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President Trump has proposed a $54 billion increase in defense spending, which he said would be "one of the largest increases in national defense spending in American history."
Past administrations have increased military spending, but typically to fulfil a specific mission. Jimmy Carter expanded operations in the Persian Gulf. Ronald Reagan pursued an arms race with the Soviet Union, and George W. Bush waged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Mr. Trump has not articulated a new mission that would require a military spending increase. This has left analysts wondering what goals he has in mind. Erin M. Simpson, a national security consultant, called Mr. Trump's plans "a budget in search of a strategy."
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/03/22/us/is-americas-military-big-enough.html
Donald J. Trump - Military Readiness Remarks
[Related]: 2017 Outlook for Navy Shipbuilding
What do you think about the proposed increase in military spending ? Does USA really need more weapons ?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by jmorris on Saturday March 25 2017, @01:27AM (14 children)
What do you think about the proposed increase in military spending?
It is needed. The military is seriously depleted, Obama exhausted our stores of armaments and left replenishing them as someone else's problem. Most of our aircraft are older than the people flying them and have seen hard service in combat situations now for over a decade without sufficient time, effort and material put into their proper maintenance. We need to be buying different stuff to face new and different threats in a lot of cases.
We also seriously need to work on restoring our tech advantage over any potential enemy, especially China. We aren't always going to be fighting goat rapists, and are more likely to get into a war with someone able to field an actual army the worse our advantage degrades. Maintaining the certainty we can win any conventional war is the fastest, best and cheapest way to ensure global peace and stability. The more indistinguishable our military is from the very Wrath of God the better. A real world war with modern weapons is a horror we should spare no expense in averting, and our proven capacity to possess the might to conquer the world and withhold our hand means we are the only ones who can be trusted with the mandate to keep order
Does USA really need more weapons?
More? Probably not. Better, newer and better maintained ones? Yes. We probably should scrap the F35 project. But we need railguns. We need anti-missile tech, perhaps using railguns! We need directed energy weapons. We need an anti-drone defense system. We need our entire military hardened against EMP and then we need EMP bombs (non-nuke) to scare the bejabbers out of potential foes. We need to replace our aging nukes before something awful happens.
We need to invest in securing information systems, probably by building up a hardened Linux with every line of the core and every certified device driver gone over with a fine tooth comb and multiple million dollar bug bounties run. Once it is capable of replacing an existing system, make using it mandatory. Deploy it embedded in weapon systems, on soldier deployed systems, desktops, military servers, everywhere. Then do the same for OpenBSD and throw some of them into the mix to prevent a pure mono-culture. Ban Windows and MacOS from connecting to any military network.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Saturday March 25 2017, @01:45AM (8 children)
It is needed. The military is seriously depleted, Obama exhausted our stores of armaments and left replenishing them as someone else's problem. Most of our aircraft are older than the people flying them and have seen hard service in combat situations now for over a decade without sufficient time, effort and material put into their proper maintenance. We need to be buying different stuff to face new and different threats in a lot of cases.
I get this. Rebuild our stockpile of armaments, build more Hornets. But buy F35's, or littoral ships, or any other seriously expensive shit? Um, how about no.
The military needs to learn what it means to live without cost-plus budgets, and decide if they want a few hundred thousand tomahawks or a few dozen F-35s.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday March 25 2017, @02:31AM (7 children)
Reading is a good idea before posting. See the part where I said we should probably scrap the F35 program?
The problem with it is that it only useful in a total war with a real enemy. It has no real place pounding goat humpers into kibble. But in a total war there is no way we can afford to field enough of the damned things to matter and every one shot down is a major blow. Better to have a dozen or more almost as good fighters stockpiled vs a single F35. Better still if we build several different ones optimized for different tasks. We need more A10 Warthogs or a new and improved replacement close air support aircraft, just for one example. Stealth is not likely to remain a thing long enough to justify the expense and compromises in performance made for the F35. Everyone is investing R&D into finding ways to defeat stealth so the odds are good somebody succeeds.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 25 2017, @03:01AM (3 children)
Stealth, at least at the level for a fighter plane, has almost no effect on performance. It's different for something like the B-2 of course, but you don't take the B-2 to a dogfight.
