasty surprises.

coeneedell 3y ago

YouTuber yes, Teenager no. Drake has been working with lasers for more than a decade and pursued a PhD on the subject.

MilStdJunkie 3y ago
Dang, you're right. How the years go by. I remember watching old videos of his and thinking, "the kids are alright"

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

rob_lh 3y ago

I'm delighted you enjoyed the piece so much. Honestly, I expected to get 20 views on the whole thing, as I felt like a crazy person researching this area for like 6 months. That collapsed in the belief I probably can't do much to help, at which point I just wanted to get it out there for anyone else in the wilderness. I did speak to a few missile manufacturers facing the same thing, including DOD's lack of urgency, which I interpret as Congress' lack of urgency. In the nightmare situation of a hot war in the Pacific, that attitude would change on a dime, and I still think Operation Warp Speed is the primary example of how we would respond to direct threats. Similar to COVID, I would much rather deter such a situation with bold action now than wait until we're certain we'll need them, which will cost many more lives. And I've heard dubious things on Replicator too, but thankfully, smart defense private money is going to truly disruptive dual-use tech that is autonomous, resilient, and ultimately attritable. That combination is the best answer for democratic countries that care about soldiers' lives vs. authoritarians sending human waves.

MilStdJunkie 3y ago
I'm sort of charmed the author directly replied. Thank you for your work. I'm not an arty or missile SME, but, speaking as humbly as possible, I am one in the realm[0] of technical publications, IETMs[1], specs and such. [0] I keep my sanity by staying grounded in lightweight markup and developer tools - there's really nothing you do in the Big XML world that you can't do in vanilla Asciidoc on standard tooling. [1] Real hard for me to not put that acronym in quotes. The IETM as a thing is a bit of an open joke. Each IETM implementation is basically a completely nonstandard, homebrewed content browser. Think if you went back in time to Ted Nelson's Xanadu, and then just had every single hardware manufacturer go absolutely nuts making their own idea of what that means. Then you make up "IETM Levels" of capability defined by total non-sequiturs.