Government Policy and Budget Discussion Thread (no politics)

[CWSooner]

You've got to imagine the sky dark with hundreds of Allied (mostly US) aircraft flying overhead.

There are plenty of photos of it, but I like this painting by the late, great British artist Robert Taylor, Victory Flyover.



At the lower right, below the Corsairs, is USS Missouri, BB-63, site of the surrender ceremony.  One of the Japanese there for the ceremony wrote that he wondered “whether it would have been possible for us, had we been victorious, to embrace the vanquished with a similar magnanimity.”

[Cincydawg]

The Corsair is perhaps my favorite (among many) WW 2 planes (still used in Korea for ground attack).  It had a massive Double Wasp engine and was designed so as to allow a very large propeller to clear the ground. The engine is 18 cylinders in two banks of 9, 46 L displacement (2800 CID).

It initially was judged too dangerous for carrier landings, but the British later solved that problem with a different approach so pilots could see to the side of it's long nose.  This meant USMC aviators got to use it off island bases.

The US leaned to air cooled engines, which meant radials, while the Brits leaned to V engines with liquid cooling.

[OrangeAfroMan]

The vast majority of wars going way back in history were not fought to annihilate the enemy.  They were to gain an advantage.


World Wars I and II are the only wars we've fought in that meet what I take to be your definition of war.

So the one thing that you are sure of is not correct.

Okay, you're kind of missing my point for the satisfaction of telling me I'm wrong.
I'm talking about now.  We weren't the world's police back in WWII.  We didn't have an overwhelming military industrial complex (although WWII is probably when it was born). 
In 2020, other countries will scrape and claw to not lose.  I didn't say anyone is trying to annihilate anyone else, you try to win knowing whatever you destroy, you'll have to rebuild, yes.  BUT, when there's a risk of you losing, you try to win at all costs.  In those wartime moments, you're on the razor's edge of survival.  There's a sense of urgency because the outcome is unknown.
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We put ourselves in a position to not have to do that.  We are the Cy Young pitcher trying out a new change-up in Spring Training.  We have more friend-fire and suicide deaths than deaths caused by the enemy.  You're citing wars in 1689 that are irrelevant. 
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So A, it's safe to say what we have and do is overkill, and
B, it's going to cost us someday - being in this mindset - makes us soft
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It's a good thing, to be top dog.  And maybe when you're the overwhelming favorite, it prevents wars that may have otherwise occurred, which is a great thing.  But it also means out multi-generational mindset is that war is an expensive niusance that happens "over there" somewhere, and we should keep costs down.  

[Cincydawg]

We have overkill for what type of conflict?

I'd agree we have nuclear overkill, but not conventional overkill for some types and conflicts that one can realistically imagine.  For one thing, we have to get troops and supplies across large oceans for virtually any conceivable conflict.

Therein lies the rub, so to speak.

[OrangeAfroMan]

This is not my understanding of history.  I don't even understand what is meant by this.

China invades Vietnam.
Hitler invades Russia.
North Korea invades South Korea.
Iran and Iraq fight a protracted war.
France fights various colonial wars.
German invades France 1914.
Russia invades Germany 1914.

I imagine every country that "goes to war" hopes for and expects a quick easy victory, which is very rare in history.

It's not about a quick easy victory, but of their mindsets going in.  
When Nazi Germany invaded Russia, how did both fight?  Tooth-and-nail, right?  Major losses on both sides.  
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That's not us, in 2020.  We dabble in wars, here and there.  We bomb the bejesus out of places before setting one boot on the soil.  I'm not being critical of the positives of this, I'm just citing our very different mindset.  Say you're a 22 year old soldier.  You don't know what a traditional country-vs-country war even looks like.  You don't know what a loss would even look like.  The gap between us and the 2nd-best country militarily is probably like the difference tween #2 and #15 or 30 or whatever.
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We see war as a niusance that costs a lot of money.  We're very far removed from seeing it as a threat to our way of life.  

[OrangeAfroMan]

We have overkill for what type of conflict?

I'd agree we have nuclear overkill, but not conventional overkill for some types and conflicts that one can realistically imagine.  For one thing, we have to get troops and supplies across large oceans for virtually any conceivable conflict.

Therein lies the rub, so to speak.

