The Little Crappy Ship (LCS) is tragically incapable in the Houthi littoral combat environment of drones, anti-ship cruise missiles and anti-ship ballistic missiles.
And the USN brass knows it
No USN flag rank will risk losing his career by exposing an LCS in the Red Sea⬇️ 1/
The failure of the LCS procurement is why Peter Zeihan's prediction that the USN will abandon protecting the world sea lanes in his book
"The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization"
is getting far too close to reality for my comfort.
2/
This Politico headline featuring three anonymous Pentagon officials talking about the US Navy losing the cost-attrition war shooting multi-million dollar missiles at $2000 Houthi drones underlines the anti-access area denial effect cheap drones cause.
Those anonymous Pentagon officials are correct to be concerned because they are looking at the per round unit costs of American anti-drone munitions like the Block 2 Coyote at $100,000.
What we saw with Raytheon going from the much cheaper electric-propeller Block I Coyote to the micro-jet engine powered Bk II version is the typical Big/Expensive/Few crew increase the capability for higher unit cost spiral of every Pentagon procurement for the last 65 years.
6/
The Big/Expensive/Few crew in the Pentagon are as professionally obsolete as Horse Cavalry Generals in 1940 and Battleship Admirals on December 7th 1941.
Their military paradigm that they built careers upon has died, but they refuse to acknowledge it.
The picture I started this thread with is of the guided missile frigate USS Stark that 30 years ago ate an Iraqi Exocet missile that its Standard missiles, 76mm gun and Phalanx CIWS failed to intercept.
Objectively, the USS Stark had a better anti-aircraft fit than any LCS.
7/
And USS Stark had Destroyer Tenders like USS Cape Cod to reload it's Standard missile while underway(left).
Burke Class Destroyers like USS Carney have to withdraw to a port to reload their vertical launch missile cells.
8/
Given the increasing range of Houthi land attack cruise missiles.
Burke class DDG's like USS Carney may have to fall back as far as Diego Garcia to reload.
Assuming the Houthi don't hide a few Quds-3 launchers in few ISO containers on a merchant ship & land a dozen there.
9/
Which brings up an important point about US Navy analysts thinking inside a box, the VLS missile box.
That means they can't assess what adding conformal fuel tanks or bigger wings mean for cruise missile range, if you launch missiles like a V-1 off a ramp or from bombers.
10/
Because the Tomahawk cruise missile was scaled for a 21 inch torpedo tube, it's wings have a lift to drag ratio of about 2.425.
If you launch a Tomahawk like a V-1, we could improve the L/D ratio of a Tomahawk to somewhere around 10,which is Piper PA-28 Cherokee performance. 11/
Hypothetically a VLR Tomahawk would need to have a 194 ft^2 wing, which is essentially about 36~ feet wide; resulting in something like this & have a range on the order of about 4,900 nautical miles (9,074 km).
You couldn't launch it from a VLS cell, but you could from a CVN 12/
A 9K km VLR Tomahawk assembled by deck crews & fired from USN carriers would make hash of China's A2AD doctrine (figure below).
Because we have jet pilots in the USN airpower chain of command, the USN literally can't think that way, AKA VLR Tomahawk CVN deck strikes.
13/
In WW2, the US Army Cavalry missions of reconnaissance, offensive penetration of enemy screens & economy of force screening against the enemy continued after the horse flesh was removed.
The 21st century naval airpower mision will continue after the human flesh is removed.
14/
But there is going to be one heck of a fight to dump the US pilots unions.
At the end of WW2 these was an incredible three way turf fight over the US copy of the V-1 buzz bomb, the JB-2 loon.
The USAAF want to use JB-2's from bombers, the USN from LSTs, subs & CVE's while 15/
the US Army ground forces wanted to use JB-2's from ramp launchers because they could deliver medium bomber weight bomb tonnage from 24/7 ramp launchers for the same manpower hit as a B-26 Marauder group.
The fight was resolved by the end of WW2 and the pilots unions rise 16/
...to power inside the newly unified Defense Department via President Eisenhower's "Massive Nuclear Retaliation" doctrine.
This focused the DoD on manned aircraft as nuclear delivery platforms and killed cheap drones & conventional air breathing missiles for 30 years. 17/
Now 80 years from that JB-2 turf fight, the pilots are facing another reckoning they and the Big/Expensive/Few crew in the Pentagon that supports them can't win.
They are no longer "cost-effectiveness competitive" in the age of $2,000 drones.
18/18 End
@threadreaderapp unroll please
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
What killed Imperial Japanese soldiers in WW2 "without a mark" inside bunkers was carbon monoxide poisoning, not a lack of O2.
Once you get enough CO in the lungs on the O2 chemical bonds.
No further O2 can get into the bloodstream and you suffocate.
2/
I ran across that fact in a trip report of a US Army Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) medical doctor sent to Leyte to take blood samples from IJA corpses that died from flame weapons.
It didn't work out and the CWS used goats in bunkers hit with flamethrower weapons to get the CO poisoning medical data.
Any trench w/o overhead cover and any passage or firing slit that is big enough to shoot a crew served heavy weapon or vehicle out of is also big enough for a FPV drone spewing thermite to fly into.
2/
Every field fortification manual ever written by every military in the world is obsolete and will have to be re-written with an eye to placing curtains, nets or wire screens across firing slits and doors to keep out small drones.
The "missile" impacts have the classic artillery rocket impact ellipse with strikes being on the line of flight axis having more dispersal (long/short) that left or right of it.
One of the spaces @secretsqrl123 had with @RyanO_ChosenCoy present. He made clear Ukrainian FPV drones based on Hollywood camera multi-copters have a 50 km one way range.
The other issue is the disintermediation of drones from platforms. 1/
"Disintermediation" means any shipping container or flat space on a vessel/vehicle works as a launcher.
A ISO container with 126 drones can be stacked on a 24 X 24 top level of a Chinese MGX-24 container ship and lob 72,576 drones in a simultaneous wave 50 km or more.
2/
Another thing that works are simple racks in cargo aircraft, helicopters or boats.
The Russians are using simple racks in the Mi-8 to hold FPV drones in large numbers to engage Ukrainian boat drones or special forces craft with MANPADS or FPV's.
Missiles are structurally strong nose to tail because, rocket acceleration. Side to side missile structure is as weak/light as possible for performance reasons.
Railway gondola cars moving missiles like this rattles them side to side like beans in a maraca.😱
It takes 40 hours for RuAF casualties to reach medical care equivalent to a battalion aid station.
The odds are RuAF field hospitals will not be able to control the infections that thermite burns generate, because they don't evacuate quickly enough. 2/