All ships have some utility, as long as they stay afloat. That is after the area around them is secured by subs and anti-air/anti-missile cruisers. I.e. subs come first, long before anything else.
A nuclear sub can do a lot of damage to ships, but can't take land. Carrier battle groups can - they have aircraft and Marines.
So do many other, far more economical classes of ships. In fact troop carriers are far better at transporting large amounts of troops and their heavy gear than aircraft carriers are. As to aircraft, many small carriers (of which the USSR had many) carry similar amount of air power as a single gigantic one. The Soviet doctrine called for sub-based naval superiority followed by troop carriers backed by many small aircraft carriers in escort and support roles. Single gigantic super-carrier is simply an exercise in militaristic naval masturbation, a target far to big and expensive to deploy against a capable opponent and only useful as a show piece against far inferior enemies who lack any naval power to speak of.
As for other nuclear ships, Wikipedia says only the Russians have anything but carriers with reactors on board (certainly the US does not).
I think I already pointed out to some here that this was in fact the crux of the matter: Soviet doctrine was wholly different to US one and called for far more nuclear ships, mainly subs, to ensure global naval capabilities.
Actually, the soviets had several large carriers planned...
The Soviets always had carriers and were planning to build more, but their doctrine called for carriers to be in support roles, to arrive after the subs and related forces secured the seas. Also, define "large". None of the seriously considered (as opposed to pipe-dream proposals) Soviet carriers were ever near the size of the US ones. Their idea was of much cheaper and more plentiful ships. What your article describes is simply a tale of the gripes of their own super-carrier nuts (who won the debate in the US and lost it in the USSR to the submariners).
I think carriers and air power at sea have pretty much shown their value from WWII onward. I don't think you can argue that they have not. I also don't think you can argue that carriers are not
relevant anymore.
All of the examples you quote are against inferior opponents. A point which I have never denied. A carrier can serve its purpose of a "mobile airfield" only if the opponent lacks the capacity to engage such a huge naval target, which is indeed a case with impoverished nations the US is so fond of beating up. But that role does not justify their expense, nor does it justify the efforts required to protect a carrier in case of a conflict with a real enemy. There is very little doubt that Soviet subs would have turned all of US carriers into scrap in short order. Iraq never had such capability.
There's a difference between engaging and occupying.
Bullshit. Read some history. You can destroy a "regime" in a country, leave, only to find out that the new "regime" is even more hostile than the old one (driven by the resentment of the humiliated population whose loved ones were murdered by the "liberators" in the last round). That is why occupation always follows a military conquest, to eradicate, to force ideology upon, to set up puppets and to do all of the things all empires have always done to the conquered, so that eventually the Imperial Troops can depart leaving behind a pliable and subjugated populace. Otherwise invasions have no practical purpose whatsoever.
And so the cost of the war must also always include the cost of the inevitable consequences of the war. Pretending otherwise is just mendacity.
Man, I could write a book trying to explain your mis-comprehensions of the strategic situation during the cold war.
And I could write a book on narcissistic, self-obsessed Americans who think that the entire history of the last few centuries revolved around their asses, they the single-handed victors of WWII, and purveyors of global "peace" and "security" ever since...
The Soviet Union had no need of naval power projection.
The discussion, as it were, pretty much ends here at this truly moronic assertion. Unless of course Cuba is in Central Europe, right alongside other South American Soviet client states, their allies in the Middle East, South Asia etc etc...
Also the Soviet doctrine, a wee timid thing that it was, scared shit-less of the American Über-menschen, would never have dared to propose a counter-strike at the US proper of any kind! That would be like blasphemy! It is just not done! No one would dream to stand up to US Masters of The Universe! Never! Its praying with quivering lips while hunkering in the bunkers waiting for US bombs to drop from the sky all the way, all the while the happy US family shops feverishly at the mall in support of "our brave troops" overseas! I would say that I fear that the US is setting itself up for a rather rude awakening... but you already got some faint hints on 9/11 what a war with a real opponent could be like.
I really hope you and all the folks who modded you insightful would actually take the time to dispel their ignorance of the subject matter before they spread more fecal mater such as the parent post.
Umm, they weren't 'always' faster, I can only think of one class that was appreciably faster than Western designs. You completely ignored the part about losing sonar effectiveness and becoming a big fat target too.
Nearly all of their nuclear attack subs were faster, a point of much griping and teeth gnashing in the West.
As to the rest, what is the point of any non ICBM carrying naval assets if the only possible outcome, according to you, would be a full-out nuclear global obliteration?
Which is why we have our own nuclear submarines.
So, by your own admission, the carrier groups are sitting ducks, whose only, and rather faint at that, hope of survival would be to be protected by US subs, somewhat defeating the whole point of the exercise in the first place. Which is what I pointed out at the outset: major surface naval assets are relics of history and exist only as showpieces to baffle the brains of the ignorant, having inherited that role from the old colourful-flag-covered battleships. Big, very, very impressive to look at and quite utterly obsolete. Not to mention their other, much desired by some, effect of draining taxpayer's purses dry. Subs are on the other hand drab-looking, much smaller, rarely seen and far, far deadlier. But they do have a rather poor utility as centrepieces of propaganda efforts, on the decks of which preening dimwits in flight-suits could declare "Mission Accomplished" and the like to a throng of reporters....