F-35 performance is killed by the requirement for vertical lift. The lift fan near the front is very wide. The engine itself has to be a bit wide, being higher bypass than ideal for a fighter. The engine exhaust needs to be far forward for balance when doing vertical lift. The wings need room for fat bleed air ducts. The cockpit and nose, being in front of the lift fan, needs to be kept light and not extend too much. The wings, which don't do much in vertical lift, need to be kept small. All this stuff compromises the shape.
You say "defeat stealth" as if stealth were a boolean. This is far from the case. Intermittent detection of an aircraft is much easier than tracking an aircraft. Ground-based supercomputers with huge antenna arrays are far more capable than enemy aircraft, and enemy aircraft are far more capable than small-diameter missiles.
The F-35 was a dumb idea, but at this point we probably ought to keep it. We'd do well to stock up on the Silent Eagle (an F-15 with moderate stealth enhancements) while designing an F-22B, like the original F-22 but with the helmet-mounted cueing system developed for the F-35. Doing a remake of the A-10, just updated for parts availability and metal fatigue, would be a good move as well. There is no substitute for numbers; we need at least a couple thousand of each.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 26 2017, @01:34AM (2 children)
The concepts are antithetical.
We discussed this some time back.
The F-35: A Gold-Plated Turkey [soylentnews.org]
A stealth aircraft doesn't have doors/access panels.
If something breaks (the example of a blown fuse was used), you have to cut a hole in the aircraft.
After making the repair, you then have to patch the hole with some pretty nasty chemicals and wait 3 days for the glue to cure.
Stealth aircraft are hangar queens.
...and old, cheap radars spot the "invisible" planes easily.
Stealth is a complete boondoggle.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 27 2017, @03:44PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 31 2017, @07:34AM
The man making the remarks is a top designer of high performance combat aircraft. [google.com]
I think I'll take his word over yours.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Saturday March 25 2017, @09:22AM (2 children)
What I understood about stealth is that the radar cross-section becomes as big as that of a relatively big bird. The problem, however, is that birds don't fly in straight lines at multiple hundreds of kilometers per hour.
A little bit of software tracking the trajectories of birds and seeing if any of them travels at a certain speed, and/or in a straight line, will identify the F-35 from the birds.
And if you are wrong, then militarily seen there is relatively few harm done to sending a SAM or GTAM to the object that is flying fast in a straight line towards one of your military infrastructures anyway.
Differently put: if you start flying with stealth airplanes over Russia and/or China in those straight lines (which you have to, given that your pilots can't withstand the G forces if they'd make fast turns at high speeds), and at speeds faster than the fastest birds (which you have to, else *really amazingly* simple technology will detect, track and shoot down your airplanes, then you will be shot down by a massive amount of SAM and GTAM missles.
You also can't detect the Russian and Chinese SAM and GTAM launch platforms, because during the Cold War have the Russians (who sell these systems to the Chinese) been developing mobile platforms. You know, launch platforms with wheels that constantly move around the countryside and that look just like any truck when viewed from a spying satellite.
In every possible scenario are stealth airplanes worthless against a serious enemy (Russia, China, etc). You will get shot down. Probably the same airplane multiple times: a first time by two or three simultaneously arriving missles, and a second time the wreck that is falling out of the sky. Just to make sure. And then a last time a few bombs on the metal that crashed on the ground. Your pilot will be tracked while shuting to the ground and he'll for absolutely sure will be tortured repeatedly to squeeze any information out of the poor sucker.
That will happen no matter how advanced the technology is. Unless you find a way to silence the planes completely (physically/theoretically impossible).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 26 2017, @12:58AM (1 child)
"like a bird" is kind of average. It blinks in and out depending on the exact angle.
The SAM has to be guided. Any onboard radar is inherently poor due to limited power and limited space, both for the computer and for the antenna. The antenna limitation is serious; no amount of technology advance can compensate for this. (basic physics issue) If the SAM is guided from the ground, then it will be unguided because the ground stations get attacked.
You damn well can detect the launch platforms. There are special aircraft designed for exactly this purpose. One can also hack into communications to determine locations. One could do even better, hacking in and doing various things.
Ultimately though, you just have to give things a best effort. Anything less is an automatic loss.
(Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Sunday March 26 2017, @09:44PM
The best-efford goes both ways.
The "special aircraft" will get shot down by more capable missiles if needed. Russia has space-rocket capability since decades, and can surely hit your average spying plane just fine. In fact, they have proven it repeatedly.
