Maj. John Spencer argues that the miles of concrete walls that lined streets and surrounded bases in Baghdad demonstrate that the most effective weapon in an urban counterinsurgency is concrete.
Source: The Most Effective Weapon on the Modern Battlefield is Concrete – Modern War Institute
Source: The U.S. Navy’s Big Mistake — Building Tons of Supercarriers | War Is Boring
The Pentagon behaves as if aircraft carriers will rule forever … they won’t
The Navy is developing a new class of supercarriers that cannot function properly, and has designed them to launch F-35 fighters that are not ready to fly their missions. This is all happening during an era of out-of-control budgets, which bodes poorly for American sea power and leadership ahead.
“If our fleet of small numbers is so fragile that it cannot afford the loss of a single ship due to budgeting, how will it survive the inevitable losses of combat?”
– Commander Phillip E. Pournelle
new anti-ship missiles “put U.S. forces on the wrong side of physics,”
– Andrew Erickson, U.S. Naval War College
In a 1982 congressional hearing, legislators asked him how long American carriers would survive in an actual war.
Rickover’s response? “Forty-eight hours,” he said.
the F-35 system remains immature and provides limited combat capability
there are still many unresolved significant deficiencies, the program continues to fall behind the planned software block development and testing goals, and sustainment of the fielded aircraft is very burdensome
aircraft continue to be produced in substantial quantities (all of which will require some level of modifications and retrofits before being used in combat)
Source: Weighing The Good And The Bad Of Autonomous Killer Robots In Battle : All Tech Considered : NPR
It sounds like science fiction, but it’s a very real and contentious debate that is making its way through the U.N. Advocates of a ban want all military weapons to be under “meaningful human control.”
Georgia Tech’s Ron Arkin, who is one of the country’s leading roboethicists, says hashing out that distinction is important but the potential benefits of killer robots should not be overlooked.
“They can assume far more risk on behalf of a noncombatant than any human being in their right mind would,” he says. “They can potentially have better sensors to cut through the fog of war. They can be designed without emotion — such as anger, fear, frustration — which causes human beings, unfortunately, to err.”
This is a very important topic for the future, and it is a lot more serious and complicated than the media tends to treat it (as shown by calling them “killer robots” like a 1970s B horror flick, and saying that “nobody wants Cylons and Terminators”).
Traditional definitions of valor don’t always account for the practitioners of advanced war-fighting tactics.
Without the enemy’s reciprocal ability to kill, war becomes a particularly brutal form of martial law.
Source: Drones, Valor, and the Future of the Military – The Atlantic
From Comments:
Hasn’t war always been that?
Certainly at some level(s), yes. But logistics challenges, local terrain/survival knowledge, and firearms all provided some aspects of levelling the battlefield — the kind of levelling that permitted the idea of “nation state borders” to exist even conceptually. That relative levelling (e.g. the infeasible logistics of Romania getting invaded and conquered by China in 1800, the financial and human costs of war even in victory) was quite shaken up with the advent of nuclear weapons, and I think they are getting shaken up again by remote warfare capabilities.
The American people were appalled by the Vietnam war and heavily protested it. They protested the Iraq war but mostly forgot about it after a few years. How could a war conducted exclusively remotely and perhaps a few hundred special operations soldiers have anything close to the same domestic impact as a war with significant citizen participation and casualty figures? Can a civilian population practically be mobilized to risk their personal safety to protest a foreign war that directly impacts only their wallets, not their children’s/communities’ lives?
And, like nuclear weapons, planetary-scale deployment of risk-free remote warfare capabilities will belong to relatively few nations (although local deployment will probably become commonplace).
In some ways, it seems like the post-modern incarnation of the proxy war — use armed drones and other remote weaponry instead of funding and supplying an intermediate nation or non-state actor.