Rearming warships at sea. In an intensive conflict, missiles can be expended very quickly. And reloading presently requires a trip back to a base, requiring weeks or months. Reload-at-sea is challenging but development is being pursued.
It could make a major difference in ship/fleet effectiveness..it’s good that this is now being pursued, but…couldn’t this work have been started 10 years ago and now be operationally deployed or at least ready to go?
The electric air taxi company Joby Aviation has received FAA approval for a flight school to train pilots for its own aircraft and those of other companies. See also plans for air taxi service in the UAE.
Why the symbolic professions tend to be highly unrepresentative of the societies that they purportedly serve.
David Brooks asserts that Ivy League admissions broke America. Here’s a transcript. He doesn’t seem to even consider the possibility that elite-schools-as-a-gateway to key positions in a society is a really bad idea, as Peter Drucker argued 50+ years ago.
Alexander Hamilton tried to warn us about people like Obama, out of office and ‘wandering among the people like discontented ghosts.’
Real science: Hacksawing your hypothesis.
There’s a report that OpenAI’s new model reacted to the threat of being shut down and replaced by a new model by copying itself into the new model. Reminded me of the story Burning Bright in the collection of SF stories that I reviewed here.
Interesting comments at the X link for the story..not totally clear to what extent the model’s actions are reflective of truly emergent behavior versus ‘nudging’ in that direction.
Nice views of the restored Notre Dame cathedral, featuring the stained glass windows.
Here’s an article that gives some detail about the process of reloading VLS with some good pictures that give an idea of just how many moveable parts there are:
https://www.twz.com/news-features/navy-just-demonstrated-reloading-vertical-launch-system-at-sea-for-the-first-time
Those VLS containers are big and awkward and the unallocated deck space on a destroyer is small, largely because of cramming on as many VLS cells as possible. Also note that the reloads have to be transferred one-at-a-time from another ship, so definitely not going to be happening during a battle or bad weather or fast.
The VLS system is a good example of solving one problem while creating others that seemed unimportant at the time, then having the landscape shift so that those minor problems are now major. The problem that VLS solved was peace. How do you make it possible for all of these very expensive and fragile missiles to survive for decades at sea until they may be needed. Outside the last year or so, I don’t think more than a small handful have been fired at a hostile target. So, all the different missiles are sitting in their very carefully sealed boxes, constantly monitored, waiting for some power to achieve a plausible ability to threaten a carrier battle group, the apex predator of the ocean sea.
They were designed in an environment where threats first had to pass the gauntlet of the air defense creating a bubble a hundred miles in all directions. Where threats were limited by the number of opposition aircraft that could be launched and land based anti-ship missiles could be simply out ranged. It somehow escaped notice that there were several very important areas where that would not be possible. The Persian Gulf, the Formosa Straight, etc.
That was then and this is now. Land bases anti-ship missiles have ranges too great to allow a carrier group to simply stand off and still effectively attack land targets. They exist in numbers that make fighting them off implausible. You can afford to shoot a lot of million dollar missiles at a 10 billion dollar carrier. You can send a lot of $100,000 drones at a billion dollar destroyer.
A U.S. carrier group that would have been invincible at Midway but is held at bay by a rump of former goat herders supported by a failing state.
Every time I read something from David Brooks, I get the distinct feeling that he’s making it up as he goes along.
Either that, or his mind is like the menu at a Chinese restaurant. He accepts the interview gig and gives them something from Column A, then something from Column B, etc.
The columns are his standard responses to all external stimuli.
What tees me off about the Ivy League admissions process is the jumping through hoops that untold high school students subject themselves in order to get admitted to those schools.
The college applicant needs some perusal of schools. If you want to become a nuclear engineer, it’s probably not a good idea to apply to a teacher’s college (which nowadays are called universities..) in lieu of universities that feature nuclear engineering.
Similarly, it is a good idea for the college applicant to do a self-appraisal. What the applicant likes and doesn’t like of various subjects. What the applicant is good at and not so good at in those subjects.
But what elite schools require of applicants may well constitute child abuse. You should not have to sell your soul to get into a college, which these days is pretty much what happens. All those projects and activities done NOT because the applicant is interested in them, but because it would look good on the application.
I have read that the curated admission, in the hope of finding someone “special” to fill an admissions slot with all those “unique” projects and activities, is actually favoring upper class or upper middle class applicants, as they are better able to ascertain precisely what admission committees will find “unique.”
Working at McDonalds- uncool, declassé. Trip to Ghana to teach literacy–supercool.
Gringo…’hoop-jumping’…Brooks seems to be saying that Ivy League admissions is mainly about IQ and success in school. I don’t think this is true. The admissions process does look at those things, but also at doing the Proper kind of extracurriculars—plus, the subjective opinions of admissions officers. I saw that one Ivy had been marking down Asian applicants because of their perceived lack of courage. The idea that an academic bureaucrat is qualified to judge anyone’s personal courage is too silly to even be worth mocking.
