Combat Stragety and Results

vesicles said:

Compared to what people saw in the two WWs, what happened in the last 50/60 years had been child's play. In WWI, a 4-month long battle cost over 2 million lives (please forgive me for unable to remember the name of the battle). It took the US mere days/weeks to completely occupy iraq in 2003. Then after that, it would be all guerrilla. I don't know what you call roadside bombs/snipers, which are THE major source of casualty for allied forces in iraq and Afghanastan, but I call it guerrilla warfare.

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I don't think the number of casualties is an accurate meassurement of how technologicly advanced, or even matched, to militaries are. Back then it was the nature of warfare that large battleformations would run against each other and therefore a big number of casualties would result.
Later on the focus in battle changed form large armies meeting each other on a field to smaller, technology centered formations. With less people on the actual battlefield, the number of casualties is naturally smaller. Yet the Vietnam war involved significant high tech challanges for the US. I do agree that the guerillia ground warfare in Vietnam was probably the major factor for the positive outcome for the Vietkong, yet there were good lessons of tech warfare to be learned for the US forces.

Hmmm, having one or two advanced systems, such as "the soviet supplied integrated air defence", definitely does not warrant a military a modern force.

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We probably disagree on that, I do argue that an IADS is much more than one or two systems, is a major part in a militaries capabilities. And IMO, among other things, also defiones a mordern military (air)force.

I want to add one more important point here. When people say the US has not faced a technologicly equal foe for 60years and would fare a lot worse against a high tech military with high tech tactics like China, I say the same is much more true for China herself. Wich high tech force has China opposed lately and fought it with high tech tactics. Definitely less then the US.

Re: How Do You Sink A Carrier?

Scratch said:

I don't think the number of casualties is an accurate meassurement of how technologicly advanced, or even matched, to militaries are. Back then it was the nature of warfare that large battleformations would run against each other and therefore a big number of casualties would result.

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Yes it does. The goal of any battle, be it between small units to between armies, is to maximize enemy's casualties while minimizing one's own. What is the purpose of a weapon? It is to gain an advantage over one's enemy, bet it a spear or a bow and arrow. Either weapon allow me to inflict physical damages to my opponent from a distance, thereby minimizing damages to myself, or even no harm to me at all. When we had large formations of armies facing each other, aka 'set piece' battles, it was because of the lack of creativity on how to best exploit any technological advantage one has if any, and how to avoid these battles where opponents are at parity with each other in terms of manpower and technology. That is not the case anymore. Today, the army with the highest level of mobility will have the best odds of winning a war because it will be able to direct its forces to where the enemy is weakest, in both manpower and technology. Parity means equal odds of victory and defeat and no general want equal odds for both.

Scratch said:

Later on the focus in battle changed form large armies meeting each other on a field to smaller, technology centered formations. With less people on the actual battlefield, the number of casualties is naturally smaller. Yet the Vietnam war involved significant high tech challanges for the US. I do agree that the guerillia ground warfare in Vietnam was probably the major factor for the positive outcome for the Vietkong, yet there were good lessons of tech warfare to be learned for the US forces.

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Every time the NVA decided to meet the US in the classic set piece battle situation, the NVA lost with disastrous results, especially in terms of human casualties. Overall, the reason why the communists 'won' in Vietnam, and I place conditions on that victory, was because of the differences in political goals between the communist North and the USA/SVN alliance. Political goals dictate military actions and successful military ojbectives increases support for those political goals.

The political goal for North Vietnam was to unite Vietnam under one rule. The political goal for the USA/SVN alliance was to maintain partition of Vietnam into two distinct political entities, ala Korea. The partition was achieved but not the peace that was expected to accompany the partition. As long as the USA/SVN alliance continue to hope for that peace, the alliance will be psychologically worn out by the constant war, which was what happened. For speculation's sakes, had the political goal for the USA/SVN alliance changed from maintenance of the partition to unification by force, then the military objectives would have been for the USA/SVN alliance to send ground troops north of the 17th parallel -- invasion. With superior technology and probably parity for manpower, South Vietnam will provide the bulk of that, it would have required increased participation from both China and the Soviets to support North Vietnam. Mostly from China. Probably some from the Warsaw Pact countries as well. Remember, there were other militaries such as South Korea and Australia in the USA/SVN alliance.

Another pertinent fact to consider is that under the program 'Vietnamization' of the war, by 1972 only the USAF and select US special forces were in active participation of the war. The ARVN held South Vietnam with the defeat of the NVA in the Easter Offensive in 1972 as supporting evidence that the NVA still could not execute set piece battles successfully. It was in 1975 when the US Congress, under pressure from the psychologically worn out American public, decided to withheld financial support for the South Vietnamese that the US rhetorically 'lost' Vietnam.

