Thread by @lymanstoneky

The Navy is as bad as it looks.

However, the consolation is that other countries' navies are even more ruinously mismanaged!

Modern navies are just an absolute crapshoot!

https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1461376164174258176

Ships are very hard to protect, deploying a global navy without directly controlled colonial empires and bases requires incredible tolerance for espionage and security risks, oversight is extremely difficult, and many historic methods of disciplining naval personnel are untenable

i.e. if you look at how navies *historically* kept sailors and officers in line compared to how they disciplined soldiers on land, you'll understand that in fact preventing the navy from collapsing into disorder is a major historic problem!

This is wrong. China's production timeline for aircraft carriers is about 2-4 years per carrier, which is about the same as a Gerald R Ford carrier, except the Ford carriers are like twice as big as the Chinese ones.

https://twitter.com/TaupeAvenger/status/1461376960685240322

China is engaging in a huge military buildout at *enormous* effort and yet their ship procurement is in fact *not* that much faster than what the US has actually done in rather recent history.

Anyways, if you think Fat Leonard is corrupt *just wait* until someday somebody gets to look at the PLAN's procurement and logistics receipts!

The most likely outcome in a serious naval contest is a ton of casualties on all sides in the opening salvos and then literally all the equipment breaks and everything grinds to a halt for six months while the surviving officers and kit try to find a new mode of warfare.

Alternatively, the main belligerents wreck each other, and then it's a contest of who can bribe India and Indonesia more to get them to either close off China's oil access or keep it open.

In a long war, China runs out of energy feedstock and quite plausibly many basic foodstuffs, unless they can bully all of SE Asia to get actively on their side. So to a considerable extent, the US' strategy *should* be about forcing a grueling, long war.

But this is a wildly unpopular plan in the US because it implies high casualty tolerance, and the prospect of having to amphibiously retake Taiwan, etc, etc. All extremely miserable prospects.

Which is why in all likelihood what actually happens is a nuclear exchange. Unfortunately, because of the US' strategic ambiguity, it's likely that such an exchange would spiral out of control, leading to apocalyptic casualties on both sides.

That is, because China can't really know under what conditions we would or would not use nukes, how massively we would retaliate, etc, they have no incentive to not retaliate massively if US nuclear usage becomes plausible.

Whereas if we have a clear policy of defensive first use for Taiwan + escalating tit-for-tat, there's an actual deterrent which could plausibly keep casualties and ecological consequences to a level where human culture in coastal China is able to continue.

Of course the optimal strategy is *to create a credible deterrent to prevent war*. But conditional on the fact that the US apparently isn't very interested in deterring war, we should have strategies which credibly deter the very worst kinds of escalation of such a war.

Anyways, we should be pushing Taiwan to ramp up its counterinsurgency training, expand reservist readiness, buy tons of mobile missile platforms, seamines, and submarines. And we should be building a lot more affordable mid-sized ships.

One of the key problems in US wargames is that our navy ends up being highly dependent on having lots of specialized ships clustered together to work together with very complicated systems.

The lesson, which nobody wants to learn but which is very obvious, is that building a very large number of ships big enough to operate independently but small enough to be built in large quantities, and with technology which can be maintained easily on long deployments...

Is probably preferable to super-tech-destroyers and giant carrier platforms. Lots of resilient cruisers with simple systems is probably what would be most useful in an actual war, unless naval stealth gets *really* good.

The United States has some of the largest rare-earth deposits in the world, we just refuse to access them because rare earth mining is environmentally ruinous, so it happens in whatever country has low standards.

https://twitter.com/topoproc/status/1461385557829894147

We even have rare earth mines we could get running again in a matter of months!

was born this way, not my fault

https://twitter.com/DrTeufelsdrockh/status/1461450945204830210