This took place in 2002, but how much do you wanna bet the philosophy behind the Navy’s failure still exists. And what they did to cover it up. Quite a story.
It all comes out of the “Millenium Challenge ’02” war games we staged in the Persian Gulf this summer. The big scandal was that the Opposing Force Commander, Gen. Paul van Ripen, quit mid-game because the games were rigged for the US forces to win. The scenario was a US invasion of an unnamed Persian Gulf country (either Iraq or Iran). The US was testing a new hi-tech joint force doctrine, so naturally van Riper used every lo-tech trick he could think of to mess things up. When the Americans jammed his CCC network , he sent messages by motorbike.
The truth is that van Ripen did something so important that I still can’t believe the mainstream press hasn’t made anything of it. With nothing more than a few “small boats and aircraft,” van Ripen managed to sink most of the US fleet in the Persian Gulf.
What this means is as simple and plain as a skull: every US Navy battle group, every one of those big fancy aircraft carriers we love, won’t last one single day in combat against a serious enemy.
Loose lips sink ships.
hmmm…If the terrorists are using lo-tech to fight us, then how come they use our GPS systems to navigate into the trade centers, user boats with MOTORS to detonate close to the cole, or better yet, use advanced RFID bombs built by the Iranians(sold by China) ? Terrorists just have a bunch of money to buy this stuff. They use their money to tap into the hi-tech streams that are out there.
And seriously guys.
There are hundreds of think tanks that are responsible for war planning. Most of the times, they are ALL right. This is a non-article.
I have no doubts about veracity of the event, the author of the article has no idea what he is talking about.
First, no one is teaching surface-to-surface combat using capital and guns ala WWI. There are far more effective means of taking out surface ships like using aircraft and missiles.
Second, subs and carriers have different purposes. While subs are certainly effective against surface ships, they are wholly inadequate at doing bombardment from 200 miles out or for transporting large numbers of troops or doing reconnaissance or providing ground troop support. Carriers are about projecting power by moving an airport off the enemy’s coast.
Both subs and carriers are unbelievably expensive. However, carriers have a longer reuse value in that you can replace its aircraft contingent over time. Subs become obsolete as their stealth technology becomes dated. Most countries do not have subs but almost every country has (had) an air force.
Lastly, it is still the case that air superiority is one of, if not the, most important objective to achieve in a battle with control of the ground being second. You can achieve both of those without control of the oceans but you cannot achieve either of them if you cannot move your aircraft to the battlefield quickly and ground based aircraft simply cannot do that yet. When we can launch a huge number of fighters and bombers from the US , fly them across the world, have them engage in an extended battle or two and then fly home with fuel to spare, then, maybe, aircraft carriers will not be needed.
Uh, Omar, in case you missed the lessons of WWII, it was that the battleship was no longer the dominant military force on the high seas. Air power sunk the Bismark and the Yamato. And dozens of others. Which is why after WWII, Battleships were used to shell coastal positions and not to slug it out against one another on the high seas.
And how many battleships are currently in the US arsenal? NONE.
Awake, you gotta stop reading those MoveOn.Org and Daily Kos talking points and read some MilBlogs like Blackfive. For it you did, you’d know that the military has won EVERY engagement they’ve had against the insurgency. What the insurgents do is rely on sucker punches through IEDs.
But in direct miltary engagements, it’s the insurgents that are getting their asses kicked. EVERY SINGLE TIME.
38 – Matt Garrett
the military has won EVERY engagement they’ve had against the insurgency.
Same thing was claimed about Vietnam when America was there, Afghanistan when the Russians were there, America in Somalia, Israel recently against Hamas in Lebanon, and for all practical purposes, the current occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Battle victories are claimed, but the wars end up being lost. Pure military might looses outright to a local population that does not want the troops there. end of story.
#40: You know, on second thought, you’re right. For example, I find little of anything on Fox News credible and not worthy of sourcing except to laugh at them, even if on rare occasion they get something right. Point taken. From now on I’ll stick to established news sources like the Washington Post, New York Times, NBC, ABC, CBS, etc. The ones with no slant, are always credible, etc.
#42, Bryan,
I think Uncle Dave’s point is that even “crack pots” can be correct. As others pointed out, this happened. You, on the other hand, appear to be shooting this loser story because you don’t like the outcome.
May, just maybe, you might find a better source with a better analysis of the war game you could quote.
#38, Matt,
What the insurgents do is rely on sucker punches through IEDs.
Which is what, better or worse than a 1000 lb bomb dropped on you?
I haven’t noticed our soldiers all in mass formation, marching in step towards their enemy, wearing brightly colored uniforms. In warfare, the only rule is to win. Every other rule has been made by the winners, after the fact.
#41 – Nice try to avoid the subject.Maybe you learned something this time and will remember to include your sources on your next attempt at fiction.
#46: Nice try at being a troll looking for a fight. But to humor you, I did include my source (the link to the site you don’t like) in my post. Since others seem to have found substantiation for everything in the post, I think you owe the guy who runs that site an apology.