Further speculations would have that if the US continued to remain loyal to the cause, South Vietnam would actually no longer be under any obligations, legally or otherwise, to remain south of the 17th parallel. With only continued USAF support, South Vietnam could have mounted an invasion of the North with a 180 deg change in political goals under the argument that this is more of a civil war than a proxy one between outside superpowers. The USAF would have remained far more combat experienced than Chinese or Soviet air forces, if either or both decided to enter this civil war. Superior technology on the USA/SVN alliance would have increased the odds of victory for the South Vietnamese.

Scratch said:

I want to add one more important point here. When people say the US has not faced a technologicly equal foe for 60years and would fare a lot worse against a high tech military with high tech tactics like China, I say the same is much more true for China herself. Wich high tech force has China opposed lately and fought it with high tech tactics. Definitely less then the US.

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Worse does not automatically equal to defeat. It might take longer and higher casualty counts but the US would prevail.

Re: How Do You Sink A Carrier?

I want to add one more important point here. When people say the US has not faced a technologicly equal foe for 60years and would fare a lot worse against a high tech military with high tech tactics like China, I say the same is much more true for China herself. Wich high tech force has China opposed lately and fought it with high tech tactics. Definitely less then the US.

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Um except for the fact that China mounted a successful invasion of North Vietnam proper in 1979?

Re: How Do You Sink A Carrier?

Ambivalent said:

For unguided munitons, they are scattered in a pattern over the ground and explode. These are blast fragmentation munitions that are good only against soft, unarmored targets and personnel.
For guided submunitions, a parachute or balute must deploy to orient the submuniton's seeker nose down so it can locate targets. These are not penetrator munitions either as Wolvie suggests these ASBM's will carry, but take advantage of the thinner armor typically found on the tops of most armored vehicles to burn through the skin of the vehicle. These are not penetrator rounds in the sense of a long rod penetrator. None of the existing carriage submunitions would do serious damage to a carrier or take it out of the fight.

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Against hard targets such as vehicles or fortified structures, it is not effective to simply scatter these sub-munitions. The parachute or the balute mechanism serve not only as you said to slow down the vehicle's descent so it can attempt to locate the target, but also as a mean for ALL vehicles, aka sub-munitions, in a single delivery to create a general contour, or ground shaping, of the area intended for destruction, which would include those vehicles or fortified structures. Even though this hypothetical anti-ship ballistic missile may dispense its cluster munitions from a point whose vertical descent component is much greater than horizontal travel, there is still some horizontal travel for these sub-munitions and at double-digit Mach, they do not have much time to attempt to locate and array themselves inflight into formation to fall within that intended contour.

The fact that this is at sea instead of land is irrelevant, ultimately the Earth is the target and the intention is to somehow compel all vehicles to fall within this imaginary boundary. This is assuming all vehicles have at least basic flight control and guidance systems. The questions would be what is the dispense altitude? How robust is the vehicle since it would be deploying these mechanical items at this double-digit Mach to slow itself down? The more robust each sub-munition, the less the warhead can carry due to weight and size limitation.

Re: How Do You Sink A Carrier?

I know this is going off-topic for the thread but I need to respond to gambit's remarks on the Vietnam War because the represent a classic misinterpretation of war. War is to accomplish political objectives, not merely to kill the enemy. The US's political objective in the Vietnam was to prevent the country from unifying under communism. It failed and in this sense lost the war. There is no ambiguity about it. Tom Clancy and many other American military apologists like to point out that US forces won every single battle against the VC/NVA including the Tet Offensive. The aphorism "won the battle but lost the war" comes to mind. Military confrontations were just one front of the war. The other, more important, front was the battle for the Vietnamese peoples' support.

Simply put, the US military and ARVN had no idea how to fight the Vietnamese communists. The US was fresh from conventional wars in Korea and Europe, and its only other counter-insurgency experience was in the Philippines forty years before, pursuing the Mexican raider Panco Villa forty years before, and the Indian Wars. The Pancho Villa expedition accomplished nothing, and the other two experiences involved copious amounts of slaughter and ethnic cleansing. The US tried this too but the Vietnamese were more organized, well-armed, more populous, and more committed to their cause than the other groups.

The American war effort had pitiful "hearts and minds" campaigns that ignored the root issues of why Vietnamese supported Ho Chi Minh: Diem and the South Vietnam regime was viewed as highly corrupt and the remnant of a foreign empire while HCM had a record of fighting the Japanese, the communists had a more compelling message for national prosperity, the communists were viewed as the best party to restore national pride. Handing out cigarettes and playing cards just couldn't compare to those core issues. The communists were also highly effective at trumpeting the cruelty inflicted on Vietnamese peasants by style of war the US chose to adopt: overwhelming force, search and destroy missions, tremendous aerial bombardment, deforestation.

