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Sneak peek at US Navy's new $13B aircraft carrier
- Thread starter ponpo
- Start date
ClosingADoor
Member
Power vacuums are not pleasant things for the most part. The EU won't fill the void, so you are left with Russia, China and India. Good luck with that.
TheLostBigBoss
Banned
The kind of dimension where I'm not running around crying about American imperialism and don't talk out of my ass about the ramifications of a world superpower retracting from the world stage?
But like I said, you don't actually seem to know anything and for some reason think this issue has something to do with Hillary and Armirox.
Go post on VOAT or something.
For perspective
around 1 billion for a single stealth bomber.
What a waste
They could just paint an F35 black for like $10 000
jstevenson
Sailor Stevenson
My projecting force you create a deterrent. The United States can launch strikes across the globe quickly and repeatedly.
If the US did not have the ability to project power, and no one else did, regional powers may not be as deterred. It's not always about projecting power, it's about being ABLE to.
A lot of people spend a ton of time going through the war game theory and situations. And while you can create air bridges with tankers to put bombs on target, its taxing and not nearly as reliable as moving an air strip off the coast to launch sorties from.
Whether or not you like the USA's role in the world, carriers are critical assets
"I'm just here being a totally rational person who isn't crying about american imperialism like some kind of moron who thinks imperialism is a bad thing, go post on Voat where people hate war and think that bombing brown people is uncool."
Oh wait voat is exactly the kind of place to jerk each other off over military hardware and make fun of people for 'crying about imperialism', good job, you made me realise that neogaf democrat status quo lowkey nationalist neocon kool aid drinking foreign policy pundits have the same views of militarism as a shithole like voat. Thanks.
TheCochese
Banned
I think we found our mysterious YouTube commenter.
TheLostBigBoss
Banned
no voat is the place where people cry about others on GAF and declare everyone to be a pedo
silly goose
lol
Captain Tuttle
Member
Yep, it's the only acceptable pork spending for all members of Congress
davidwhangchoi
Member
can they use this for Top Gun 2?
Tal Shiar Agent
Member
I believe the $13b also covers the r&d for the whole class. The Ford class is needed to phase out the relatively ancient Nimitz class.
Plus they are wonderful for humanitarian reasons. They are mobile hospitals, water treatment and desalination plants, and power supplies.
PersonAndStuff
Member
Fuck, we're going to need to get off this President naming scheme before we get to Trump.
Military contacts are pretty much the only thing keeping the hand full of American shipyards still open. So it's infrastructure, kind of.
Vault Dweller 111
Member
When people put the blanket statement out "anything that is expensive in the military is a huge fucking waste, fuck American military spending" it really lessens the argument. This seems like a pretty damn solid way to spend a tiny fraction of the defense budget. There are plenty of better opportunities to complain about military spending and projects, if you do it here then I'm inclined to think you'd complain about any sort or military spending which is just silly.
If you want a legitimate cause to be mad about with the military budget then go look up the amount of money spent on the F35 fighter.
If you want a legitimate cause to be mad about with the military budget then go look up the amount of money spent on the F35 fighter.
TheCochese
Banned
Yup, and you can argue against cost overruns, deploying untested or poorly tested equipment, delivering it unfinished...
Carriers are still needed in some capacity.
Carriers are pretty much the most important thing the US has due to power projection. Carriers need to be replaced, and this actually isn't the expensive for what we are getting.
Seems like a pretty good deal, as long as the new launch system doesn't cripple the whole ship and require redesigns.
Seems like a pretty good deal, as long as the new launch system doesn't cripple the whole ship and require redesigns.
Trump is a fucking idiot, it goes without saying but occasionally we need to state it so this shit isn't normalised.
TheCochese
Banned
Typically large vessels will leave port and sail into storms because being docked will do way more damage. The goal would to not be in one, but yes.
I think you have to basically double the cost for lifetime maintenance, including one reactor rebuild.
But I am going off of a "read that somewhere" memory.
I was on the Ike, and it really showed its age.
One Eyed Willy
Member
They spent trillions on a plane that will never fly. This is the Humble Bundle of military spending.