Okay, take me down the road of a situation in which our having 1.3 million active military personnel matters in a war versus, say, Iran's 500,00 soldiers.  In what universe will those numbers matter in 2020?
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If we only had 500,000 soldiers too, would we be any less likely to 'call our shot' of how badly we beat them?  

[Cincydawg]

Well, first, we would not be able to get 1.3 million active military personnel to Iran obviously.  We have other commitments, like Korea where we have 28,000, and another 20,000 or so on Okinawa.  The majority of sailors would not be "on the ground" obviously or even in theater.

An invasion of Iran by us would be extremely taxing and difficult and messy and long lasting, a sort of Iraq on steroids.  And then the US would need to move however many ground forces - and supplies - to Iran.  As I keep saying, the ability to project power is a key part of the expense equation.  We have ten active Army divisions and three active Marine divisions.  Two of those are tied up in the Pacific.  Assuming we could ship and support the remainder to Iran (leaving no one anywhere else active duty), that would be approximately 11 divisions or 200,000 ground troops.  They would be met initially with some conventional warfare resistance and then the very difficult asymmetric warfare that is inevitable any time a country is invaded by a much more capable conventional force.

I shudder to imagine what an invasion of Iran would be like.  Bad isn't close.

[847badgerfan]

Well, first, we would not be able to get 1.3 million active military personnel to Iran obviously.  We have other commitments, like Korea where we have 28,000, and another 20,000 or so on Okinawa.  The majority of sailors would not be "on the ground" obviously or even in theater.

An invasion of Iran by us would be extremely taxing and difficult and messy and long lasting, a sort of Iraq on steroids.  And then the US would need to move however many ground forces - and supplies - to Iran.  As I keep saying, the ability to project power is a key part of the expense equation.  We have ten active Army divisions and three active Marine divisions.  Two of those are tied up in the Pacific.  Assuming we could ship and support the remainder to Iran (leaving no one anywhere else active duty), that would be approximately 11 divisions or 200,000 ground troops.  They would be met initially with some conventional warfare resistance and then the very difficult asymmetric warfare that is inevitable any time a country is invaded by a much more capable conventional force.

I shudder to imagine what an invasion of Iran would be like.  Bad isn't close.

Yeah, it would be bloody. Much like the "Japs" in WWII, they'd probably rather die a martyr than surrender to infidels.

[CWSooner]

Our way of war emphasizes high technology for mobility, firepower, and the whole C3I thing--command, control, communications, and intelligence.

Consequently, we have a very small tooth-to-tail ratio.  American mothers don't want their sons to be armed with nothing better than what the enemy has, fighting on his terrain, where everyone speaks his language, not ours, and where he thinks he's going to paradise if he straps a bomb to himself and blows a couple dozen of us to bits while he's in the act of surrendering.

We want overmatch.  And that's expensive in both research/development/acquisition dollars and in manpower.

And anywhere we could expect to fight involves power projection.  That's expensive.

BTW, per Wikipedia, the Russian armed forces contain 900,000 personnel, plus 2.0 million in reserve.
Per Wikipedia, the Chinese armed forces contain 2.035 million personnel, plus 500,000 in reserve.
Per Wikipedia, The U.S. armed forces contain 1.381 million personnel, plus 845,000 in reserve.
Per Wikipedia, Russia also has 554,000 paramilitary troops, China has 660,000 paramilitary troops, and we have none.

Those three are basically in the same ballpark.  But a far greater percentage of hour manpower is involved in projecting power rather than being bayonet-stickers, trigger-pullers, cannon-firers, and bomb-droppers, in comparison to those other two.

If all we had to do was defend our own shores, as was the case in the 19th century, then we could cut our forces in half and feel reasonably confidant that we could defeat an invader.  Maybe not strong enough to deter an invasion, but probably strong enough to defeat one.  If we didn't just decide to surrender when the ships showed up on our shores and bombs started dropping on our cities.

[Cincydawg]

If the US went isolationist and had NO foreign commitments that could require our military, I think we could defend the 50 states with an expert competent Navy and Air Force and smallish Army.  Obviously, this would not apply to a full scale nuclear attack.  No other country could move even one division of ground troops across an ocean and keep them supplied, and they couldn't move much of anything if we interdicted their force at sea.

