Didn’t ours do okay in WW2? Or is that a myth I need to unlearn? Or is that not counted as “offensive” because we were trying to take Western Europe back? In any case, they certainly weren’t defending American soil.
Well I am not sure I'd call WW2 a real offensive war on our part.
Russian troops in Ukraine have scrambled to avoid detection and attack by using tree branches and straw, even swaths of carpeting, to conceal tanks and other armored vehicles, in what analysts call a surprising lack of sophistication for such an advanced military and further evidence of how ill-prepared some commanders were for the sustained fight that has unfolded.
yeah, I don't know how to fix it. Anyways. i still think aircraft carriers are probably the single most important piece of hardware in combat. That might change in 30 years.
Less than that. Anti-ship missiles already have greater range than F-35Cs + their weapons. It's like boxing with someone who's 6'9" - they can reach you, but you can't reach them.
Aircraft carriers were at the heart of the war in the Pacific.
Perhaps I'm misreading this comment, but the island hopping takeovers to push Japan back toward ther mainland I would think constitutes an offensive strategy.
True, but Japan attacked first and you could make a strong argument that these maneuvers, while not directly defensive, were in retribution/retaliation. Not trying to split hairs here, but I think my point stands. In general, conscripted soldiers on purely offensive assaults do less well than when they're on the defense.
Right, I think there is a difference between "conscripted because the country was attacked" and "conscripted because the country wanted to go do something for no explicit reason". Harder to motivate for the latter; look at WW2 versus Vietnam.
I figure air superiority is shifting from manned flights to UAVs fairly rapidly and especially after what we've seen in Ukraine. The biggest problem is going to be CAS I would think. Do we have any great CAS options flying remotely yet? I know we have hellfires, but you look at what a UAV carries vs. an F35 or A10 or any rotary option and I just don't think it's there.
Maybe WW2 counts as a "defensive" war in the sense that we were defending the status quo. The Axes and Japan were clearly the aggressors, regardless of whether the battle lines were traveling east or west.
That's already happened. From the US using drones for stikes all over the place to DIY drones being used to attack US supporters- we have been on the leading edge of this kind of war as it's played out.
Ukraine is both learning what worked for us as well as what worked for insurgents in terms of drones.
The more surprising part is how bad the ruskies have been at anti-drone electronic warfare. Not that they are doing nothing- but it's not enough to avoid some pretty interesting videos we all get to watch.
In terms of the drone weapons- I wonder if they can be told to wait to go off until they pass though the cages that the russians are using against some anti-tank weapons. Those are designed to either set a weapon off early, or disrupt it going off at all. But, in theory, the drones can be told that there's a cage to delay the trigger to make sure it's hitting the vehicles hull. Or perhaps the designers can have a mini-weapon to penetrate that.