A bit on the tangent, but seeing how the US often struggles to fight clearly inferior forces, I have to question how effective the US military really is.
The US has the most advance tech and the largest budget, nobody can deny that. But how useful are these when something like the B2 cost billions and there is only one tank factory in the entire country? Also, many critical parts for these expensive war machines are difficult to source and easily disrupted by an adversary.
One example is the artillery ammunition being supplied to Ukraine. The US can barely break 50K/month. Meanwhile, Russia is producing them by the hundreds of thousands. China is even higher.
The US has the fanciest toys but those can barely be made and are only good for strategic, precision attacks; and their supply chain cannot sustain a prolonged conflict. In a peer conflict, these are fatal. If China started a war, their manufacturing base can potentially pump out more weapons than the US can destroy. And in the long term, the US may not be able to keep up in both weapons and personnel.
Just like how Japan got the largest and most advance battleships with the more
experienced crews at the beginning of WW2 but still lost to the US. Japan could not match the production and rapid replacement rate the US had. Now, the US is in Japan position compared to China.
The US is still very effective and well-trained compared to its peers, however the issue is armed forces all over the world (including the US, and other NATO countries, especially the UK and Germany) are in parts struggling with retention and providing training to their soliders/sailors/aircrew (flight-time to pilots in the case of Air force), so collectively standards are going down.
The Royal Air Force has less active fast jets (fighters and bombers) now than it had just bomber aircraft (Tornados) 20 years ago, and the Royal Navy is struggling to find sailors to man ships (not surprising given the pay, and the fact the UK doesn't do what the US armed forces do and pay for education, i.e. college).
If you look at accident reports over the past year from the US Air Force, the amount of flying time pilots are getting for practice every three months is around a third of what is was 10 years ago.
I think training and experienced crews are in the same boat as equipment. It takes too much time and effort to train someone to do things like flying the F35 or crew an aircraft carrier. By the time a new pilot is certified, in a real conflict, probably 10 already died. It is simply unsustainable if the enemy can fighting back on equal ground.
The history example with Japan also demonstrated this point. Japan had highly trained and effective sailors and pilots. But they all died and by the end of the war, Japan had to scrape the barrel and forced untrained young boys into the fights, who did not received any advice or training from the experienced veterans because those had all died. And so they lost.
The US may walk the exact same path on both equipment and personnel.
The commander said while they were able to fire off a lot of rounds, the U.S. troops conducting that training did not have a full understanding of the challenges Ukraine would face fighting Russia.
“Well, we got a luxurious shooting practice (around 100 rounds fired by each gunner) and some good overall knowledge about the tank,” he explained. “But the American instructors AND military were completely unaware of the modern battlefield threats. And still are unaware (I communicate with some of the American tankers and try to share information with them).”
For example, the commander said his trainers “are shocked that Russians can see us at night with thermal-vision recon drones (we were taught that we would be haunting the Russians who are blind at night), they do not understand at all the threat posed by the FPVs, etc.”
“The American tankers should act promptly,” he urged. “Their tanks are too thin and vulnerable given the current threats on the battlefield. Protect your tanks urgently to avoid losses in potential near-future conflicts, taking into account our experience.”
---------------
Found another comment about "Bradley commander who said he was taught in Germany to ride with the hatches open and they did that for about 2 days"
Procurement is still leaning hard on expensive high end drones expecting them to survive while even Houthis easily and regularly shoot down Reapers. Spotting drone life is counted in days in Ukraine, more than one day of survivability is really good. Everything needs to be expendable, US will not get far with $100K FPV kamikaze drones https://www.twz.com/air/rogue-1-is-one-of-the-marine-corps-n... when adversary is sending $1-2K fiber optic (unjammable) ones at you at 100 to 1 ratio.
The US is driven by capitalist logic. The arms dealers make a bundle. The military is imperialist and has ever lower public support for wars that are oriented around getting cheap labor, raw materials, and markets for US companies, or simply smashing and bleeding rivals.
The US is not tooled for "winning" wars, it's tooled for making money and causing chaos. It's like a private equity firm and everyone at the top will continue to make out like bandits until the scam falls apart.
In this case, the US pilots were likely fighting against the Yemenese, who are supporting the Palestinian people against the Israeli genocide. When the genocide stops, the red sea will reopen. This is clear.
I think there is reason to worry about the effectiveness of the US military.
