What's the point of Defence Cuts?

[PsihoKekec]

While having a battlegroup on regular posting down there is infeasible, keeping a conventional carrier with attendant battlegroup woul go a long way towards disuading the Argentinian junta from adventurism in that direction, so they would probably start the war with Chile instead.

 

[Aaron Fox]

While having a battlegroup on regular posting down there is infeasible, keeping a conventional carrier with attendant battlegroup woul go a long way towards disuading the Argentinian junta from adventurism in that direction, so they would probably start the war with Chile instead.

That wouldn't do well, for the British learned the same lessons that the US learned when it came to conventional carriers: their time on-station is shit. A CVN allows you to stay on-station for months, a CV only can stay for weeks and this is significant. The only reason that the US got the Kitty Hawks and JFKs were due to the fact Congress balked at the cost of the Enterprise-class CVNs and canceled the entire class. Once the Enterprise kept showing why CVNs were superior, only then Congress relented and had the Nimitz class be built (which is something of an Enterprise 2.0).

The USN had done several papers on the subject whenever someone asked for a conventional CV. All of them agree that time-on-station was very sub-optimal. What would have been a tiny (comparatively) footprint consisting of a fission reactor is now whatever conventional plant and bunkerage... which would eat into the aircraft supplies (fuel, ammo, spares, etc.). Then there is the fact that it can't (comparatively) stay at combat speed for any appreciative amount of time... which is bad when those AShMs come in...

 

[Lord Sovereign]

While having a battlegroup on regular posting down there is infeasible, keeping a conventional carrier with attendant battlegroup woul go a long way towards disuading the Argentinian junta from adventurism in that direction, so they would probably start the war with Chile instead.

We did have the cash for more than one. Had the CVA-01 program actually gone through, the Argies wouldn't have been merely dissuaded. They'd have shat themselves at the mere thought of tangling with the still mighty Royal Navy. Even the Soviets would not have been able to challenge us on those terms.

The USN had done several papers on the subject whenever someone asked for a conventional CV. All of them agree that time-on-station was very sub-optimal. What would have been a tiny (comparatively) footprint consisting of a fission reactor is now whatever conventional plant and bunkerage... which would eat into the aircraft supplies (fuel, ammo, spares, etc.). Then there is the fact that it can't (comparatively) stay at combat speed for any appreciative amount of time... which is bad when those AShMs come in...

So...Britain should build CVNs?

I agree!

That aside, back in the 1960s when we would have been beefing up the fleet a bit, nuclear stuff wasn't as available. So conventional carriers it would have had to be.

 

[ATP]

Seriously.

What in the ever living fuck is the point of them?

Defence Cuts save pretty much bugger all in terms of money whilst crippling the Armed Forces just in time for tomorrow's war. Defence Cuts dismembered the Royal Navy throughout the later 20th century, which then put all the wrong ideas in Argentina's head. With a strong Royal Navy, they'd never have dared go near the Falklands. Almost like hard power is useful...

I can only fathom that they are done so a government can look like it's being "fiscal" and responsible with the nation's money. Because if they actually were responsible, they'd have taken a lot of ineffective (and vastly more expensive) social programs to the chopping block long ago.

I could say,how "well" it go for Poland.After death of Jan 3 Sobieski in 1696,next ,saxon kings agreed to smaller money on army to made peace in Poland,and - whats worst - gave regiments to their toadies.Which steal most of money.
As a result,winged hussarls become group of old dudes attending funerals,and one calvary regiments had 42 people and...one horse/for commander/
It worked till kings of Saxony was Kings of Poland,becouse Saxon army was intact,but when they stopped to be,we have first partition of Poland.We tried made real army after 1788,but Russia crushed us before anything bigger could be done.
What even worst,we lost all our 17th style calvary,which would wipe out any enemy calvary and most infrantry,and copied others.
I hope,that USA would not go that way.

 

[Battlegrinder]

And how would Britain have been able to have a Carrier group or naval group 'on station' in the Falklands. There was, and indeed still is not no permanent naval base there. The next nearest territory seems to have been South Georgia which was also taken. Then you had Ascension Island which although British at that time was largely used by the US as a tracking station, and neither South Georgia or Ascension had a port. It just isnt practical to keep a sizeable force down there at that time 'just in case'.

I think there's a bit of a difference between "station an aircraft carrier off the coast of the farklands at all times just in case someone tries something" and "go rummaging through meusems to find enough working refueling probes to outfit a mere 10 bombers". One is unreasonable, but allowing things to degrade the point of the other extreme (which is not fiction, that actually happened) is also unacceptable.

 

[Abhorsen]

The reason people want cuts is that the Defense budget is bloated. There have been repeated instances of the military not wanting funding, but being forced to spend anyway to satisfy a congresspersons local voters, for just one example.

On top of this is that military projects are frequently done via the costs plus system, so the price to the military is the costs incurred by the compan plus a percentage. This completely gets rid of capitalism's incentive to get stuff done cheaper, and instead reverses it to incentivize costly behavior. It's a structural problem that needs a structural solution.

