Quote:We are on the edge of an enormous revolution in warfare.
It will not be an incremental evolution from what we are already doing. It will be a profound, disruptive transformation. We will have to rethink all of our plans, doctrines, organizational structures, and training systems.
Genuinely disruptive technological capabilities are relatively rare historically. The transition from arrows to gunpowder was one such revolution. It ended the era of large castles. Powerful cannons could simply knock them down.
The combination of the internal combustion engine and the radio similarly revolutionized warfare. It evolved into controlling ships at sea, replacing sails with steam, developing air power, creating tanks, and then enabling large tank formations to be directed by radio. That evolution from 1870 to 1980 was dominant. Countries which did not adapt were rapidly and decisively defeated.
The emergence of theater wide—and in some cases worldwide—real-time communications created another revolution in the 1980s. In June 1982, an Israeli version of the airborne warning and control system (AWAC) airplane monitored the Syrian Air Force—even before planes left the runway. The plane directed Israeli fighters into a series of ambushes—in which 101 Syrian fighters were shot down at the cost of one Israeli plane.

When I was briefed on this engagement at the Air University in the 80s, I immediately realized it marked the end of the Soviet Union. A dictatorship that thought Xerox machines were state secrets could not possibly compete with a real-time, theater wide information system. In effect, the entire, heavily armored World War II Soviet military was being made obsolete by the information revolution. Furthermore, the survival requirements of a totalitarian state were going to make it virtually impossible to adapt to the new reality.
Now we are in the early stages of a new profound revolution in war fighting.
Ukraine will build 4 million drones this year, including autonomous vehicles capable of hitting targets 1,900 miles away.
Space X has already lowered the price of satellite launches by 90 percent with its reusable rockets. The Starship will reduce the cost even further—and will launch the equivalent of a C-17 aircraft into space. (That’s 100 tons to 150 tons of cargo or 100 people per launch.) Seven passenger launches by Starship would equal every person put into space by every country in the last six decades. In 2017, Elon Musk proposed a point-to-point use of Starship which would carry more than 100 passengers in airline style seating from New York to Tokyo in 37 minutes. The military potential that creates for rapid intervention is worth pondering.
Anduril is building an autonomous submarine called the Ghost Shark for the Australian Navy. This submarine does not need space for people. It is the size of a school bus and can carry a lot of torpedoes. As Chris Brose told me on an upcoming episode of my Newt’s World podcast, a Virginia Class submarine costs $4 billion, and there are few of them. The standard Mark 48 torpedo costs $5 million, and there are relatively few of them. For the same price you could have hundreds of Ghost Sharks carrying thousands of inexpensive torpedoes. If the Navy focused its most sophisticated systems on the most complex threats, it could then focus Ghost Sharks on all the easier targets. In a place like the Taiwan Straits, this would make a Communist Chinese invasion virtually impossible.
The new technologies are going to rapidly evolve, and we must have fast, adaptable manufacturing to produce enough quantity to meet the demands of the modern battlefield. One example of the revolution in manufacturing is Divergent 3D. This factory combines artificial intelligence, 3D printing, robotics, and specialized chemistry to create the most adaptable and rapid manufacturing system in the world.
The scale of change is captured in a project at the LeMay Center at the Air University. The Center is looking at five different areas of dramatic breakthroughs: artificial intelligence and autonomy; advanced materials and production; biotech and neuroscience; quantum science; and robotics and miniaturization. Of course, these five also require a sixth zone of study which is how you build synergistic systems that integrate all five.
In a time of revolutionary change, it takes an enormous amount of experimentation and entrepreneurial leadership to fully develop an applied version of the new developments. Often it is the integration of several breakthroughs that suddenly lead to enormous increases in capability.
The German adoption of the radio for every tank created a speed of command and control in 1940 which allowed them to decisively outperform a significantly larger number of French tanks in just a matter of weeks.
The original flight of the Wright brothers on Dec. 17, 1903 was a shorter distance than the wingspan of a Boeing 747. It was slow enough that one brother could run alongside the plane to make sure it did not flip over. Within 15 years, dramatically more powerful aircraft evolved into the fighters, bombers, transport planes, and other aircraft of World War I—out of which the modern Air Force emerged.
The earliest aircraft carriers at the end of World War II were small. The aircraft were so underpowered that it was not clear they would ever be a threat to ships. Within 20 years, dramatically more powerful improvements in aircraft engines—and the development of large aircraft carriers—had decisively changed the nature of war at sea. The battleship admirals of the time did not believe it, until their precious ships started to be sunk by airplanes.
When you are entering a period of revolutionary change, the present is merely a Polaroid snapshot. You must imagine the change as a continuously evolving and expanding motion picture. You must imagine the future by looking far beyond the present.
This revolution in warfare is going to be an enormous challenge for the Pentagon. But it must be embraced and developed if we are to remain the most effective military in the world.
From Gingrich360

(10-05-2025, 11:47 AM)727Sky Wrote: https://lists.theepochtimes.com/links/7bOS5KyMhZ/Jlid8tcrj/b3XK0cBSvO/FmXERIp9jm