> The US has the most advance tech
In the Ukraine conflict, drones have played an important role. And China (in DJI) is the undisputed leader in drones. Not only is the US sorely behind in this area, it's unclear if we can even produce drones without buying critical components from China.
> and the largest budget
Similar to many other things, the US pays a lot, but that doesn't guarantee a better result. When the Russia-Ukraine war broke out, articles came out about how Russian troops were wearing fake body armor due to corruption. While the US isn't (AFAIK) quite that bad yet, _everything_ we're seeing with enshittification affects the military as well. When a normal company sacrifices on quality control, or does stock buybacks instead of R&D--that plain sucks. With a defense contractor this impacts the military's effectiveness. If Boeing can't make a civilian plane where the doors don't fall off, should we expect their military products to be any better? And that's to say nothing of the suppliers that _significantly_ overcharge the government for replacement parts.
It costs more and takes longer today to build new planes than it did in the 1940s--and we have computers now. Sure planes are more complicated, but $2 trillion to design a plane--that's absurd!
None of this is new, the military industrial complex has been ramping up for over half a century, but the problems are accelerating. For now, we've avoided this attrition by just throwing more money at the military, but it's not enough. We are buying fewer munitions, fewer planes, because they're just too damn expensive--not because they need to be, but because of grift.
China is currently building ships 200x faster than the US. We rely on them for much of our advanced manufacturing. If we really want to beat China--militarily or economically--our industries will need to focus on producing better products, rather than just increasing shareholder value.
But also, take this with a grain of salt. I'm not an expert--I just dabble :)
ETA: Also, at risk of making this political, China has a much larger population than the US. The US could try to offset their weakness by taking advantage of relationships with other countries--but Trump is currently angling to start trade wars with Canada, Mexico, and the EU. Which is not how you build a coalition against China.
The US has lost all wars in the last five decades: Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. War is merely a tool to achieve political goals, and none of these goals were achieved. This means all the effort and resources spent on these wars were wasted, and the wars were effectively lost. The US has never faced an opponent like China. Nazi Germany is a joke compared to China when you consider their access to resources, production capacity and technology. There is a lot of mythology surrounding the idea that the US won WWII alone, but without the Soviet Union's effort, they would likely have lost that war as well. Now, you have Russia and China in the same corner. People should read the Pentagon report[1][2] from a few days ago, which states that China is already almost on par with the US military in most categories.
Is it fair to say the US easily won the "hot" stages of each of these wars, but struggled and failed with the counter-insurgency bits? And possibly the same is happening in Yemen.
These are totally different tasks, and I'm not sure you can deduce much about one from the performance in the other.
The US's main strategy is to dominate the battlefield and achieve the objective as fast as possible using technology and overwhelming firepower. So yes, they could and did win the "hot" stages where they were able to deploy all they have.
But when the fight dragged out, as it has always done and absolutely will be in a peer or near peer conflict, the effectiveness of the US military drops like a rock. It is here that I question what is the point of all the expensive toys and the trillion dollars budget.
True, but also as these wars have dragged out, they have turned to counter-insurgency. Are you saying the US would also do badly at a dragged out "conventional" conflict?
Yes, very likely. The US has no means to rapidly switch into wartime production. It is woefully inadequate when you realize that there is only one factory making tanks and it almost got shutdown. Even Russia is out producing the US. China would absolutely embarrass the US if it comes to sustained conflict and supply chain.
And the US military is still stuck in the past in term of strategy for all out conflicts. A bunch of drones scared the entire nation the last few days and the army literally has no effective means to immediately response or track them. Meanwhile, billions are poured into aircraft carriers, all of which are easy targets for mass drone strikes or an ICBM attack. The US has no way to recover even a single carrier loss. There is simply no time or material to build them faster. Yet they are still the backbone of the US force. A bone that is getting more and more vulnerable every day.
Correct on the first bit, however the backseater's the Weapons Systems Officer, not a pilot (despite what many films show, i.e. backseaters going off to be pilots).
>> Pilots recovered alive – one with minor injuries – after ejecting from fighter jet as US military says its guided missile cruiser ‘mistakenly’ fired on the F/A-18.
And I thought the F/A-18 was sorta outdated by now... Are they flying it just for practice/training missions because it's cheaper, or did they upgrade it substantially?
Part of the picture here is how few of the newer generation fighters are actually in service.