Russian access to the Atlantic is restricted through the Barents, Bering, and Black seas all bordering NATO members.
Conversely, all of these areas bordered the USSR. Your point? Was it somehow impossible for the Soviets to operate off their shore and not so for the NATO members? How so? Oh, I see, because USA is oh-so-speeeecial!
Access to the Indian ocean requires the cooperation of various Middle East powers.
Not if you depart from any of the ports in the Sea of Japan or thereabouts. Look I understand that Americans consider all seas as "exclusively US property" and that somehow mere presence of a US fleet in some ocean immediately prohibits the whole planet from dipping a toe at the other end of it, but American delusions of divinity and absolute power have somewhat tenuous link to reality.
Vladivostok has its own limitations due to its proximity to both Japan and South Korea.
Sigh. See above. Its no use! US fleets are in contact somewhere with the same body of salt water! I am sure if you only inform the Russians of this dire fact, they will close down Vladivostok immediately.
During the Cold War the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact powers maintained significantly fewer surface fleet assets than did the US and NATO powers
Which was by design. Their entire naval strategy was submarine centric. And they had a lot of nuclear subs indeed, while shunning major surface vessels.
What a "two ocean" strategy describes is territorial control and force projection (sending someone to go fight) anywhere bordered by either the Pacific or Atlantic oceans
How could I have missed this!? Clearly submarines cannot fight at sea or else sending them would constitute "sending someone to go fight", surely!
The US carrier battle group is designed to go just about anywhere in the world and fight a war.
So is a nuclear sub. It has a global range, it can reach its theatre of operations undetected and remain there for months submerged, only risking its position to be exposed when firing its missiles. Following which it can dive and lurk somewhere else.
The Soviet and modern Russian navies are more based around cruiser battle groups which don't force project quite as well but can more readily disrupt maritime supply lines. So as the GP mentioned, Russia does not have a "two ocean" navy.
You guys are nuts. There is no such thing as a "two ocean" navy in the age of nuclear ships. Any nuclear warship can remain at sea for months on end and circle the globe multiple times. What you are blabbering about are ideas from WWII and before, where control of harbours nearby was a necessity for constant refuelling and resupply. Heck, Soviet subs were known to get to the Pacific by passing under the Arctic ice!
I predict no one will ever challenge the US in a set piece battle ever again.
Yea, yea, and the Roman Empire still goes on, and the 3rd Reich is in its 7th decade and has peaceful relations with the Mongolian Empire, no?
I have news for you: every empire thinks itself "last" and "everlasting" and their generals arrogantly declare that "no one will ever challenge us again".... and they all bite the dust sooner or later just the same.
It fell apart only slightly more pathetically then what is going on in the West at present. Neither system is sane or sustainable in the long term, which is why the so-called "free markets" have devolved into kleptocracy, oligarchy or down-right feudalism everywhere they has been tried to date and why the so-called "democracy" degenerates into two-horse-race TV spectacles where the state of the candidate's dentistry is more important than his political position. Humanity as a whole is simply irrational.
No, we were talking about USSRs general access to seas and oceans. Also the Arctic Sea is not the same as the Arctic itself. It is open year round, granting access to both Atlantic and Pacific for the Russian Northern Fleet.
Again, here is this talk about "money" in respect to USSR. Somehow it keeps slipping the attention of so many armchair generals in the West that USSR was a command economy where "money" was wholly arbitrary and the "expense" of the arms race was measured in raw materials (of which USSR had plenty) and labour (of which USSR had plenty). What doomed the Soviets was deterioration of their society and culture, aided feverishly by the West busily lying its collective heads off about the supposed miracles awaiting the Soviet populace just around the corner of the next "reform"... if any Western entity has any right to the credit for the destruction of the USSR, it would be Hollywood aided by bootleg VHS tapes, far, far ahead of anything else.
Japan was a militarily 3rd-rate impoverished country?
Since WWII. We are not discussing 1914 here either...
1) They can't keep up with a fast moving surface task force without giving away their location and losing sonar effectiveness. The best way for them to engage such a task force is to lie in wait for it but this isn't always possible if your enemy doesn't cooperate and go where you think he's going to go.
Not true. That was the main reason why the Soviet subs were always faster then the US equivalents. They were meant to keep up with carrier fleets while submerged and undetected (at a nuclear torpedo range).
2) They can't communicate in real time with their base and thus have a harder time taking advantage of other sensor platforms (aircraft, satellites, etc) that would help them locate their targets.
True, but subs are designed to deal with this and employ tactics which need little of such data.
3) They can't take advantage of long range stand-off weapons (missiles) without giving away their location.
