30 October 2024

Stray Military Procurement Ideas

* Modularity is a commonly touted feature of military systems but doesn't seem to work very well in practice. One system is rarely traded out for a different module on the fly.

Modularity has not been a valuable feature, for example, of the Littoral Combat Ships, not of which has changed its mission since it entered service.

* Likewise, one size fits all tends to not optimize a system's effectiveness in any mission, while systems purpose built for a particular narrow mission seem to fare better, with fewer procurement hiccups and a better final product. 

For example, the F-35A jet fighter has not been a good successor to the A-10 in the close air support role, and the commonalities that were so highly sought between the F-35A for the Air Force, the F-35C for U.S. aircraft carriers, and the F-35B, primarily for the U.S. Marine Corps for launches from both aircraft carriers and helicopter carriers, has not been very useful. Maybe commonalities between the F-35C and the F-35B have provided minor benefits, but the commonalities between these models than the F-35A have been very modest, if there have been any benefits. The F-35A's high costs and technical complexity have also led the U.S. Air Force to purchase new F-15Es which lack the F-35A's stealth, a feature that is irrelevant in places where U.S. forces have neutralized anti-air missile systems and secured air superiority.

Likewise, the F-35A is expensive overkill in the role of providing security to the airspace in the vicinity of U.S. cities against rogue civilian aircraft, even if lightly armed. Even an F-16 is really overkill for this role. Homeland defense of U.S. cities against rogue civilian aircraft does not require stealth, supersonic speed, or any capacity to drop bombs, and requires only a small compliment of air to air weapons relative to most fighter jets. But since these missions keep fighters in the air for many hours a year, keeping operating costs down is important. And, an aircraft purpose built for this mission could be much less expensive per plane than an F-35A or an F-15E, let alone the proposed Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) fighter aircraft whose development was recently put on hold.

While there is a place for a supersonic stealth fighter that can carry a decent sized load of missiles and bombs, not all missions require that capability, especially once air superiority is achieved. Dispensing with those capabilities in different military aircraft models where these capabilities aren't needed can greatly reduce the cost of the overall Air Force fleet of warplanes without unduly reducing its capabilities.

However, often a military system designed for one narrow mission can be adapted later with variants for different missions once the original version has proven itself. For example, most U.S. fighter jet designs have had second lives as electronic warfare aircraft, like the EF-18 Growler. The success of both M113 and Bradley M2 tracked troop transports, and the wheeled Stryker armored personnel carrier, and the Humvee, have led to many successful, single purpose variants of each of them. There have likewise been many variants of the UH-60 Blackhawk military transport helicopter.

* Another problem with one size fits all is the need to have military systems proportional to the missions that they carry out, even in cases where there are different kinds of conflicts with the same opponent.

For example, the kinds of military systems that would be best for repelling an invasion of Taiwan by the People's Republic of China are not necessarily or even usually the kinds of military systems that are best for dealing with maritime harassment of civilian boats and ships near the Philippines and Vietnam by the Chinese Coast Guard, and paramilitary Chinese commercial ships.

In the same vein, the kind of warplanes and Air Force tactics that make sense in a "permissive" environment where the opponent lacks modern anti-aircraft missiles is very different from the warplanes and Air Force tactics that make sense in a non-permissive environment where the opponent has advanced air defense systems.

The military systems that make sense for U.S. National Guard and U.S. Coast Guard forces charged primarily with homeland defense, low intensity counterinsurgency responses, and disaster response in the United States and its coastal waters is very different from the military systems that make sense for the active duty forces of the Department of Defense (in peacetime) engaging in expeditionary military activities.

It is all good and well to have anti-drone and anti-missile missiles. But if they cost $1 million each and the incoming drones and missiles cost $10,000 to $100,000 each, this is still a losing proposition in a war of attrition in the long run.

Not every country has a military large enough to make multiple different kinds of military systems for different situations. But the U.S., with the largest military budget in the world by far, is large enough to do so, and has a greater need to do so because it could potentially be involved in a much broader class of conflicts.

* U.S. National Guard forces and the U.S. Coast Guard are mostly adequate to maintain domestic security and protect against military invasions of the United States. It doesn't take much to defend the U.S. from Canada and Mexico, or from other nearby countries in the Caribbean, Central America, or South America. These forces might need some assistance from the regular U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force and U.S. Space Force to defend U.S. borders from an attack across the Pacific Ocean or the Atlantic Ocean with warships or warplanes or long range missiles (possibly nuclear), but only a small fraction of their resources are needed, and neither the U.S. Army nor the U.S. Marine Corps are very well suited to defend U.S. territory against this kind of military invasion.

Homeland defense missions don't require bomber aircraft, heavy main battle tanks, or numerous artillery batteries. Insurgent forces are likely to have small arms up to 0.50 caliber that are either semi-automatic or have been modified to be automatic assault rifles and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and armed drones adapted from commercial off the shelf models, but not tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery, anti-armor missiles, rocket propelled grenades, recoilless rifles (i.e. bazookas), cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, nuclear weapons, or heavily armed warships.

* Predominantly, the U.S. Department of Defense is tasked with conducting military operations abroad and on the high seas against state actors and insurgent or terrorist groups that rival state actors (and may be funded and supplied by state actors such as the Houthis). This means that speed of deployment should be a major consideration for all of these forces. A 70-80 ton tank does not do any good in foreign wars sitting at domestic U.S. military bases. If slow and heavy military systems have any place in modern warfare, they need to be prepositioned where they are likely to be needed.

For example, while they both launch identical artillery missiles, the M270 multiple rocket launcher based variant of the M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicle has ended up being much less in demand than the C-130 transportable, wheeled HIMARs system which carries half as many missiles and is unarmored.

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