The F22 fleet is capped at 200, and I gather significantly less than that in a state of combat readiness. There are technically around 600 F35s in service, but they are plagued by reliability issues, to the point that they are only averaging 50% availability for missions.
The slogan aside, Israelis (sorry, "the Jews") have much, much less to fear from Ansar Allah than the overwhelming majority of Yemenis who aren't Zaydi, those being the people the Houthis are actually working to exterminate.
It is not genocidal to fight back against imperial forces that have destroyed your land and slaughtered your people. Not saying I agree with all of their actions but they do not exist as 'evil' in a vacuum. If you lived on a planet that was constantly bombed by an alien species would you not want to destroy them? Would the pain of only seeing constant suffering and death all around you not blind you with rage? It's just that but at a country scale.
That's not who the Houthis are actually fighting and it's not who they're genocidally threatening. The IDF is not afraid of Ansar Allah. A Sunni Yemeni (or a Zaydi middle schooler who doesn't want to take up arms) sure is, though.
Until the US provides evidence confirming it was friendly fire, you can assume Houthis shot it down. The US does not want to acknowledge their role in attacking Yemen.
They also blew the hell out of an aircraft carrier. Ignore the commanding officer tweeting pictures of the facility dog and the ice cream machines; that was all a smokescreen to hide how much damage the Houthis had done.
A bit on the tangent, but seeing how the US often struggles to fight clearly inferior forces, I have to question how effective the US military really is.
The US has the most advance tech and the largest budget, nobody can deny that. But how useful are these when something like the B2 cost billions and there is only one tank factory in the entire country? Also, many critical parts for these expensive war machines are difficult to source and easily disrupted by an adversary.
One example is the artillery ammunition being supplied to Ukraine. The US can barely break 50K/month. Meanwhile, Russia is producing them by the hundreds of thousands. China is even higher.
The US has the fanciest toys but those can barely be made and are only good for strategic, precision attacks; and their supply chain cannot sustain a prolonged conflict. In a peer conflict, these are fatal. If China started a war, their manufacturing base can potentially pump out more weapons than the US can destroy. And in the long term, the US may not be able to keep up in both weapons and personnel.
Just like how Japan got the largest and most advance battleships with the more experienced crews at the beginning of WW2 but still lost to the US. Japan could not match the production and rapid replacement rate the US had. Now, the US is in Japan position compared to China.
The US is still very effective and well-trained compared to its peers, however the issue is armed forces all over the world (including the US, and other NATO countries, especially the UK and Germany) are in parts struggling with retention and providing training to their soliders/sailors/aircrew (flight-time to pilots in the case of Air force), so collectively standards are going down.
The Royal Air Force has less active fast jets (fighters and bombers) now than it had just bomber aircraft (Tornados) 20 years ago, and the Royal Navy is struggling to find sailors to man ships (not surprising given the pay, and the fact the UK doesn't do what the US armed forces do and pay for education, i.e. college).
If you look at accident reports over the past year from the US Air Force, the amount of flying time pilots are getting for practice every three months is around a third of what is was 10 years ago.
I think training and experienced crews are in the same boat as equipment. It takes too much time and effort to train someone to do things like flying the F35 or crew an aircraft carrier. By the time a new pilot is certified, in a real conflict, probably 10 already died. It is simply unsustainable if the enemy can fighting back on equal ground.
The history example with Japan also demonstrated this point. Japan had highly trained and effective sailors and pilots. But they all died and by the end of the war, Japan had to scrape the barrel and forced untrained young boys into the fights, who did not received any advice or training from the experienced veterans because those had all died. And so they lost.
The US may walk the exact same path on both equipment and personnel.
Current US military TRADOC still doesnt acknowledge drones. Recently Ukrainian Ambrams crew posted their experience after losing tank in Kursk https://www.twz.com/news-features/ukrainian-m1-abrams-comman...
-----------
The commander said while they were able to fire off a lot of rounds, the U.S. troops conducting that training did not have a full understanding of the challenges Ukraine would face fighting Russia.
“Well, we got a luxurious shooting practice (around 100 rounds fired by each gunner) and some good overall knowledge about the tank,” he explained. “But the American instructors AND military were completely unaware of the modern battlefield threats. And still are unaware (I communicate with some of the American tankers and try to share information with them).”
For example, the commander said his trainers “are shocked that Russians can see us at night with thermal-vision recon drones (we were taught that we would be haunting the Russians who are blind at night), they do not understand at all the threat posed by the FPVs, etc.”