Apologists assert the US was "winning" as long as it was propping up the government, and it was those weak liberals in Congress who stabbed the war effort in the back. First of all, the US military was responsible for a lot of the anger with it because of their deception of Congress and the President in the Gulf of Tonkin incident, their deception of the country in their assessment of progress in the war (evidenced by the Pentagon Papers and Tet Offensive), and pigheadedness in war strategy (always asking for more, more, more escalation, never a serious reevaluation of the strategy). Second, the military never defined a timetable for victory. It sounds like they just wanted unlimited resources to set up a permanent war in south Vietnam. That is totally unrealistic politically and militarily. The American military was in bad shape by 1972, morale was low and it was disorganized. After the Vietnam experience the military went through a complete overhaul to transform it into a more professional force.

Additionally, how long would the US have held out? If it was a battle of wills the Vietnamese communists displayed much more will than the US. A guerrilla army are the fish in the sea like Mao said, and their strength was evident of their wide popular support. By 1975 an estimated 3.1 million Vietnamese had been killed, military and civilians, yet the North was as resolute as ever. The US threw everything it had at the Vietnamese except atomic weapons and still old men kept humping weapons in sandals down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The communist rank-and-file were extremely dedicated to the cause, more so than the ARVN and a mile ahead of the conscripts in the American army by 1972. Atomic weapons were out of the question due to Chinese and Soviet retaliation threats.

There is no ambiguity as to who won the Vietnam War, it was the Vietnamese communists completely and without caveats.

Re: How Do You Sink A Carrier?

Geographer said:

I know this is going off-topic for the thread but I need to respond to gambit's remarks on the Vietnam War because the represent a classic misinterpretation of war.

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I am Vietnamese. Shortly after WW II, my grandfather took the clan and fled the North because based upon what he saw of some of the atrocities the Viet Minh, with Red Chinese assistance, were starting to inflict upon the people, he believe no good would come from communism. Whoever of the clan chose to remained in the North, they died -- not of old age. I myself have memories as a child of the Vietnam War as far back as the 1968 Tet Offensive in downtown Sai Gon, terrified by tanks, choking and vomiting from gas, dodging bullets running home.

We fled Viet Nam two weeks before Sai Gon felled. I know full well the terror of the people before the coming communists. My grandparents chose to stay, believing their old age would protect them. They were wrong. The communists turned my Catholic boarding school in Thu Duc into a 're-education camp'. My grandparents died in the boarding school their grandson grew up in. Years later when my family name was finally removed from the blacklist we tried to find their remains for a proper burial, we found out the communists have been giving out animal bones to many people who were too ignorant to know better. We decided to drop the issue. Why was my family name on the blacklist? Because of my grandfather's relationship to Ngo Dinh Diem when Diem needed experience bureaucrats to get the new government functioning. If I had returned to Viet Nam sooner, not even my US citizenship and my active duty status in the USAF could protect me from a prison cell somewhere in Viet Nam.

I have ten years in the USAF, three of them years temporarily assigned to the USAFSOC as a linguist in SIGINT because I speak Viet, I am a graduate of SERE, and I was in post-Saddam Kuwait. I know enough about the military life in general and plenty enough information about the Viet Nam War in particular, from American as well as Vietnamese sources, that are not as well known in mainstream lore compared to the liberal biases about the Vietnam War. From what I have seen so far, you do not know about the subject as much as you tried to pass yourself to be.

Geographer said:

War is to accomplish political objectives, not merely to kill the enemy.

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Killing the enemy is a military objective in order to lend support to the political goals. Those goals can be short and long terms. For the USA/SVN alliance, the political goal was to compel North Vietnam to the negotiation table. The military objective was to engage a bombing campaign that cost North Vietnam so much that the North Vietnamese had to comply, at least to give the NVA respite to recover.

Geographer said:

The US's political objective in the Vietnam was to prevent the country from unifying under communism. It failed and in this sense lost the war. There is no ambiguity about it.

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Who is disputing this fact?

Geographer said:

Simply put, the US military and ARVN had no idea how to fight the Vietnamese communists.

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Utter nonsense. There were TWO distinct entities: the NVA, which was a formalized army heaquartered in North Vietnam and had numbered units, and the Viet Cong (VC), which was the guerrilla arm, and whose individual units were more autonomous. Vo Nguyen Giap was consistently defeated on the battlefields and even the communists admitted it...

Summers told Tu, "You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield." Tu replied, in a phrase that perfectly captured the American misunderstanding of the Vietnam War, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."

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Simply put, your contention that the USA/ARVN had no idea on how to fight the NVA and the VC is empty rhetorics. The war was lost politically, not militarily.