DU is not a professional news organization. We aren’t paid reporters. Other than John and Alex, we aren’t even professional writers. We simply find interesting articles and post them. Period. If readers want to find articles that are conflicting, supporting or otherwise, that’s up to them. That’s what the comments are for.
Sounds like we need to go through your website and check for each and every article posted being meticulously researched.
Don’t like it? Tough shit.
#46, indirectly you caught the real problem with many of the responses, and the genus of the neo-con true believers. If you don’t like the information being presented, change the focus to something that will smear the messenger. Let’s not pay attention to the what’s being said here (a reliance on “high tech” by itself isn’t going to be enough to win military actions) and not the flakey source.
Read through the responses. There is a lot of evidence cited that regardless of the original source, the facts are: a) the event happened, b) it didn’t go down according to script, c) if it had been a real event, rather than a scripted exercise, the “Blue” force would have been severely damaged in ways they could not react to, and d) that probably not a good thing.
However I do love the irony that, by your reasoning, people should not rely on Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Fox News, because their content is agenda driven rather than factual, they don’t include their sources, and they are crackpots. So, in that context, even you are partially right.
Doesn’t that trouble you more than Unc Dave’s original source?
Awake, Nixon was able to force a treaty on North Vietnam. The news media made it look like a defeat.
North Vietnam did not invade and conquer the South until several years later. The Democratic Party controlled Congress voted down funds to support the South (as was required by the treaty), and the Northern invaders massacred many people.
I don’t know what you did in the military, but you sure have not learned anything since.
Wow, just looked at Benson’s web site. This is a man not to be argued with. As in psychotically right wing, so why bother.
Where will these people go for comfort once Bush and the Republican congress’s excess bury the neo con movement? And those excesses will bury it, especially when they lose the power to cover the full extent of their graft and corruption. These folks are going to find themselves as marginalized as the far left politics of the late 60’s and 70’s. Only they are going to be even more reviled once the bills start coming in, which is going to be necessary since they have clustered enough money to hold onto some significant influence better than the hippies did.
This is not some secret, nor is the vulnerability of our CBG’s something that exists in the minds of crackpots alone. Smearing the messenger will not change the consequences of attacking Iran with our current strategy. However, given this, you would think that the neocons would hesitate, eh? Well, it seems that they have a . . .rosier vision of what would occur after such an attack. . . .
“Next, the Iranians would do nothing — bupkes. They don’t attack Israel, they don’t choke off the world’s oil supply, they do not send hit squads to the United States, there is no “war” in the conventional sense of attack counterattack. Iran already has its hands full without inviting more trouble. Its leaders would be reeling from the initial US attack and they would know our forces are in position to strike again if Iran provokes us or our allies. They would stand before mankind with their pants around their ankles, dazed, bleeding, crying, reduced to bloviating from mosques in Teheran and pounding their fists on desks at the UN. The lifelines they throw to the Iraqi insurgents, Hezbollah and Syria would begin to dry up, as would the lifelines the double-dealing Europeans have been throwing to Iran. Maybe the Mullahs would lose control.”
http://tinyurl.com/33tarm
And the Iranian people will throw flowers and chocolates at our jets. . . and a pony! A shiny pony with wings that drops golden turds wherever it goes!
It seems that one does not need to be a loon muttering about Zionists to be a crackpot, nor does a crackpot necessarily have no power of opinion within the executive branch. Look upon his site, and see the face of neo-conservatism!
At the current rate, it won’t be the excesses of the neo-cons that will bury their movement, it will be the complete destruction of the armed forces due to their anti-strategic strategy, and the US economy crashing due to a prolonged oil crisis. Better get used to a US that has the economy and influence of a third world country, rather than just the leadership.
This all reminds me of an Old Copy trick.
There is only so much room on a floppy disk.
So the makers would place copy protection for the current year on the disks.. some of it was very interesting. they could protect against almost any copy method.
there IS a problem.
You can only FIT so much on 1 floppy.
So, many of us would have 5-7 years worth of copy programs.
THE NEW formats and protections had to drop the OLD protections to Protect against the NEW..
The OLD ones may take LONGER to do the same job, but they worked.
Defending yourself TODAY with TODAYS weapons, and not looking to the past…Is like sending someone into the field with 1 ton of tech that runs on batteries…without any extra batteries.
Iv told many that the FIRST thing you train someone is with the OLD tech…THEN teach them the NEW… If the NEW fails, you can fall back on the old. example: If your compressor fails and your nail gun DONT WORK, GRAB a Hammer…
You cant do Flash attacks, when you are trained in SQUAD tactics.
You dont do Squad tactics in gorilla warfare..
Teach Gorilla tactics FIRST…Teams of 3…THEN you teach squad tactics.
The only thing you need to know about this is that putting a fleet into a confined space like the gulf is super risky. This isn’t news. The best responce for a nation like Iran is to throw everything you have at it at the same time and hope to overload the defense. If you manage the odds are excellent that the fleet you hit is going to be neturalized. There are certainly a variety of weapons systems available at the present able to sink or so badly damage a carrier so badly that it isn’t going to be of any further use for a long time.
Numbers matter.
You guys must be getting hard up for items to make the guys that put their lives on the line look bad. This story has made the circuit at least 4-5 times. Get a life!!!