Quote:We are on the edge of an enormous revolution in warfare.
It will not be an incremental evolution from what we are already doing. It will be a profound, disruptive transformation. We will have to rethink all of our plans, doctrines, organizational structures, and training systems.
Genuinely disruptive technological capabilities are relatively rare historically. The transition from arrows to gunpowder was one such revolution. It ended the era of large castles. Powerful cannons could simply knock them down.
The combination of the internal combustion engine and the radio similarly revolutionized warfare. It evolved into controlling ships at sea, replacing sails with steam, developing air power, creating tanks, and then enabling large tank formations to be directed by radio. That evolution from 1870 to 1980 was dominant. Countries which did not adapt were rapidly and decisively defeated.
The emergence of theater wide—and in some cases worldwide—real-time communications created another revolution in the 1980s. In June 1982, an Israeli version of the airborne warning and control system (AWAC) airplane monitored the Syrian Air Force—even before planes left the runway. The plane directed Israeli fighters into a series of ambushes—in which 101 Syrian fighters were shot down at the cost of one Israeli plane.

When I was briefed on this engagement at the Air University in the 80s, I immediately realized it marked the end of the Soviet Union. A dictatorship that thought Xerox machines were state secrets could not possibly compete with a real-time, theater wide information system. In effect, the entire, heavily armored World War II Soviet military was being made obsolete by the information revolution. Furthermore, the survival requirements of a totalitarian state were going to make it virtually impossible to adapt to the new reality.
Now we are in the early stages of a new profound revolution in war fighting.
Ukraine will build 4 million drones this year, including autonomous vehicles capable of hitting targets 1,900 miles away.
Space X has already lowered the price of satellite launches by 90 percent with its reusable rockets. The Starship will reduce the cost even further—and will launch the equivalent of a C-17 aircraft into space. (That’s 100 tons to 150 tons of cargo or 100 people per launch.) Seven passenger launches by Starship would equal every person put into space by every country in the last six decades. In 2017, Elon Musk proposed a point-to-point use of Starship which would carry more than 100 passengers in airline style seating from New York to Tokyo in 37 minutes. The military potential that creates for rapid intervention is worth pondering.
Anduril is building an autonomous submarine called the Ghost Shark for the Australian Navy. This submarine does not need space for people. It is the size of a school bus and can carry a lot of torpedoes. As Chris Brose told me on an upcoming episode of my Newt’s World podcast, a Virginia Class submarine costs $4 billion, and there are few of them. The standard Mark 48 torpedo costs $5 million, and there are relatively few of them. For the same price you could have hundreds of Ghost Sharks carrying thousands of inexpensive torpedoes. If the Navy focused its most sophisticated systems on the most complex threats, it could then focus Ghost Sharks on all the easier targets. In a place like the Taiwan Straits, this would make a Communist Chinese invasion virtually impossible.
The new technologies are going to rapidly evolve, and we must have fast, adaptable manufacturing to produce enough quantity to meet the demands of the modern battlefield. One example of the revolution in manufacturing is Divergent 3D. This factory combines artificial intelligence, 3D printing, robotics, and specialized chemistry to create the most adaptable and rapid manufacturing system in the world.
The scale of change is captured in a project at the LeMay Center at the Air University. The Center is looking at five different areas of dramatic breakthroughs: artificial intelligence and autonomy; advanced materials and production; biotech and neuroscience; quantum science; and robotics and miniaturization. Of course, these five also require a sixth zone of study which is how you build synergistic systems that integrate all five.
In a time of revolutionary change, it takes an enormous amount of experimentation and entrepreneurial leadership to fully develop an applied version of the new developments. Often it is the integration of several breakthroughs that suddenly lead to enormous increases in capability.
The German adoption of the radio for every tank created a speed of command and control in 1940 which allowed them to decisively outperform a significantly larger number of French tanks in just a matter of weeks.
The original flight of the Wright brothers on Dec. 17, 1903 was a shorter distance than the wingspan of a Boeing 747. It was slow enough that one brother could run alongside the plane to make sure it did not flip over. Within 15 years, dramatically more powerful aircraft evolved into the fighters, bombers, transport planes, and other aircraft of World War I—out of which the modern Air Force emerged.
The earliest aircraft carriers at the end of World War II were small. The aircraft were so underpowered that it was not clear they would ever be a threat to ships. Within 20 years, dramatically more powerful improvements in aircraft engines—and the development of large aircraft carriers—had decisively changed the nature of war at sea. The battleship admirals of the time did not believe it, until their precious ships started to be sunk by airplanes.
When you are entering a period of revolutionary change, the present is merely a Polaroid snapshot. You must imagine the change as a continuously evolving and expanding motion picture. You must imagine the future by looking far beyond the present.
This revolution in warfare is going to be an enormous challenge for the Pentagon. But it must be embraced and developed if we are to remain the most effective military in the world.
From Gingrich360

Quote:The aircraft were so underpowered that it was not clear they would ever be a threat to ships. Within 20 years,

(10-05-2025, 03:27 PM)SomeJackleg Wrote: i have to dis agree with this part,

Quote:The aircraft were so underpowered that it was not clear they would ever be a threat to ships. Within 20 years,

it was very clear and evident, that aircraft launched from carriers were a tremendous threat to war ships. the Japanese knew this and all one has to do is look at Pearl Harbor.

