Quote:
Originally Posted by striperman36
JDF, LCS programme, F-35, airborne laser?, A navy, a marine corps navy and airforce, Army Airborne, Airforce, 4 chains of commands, boots on the ground 2 forces unable to tactically communicate?
USS Kearsarge rocks though.
Sound familiar JimCT?
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F35 - Massive FAIL. With the services (and congressional oversight) thinking they'd save money by being 80% common in the aoirframe between three services instead has created an awful monster. Made worse by trying to get the STOVL F35B variant which further fails the AF and Navy models. And after bbiiillliioonnss spent, will likely be a half-azzed aircraft.
Kill the JSF. Build more F22s and enhanced F16s and F18s.
Use what you can in a new system. Send the people involved in this costly Nunn-Mccurdy breech to court. Congress included.
LCS -
Littoral Combat Ship Little Crappy Ship. Steel version, overweight so bad it needs floaties on the a$$ end. and such a pig on fuel it can't go far at top speed. Aluminum trimaran version is way cool and way delicate. Both models can't defend themselves adequately and both are way TOOOOO expensive yet their congress reps have kept them afloat. What was supposed to be $200 mil a piece (which was too cheap to begin with) they've hit $700+ mil for sexy speedboats. Crewsize:
optimal manning not enough crew to survive a Sammy B moment circa '88. And these are supercrews with the best of the Navy but there are not enough of them.
ABL? Flawed because you'd need to have a ton of them within a short distance of the launch areas to make it work, but it is a good tech demonstrator to learn from - direct energy weapons will be a needed tech to have. We need to have that developed so we can learn to bring down costs. We can't afford having 20 million dollar systems to defend against $10,000 munitions. We need to have the defending system cost effective against the offensive system. ABL pays off 20 years down the road.
The bad guys are not going away anytime soon. In many ways we are like the 1900-1910 range a century ago. This is not good.
Army? Doesn't do forced entry from the sea and is too heavy to do any real expeditionary work. Marines can do some forced entry and can do expeditionary. I think they are man for man better than the army (one yahoo's opinion anyway) but there are not enough and they are typically lighter than comparable army units.
AF / Naval Air, two necessary complimentary systems. Each can do things the other can't. Marine air? That might be redundant. At leaswt the most redundant of the three.
Commands? Gates eliminate much of the joint of "jointness" so expected it to actually get worse?
I'm way out of my league on this but it is something I've been following as an Armchair SECDEF for more than a few years.
JDF? Jamaican Defense Force ?