LinkAndEpona
Banned
Indeed, if I had to go into a military service, Navy would be my first choice.
OG Shaka Zulu
Member
Hmmmm $13B to burn. Put it towards healthcare for vets or a new aircraft carrier?
Banjo-Kazooie
Member
Aircraft carrier
soooo cool until youre stuck on one months on end working 12 hour shifts and seeing the same people day in and day out with no where else to go.
its still a badass asset but like anything in the military, everythings "cool" until youre actually doing it.
Deployments are cool, you get to see a ton of cool shit. Trade off is lots of hard work sure, but it's worth it.
Also there is no better feeling than coming home to family and friends after several months, with the feeling of accomplishment.
FrankCanada97
Roughly the size of a baaaaaarge
Serious question to those whinging about developing a new carrier:
Do you want your navy to just operate the current fleet until the end of time? I mean, just think of all the money you'll save by never having to replace anything ever again!
Do you want your navy to just operate the current fleet until the end of time? I mean, just think of all the money you'll save by never having to replace anything ever again!
ThoseDeafMutes
Member
I assume you are referring to the F35. The trillion dollar figure was the estimated lifetime cost if procuring, operating and maintaining 2400 airframes over their entire lifetime (like 40 years), adjusted for future inflation.
Unknown Soldier
Member
I don't think there is any reason to defend the F-35 at this point. It's unarguably the worst boondoggle in US military history and sucks in so many ways that it's often inferior to the much cheaper dedicated platforms it's meant to replace.
They could have just canceled the F-35 and put in more orders for refreshed F/A-18's, F-16's, and F-22's and gotten a better result.
ThoseDeafMutes
Member
I'm not defending anything, I'm being accurate. They've already flown, and nobody has spent one trillion, let alone multiple.
luckygodzilla
Member
You do realize the costs of running a legacy fleet for the next half centruy easily exceeds the two trillion dollars mark correct? What most people tend to forget is that the key driver for costs in aviation is the supply chain to keep the damn things in the air.
(I mean hell this doesn't even acknowledge the fact that the armed forces are literally flying the wings off legacy aircraft)
By sharing multiple key structural and electronic components, namely the engine and avionics systems investing in the JSF alone allows the various branches of the United States armed forces to cut the costly supply chains of the legacy hornet, F-16,and Harrier. This allows for for simplified supply chains and universally applicable training regimen, the importance of which cannot be overstated.
As for performance, the demonstrated 20-1 kill ratio in red flag '17 coupled with the increased range, payload capicity, and areodynamic performance when kitted for war over all legacy platforms speak for themselves.
Unknown Soldier
Member
Well, okay. I didn't mean you had to keep using the same F/A-18's, F-16's, and F-15's or whatever. Considering that new F-15's are still being built for domestic and export use and F-16's are still being built for export, you could you know build new ones when old ones wear out.
The concept of all the cost sharing and saving from a project like F-35 is great on the drawing table but we've already seen how terrible it is in execution. The costs have been unbelievable, the delays stretched nearly a decade, and in the end the actual plane has inferior performance to decades-old airframes. I mean it's literally the plane which is the jack-of-all-trades and the master of none, which is a strange reversal from the high-performance dedicated platforms of the 80's and 90's. What's even worse is how other programs had to be cut or canceled to keep funding F-35, such as the F-22 which was and is absolutely our best air-superiority platform.
The F-35 can only manage a high kill ratio against legacy platforms when it can rely on stealth and stay out of visual range. You might argue that visual range is obsolete and no one can see our new advanced aircraft and that's all well and good today but no one is standing still there and potential adversaries are developing new types of radar to see airframes like the F-35. If you can SEE the F-35, it's more or less dead meat as an ordinary F-16 can and has destroyed an F-35 in a dogfight and last I checked F-16 is one of the most common fighters deployed in the world by over two dozen nations. The F-35 has absolutely terrible actual performance in flight and so unlike for example the F-22 it's completely dependent on remaining invisible because if you see it, you can kill it pretty easily. Not exactly a shining example of what we wanted to spent $1.5 trillion on.
luckygodzilla
Member
I mean sure we could keep pumping out legacy designs that are nearing 50 years of age from their initial inception. Sure they hold up well enough today, but as S-300 and S-400 class systems continue to proliferate one had to begin to wonder how well they would fare in a conflict taking place in say 2025.
