This platform prides itself on referencing history as a potent backdrop to the news of the day TODAY.
The lessons learned in the past seem to us to be forgotten moving forward as the world again seems to be spiraling out of control on a variety of fronts.
This post references a key military asset as the naval linchpin in our strategies in defining how we are choosing to address the Indo Pacific political and military situation and to us is alarming in it’s potential flaws in planning and liabilities based on historical precedent.
In WW2, all the rage until June of 1942 was the building of behemoth battleships by the key Axis combatants, a nod to the inability of the Axis powers to compete with the perceived industrial might of the West at the time in regards to shipbuilding capabilities.
The military mentality (at least with Yamato and Musashi the Japanese super battleships and to a lesser extent with Bismarck and Tirpitz) was that superior vessels designed to destroy the enemy from beyond the horizon with deadly salvos before detection by the enemy would compensate for the numerical superiority of the Allies in this regard.
The stark reality was Midway in early June of 1942 proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that the future of naval warfare was aircraft carriers rendering the super battleships obsolete overnight.
The “swarm” tactic the carriers gave their air wings in battle tactics established a new norm in naval warfare at the time and may very well be the insidious legacy that heralds the destruction of the carriers with the advent of similar tactics spawned by emerging drone and missile technologies.
The current Iranian “swarm” missile and drone attack on Israel has propelled this concept into the public consciousness and our US Navy (via the Aegis class destroyers) have been dealing with attacks of a similar nature in the Red Sea for months now.
We are not privy to the classified protections the carriers may or may not have to counter this obvious threat and their multiple ship battle group support teams certainly add major firepower to their defense capabilities but we harbor (no pun intended) serious trepidations on their abilty to counter a massive swarm drone and hypersonic missile attack that these combatants have been preparing for YEARS and with 5 carriers in region as target practice it makes us VERY uneasy. Food for thought…..