At which point the target US carrier fleet is about to sink, making the point moot. Also the sub can fire its weapons and dive away. An option never available to a rather conspicuous carrier fleet. Never you mind that missiles are not preferred weapons of subs against carrier fleets, nuclear torpedoes are, torpedoes which are meant to detonate at significant depth (making their approach very difficult to detect) and to sink ships via a massive rising shock-wave, essentially lifting them out of the water and thus exceeding any conceivable strength their hulls might have. Ships, particularly very large ships, simply break apart from mechanical stresses no ship design can compensate for given the materials they are made of.
4) Their primary sensor platform (passive sonar) requires a fair amount of time to develop a targeting solution (see target motion analysis). This process is rendered much harder when tracking a target that is taking evasive action (random changes in course or speed) to complicate the process. Active sonar removes this limitation but gives away their location and subjects them to counter-attack.
You are thinking WWII again. All a modern sub has to do is to fire its nuke torpedoes somewhere close enough to the carrier's location so that the shock-wave coming up from a few hundred meters below encompasses the carrier.
Submarines can only dominate the oceans in the absence of an effective ASW strategy (see the Pacific in WW2). When such a strategy is implemented they are certainly manageable (see the Atlantic in WW2). We have a competent ASW strategy and the best technology in the world for the task. We also have the most effective ASW weapon available -- our own submarines.
All of these strategies only work effectively in the absence of nuclear submarines. The pivotal weakness of WWII submarines was the need to operate on the surface, or very near surface, for significant amount of time during a mission. Nuclear subs have no such constraints. And then there is of course the nuclear long-range torpedoes. Submarine warfare of today has very little in common with its WWII past.
Actually they tried, but couldn't afford it. The US defeated the USSR by outspending them and crippling their economy, and not just in the Naval arena.
Bullshit. The Soviet system fell apart from a myriad of factors, military spending playing only a part in its demise. In fact most Russians, even today, have nothing against spending money on the military. What you espouse is the Reaganite view of the world that somehow the US huffed and puffed mightily until the Soviets fell, their own societal problems having nothing to do with it.
In fact the US has spent itself into a corner, with hugely overpriced and useless systems everywhere, to the point that it can't engage a single impoverished 3rd-world nation without running up a $3-trillion tab. Most of it on credit.
They do have one carrier now I believe, but could never afford to field as many as the US can.
USSR and Russia always had helicopter carriers and continue to do so. That is what their submarine-centric naval doctrine calls for. The carriers are in support roles.
Also all this nonsense about "affording" stuff in USSR is laughable. The USSR was a command economy whereby the state assigned value to goods and materials, not market forces. They could "afford" anything as long as there were enough materials and workers to make it happen. It was simply a matter of priorities. A super-carrier is just a very large ship, its construction requiring no new scientific achievements.
Its utter nonsense. USSR also maintained strong presence in all the major seas and both oceans, it just did so based on a different naval doctrine. Theirs was as "two-ocean" fleet as any (whatever that meaningless phrase is supposed to stand for, given that all military ocean going vessels can traverse the globe).
The Soviet Union (and today Russia) had direct access to the Baltic, the Arctic Sea (from which to access both Atlantic and Pacific with no "straits" to run through) and to the Bering Sea, Chukchi Sea and the Sea of Japan, not to mention the Black Sea.
We have a better military because we can afford it.
Spoken like a real self-obsessed, greed worshipping USian. Newsflash: more expensive does not equal better. It just means more expensive. An expense which incidentally is so out-of-control that the US can no longer even pretend to afford it, where a conflagration with a single impoverished 3rd-world country, armed with 1950s era weaponry, ends up generating $3-trillion debt. One gets to wonder for how long China, who essentially owns the US these days, is going to bankroll that sort of idiocy.
I am not so sure. You seem to forget that carrier fleets are as much a result of political posturing as necessity and are a direct outgrowth of US experiences in the WWII in the Pacific, which is to put it diplomatically a classic case of "fighting the last war". Also the US has never been truly tested on the seas against anyone but militarily 3rd-rate, impoverished countries. I seem to recall a saying the submariners are rather fond of, to the effect that in case of a serious modern naval conflict there would be only two classes of ships at seas: submarines and... "targets"!
Something else to ponder: the Soviet Union never invested in the massive carriers, focusing rather heavily on fast, long-range submarines instead. Presumably they also had "people thinking about fleet deployment for a living", don't you think? Or do you suppose they were all idiots, far beneath the American Super-Men, The Masters of the Universe?
Some wacky Slashdot algorithm at work. Ever since I got too busy to post at any meaningful length here, suddenly every second time I show up I have mod points to spend!
Given that, and looking at your history, I figure that the inverse of frequency of posting is one variables Slashdot uses in its mod points assignment...
Which of course is the point: such gimmicks as 10 lumen projectors are about as useful as a sandbag in the desert. 10 lumens output is so low that you pretty much have to have pitch black room to display anything, and if you expand the image to its theoretical limit of 40 inches diagonal, the amount of light per square inch will be so low as to render the entire exercise futile, even in total darkness.