Sure you could maybe make it work, but the sheer amount of of planning to get past an proper IADS system with legacy platforms is staggering. Between multiple strike packages to compensate for inevitable losses, jamming support to compensate for the lack of stealth, and awacs to fill the hole of reduced sensor range, one has to wonder if it wouldn't be more efficient to simply exploit holes in the system with a flight fifth generation design, a physical impossibility in a legacy design.
I mean hell, why is the F-35 being a multirole suddenly an issue? The F-16 itself is a multirole, and the F-35 outperforms it in sensor capability, turning ability when loaded with fuel and munitions (you know the things you want to bring with you to war), as well as range and total payload capacity. Hell the exact same metrics hold true with the F-35C when compared to the legacy hornet (which, fun fact, like the '35 is also a multirole), and particularly the B when compared to the harrier, where the comparison is barely worth making.
And those comparisons don't even begin to take into account the sheer dominance a fifth generation platform holds in the air. Anything you can provide a pilot that can brake the OODA loop of an opposing actor is absolutely worth investing in, and the stealth afforded by the F-35 platform provides that in spades.
I'm not denying that the procurement process of the JSF was an absolutely horrid mess. It exemplified everything wrong with modern procurement methods in the United States armed forces. But at the end of the day, the final product is simply not compromised, and outperforms every single platform it's replacing in all aspects.
That is what is worth keeping in mind.
Prinz Eugn
Member
Um, no. I'm sleepy but I've been reading these sorts of arguments for about a decade.
There have been higher costs and delays, but this is sadly pretty par for the course for defense programs. No one knows how much it's going to cost to build something that no one's ever built before, and there are a lot of incentives on many different sides to lowball the figure and be optimistic about the schedule. What makes the F-35 program special is that it's so huge everybody is paying attention.
The push for multi-role and multi-service makes sense on several fronts. Post-Cold War, each service needs to make due with fewer aircraft, so having each aircraft be able to do more makes sense. Sensors and avionics used to be a limiting factor in terms of which-airplane-could-do-what, but advances in technology mean you can have one airplane that can do a lot of different missions pretty well. This was already established in the 1980s with the F/A-18. Single-mission or single-service aircraft are also vulnerable politically since they are easier to cancel or curtail, and the services would rather have some pretty good airplanes on the ramp than some perfect airplanes on paper. This is a serious practical consideration, and why there are 187 F-22s, not 650 as planned. Commonalities mean economies of scale, so each aircraft costs less, and a huge user base means updates and maintenance also costs less. For example, you get a new radar mode programmed or new weapon integrated and it can go out to thousands of jets.
The kinematic performance of the F-35 is absolutely fine, and even has some advantages over the F-16 up close, even without tons of time to develop tactics.
But why get up close when you can sneak up and murder your opponent? This is the whole point of being low-observable, the advantages of which are never going away. Legacy aircraft are always going to be in a worse position because any sensor that is going to see an F-35 earlier, is going to see them way, way earlier. Anything that is going to be tough for an F-35 to fight, such as the eventual production T-50, is going to absolutely crucify a legacy airplane.
Fun fact: there are more F-35's flying today then there are F-22s.
You know that they also have terrible political opinions, right? Opinions that you share.
Politics isn't some game you play on the internet where you pick a side and put their logo on your profile and that's it. There are actual ideas behind these arguments.
'lol go to voat hurr you're not allowed in my club' is some 4chan level lazy thinking, except with reddit replaced with voat
This is why you guys keep losing elections by the way
Miggytronz
Member
Im extremely proud to say I helped design portions of that Carriers Propulsion System. The amount of technology installed it unfathomable.
1.21Gigawatts
Banned
How can any member of the military actually support this man?
Wtf is this even?
Yeah let's let all the Gamer Gaters back in. That won't be a total shit show.