If you want to loose expensive gear, pilots + training and and face the music in international media by having fancy toys shot out of the high skies: fine. Because that's exactly what your "special aircraft" will encounter. RT will even put it on youtube for all to see. Even and especially if you cry-baby in the Western media about it. Shot down they will.
Another example: the blinking-on-radar by no means implies that even simple amateur software can't find a pattern of a straight line going at a certain speed out of it. It easily can. And will. And then your fancy expensive fighter jet gets shot down anyway. With all the international media drama to go with it, too.
You see. "The other side", the Russians, also invested in defence. If you fly over them in ways that they don't want you to; you get shot down. Plain and simple.
You can leave your US cowboy hat at home. As it'll get shot down, too.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday March 25 2017, @03:11AM (2 children)
You'd be able to do it only if you match China's manufacturing capabilities. That's a race you fell behind quite a long time - good luck with that, you'll need it if you want this to happen soon enough.
Tell you what: you'll start to be able to beat China the moment your PhD theses and scientific articles will be signed by Johns and Janes rather than Lius and Hengs.
In the eventuality of a war, China will pay your post-graduates better than you'll be able to do; besides, you have a habit to put them in camps [wikipedia.org]
Bullshit - not until the energy storage in chemical bonds is surpassed by the capacity of electric energy storage.
Granted, for big atomic ships it may make sense (producing the energy at a high enough rate), but even there the current materials used for rails will wear very fast - much faster than a gun bore.
But be my guest, drop your explosive driven guns for railguns if you like them better.
Let yourself opened to attacks favouring cheap low-tech en-masse, the type a big nation with large manufacturing capability can mount.
You'll finish in spending 10 times the amount of dollars to fend a low-tech attack.
That would go on a collision course with ubiquitous use of electronics, don't you think?
Especially when it's so easy to craft a non-nuke EMP bomb [wikipedia.org] - big capacitor [aliexpress.com] discharged into a conductive loop that's explosively compressed.
Carpet-bomb Wall Street with them and chaos ensures with minimal human loss.
You delude yourself that you can win any war... pretty much as the delusion you have the certainty of employment or income nowadays; nobody can.
You win a war only when you can pacify whatever territory you won - and yet... you can't pacify yourself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 25 2017, @03:51AM
Yours is the only sane post I have read yet.
Trump is merely another maniac waiting for his time to come.
I personally think he's dreaming for a crisis to happen so he can go and kick everybody's asses and take their money.
Shallow man. Shallow dreams. Money is all.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 25 2017, @10:35AM
Bullshit - not until the energy storage in chemical bonds is surpassed by the capacity of electric energy storage.
Which in the case of rail guns systems has already been done. There's no way to put that much kinetic energy on ordinance without a complex, mass-inefficient rocket system, using chemical energy. And by mass-inefficient, I mean that it's more mass effective to stow fuel for an efficient diesel or gas turbine generator than it is to store propellant on a shell intended to go several km per second.
But be my guest, drop your explosive driven guns for railguns if you like them better. Let yourself opened to attacks favouring cheap low-tech en-masse, the type a big nation with large manufacturing capability can mount. You'll finish in spending 10 times the amount of dollars to fend a low-tech attack.
The US would spend gobs anyway. Current military procurement costs are grossly overinflated no matter what military technology is being developed, be it a better gun or supposedly better food or not developed (obsoleting the A-10 without a replacement).
That would go on a collision course with ubiquitous use of electronics, don't you think? Especially when it's so easy to craft a non-nuke EMP bomb - big capacitor discharged into a conductive loop that's explosively compressed.
Carpet-bomb Wall Street with them and chaos ensures with minimal human loss.
Because no one would ever exploit an obvious military vulnerability.
You delude yourself that you can win any war... pretty much as the delusion you have the certainty of employment or income nowadays; nobody can. You win a war only when you can pacify whatever territory you won - and yet... you can't pacify yourself.
Certainty is not a bit flag you set. No military is prepared for sufficiently incompetent leadership.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 25 2017, @07:09AM
How so? The military budget increased under Obama, and some of the reductions were partly Republican induced via The Sequester budget fight.
(Score: 2) by andersjm on Saturday March 25 2017, @07:48AM
Not for lack of funds.