Mega-Thread: Trump Focused Discussion

[Adam Jensen]

I'm not going to defend incompetence, but unless a warship is flying colours, most civilians would be hard-pressed to tell a US ship from a Russian, German, Chinese, British or any other modern Navy one. It's not like the nation is written on the seabord in giant letters. You need to have an active interest in these kinds of things to know that the US doesn't have Battlecruisers, that Battleships are no longer a thing, or that this is a Russian ship. The guy probably just typed in 'menacing US ship' and got a picture of a Kirov class.

I literally found out like a few weeks ago the US doesn't really have battleships anymore.

[Skulltaker]

I literally found out like a few weeks ago the US doesn't really have battleships anymore.

Think the last time a Battleship was used was during the first Gulf War, and those were refitted WW2 Iowa-class BBs

[jonnysensible]

I really don't want to have the "What qualifies as a mass grave?" conversation twice this year.

forgot about this... https://www.democracynow.org/2015/7/...rants_found_in

all the reporters i follow who do border work have warned for years of very bad shit going down there (and being harrassed and targeted by law enforcement). I cant remember that geezer who died trying to burn ICE vehicles but what a champion

[kaid]

I literally found out like a few weeks ago the US doesn't really have battleships anymore.

Well technically I think we still have one or two in mothballs but highly unlikely to ever be reactivated and refurbished there just isn't any use for them any more.

[Adam Jensen]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-wh...terectomies-11

if this turns out to be true ( which almost every whistleblower does)
im just going to call trump a nazi
because thats literally some nazi eugenics shit
but you know
this is 100% what the "economically anxious" factory worker in ohio wanted, so it wont even cost him support

Found myself in a facebook thread and then hovering in a toilet about to puke, because a lot of people were clamboring about how Trump deserves a third term because the "demonic rats" ruined his first term. Anyways, with all the unconstitutional batshittery, one guy wanted Trump to win again entirely because the last four years were "the best four years his shop ever had."

Never mind the 200,000 dead Americans, the kids in cages, the forced hysterectomies, the extortion of world leaders for dirt on Joe Biden, the sabotage of the post office, the rise of white nationalism and hate crimes . . . his fucking shop had a great four years.

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Well technically I think we still have one or two in mothballs but highly unlikely to ever be reactivated and refurbished there just isn't any use for them any more.

Kinda makes sense, with the aircraft carrier the dominant naval force, a battleship just seems redundant.

[kaid]

Found myself in a facebook thread and then hovering in a toilet about to puke, because a lot of people were clamboring about how Trump deserves a third term because the "demonic rats" ruined his first term. Anyways, with all the unconstitutional batshittery, one guy wanted Trump to win again entirely because the last four years were "the best four years his shop ever had."

Never mind the 200,000 dead Americans, the kids in cages, the forced hysterectomies, the extortion of world leaders for dirt on Joe Biden, the sabotage of the post office, the rise of white nationalism and hate crimes . . . his fucking shop had a great four years.

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Kinda makes sense, with the aircraft carrier the dominant naval force, a battleship just seems redundant.

Honestly in actual wartime situation of near peers I am not sure how survivable any naval ship is any more. I kind of suspect in a major conflict we find that carriers are basically sitting ducks and its just to easy to swamp them from stand off range with missile strikes to the point they can't survive near enough a hostile target to deploy their fighters effectively. We mostly use them against non peers as mobile airbases which has been useful for the conflicts we have been doing.

[Gorsameth]

Honestly in actual wartime situation of near peers I am not sure how survivable any naval ship is any more. I kind of suspect in a major conflict we find that carriers are basically sitting ducks and its just to easy to swamp them from stand off range with missile strikes to the point they can't survive near enough a hostile target to deploy their fighters effectively. We mostly use them against non peers as mobile airbases which has been useful for the conflicts we have been doing.

No need to suspect, the US tested it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
A retired general destroyed a carrier group in a mock middle-east war game.

[Thekri]

Well technically I think we still have one or two in mothballs but highly unlikely to ever be reactivated and refurbished there just isn't any use for them any more.