Err, they are fundamentally different, in positive ways, from the previously referenced mongols, such that there's no serious comparison
The fundamental goal of empire building is control and dominance. So no difference other then in tactics.
But you are arguing against youself, because that never happened.
Right, that is why all of the nations mentioned are sporting economic and political structures oh-so hostile to the US interests....
Then there is of course the long list of tyrants and dictators installed with US help to facilitate "friendly" to US economic elites behaviour in nations not directly overrun by US forces.
Oh, and that wee thing with military installations in nearly 70 countries and endless attempts to expand that network.
I could go on but history lessons are probably quite lost on people who are so wilfully blind as you.
Japan attacked us. Germany attacked our allies...
Which is often the case with competing empires. They attack each other. You should also remember that in case of Japan, they were pretty much forced to act after US managed to cut off their fuel supply. I think I already mentioned something about economic dominions.
Iraq attacked us and our allies and violated treaties and threatened more attacks
WTF?! Iraq attacked the US?! What sort of alternative Universe do you inhabit?! In this Universe however Iraq waged a war with Iran, on US behest and with US supplies of WMDs to use on the Iranians, subsequently to which Iraq invaded Kuwait (with a deceitful US "approval" given by US ambassador to US-allied Iraq at the time). At no time did Iraq attack the US. In fact the US and Britan by themselves (without any UN backing) established self-serving "no fly zones" after 1991 Gulf War, completely violating Iraq's sovereignty, following which they claimed that Iraqis firing at the US planes were somehow "attacking" the US (over Iraq's own territory). "Imperial Hubris" doesn't even begin to describe this attitude.
As to treaties, what treaties precisely? Maybe you mean UN resolutions?! If that is the reason for US invasion then Israel should have been chock-full of US troops bringing "democracy" and "freedom" there twice over, since by 2003 it has violated two times as many UN resolutions as Iraq had (Iraq = 69, Israel = 138). Not to mention that the final UN resolution 1441 before 2003 invasion did not endorse military action (which can be easily seen when compared to the equivalent UN resolution 679 in 1990). Which is also why the Iraqi invasion was no less a violation of international law than that of Iraq invading Kuwait. But then again the laws are for "little people", US being exempt, for "our own good", naturally.
Did I mention Imperial Hubris?
These countries violated international law, we beat them, and when they lost they made concessions. That is almost completely unrelated to anything the mongols did.
In the light of the above stellar commitment to "international law" (i.e. ignore it when US is involved and sternly apply it to everyone else) this line must surely be an attempt at comedy.
That never happened, in fact.
Right, that is why you can point to many examples where one of these US dominated counties sports an economic system other then capitalism modelled after the US template or the local populace does not learn English as a compulsory subject in elementary or high school. I am waiting for this surely very lengthy list with held breath....
Which wars are you referring to? Vietnam, which the U.S. had no hand in starting...
The free market is a system of voluntary exchange.
Oh yea! There is a lot of "voluntary exchanges" that occur when one is born into insurmountable debt and hungry and in need of a shelter! "voluntary" work as an indentured slave or "voluntary" death in horrible pain! So many "voluntary" choices that one could almost turn violent from being overwhelmed by them...
And that is just one of many merry ways in which a wealthy enough "entrepreneur" of the "free market" can make slaves out of great many "lazy losers". In fact for a quick tour of what can be done one has to only look throughout history of the US Gilded Age. And that is of course far from an exhaustive list, a whole new vistas of enslavement beckon with the new technologies, "micropayment" schemes and what not.
Bashing heads and grabbing loot is what governments do.
The world's greatest superpower who has nevertheless continually refused to exercise any semblance of the imperialism of its predecessors. Germany, Japan, Iraq, and more are all testaments to the devotion our country has to peace.
Err, those are precisely the very examples of US Imperialism. The Empire is sustained by its culture and commerce. Military power servers to expand the influence and enforce the compliance of the conquered nations to US-centred commercial and cultural dominance. Do you think it is a coincidence that all of these conquered countries do, or are expected to (in case of Iraq), follow precisely a US-elite-friendly model of law and commerce? Is it a coincidence that they are all expected (and did so) to replace in large degree their own culture with US imports? Who could even imagine nation-wide, state-approved Christmas celebrations is Japan before WWII?! This is what empires always did to the conquered, they homogenize them to the dominant Empire standard. In this US is no different from the Roman Empire.
As to "peace", ignoring the fact that US has, since WWII, unilaterally started multiple wars with millions of civilian casualties, the Roman Emperors also spoke of "peace"... 'Pax Romana' it was called. Romans had even inscribed "peace given to the world" on their medals. Little wonder then that US, like Rome, was so fond of slavery throughout its history, and even now is still one of the most bigoted nations on Earth, complete with hordes of powerful religious lunatics no different, other than the god they pray to, from those of the Taliban.
No, I mean when did you start to believe that verbiosity is a substitute for having something worthwhile to say?