 

[Battlegrinder]

The reason people want cuts is that the Defense budget is bloated. There have been repeated instances of the military not wanting funding, but being forced to spend anyway to satisfy a congresspersons local voters, for just one example.

I don't think that's case, generally. Defense budgets as a whole aren't bloated, the army has been complaining about cuts for years. Only certain areas are overfunded, and often there's more a reason then congressional self interest.

For example, there are occasionally complaints about "forcing the army to buy tanks it doesn't need", which are true in that the army isn't looking to expand it's tank fleet at the time. But congress's logic is that it's better to maintain that capacity to build tanks rather than shut down or scale back, in case that capacity is needed in the future. This is wasteful in the moment, yes, but also avoids having an L86-type screwup in the future, which would not merely be costly, but actively destructive to the military's actual effectiveness (far worse so than the L86. Small arms are after all fairly interchangable and easily sourced in bulk from elsewhere. Tanks are not).

 

[Bear Ribs]

One thing a lot of people don't get is that military spending isn't like an RTS where you click the button and a tank comes out of the right building and if you've teched up, it's fine you just build other stuff and can always come back.

In real life you have to keep your people on the job and in practice so that their experience at building military hardware is sustained and passed on to the next generation of workers.

As an example right now the US doesn't know how to build the big guns on a battleship. We haven't built one in so long everybody who knew how is dead or retired so we'd need to relearn how to do it before we could build another battleship. Similarly the US must spend X dollars a year on Submarines to keep Electric Boat in business, because they are the only ones left in the US who know how to build submarines. If they spend less Electric Boat lays off workers or goes out of business and the US will have to buy it's submarines form a foreign power or laboriously reinvent the submarine from first principles, with probably several lemons that get good sailors killed along the way.

 

[Battlegrinder]

Well, we wouldn't have to reinvent submarines, we'd still have the technical specs of the last generation of subs and the theoretical understanding of the principles and technology involved. We'd just have to rebuild and retrain all the equipment and people that actually make submarines, which is still an expensive and complicated endeavor with it's own set of problems (again, I'll point to the L85).

 

[Aaron Fox]

The reason people want cuts is that the Defense budget is bloated. There have been repeated instances of the military not wanting funding, but being forced to spend anyway to satisfy a congresspersons local voters, for just one example.

On top of this is that military projects are frequently done via the costs plus system, so the price to the military is the costs incurred by the compan plus a percentage. This completely gets rid of capitalism's incentive to get stuff done cheaper, and instead reverses it to incentivize costly behavior. It's a structural problem that needs a structural solution.

I'm, sadly enough, saying that we're in a situation where it is the opposite for the US. For the US, we're having the problem of not having enough budget and military for what we're asking for it, especially with the navy. If you want to have a world war once a generation, then fine, cut the budget now. We'll be back to where we started sooner than later.

 

[Abhorsen]

I'm, sadly enough, saying that we're in a situation where it is the opposite for the US. For the US, we're having the problem of not having enough budget and military for what we're asking for it, especially with the navy. If you want to have a world war once a generation, then fine, cut the budget now. We'll be back to where we started sooner than later.

No, I mean this happens in the US. There are projects that the DOD wants to stop, but isn't allowed to stop. Remember a budget isn't just a lump sum that the military gets to spend as it wants. It details every little thing and how much can be spent on it. So they can't just shift around the money. So it's quite easy for the military budget to be bloated in one area and short in others.

Second, the thing stopping world wars in nukes, not the US military. Without nukes (for everyone), the US would probably be more powerful to be honest, but fight more wars. What the US Military does is stop conflicts for most everyone else, and also act as a big threat towards other belligerent countries.

Third, my point about cost-plus contracts being bloated still stands. These need to be gone.

 

[Aaron Fox]

No, I mean this happens in the US. There are projects that the DOD wants to stop, but isn't allowed to stop. Remember a budget isn't just a lump sum that the military gets to spend as it wants. It details every little thing and how much can be spent on it. So they can't just shift around the money. So it's quite easy for the military budget to be bloated in one area and short in others.

Second, the thing stopping world wars in nukes, not the US military. Without nukes (for everyone), the US would probably be more powerful to be honest, but fight more wars. What the US Military does is stop conflicts for most everyone else, and also act as a big threat towards other belligerent countries.

Third, my point about cost-plus contracts being bloated still stands. These need to be gone.

That goes against human history I'm afraid, all it takes is some idiots with more ideology than sense to push things into the worst possible route. We've seen it happen before numerous times, with the latest being the 'War on Terror' and World War 1. Both of which were initiated because some idiots with more ideology than sense wanted things their way and pushed things to war.

Humanity and War are effectively one and the same. If you've got humanity, you've got war. The only reason that we're not at World War VII yet is that the US leadership built a geopolitical system of 'trade or else' that forced an intense level of interconnectedness. This, and nukes, is the equivalent of a dam on the cycle of war and the dam is cracking.

Also, a lot of those programs is to retain this little thing called institutional knowledge. If you want to know how bad you can backslide without constant maintenance of this sort of knowledge, then look no further than the Kriegsmarine... just over a decade of not building and designing ships, in general, gave the Kriegsmarine a fair amount of lemons and semi-lemons in terms of ship classes.