“The American tankers should act promptly,” he urged. “Their tanks are too thin and vulnerable given the current threats on the battlefield. Protect your tanks urgently to avoid losses in potential near-future conflicts, taking into account our experience.”
---------------
Found another comment about "Bradley commander who said he was taught in Germany to ride with the hatches open and they did that for about 2 days"
Procurement is still leaning hard on expensive high end drones expecting them to survive while even Houthis easily and regularly shoot down Reapers. Spotting drone life is counted in days in Ukraine, more than one day of survivability is really good. Everything needs to be expendable, US will not get far with $100K FPV kamikaze drones https://www.twz.com/air/rogue-1-is-one-of-the-marine-corps-n... when adversary is sending $1-2K fiber optic (unjammable) ones at you at 100 to 1 ratio.
The US is driven by capitalist logic. The arms dealers make a bundle. The military is imperialist and has ever lower public support for wars that are oriented around getting cheap labor, raw materials, and markets for US companies, or simply smashing and bleeding rivals.
The US is not tooled for "winning" wars, it's tooled for making money and causing chaos. It's like a private equity firm and everyone at the top will continue to make out like bandits until the scam falls apart.
In this case, the US pilots were likely fighting against the Yemenese, who are supporting the Palestinian people against the Israeli genocide. When the genocide stops, the red sea will reopen. This is clear.
I think there is reason to worry about the effectiveness of the US military.
> The US has the most advance tech
In the Ukraine conflict, drones have played an important role. And China (in DJI) is the undisputed leader in drones. Not only is the US sorely behind in this area, it's unclear if we can even produce drones without buying critical components from China.
> and the largest budget
Similar to many other things, the US pays a lot, but that doesn't guarantee a better result. When the Russia-Ukraine war broke out, articles came out about how Russian troops were wearing fake body armor due to corruption. While the US isn't (AFAIK) quite that bad yet, _everything_ we're seeing with enshittification affects the military as well. When a normal company sacrifices on quality control, or does stock buybacks instead of R&D--that plain sucks. With a defense contractor this impacts the military's effectiveness. If Boeing can't make a civilian plane where the doors don't fall off, should we expect their military products to be any better? And that's to say nothing of the suppliers that _significantly_ overcharge the government for replacement parts.
It costs more and takes longer today to build new planes than it did in the 1940s--and we have computers now. Sure planes are more complicated, but $2 trillion to design a plane--that's absurd!
None of this is new, the military industrial complex has been ramping up for over half a century, but the problems are accelerating. For now, we've avoided this attrition by just throwing more money at the military, but it's not enough. We are buying fewer munitions, fewer planes, because they're just too damn expensive--not because they need to be, but because of grift.
China is currently building ships 200x faster than the US. We rely on them for much of our advanced manufacturing. If we really want to beat China--militarily or economically--our industries will need to focus on producing better products, rather than just increasing shareholder value.
But also, take this with a grain of salt. I'm not an expert--I just dabble :)
ETA: Also, at risk of making this political, China has a much larger population than the US. The US could try to offset their weakness by taking advantage of relationships with other countries--but Trump is currently angling to start trade wars with Canada, Mexico, and the EU. Which is not how you build a coalition against China.
The US has lost all wars in the last five decades: Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. War is merely a tool to achieve political goals, and none of these goals were achieved. This means all the effort and resources spent on these wars were wasted, and the wars were effectively lost. The US has never faced an opponent like China. Nazi Germany is a joke compared to China when you consider their access to resources, production capacity and technology. There is a lot of mythology surrounding the idea that the US won WWII alone, but without the Soviet Union's effort, they would likely have lost that war as well. Now, you have Russia and China in the same corner. People should read the Pentagon report[1][2] from a few days ago, which states that China is already almost on par with the US military in most categories.
1. https://media.defense.gov/2024/Dec/18/2003615520/-1/-1/0/MIL...
2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/12/18/...
Is it fair to say the US easily won the "hot" stages of each of these wars, but struggled and failed with the counter-insurgency bits? And possibly the same is happening in Yemen.
These are totally different tasks, and I'm not sure you can deduce much about one from the performance in the other.
The US's main strategy is to dominate the battlefield and achieve the objective as fast as possible using technology and overwhelming firepower. So yes, they could and did win the "hot" stages where they were able to deploy all they have.
