Comment by maxglute
4 months ago
It's substantially cheaper after skipping personel + operational costs of training and associated maintenance etc. Keeping the human bits trained involves flight hours, platform wear and tear etc. Unmanned = do more with less, i.e. same airframes can focus on useful missions. Or sustain more with much less upkeep. Wasting hours wearing down platforms to maintain crew proficiency is SUBSTANTIAL over lifetime of highend platforms. XXLUUV fleet - skipping out on 1,000s of crew, and can be built to lower standards etc. The AI proliferates experience across all hulls simultaneously. For same acquistion you can acquire 2/3x size fleet, have most in storage while a few do day to day operations with significantly cheaper OPEX while maintaining readiness.
XXLUUVs aren't cheap or lowend, they are highend but PRC shipbuilding advantage over US simply monumental, i.e. they can match capabilities and win attrition game on budget. Like UUVs following surface fleet is basically DARPA ACTUV proposal... TLDR is instead of spending 500k-1M per day (US costs) on fleet size ASW you can use a few 10k per day drones that keep tabs on marked targets. PRC has ship building capabilities to execute this at fraction of cost. Once you remove manning, attrition based strategies become even more potent for PRC industrial base.
UKR demonsrates how shitty deindustrialized powers are at generating fires. PRC is has industrial base to make 30m cars and 20m motorcycles annually. This translates to industrial base that can output 5 digit shaheed tier munitions daily. This basically enough satuate any layered defense US+co can prepsition. That's just lowend. Medium end like cruise missiles PRC can probably do ~1000 a day, see their cruise missile gigafactory. The key difference between RU, is PRC (like US) has C4ISR to make efficiently use munitions. RU is closer to Iran level.
ATACMS and Storm Shadow range are functionally toys in IndoPac, i.e. we're talking about different scale of of highend warfare over much greater distances and magazine exchanges. UKR is frankly schoolyard fight and has no worthwhile lessons for Indopac except it's important to have strong industrial base for attrition game, i.e. RU able to sustain very incompetent exchanges vs entire US+NATO support. Incompetent as in wildly inefficient and constrained because they have shit C4ISR that can't dismantal UKR IADs or logistics insulated on NATO soil. There's no "sancturary" in IndoPac.
The useful lesson we learned in last few years relevant to highend peer to peer fight is basically shit tier missiles can penetrate the most sophisticated ABM in the world (Iran vs Israel), more than carrier groups has magazine depth. XXLUVs basically another layer of massing fires in quantities current surface fleet composition can't survive, but strips out ambiguity around long distance / standoff kill chains by parking satuation sized salvos always in terminal range. Again these are not cheap low end solutions, these are HIGH END solutions that PRC simply can build cheaply at scale.
> Wasting hours wearing down platforms to maintain crew proficiency is SUBSTANTIAL over lifetime of highend platforms.
That's a good point of course. But I guess that also means we have to figure out how to operate these vehicles with 0 crew - not even remote crew, because they would need training too. I guess that's something we can't do yet - if we could, the humans wouldn't be there already.
> XXLUUVs aren't cheap or lowend, they are highend but PRC shipbuilding advantage over US simply monumental, i.e. they can match capabilities and win attrition game on budget.
I don't doubt China's supermacy in either low or high end manufacturing. But how limited are they here by the ability to build lots of hills Vs to fill them with expensive sensors etc? It seems like a stretch to say that because they can make lots and lots of ships they can make lots and lots of sophisticated unmanned subs too. Either way, if China's industrial prowess is so much better than the US's, it sounds like they would beat NATO with or without drones - they are maybe an efficiency improvement, but if they put their heart into building normal subs, they would still out build the US.
I agree industrial capability appears to be key. NATO, vis a vis Russia, apparently knows they can't destroy all their tanks and kill every last soldier, and instead you need to target supply lines and command structures. AFAICT, this has basically informed th last few decades of NATO strategy. I guess the question is, what is the strategy "against" China. Because, you're right, if it's an attritional war then we're screwed.
> I guess the question is, what is the strategy "against" China.
- Eliminating their food calories and energy imports via effective/unrestricted submarine warfare (resulting in mass famine and internal insurrection)
- Strategic nuclear weapons
Autonomy is still prospective but high priority, US+PRC (even PRC) both have manning issues. Less total crew + different crew - cheaper to train mission specialists on software in office than actual exercises.
The problem is NATO subsurface barely exist outside of US, so they're not really relevant. Even surface fleet barely matters, if anything would probably drag US down because NATO would share US unrep. As for PRC industry they have AESA radars in <10k agriculture drones, their cruise missile gigafactory was CNCing turbofan blades, they expanded primary sub shipyard (bohai, huludao) to 24 bays (US has 5), which also does nuclear. When PRC smashes scale, it probably means they have unit costs down and something cooking.
>strategy "against" China
Honestly, I don't think there is one, or a sensible one. The "cope" strategy, is after distributing assets in 1IC, 2IC US+co can create survivable force structure that basically sinks all of PLANavy, which TBH was always the easy part. Somehow this translates to defeating PRC because it delays invasion. That's basically the TLDR of what most rational seems to boil down to. None of it talks about the fact that US+co can sink all of PLAN, but PRC mainland fires complex can basically dismantle US posture in 1st IC without a single ship, and basically lock down and islands (TW,JP,functionally SKR, PH) in perpituity. An umbrella of distributing assets are all the drone hellscape proposals that forgets PRC can outdrone everyone else. Or PRC medium/long range fires can hit/displace US posture 5000km around PRC, which includes CENTCOM/parts of EUCOM (no one ever looks west). Which is basically where thinking stops, i.e. all the strategy assumes because US can preposition hardware, it puts PRC at disproportion vunerability, but more and more we seek PRC capabilities will leak fighting outside of Indopac, including PRC pursuing global strikes, i.e. imagine if every US asset larger than 20 meters can be destroyed in under an hour. We're talking about all surface combatants, support ships, bombers, fuelers, awacs, fixed infra targets aka everything highend - the entire US expeditionary model. IMO is why golden dome exists, because PRC hitting CONUS is rocketry is a few years away from mainstream discussion. This without mentioning CONUS strategic targets. Or that if PRC dismantles US exquisit delivery platforms, they not only win the fires generation game (very hard to destroy sheltered launchers vs carriers, bombers that can be sheltered), or that in a both navy airforce gone scenario PRC has industrial base to reconstitute faster. Nevermind US+co has only fought vs adversaries with less than 50% US industrial output.