Quote:In 1921, a controversial military exercise demonstrated to the world the power of aerial warfare in the naval domain. The live-fire exercise off the coast of Virginia, in which several ships were sunk, accurately predicted air power’s dominance over traditional battleship-dominant navies in the Second World War nearly twenty years later.

William “Billy” Mitchell was a U.S. Army general widely regarded as the father of the modern U.S. Air Force. Mitchell commanded all American aviation units on the Western Front during World War I. He was a firm believer in the superiority of air power over all else. Mitchell planned and directed one of the first large-scale air offensives ever attempted during the successful battle of St. Mihiel. Mitchell’s air armada for the campaign included 1,481 Allied aircraft.

After the war. Mitchell became assistant chief of the Army Air Service, which would later become the Army Air Corps. He believed that very soon the air power would become the dominant power in warfare, and that the United States would inevitably find itself under threat of aerial attack. As Mitchell himself said, “Nothing can stop the attack of aircraft except other aircraft.”

Mitchell believed that aviation—which could respond to both air and naval threats—was much better suited to protecting the country’s coastline than battleships. Mitchell was fond of stating that a thousand bombers could be purchased for the cost of a single battleship, and told a House subcommittee that properly equipped, an Air Service could sink any battleship in existence.

In one of the first interservice rivalries of the American armed forces, he charged that money for battleships in the postwar period was wasteful and a misuse of defense dollars. For a U.S. Navy that still believed in the power of big-gun battleships, these were fighting words. Mitchell set the Army Air Service and the Navy on a collision course, which was somewhat ironic considering his real goal was a separate, third service.

Mitchell repeatedly demanded realistic tests to prove or disprove his theories, claiming that he could sink ships under “war conditions.” U.S. naval aviators had already sunk the elderly battleship USS Indiana in November 1920, and the Navy had come away with the conclusion that “the entire experiment pointed to the improbability of a modern battleship being either destroyed or completely put out of action by aerial bombs.”

Unfortunately for the Navy, word leaked that it had used dummy bombs filled with sand during the exercise, later sinking it with high explosives where the bombs had hit. The Indiana test invalidated, the stage was set for a new series of tests to prove Mitchell’s theories. Secretary of War Newton Baker and Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels agreed the following February to a series of joint Army-Navy exercises, nicknamed Project B, in which Air Service bombers would attack and attempt to sink obsolete ships.

Mitchell formed a new air unit, the First Provisional Air Brigade, based at Langley Field, Virginia (now Langley Air Force Base). The brigade consisted of 150 aircraft and one thousand Air Service personnel from across the country. Pilots quickly trained to sink ships, aided by Russian Imperial Naval Service veteran Alexander de Seversky, who had conducted air attacks on German destroyers during World War I. Seversky educated American pilots in the art of the “near miss,” in which a bomb dropped by an aircraft very close to a warship still causes hull damage by generating an underwater pressure wave. Army ordnance engineers also produced a two-thousand-pound aerial bomb that was thought necessary to sink battleship-sized targets.

The Project B tests were held in the Chesapeake Bay in July 1921. Airplanes of the First Brigade sank a captured German destroyer and then a an armored light cruiser. Next was the German battleship Ostfriesland, considered “unsinkable” due to its extensive compartmentalization. After a day of 230- and 600-pound bombs dropped by Marine, Navy, and Army aircraft, the battleship settled three feet by the stern with a five-degree list to port. Ostfriesland, it turned out, was not unsinkable from the air.

The next day, five Martin NBS-1 bombers each dropped a 1,100-pound bomb on the German battleship, scoring three more hits and causing the ship to sink even further. NBS-1 bombers returned with their new battleship-killer bombs. Of six bombs, three scored near misses powerful enough to rip hull plates off. Twenty-two minutes after the attack, Ostfriesland turned turtle and sank under the waves.

Ostfriesland wasn’t the only battlewagon sunk by American airpower during this test period. The battleship Alabama was sunk in September, and the Virginia and New Jersey were sunk in 1923. The latter were both sunk within less than an hour.

The exercises weren’t perfect. Mitchell had claimed he could sink battleships under “war conditions,” but the battleships had been stationary and not underway. They were also not shooting back with antiaircraft fire and were obviously lacking damage-control parties.

Regardless, the validity of Mitchell’s claims were self-evident—every ship had been sunk. While this did not wean the Navy off expensive battleships in the short term, it did expose their vulnerability from the air, and the Navy did seemingly hedge its bets later on by producing the Lexington-class aircraft carriers. The exercises also undoubtedly increased the Army Air Service’s influence, which set the stage for the larger Army Air Corps of the Second World War.

Like any good military exercise pushing the boundaries of contemporary technology, Project B was a window into the future. While it’s difficult to measure exactly how much influence the Project B tests had on the outcome of the Second World War, that they mirrored many of the war’s future engagements—the attack on Pearl Harbor, the sinkings of HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, and scores of smaller air/naval engagements—is unmistakeable. Project B was a harbinger of the violence to come.