Translation: "Jcr be hearing none of them long words, many words be confusing Jcr, Jcr be having no use for words, Jcr be wanting to eat, bash heads, grab loot from all weaker then Jcr... and fuck! Gah! Jcr be wanting 'fphree... ftree... furree market'!. He be hearing in 'furree market' there Jcr can bash heads and get loot by fucking everybody over! No confusing long words in 'furree market'! ".
Pompous? You mean when did I stop being awed by surfaces of shiny objects and learnt to look beyond their superficiality? I think I was about 5 or 6 at the time, all those years ago. But then again, it appears that a lot of people never did grow up, as the ever plentiful abundance of wildly popular religions quite clearly demonstrates, be they dealing with matters of after-life, sexual reproduction or in the case of our discussion, economics.
It does not follow that because you worship the state,
I "worship" nothing of the sort. Worship, being associated with absolutism, also known as "fundamentalism", is the exclusive domain of believers in simple "solutions" as fixes to complex problems, like for example a naive and simplistic notion of "free market" being somehow capable of addressing a vastly complicated problem of resource-related relations between individuals.
that those of us who prefer freedom must be worshippers of something else.
The so-called "free markets" have nothing whatsoever to do with "freedom" beyond a very superficial coating of propaganda to make their true consequences hidden and to make them more palatable to those who are unable or unwilling to look into the matter to any depth.
The market is something we use, the way we use language. It conveys information about priorities and preferences.
A "market" and the "free market" ideology are two completely different things. A market is indeed just a tool, no different from a road or a waterway, a means of connecting people or localities for a particular purpose of exchange of resources. "Free market" ideology on the other hand is a fundamentalist religion which holds as its base commandment that trading on markets must have no constraints, and if the religion's believers manage to bring about such unrestricted trade, their deity will, by means as miraculous as they are demonstrably illogical, bring about solutions to a vast array of complicated problems of human civilization.
Slashdot Mirror
All ships have some utility, as long as they stay afloat. That is after the area around them is secured by subs and anti-air/anti-missile cruisers. I.e. subs come first, long before anything else.
So do many other, far more economical classes of ships. In fact troop carriers are far better at transporting large amounts of troops and their heavy gear than aircraft carriers are. As to aircraft, many small carriers (of which the USSR had many) carry similar amount of air power as a single gigantic one. The Soviet doctrine called for sub-based naval superiority followed by troop carriers backed by many small aircraft carriers in escort and support roles. Single gigantic super-carrier is simply an exercise in militaristic naval masturbation, a target far to big and expensive to deploy against a capable opponent and only useful as a show piece against far inferior enemies who lack any naval power to speak of.
I think I already pointed out to some here that this was in fact the crux of the matter: Soviet doctrine was wholly different to US one and called for far more nuclear ships, mainly subs, to ensure global naval capabilities.
The Soviets always had carriers and were planning to build more, but their doctrine called for carriers to be in support roles, to arrive after the subs and related forces secured the seas. Also, define "large". None of the seriously considered (as opposed to pipe-dream proposals) Soviet carriers were ever near the size of the US ones. Their idea was of much cheaper and more plentiful ships. What your article describes is simply a tale of the gripes of their own super-carrier nuts (who won the debate in the US and lost it in the USSR to the submariners).
All of the examples you quote are against inferior opponents. A point which I have never denied. A carrier can serve its purpose of a "mobile airfield" only if the opponent lacks the capacity to engage such a huge naval target, which is indeed a case with impoverished nations the US is so fond of beating up. But that role does not justify their expense, nor does it justify the efforts required to protect a carrier in case of a conflict with a real enemy. There is very little doubt that Soviet subs would have turned all of US carriers into scrap in short order. Iraq never had such capability.
Bullshit. Read some history. You can destroy a "regime" in a country, leave, only to find out that the new "regime" is even more hostile than the old one (driven by the resentment of the humiliated population whose loved ones were murdered by the "liberators" in the last round). That is why occupation always follows a military conquest, to eradicate, to force ideology upon, to set up puppets and to do all of the things all empires have always done to the conquered, so that eventually the Imperial Troops can depart leaving behind a pliable and subjugated populace. Otherwise invasions have no practical purpose whatsoever.
And so the cost of the war must also always include the cost of the inevitable consequences of the war. Pretending otherwise is just mendacity.
And I could write a book on narcissistic, self-obsessed Americans who think that the entire history of the last few centuries revolved around their asses, they the single-handed victors of WWII, and purveyors of global "peace" and "security" ever since...
The discussion, as it were, pretty much ends here at this truly moronic assertion. Unless of course Cuba is in Central Europe, right alongside other South American Soviet client states, their allies in the Middle East, South Asia etc etc ...
Also the Soviet doctrine, a wee timid thing that it was, scared shit-less of the American Über-menschen, would never have dared to propose a counter-strike at the US proper of any kind! That would be like blasphemy! It is just not done! No one would dream to stand up to US Masters of The Universe! Never! Its praying with quivering lips while hunkering in the bunkers waiting for US bombs to drop from the sky all the way, all the while the happy US family shops feverishly at the mall in support of "our brave troops" overseas! I would say that I fear that the US is setting itself up for a rather rude awakening... but you already got some faint hints on 9/11 what a war with a real opponent could be like.