Not anymore, the Iowa was stricken in 2012. They should have been stricken in the 1980s, if not earlier, but they were part of Reagan's naval initiatives, so they stuck around a lot longer then they should have. Some members of congress were really hung up on using their guns for shore bombardment (Which they actually did as recently as Desert Storm), which is why they crammed that requirement into the Zumwalt destroyers to "Replace" a battleships capability. This went about as horribly as actually keeping battleships around.

The most effective platforms in the Navy from a conventional warfare perspective are undoubtedly the SSNs (And SSGNs), which are tremendously powerful, and really hard to counter by anything. We have a lot of them, and they can pretty much lock down any ocean they want by themselves, while launching interdiction strikes on land targets with cruise missiles, and launching Special Forces raids with impunity. Battleships haven't had a primary conventional roles since WWI. Force Projection is the domain of the CVNs, the Nimitz/Gerald Ford class supercarriers. We send those somewhere when we want people to take notice. They are floating threats, while being more vulnerable and (Possibly) less capable then the SSNs. Battleships held this role into the late 1950s, when Supercarriers replaced them at it. Finally, there is the Amphibious support roles. Battleships excelled at this role through WWII, but there hasn't been much need for it since. The LHA type ships are the current kings of this space, which is why China is rushing to build as many as they can. While LHAs don't provide the same level of fire support, they are incredibly flexible, and are probably the most cost effective ships in any navy for their uses in peacetime and low intensity conflicts.

In short, Battleships got replaced in all their roles, and they are stupidly expensive dinosaurs that cost nearly as much as supercarrier to operate, despite being much smaller and infinitely less useful.

[Adam Jensen]

Honestly in actual wartime situation of near peers I am not sure how survivable any naval ship is any more. I kind of suspect in a major conflict we find that carriers are basically sitting ducks and its just to easy to swamp them from stand off range with missile strikes to the point they can't survive near enough a hostile target to deploy their fighters effectively. We mostly use them against non peers as mobile airbases which has been useful for the conflicts we have been doing.

Tom Clancy explored this in Red Storm Rising. An American air carrier group was decimated by long range Russian bombers because of missile strikes being able to overwhelm their defenses. Fiction, I know, but based on reality and real world weapons as of the time the book was written.

[Wikko]

No need to suspect, the US tested it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
A retired general destroyed a carrier group in a mock middle-east war game.

"After the war game was restarted, its participants were forced to follow a script drafted to ensure a Blue Force victory. Among other rules imposed by this script, Red Force was ordered to turn on their anti-aircraft radar in order for them to be destroyed, and was not allowed to shoot down any of the aircraft bringing Blue Force troops ashore.[3] Van Riper also claimed that exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against Blue Force, and that they also ordered Red Force not to use certain weapons systems against Blue Force and even ordered the location of Red Force units to be revealed.[4]"

What the hell is the point of that war game if you script it?

[Thekri]

No need to suspect, the US tested it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
A retired general destroyed a carrier group in a mock middle-east war game.

Having played in a lot of war games, I can assure you that is not a definitive answer. Major US maneuver units get crushed in those all the time, because a large part of the training value is snapping people out of a notion of invulnerability, and forcing them to deal with catastrophe. You don't really test a fleet command staff under pressure if everything goes well, but if you tell them they just lost a carrier and half their ships, you get to see them deal with some real stress. When I was playing, it was in Fort Irwin and Fort Polk, where major army formations routinely get wrecked by simulated "Third world" opponents. Of course the actual players against them are highly experienced US soldiers that are throwing all sorts of clever shit at you, and cheating as well. Nobody walks through those wargames unscathed, because that would be a waste of time and money. They aren't built to pad egos, they are designed to stress the systems and shake everyone up.

Typically they reset after that and let you properly dominate the last day or two under more reasonable circumstances.

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What the hell is the point of that war game if you script it?