My fear is more along the lines of a rogue EMP strike or computer virus no one can contain and perhaps a viral pandemic that crashes out economy.

[CWSooner]

The Corsair is perhaps my favorite (among many) WW 2 planes (still used in Korea for ground attack).  It had a massive Double Wasp engine and was designed so as to allow a very large propeller to clear the ground. The engine is 18 cylinders in two banks of 9, 46 L displacement (2800 CID).

It initially was judged too dangerous for carrier landings, but the British later solved that problem with a different approach so pilots could see to the side of it's long nose.  This meant USMC aviators got to use it off island bases.

The US leaned to air cooled engines, which meant radials, while the Brits leaned to V engines with liquid cooling.

I love the Corsair too!

The Navy's F4U Corsair and F6F Hellcat, and the USAAF's P-47 Thunderbolt all shared the Pratt & Whitney R-2800, albeit in slightly different versions.  They all chose different ways to gain ground-clearance for the huge-diameter propeller necessary to harness the power.  The Corsair had the famous inverted gull wings so as not to require extra-long landing gear (which also gave the wing a 90-degree join with the fuselage, so a fillet was not required), the Hellcat had a deeper fuselage with the engine mounted higher, and its landing gear rotated 90 degrees before the struts retracted to the rear rather than laterally, and the Thunderbolt had landing-gear struts that lengthened once the gear were extended.
The air war in the Pacific was not fought at high altitude.  So the Corsair and Hellcat just had the mechanical supercharger that was part of the R-2800 layout.  By contrast, air fighting over Europe went up above 30,000 feet, so the Thunderbolt had that mechanical supercharger plus a turbo-supercharger mounted in the rear fuselage.  The P-38 Lightning had a turbo-supercharger for each of its two (already mechanically supercharged) Allison V-1710s.

Within the U.S. services, the Navy preferred radials over V-12s for the same reason it prefers twin-engine fighters today--reliability.  A radial engine doesn't have a vulnerable coolant tank and radiator to worry about, so it's more battle-damage tolerant.  The USAAC/USAAF was more open to the advantage of V-12s--less frontal area, hence a more streamlined design.  So its upgrade to the P-36 was to replace the P&W R-1830 with the Allison V-1710.  Presto!--P-40.  The P-38 was designed with twin Allison V-1710s, and the P-51 Mustang was designed with one.  There was no room in the P-51 to install a turbo-supercharger, so it eventually switched to the classic, Rolls-Royce-designed, Packard-Merlin V-1670, with a multi-stage mechanical supercharger, so that it could fight at high altitude.
The reason that the Allison didn't have supercharging that would enable it to perform at high altitude is because the prewar USAAC had told all its contractors not to worry about producing such engines.  Our bombers, like the turbo-supercharged B-17, weren't going to need fighter escorts.  Heh!

By the end of the war, Allison had such supercharging, and the postwar Mustang variants used Allisons.

[FearlessF]

[CWSooner]

Yep.  The ole Black Sheep himself.

As I understand it, he quit the Flying Tigers before their contracts expired, and they were not unhappy to see him go.

[Cincydawg]

There is a story that Jimmy Doolittle was a key figure in getting US aviation gasoline to higher octane than the Axis could make, enabling higher output (compression).

My Dad told me the night they crashed, they rolled out in a B-24 and during run up it had a "run away supercharger", so they had to taxi back and get another plane.  He thought they were downed by enemy action long after takeoff, but the official report claims they went into the Pacific shortly after takeoff.  He said he knows he had rolled out the radar dome which replaced the belly turret, and he wouldn't do that before they were at altitude (which was low relatively anyway).

I met the copilot once, his forehead went back at a weird angle from where he hit the windshield.  He went through it, and the flight engineer Lamica apparently went after him.  Lamica was relatively uninjured and kept the two survivors afloat until they were picked up by a US destroyer.  My Dad thinks the heavy radar dome hit the water first and broke the fuselage in half and he floated free, he doesn't remember the crash at all.

I remember he fought for a long time to get his Purple Heart and finally did so, and then gave it to me a while back.  He had the license plates too.  He still had back problems and some kind of fungus, and didn't much like the VA.  At all.