See above. Pot. Kettle. Black.
Nearly all of their nuclear attack subs were faster, a point of much griping and teeth gnashing in the West.
As to the rest, what is the point of any non ICBM carrying naval assets if the only possible outcome, according to you, would be a full-out nuclear global obliteration?
So, by your own admission, the carrier groups are sitting ducks, whose only, and rather faint at that, hope of survival would be to be protected by US subs, somewhat defeating the whole point of the exercise in the first place. Which is what I pointed out at the outset: major surface naval assets are relics of history and exist only as showpieces to baffle the brains of the ignorant, having inherited that role from the old colourful-flag-covered battleships. Big, very, very impressive to look at and quite utterly obsolete. Not to mention their other, much desired by some, effect of draining taxpayer's purses dry. Subs are on the other hand drab-looking, much smaller, rarely seen and far, far deadlier. But they do have a rather poor utility as centrepieces of propaganda efforts, on the decks of which preening dimwits in flight-suits could declare "Mission Accomplished" and the like to a throng of reporters ....
Conversely, all of these areas bordered the USSR. Your point? Was it somehow impossible for the Soviets to operate off their shore and not so for the NATO members? How so? Oh, I see, because USA is oh-so-speeeecial!
Not if you depart from any of the ports in the Sea of Japan or thereabouts. Look I understand that Americans consider all seas as "exclusively US property" and that somehow mere presence of a US fleet in some ocean immediately prohibits the whole planet from dipping a toe at the other end of it, but American delusions of divinity and absolute power have somewhat tenuous link to reality.
Sigh. See above. Its no use! US fleets are in contact somewhere with the same body of salt water! I am sure if you only inform the Russians of this dire fact, they will close down Vladivostok immediately.
Which was by design. Their entire naval strategy was submarine centric. And they had a lot of nuclear subs indeed, while shunning major surface vessels.
How could I have missed this!? Clearly submarines cannot fight at sea or else sending them would constitute "sending someone to go fight", surely!
So is a nuclear sub. It has a global range, it can reach its theatre of operations undetected and remain there for months submerged, only risking its position to be exposed when firing its missiles. Following which it can dive and lurk somewhere else.
You guys are nuts. There is no such thing as a "two ocean" navy in the age of nuclear ships. Any nuclear warship can remain at sea for months on end and circle the globe multiple times. What you are blabbering about are ideas from WWII and before, where control of harbours nearby was a necessity for constant refuelling and resupply. Heck, Soviet subs were known to get to the Pacific by passing under the Arctic ice!
Yea, yea, and the Roman Empire still goes on, and the 3rd Reich is in its 7th decade and has peaceful relations with the Mongolian Empire, no?
I have news for you: every empire thinks itself "last" and "everlasting" and their generals arrogantly declare that "no one will ever challenge us again" .... and they all bite the dust sooner or later just the same.
It fell apart only slightly more pathetically then what is going on in the West at present. Neither system is sane or sustainable in the long term, which is why the so-called "free markets" have devolved into kleptocracy, oligarchy or down-right feudalism everywhere they has been tried to date and why the so-called "democracy" degenerates into two-horse-race TV spectacles where the state of the candidate's dentistry is more important than his political position. Humanity as a whole is simply irrational.
No, we were talking about USSRs general access to seas and oceans. Also the Arctic Sea is not the same as the Arctic itself. It is open year round, granting access to both Atlantic and Pacific for the Russian Northern Fleet.
Again, here is this talk about "money" in respect to USSR. Somehow it keeps slipping the attention of so many armchair generals in the West that USSR was a command economy where "money" was wholly arbitrary and the "expense" of the arms race was measured in raw materials (of which USSR had plenty) and labour (of which USSR had plenty). What doomed the Soviets was deterioration of their society and culture, aided feverishly by the West busily lying its collective heads off about the supposed miracles awaiting the Soviet populace just around the corner of the next "reform"... if any Western entity has any right to the credit for the destruction of the USSR, it would be Hollywood aided by bootleg VHS tapes, far, far ahead of anything else.
Laughable delusions of grandeur. USA is just another Empire, here today, gone tomorrow, to be replaced by yet another.
Since WWII. We are not discussing 1914 here either ...
Not true. That was the main reason why the Soviet subs were always faster then the US equivalents. They were meant to keep up with carrier fleets while submerged and undetected (at a nuclear torpedo range).
True, but subs are designed to deal with this and employ tactics which need little of such data.
At which point the target US carrier fleet is about to sink, making the point moot. Also the sub can fire its weapons and dive away. An option never available to a rather conspicuous carrier fleet. Never you mind that missiles are not preferred weapons of subs against carrier fleets, nuclear torpedoes are, torpedoes which are meant to detonate at significant depth (making their approach very difficult to detect) and to sink ships via a massive rising shock-wave, essentially lifting them out of the water and thus exceeding any conceivable strength their hulls might have. Ships, particularly very large ships, simply break apart from mechanical stresses no ship design can compensate for given the materials they are made of.