Brooks says that one-time Harvard president Conant ran admissions on a meritocratic basis, but…he apparently did restrict the admissions of Jews:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23887353
though not to the same level as his predecessors.
Gringo…’hoop-jumping’…Brooks seems to be saying that Ivy League admissions is mainly about IQ and success in school. I don’t think this is true.
If that were true, then Ivy League admissions could be trimmed down to SAT and grade average. But that would put a lot of admissions staff out of work.
The idea that an academic bureaucrat is qualified to judge anyone’s personal courage is too silly to even be worth mocking.
Exactly. Moreover, personal courage is far from the only attribute that these admissions bureaucrats judge.
Land bases anti-ship missiles have ranges too great to allow a carrier group to simply stand off and still effectively attack land targets.
In other words, aircraft carriers are now obsolete.
Wall-of-text to justify and add caveats not written.
I expect you know all about that.
“In other words, aircraft carriers are now obsolete.”
Not in other words, but certainly in terms of American carriers and an attack on, or anywhere near, the Chinese coast for instance. On the other hand, both coasts of North America and those of Western Europe are more or less pristine.
The truth is somewhat better as our Air Force seems to have lately come to the conclusion that attacking ships may be a job that real pilots, rather than just Navy pilots, do:
https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3865918/us-air-force-demonstrates-low-cost-capability-to-defeat-surface-vessels-from-th/
In any case, VLS reload is not the answer to the problem. That is that a carrier group under way is larger than most cities. Our only plausible adversary that doesn’t have the ability to track them anywhere in the world is the Afghan Taliban. The ability to successfully attack them anywhere in the Pacific, Atlantic or Indian oceans is somewhat more uncertain but China is working hard on the problem. I find it hard to imagine a scenario where an American carrier force could plausibly be deployed against a “near-peer” (China) adversary.
Watching China spend so much effort to perfect such a sunsetting technology at least reassures me that their military establishment is as near sighted as ours.
MCS: “Watching China spend so much effort to perfect such a sunsetting technology at least reassures me that their military establishment is as near sighted as ours.”
Agreed that the era of the aircraft carrier is now over, following the battleship into the list of technologies which we still could do — but choose not to. The era of ultra-accurate hypersonic missiles, on the other hand, has just begun — as Russia recently demonstrated. The next piece of the puzzle is to make it possible to fire such accurate missiles at moving targets, such as naval warships in the middle of an ocean. we will have to see if Russia or China is the first to develop such technology; sadly, it certainly won’t be the people who gave us the F-35 and the LCS.
There may be an even bigger game-changer on the horizon. Some Chinese researchers claim (maybe!) they have a technology to identify submarines in the deep ocean. That would spell the end of the submarine.
https://interestingengineering.com/military/submarine-detection-at-light-speed-china
If aircraft carriers and submarines soon become no longer viable, then the case for a Blue Water navy goes away. Maybe then the DC Swamp will stop playing at global policeman and focus on what is happening at home?
I have conjectured for 20 years, at least, that eventually synthetic aperture radar would progress to the point that the wake of a submarine would be detectable on the surface.
I don’t find the paraphrase of of a Chinese press release that Gavin sited very persuasive. What passes for an explanation makes no sense I can see. I find it sort of unlikely that the Chinese government would allow the open release anything that would be so much more valuable as a secret, any more than ours would. It’s not like they could test it without military involvement. If I’m wrong, I await a demonstration.
Watching China spend so much effort to perfect such a sunsetting technology at least reassures me that their military establishment is as near sighted as ours.
No disagreement here. My guess is that the amount of wealth uncorked for the Chinese navy is at such a scale that a few expensive equivalents of the last US battleships and even the Alaska-class whatevers don’t matter too much. They want all the bases covered, just in case.
I’ve got a copy of the Paul Silverstone book on the astounding numbers of ships built for the US navy during and immediately prior to WWII. The scale of the Chinese navy build up today reminds me of that.
Meanwhile, the US navy can’t manage to keep the relatively few ships it still has from going to sea covered in rust.
Sad. And Infuriating.
MCS: “I have conjectured for 20 years, at least, that eventually synthetic aperture radar would progress to the point that the wake of a submarine would be detectable on the surface.”
It is probably inevitable that someday a technology will be developed which can identify the location of submarines in the deep ocean. Think of what that means for the future of a navy — any country’s navy.
We already understand that surface combatants increasingly are sitting ducks as missiles improve. Ah! But we still have undetectable submarines, and our submarines are world-leadingly Woke with lots of female sailors. When the submarine becomes detectable, it may be that the Era of Navies will be over — for everyone. And that has big implications for an America whose “leaders” suffer from an irresistible urge to interfere in the far-off affairs of the World Island.