Geographer said:

The American war effort had pitiful "hearts and minds" campaigns that ignored the root issues of why Vietnamese supported Ho Chi Minh: Diem and the South Vietnam regime was viewed as highly corrupt and the remnant of a foreign empire while HCM had a record of fighting the Japanese, the communists had a more compelling message for national prosperity, the communists were viewed as the best party to restore national pride.

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Utter BS. The flow of refugees was consistently North to South, never opposite. That in itself was a clue on how the Vietnamese really felt about the communists. Ho was not the only one who fought against colonialist powers like France and Imperial Japan. There were plenty of other non-communist allied nationalists whom the US had relations during WW II. Ho managed to kill most of them off with Chinese and French assistance.

The Ho Sainteny agreement was an agreement made March 6, 1946 between Ho Chi Minh, President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and Jean Sainteny, Special Envoy of France. It recognized Vietnam as a "Free State" within the French Union, and permitted France to continue stationing troops in North Vietnam until 1951.

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Look at the date of the agreement. Many Northern Viets who resented colonialist France were bitter that Ho, who at that time did not have majority support among the people, enlisted the former colonial master back into the country. Ho used French support to murder off many nationalists and silenced many more. Then when the Viet Minh became firmly established Ho turned against France. The migration began long before the US had any significant presence in Indochina.

As for Diem, Ho feared Diem. When Diem was once a province governor, he routed communists out of his province. Ho actually had Diem in prison at one time but could not kill him out of fear of a revolt by the people. Diem's regime in South Vietnam may not have been a paragon of democratic virtues, but it was no different than Ho's own regime in the North. I suggest you educate yourself with this short memoir...



Bui Tin was the man who accepted South Vietnam's surrender. Let me know if you want a quote about Diem.

Your knowledge is based upon deliberate searches on sources that fit your biases, not from genuine scholarly interests. The atrocities committed by the communists during the Tet Offensive turned most of South Vietnam against the VC, the result was many VC sympathizers turned them in and the South Vietnamese ruthlessly persecuted them.



The VC in South Vietnam never recovered to be more squad level, whereas before the Tet Offensive, the VC were able to wield battallion strength. Vo Nguyen Giap, the supposedly 'genius' NVA general, was actually wise enough to object to the planned Tet operation. He felt that the NVA was not ready to engage the USA/ARVN alliance in such a large operation, indirectly he also admitted his own incompetence in military maneuvers. The Politburo overruled Giap and ordered him to commit to the operation anyway. They were hoping for a popular uprising by the people against the corrupt Diem regime. That popular uprising never occurred.

I could go on in even more gory details on why you are so wrong about the Vietnam War but the point is made.

Combat Strategy and Results

I'm starting this thread in order to continue a discussion started in the Sink your CV thread.

bd popeye super moderator

Re: How Do You Sink A Carrier?

gambit said:

Your knowledge is based upon deliberate searches on sources that fit your biases, not from genuine scholarly interests.

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An expression involving a pot and kettle comes to mind. Clearly you have a lot of personal interest in this matter and an axe to grind.

Re: How Do You Sink A Carrier?

RedMercury said:

An expression involving a pot and kettle comes to mind. Clearly you have a lot of personal interest in this matter and an axe to grind.

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You are more than welcome to dispute what I posted. For example...Now that you know that Ho had no problems using foreigners to kill off his own people, how does that fit into the myth about Ho, the nationalist, that so many people believe?

Re: How Do You Sink A Carrier?

gambit said:

Yes it does. The goal of any battle, be it between small units to between armies, is to maximize enemy's casualties while minimizing one's own. What is the purpose of a weapon? It is to gain an advantage over one's enemy, bet it a spear or a bow and arrow. ...

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I disagree with that statement. The military objective of war is, IMO, to degrade the opponents ability to fight. In the old days, when that ability to fight was based alone on humans standing on the field, and had to be there in large numbers, it meant killing, or otherwise incapacitating, men.
Today, in symmetric high tech warefare, the ability to fight can be crippled by destroying HQs, comm links, radars, fighters, tanks, etc. wich are manned with a lot less people, or whose operators don't have to be physicly colocated with the site at all.
So you don't have to kill millions today in order to win a war, wich is not necessarily occupying the land itself.
This does only apply to the descibed modern warfare. But then again that is what was discussed when I started stating my opinion initially .

FriedRiceNSpice said:

Um except for the fact that China mounted a successful invasion of North Vietnam proper in 1979?

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I thought NV doesn't count at all in the category of fighting a tech advanced enemy? That's what this is all about.
People say the US didn't fight any meaningful adversary since WW II. So if NV doesn't count for the US, why should it count for China?