See above. The article is just raising false equivalences, all wargames are scripted, and red team cheats a lot more then blue team ever does. This is by design. Red team typically doesn't have to deal with any sort of casualty replacement, logistics, or material concerns, because they aren't being tested. So without restrictions, they just throw unlimited crap at you.

[kaid]

No need to suspect, the US tested it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
A retired general destroyed a carrier group in a mock middle-east war game.

Well that area the carriers were in pretty tight sea area that attack boats and commercial drones could get to. In actual blue water most of the tactics of that exercise won't work. That said there is a reason china and russia have been concentrating on intermediate missile weapons. Counter the US superiority in naval and air forces with mass amounts of missiles to just swamp defenses.

[Thekri]

According to press reports, Iran may be planning an assassination, or other attack, against the United States in retaliation for the killing of terrorist leader Soleimani, which was carried out for his planning a future attack, murdering U.S. Troops, and the death & suffering...
...caused over so many years. Any attack by Iran, in any form, against the United States will be met with an attack on Iran that will be 1,000 times greater in magnitude!

Again, Trump (or Savino, more likely) is using nebulous threats about Iran to look tough. And I am sure our resident Trumpsters all got boners for it, and posted a dozen bald eagle memes on reddit in response. And yes, if Iran does attack us, of course I support a strong response, but lets look at the clusterfuck this post actually is.

1) "According to press reports". Wait a minute... why the fuck is the President getting intel reports on potential Iranian attacks from the media? I could have sworn the government pays people to do pretty much exactly this. How many months has it been since this guy actually had an intel briefing?
2) Lets look at the last time Iran retailiated for the same thing. They shot 22 ballistic missiles (Giant things the size of telephone poles, not those little rockets) at US bases. 110 US Service members were injured enough to get medical treatment. Donald Trump did absolutely nothing. He dismissed the attack as "Headaches", and didn't even really acknowledge that a nation launched an overt military attack on US Troops. This isn't Russian bounties, this is the Iranian military shooting actual Iranian made weapons at actual uniformed US Troops. And he did nothing.

Any resident Trump supports want to weigh in on how tough Trump is again? Any of you confused about the difference between being tough on Twitter, and tough in reality?

[Inuyaki]

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1305844978543988736

omg, this is so dumb, I don't know what to say...
"forest cities" in Europe, wtf... I live in a forest? I never knew
Also "exploding trees" ...

[Edge-]

https://www.axios.com/trump-mattis-b...79e4a0bab.html

Uh...did Trump just call into Fox and Friends and say the only thing stopping him from having the leader of a country assassinated was Mattis? I mean, fuck Assad, if he eats a bullet I wouldn't be remotely sad but like...

I feel like it's generally not common for presidents to brag about how they almost assassinated another head of state...

[Adam Jensen]

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1305844978543988736

omg, this is so dumb, I don't know what to say...
"forest cities" in Europe, wtf... I live in a forest? I never knew
Also "exploding trees" ...

Exploding trees are a thing.

But it has more to do with the sudden expansion of water in their system freezing when temperatures rapidly drop below freezing and less to do with forest fires.

[Edge-]

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1305844978543988736

omg, this is so dumb, I don't know what to say...
"forest cities" in Europe, wtf... I live in a forest? I never knew
Also "exploding trees" ...

TIL Europe is Endor/Kashyyyk...despite at least the Endor scenes being shot in California.

[downnola]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-wh...terectomies-11

if this turns out to be true ( which almost every whistleblower does)
im just going to call trump a nazi
because thats literally some nazi eugenics shit
but you know
this is 100% what the "economically anxious" factory worker in ohio wanted, so it wont even cost him support

That's pure evil, holy shit.

[Adam Jensen]

TIL Europe is Endor/Kashyyyk...despite at least the Endor scenes being shot in California.

Look at all the forest in the forest city of Bastogne:



Oh and more forest out in the Belgian countryside by the memorial for the Battle of the Bulge:



There are trees in that one, therefore, forest, right?

[Thekri]

There are trees in that one, therefore, forest, right?

But look at how nicely it is raked between them!

(ok, seriously, did they rake that shit for real? I see no leaves on the ground)