You are thinking WWII again. All a modern sub has to do is to fire its nuke torpedoes somewhere close enough to the carrier's location so that the shock-wave coming up from a few hundred meters below encompasses the carrier.
All of these strategies only work effectively in the absence of nuclear submarines. The pivotal weakness of WWII submarines was the need to operate on the surface, or very near surface, for significant amount of time during a mission. Nuclear subs have no such constraints. And then there is of course the nuclear long-range torpedoes. Submarine warfare of today has very little in common with its WWII past.
Bullshit. The Soviet system fell apart from a myriad of factors, military spending playing only a part in its demise. In fact most Russians, even today, have nothing against spending money on the military. What you espouse is the Reaganite view of the world that somehow the US huffed and puffed mightily until the Soviets fell, their own societal problems having nothing to do with it.
In fact the US has spent itself into a corner, with hugely overpriced and useless systems everywhere, to the point that it can't engage a single impoverished 3rd-world nation without running up a $3-trillion tab. Most of it on credit.
USSR and Russia always had helicopter carriers and continue to do so. That is what their submarine-centric naval doctrine calls for. The carriers are in support roles.
Also all this nonsense about "affording" stuff in USSR is laughable. The USSR was a command economy whereby the state assigned value to goods and materials, not market forces. They could "afford" anything as long as there were enough materials and workers to make it happen. It was simply a matter of priorities. A super-carrier is just a very large ship, its construction requiring no new scientific achievements.
Its utter nonsense. USSR also maintained strong presence in all the major seas and both oceans, it just did so based on a different naval doctrine. Theirs was as "two-ocean" fleet as any (whatever that meaningless phrase is supposed to stand for, given that all military ocean going vessels can traverse the globe).
The Soviet Union (and today Russia) had direct access to the Baltic, the Arctic Sea (from which to access both Atlantic and Pacific with no "straits" to run through) and to the Bering Sea, Chukchi Sea and the Sea of Japan, not to mention the Black Sea.
Spoken like a real self-obsessed, greed worshipping USian. Newsflash: more expensive does not equal better. It just means more expensive. An expense which incidentally is so out-of-control that the US can no longer even pretend to afford it, where a conflagration with a single impoverished 3rd-world country, armed with 1950s era weaponry, ends up generating $3-trillion debt. One gets to wonder for how long China, who essentially owns the US these days, is going to bankroll that sort of idiocy.
I am not so sure. You seem to forget that carrier fleets are as much a result of political posturing as necessity and are a direct outgrowth of US experiences in the WWII in the Pacific, which is to put it diplomatically a classic case of "fighting the last war". Also the US has never been truly tested on the seas against anyone but militarily 3rd-rate, impoverished countries. I seem to recall a saying the submariners are rather fond of, to the effect that in case of a serious modern naval conflict there would be only two classes of ships at seas: submarines and ... "targets"!
Something else to ponder: the Soviet Union never invested in the massive carriers, focusing rather heavily on fast, long-range submarines instead. Presumably they also had "people thinking about fleet deployment for a living", don't you think? Or do you suppose they were all idiots, far beneath the American Super-Men, The Masters of the Universe?
Some wacky Slashdot algorithm at work. Ever since I got too busy to post at any meaningful length here, suddenly every second time I show up I have mod points to spend!
Given that, and looking at your history, I figure that the inverse of frequency of posting is one variables Slashdot uses in its mod points assignment ...
Which of course is the point: such gimmicks as 10 lumen projectors are about as useful as a sandbag in the desert. 10 lumens output is so low that you pretty much have to have pitch black room to display anything, and if you expand the image to its theoretical limit of 40 inches diagonal, the amount of light per square inch will be so low as to render the entire exercise futile, even in total darkness.
Wait ... 10 as in ten lumens?! Isn't that output inferior to this device? Are the Luis XIV style whigs coming back into fashion too?
The fundamental goal of empire building is control and dominance. So no difference other then in tactics.
Right, that is why all of the nations mentioned are sporting economic and political structures oh-so hostile to the US interests ....
Then there is of course the long list of tyrants and dictators installed with US help to facilitate "friendly" to US economic elites behaviour in nations not directly overrun by US forces.
Oh, and that wee thing with military installations in nearly 70 countries and endless attempts to expand that network.
I could go on but history lessons are probably quite lost on people who are so wilfully blind as you.
Which is often the case with competing empires. They attack each other. You should also remember that in case of Japan, they were pretty much forced to act after US managed to cut off their fuel supply. I think I already mentioned something about economic dominions.