But when the fight dragged out, as it has always done and absolutely will be in a peer or near peer conflict, the effectiveness of the US military drops like a rock. It is here that I question what is the point of all the expensive toys and the trillion dollars budget.
True, but also as these wars have dragged out, they have turned to counter-insurgency. Are you saying the US would also do badly at a dragged out "conventional" conflict?
Yes, very likely. The US has no means to rapidly switch into wartime production. It is woefully inadequate when you realize that there is only one factory making tanks and it almost got shutdown. Even Russia is out producing the US. China would absolutely embarrass the US if it comes to sustained conflict and supply chain.
And the US military is still stuck in the past in term of strategy for all out conflicts. A bunch of drones scared the entire nation the last few days and the army literally has no effective means to immediately response or track them. Meanwhile, billions are poured into aircraft carriers, all of which are easy targets for mass drone strikes or an ICBM attack. The US has no way to recover even a single carrier loss. There is simply no time or material to build them faster. Yet they are still the backbone of the US force. A bone that is getting more and more vulnerable every day.
Weird headline? They seem to have shot down 1 fighter jet which had 2 crew, both of whom were pilots.
I guess that's a human-centered title rather than object-centered one.
I would have expected one of us programmers to make a joke about Types here, but missed opportunity! My dad jokes are too poor to try
It's a deceptive title, clearly intended to sound like it was two planes.
Correct on the first bit, however the backseater's the Weapons Systems Officer, not a pilot (despite what many films show, i.e. backseaters going off to be pilots).
Relevant
>> Pilots recovered alive – one with minor injuries – after ejecting from fighter jet as US military says its guided missile cruiser ‘mistakenly’ fired on the F/A-18.
And I thought the F/A-18 was sorta outdated by now... Are they flying it just for practice/training missions because it's cheaper, or did they upgrade it substantially?
Part of the picture here is how few of the newer generation fighters are actually in service.
The F22 fleet is capped at 200, and I gather significantly less than that in a state of combat readiness. There are technically around 600 F35s in service, but they are plagued by reliability issues, to the point that they are only averaging 50% availability for missions.
Probably both, the even older F-15s are still the main workhorse fighter for US and others albeit with many upgrades
It's still in production (until 2025.)
The F-15, F-16, and F/A-18 have all been continuously upgraded over time. Examples:
https://www.defensenews.com/air/2024/04/12/air-force-to-get-...
https://theaviationist.com/2024/01/24/usaf-to-fly-f-16s-into...
https://www.twz.com/litening-targeting-pod-tested-on-f-a-18-...
It's not the plane, Mav. It's the pilot.
That is incredible. So low over the water, with missile inbound. Those aviators are lucky to be alive.
Last time an American war plane was shot down by a missile fired from the ship was in Vietnam!
[flagged]
They demand a genocide right on their flags.
The slogan aside, Israelis (sorry, "the Jews") have much, much less to fear from Ansar Allah than the overwhelming majority of Yemenis who aren't Zaydi, those being the people the Houthis are actually working to exterminate.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slogan_of_the_Houthi_movemen...
little dessert nazi party can die in a fire
You do not gotta hand it to the Houthis, who are themselves genocidal.
It is not genocidal to fight back against imperial forces that have destroyed your land and slaughtered your people. Not saying I agree with all of their actions but they do not exist as 'evil' in a vacuum. If you lived on a planet that was constantly bombed by an alien species would you not want to destroy them? Would the pain of only seeing constant suffering and death all around you not blind you with rage? It's just that but at a country scale.
That's not who the Houthis are actually fighting and it's not who they're genocidally threatening. The IDF is not afraid of Ansar Allah. A Sunni Yemeni (or a Zaydi middle schooler who doesn't want to take up arms) sure is, though.
[dead]
Guardian is not much different than the Sun, Der Spiegel or Foxnews these days. Dont read it or take it with a grain of salt.
Until the US provides evidence confirming it was friendly fire, you can assume Houthis shot it down. The US does not want to acknowledge their role in attacking Yemen.
They also blew the hell out of an aircraft carrier. Ignore the commanding officer tweeting pictures of the facility dog and the ice cream machines; that was all a smokescreen to hide how much damage the Houthis had done.
Houthis did down 12 fancy Reaper drones tho. Its not like they are shooting rockets made out of lamp posts, its all Iran/Russian finest gear.
What? The publicly acknowledges their role all of the time, they even post about it in Twitter https://x.com/CENTCOM