WTF?! Iraq attacked the US?! What sort of alternative Universe do you inhabit?! In this Universe however Iraq waged a war with Iran, on US behest and with US supplies of WMDs to use on the Iranians, subsequently to which Iraq invaded Kuwait (with a deceitful US "approval" given by US ambassador to US-allied Iraq at the time). At no time did Iraq attack the US. In fact the US and Britan by themselves (without any UN backing) established self-serving "no fly zones" after 1991 Gulf War, completely violating Iraq's sovereignty, following which they claimed that Iraqis firing at the US planes were somehow "attacking" the US (over Iraq's own territory). "Imperial Hubris" doesn't even begin to describe this attitude.
As to treaties, what treaties precisely? Maybe you mean UN resolutions?! If that is the reason for US invasion then Israel should have been chock-full of US troops bringing "democracy" and "freedom" there twice over, since by 2003 it has violated two times as many UN resolutions as Iraq had (Iraq = 69, Israel = 138). Not to mention that the final UN resolution 1441 before 2003 invasion did not endorse military action (which can be easily seen when compared to the equivalent UN resolution 679 in 1990). Which is also why the Iraqi invasion was no less a violation of international law than that of Iraq invading Kuwait. But then again the laws are for "little people", US being exempt, for "our own good", naturally.
Did I mention Imperial Hubris?
In the light of the above stellar commitment to "international law" (i.e. ignore it when US is involved and sternly apply it to everyone else) this line must surely be an attempt at comedy.
Right, that is why you can point to many examples where one of these US dominated counties sports an economic system other then capitalism modelled after the US template or the local populace does not learn English as a compulsory subject in elementary or high school. I am waiting for this surely very lengthy list with held breath....
Huh?! What?! Ever heard of the
Oh yea! There is a lot of "voluntary exchanges" that occur when one is born into insurmountable debt and hungry and in need of a shelter! "voluntary" work as an indentured slave or "voluntary" death in horrible pain! So many "voluntary" choices that one could almost turn violent from being overwhelmed by them ...
And that is just one of many merry ways in which a wealthy enough "entrepreneur" of the "free market" can make slaves out of great many "lazy losers". In fact for a quick tour of what can be done one has to only look throughout history of the US Gilded Age. And that is of course far from an exhaustive list, a whole new vistas of enslavement beckon with the new technologies, "micropayment" schemes and what not.
May I introduce you to one Mr. Rockefeller. Or maybe Mr. Carnegie?
Err, those are precisely the very examples of US Imperialism. The Empire is sustained by its culture and commerce. Military power servers to expand the influence and enforce the compliance of the conquered nations to US-centred commercial and cultural dominance. Do you think it is a coincidence that all of these conquered countries do, or are expected to (in case of Iraq), follow precisely a US-elite-friendly model of law and commerce? Is it a coincidence that they are all expected (and did so) to replace in large degree their own culture with US imports? Who could even imagine nation-wide, state-approved Christmas celebrations is Japan before WWII?! This is what empires always did to the conquered, they homogenize them to the dominant Empire standard. In this US is no different from the Roman Empire.
As to "peace", ignoring the fact that US has, since WWII, unilaterally started multiple wars with millions of civilian casualties, the Roman Emperors also spoke of "peace" ... 'Pax Romana' it was called. Romans had even inscribed "peace given to the world" on their medals. Little wonder then that US, like Rome, was so fond of slavery throughout its history, and even now is still one of the most bigoted nations on Earth, complete with hordes of powerful religious lunatics no different, other than the god they pray to, from those of the Taliban.
Translation: "Jcr be hearing none of them long words, many words be confusing Jcr, Jcr be having no use for words, Jcr be wanting to eat, bash heads, grab loot from all weaker then Jcr ... and fuck! Gah! Jcr be wanting 'fphree... ftree... furree market'!. He be hearing in 'furree market' there Jcr can bash heads and get loot by fucking everybody over! No confusing long words in 'furree market'! ".
Pompous? You mean when did I stop being awed by surfaces of shiny objects and learnt to look beyond their superficiality? I think I was about 5 or 6 at the time, all those years ago. But then again, it appears that a lot of people never did grow up, as the ever plentiful abundance of wildly popular religions quite clearly demonstrates, be they dealing with matters of after-life, sexual reproduction or in the case of our discussion, economics.
I "worship" nothing of the sort. Worship, being associated with absolutism, also known as "fundamentalism", is the exclusive domain of believers in simple "solutions" as fixes to complex problems, like for example a naive and simplistic notion of "free market" being somehow capable of addressing a vastly complicated problem of resource-related relations between individuals.
The so-called "free markets" have nothing whatsoever to do with "freedom" beyond a very superficial coating of propaganda to make their true consequences hidden and to make them more palatable to those who are unable or unwilling to look into the matter to any depth.
A "market" and the "free market" ideology are two completely different things. A market is indeed just a tool, no different from a road or a waterway, a means of connecting people or localities for a particular purpose of exchange of resources. "Free market" ideology on the other hand is a fundamentalist religion which holds as its base commandment that trading on markets must have no constraints, and if the religion's believers manage to bring about such unrestricted trade, their deity will, by means as miraculous as they are demonstrably illogical, bring about solutions to a vast array of complicated problems of human civilization.