Thoughts on upgrading our naval power

I have been thinking a great deal and reading a great deal about the current state of our navy, particularly in light of the book recommended in the preceding post. Clearly the proliferation of very quiet diesel-electric submarines around the world, the evolution of increasingly effective ship-killer cruise missiles and medium-range ballistic missiles, and the advances in space-based sensor systems has dramatically changed the naval battlespace. Looking at the current and planned future developments in the US navy has led me to the following observations:

The current trend to decrease the manpower on warships is short-sighted. Yes it cuts the operating costs – fewer sailors to train and maintain. But in real combat ships get damaged, and what keeps them afloat and fighting are the damage control teams. Cut the manning down too far and there aren’t enough sailors for effective damage control teams. Lightly-manned ships are fine in peacetime, but I fear in actual combat we will lose ships and sailors we could have saved if there had been enough manpower aboard to do effective damage control.

The recent focus on shorter range air-superiority fighters on carriers is short-sighted. Because of the new developments, carrier groups will likely have to operate further from the battlefront, and their air wings will need a longer reach. Mid-air refueling can help the problem a bit, but the relatively slow and unprotected refueling planes are an obvious early target for any opponent. We need to develop longer-range naval aviation planes.

The new “distributed lethality” concept is a good one – equip more smaller ships with effective anti-ship missiles, so that every navy ship, whatever its size, is a serious combatant, instead of just a few of the major battlewagons. Of course anti-ship missiles are only as good as their guidance and targeting information, so even the smallest of these ships will need to be connecting to the evolving combat networks.

A clear weak point in the US military as a whole is the increasing dependence on space-based sensors and communications assets, which any serious opponent will probably try to knock out at the very beginning of hostilities, either with a high-altitude nuclear EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) burst and/or anti-satellite missiles.  China in particular has invested heavily in developing and testing anti-satellite weapons.  We ought to take that into account.

We ought to push hard the evolution of unmanned stand-off weapons like cruise missiles with intelligent guidance systems that are not wholly dependent on GPS for their accuracy.  We are likely to need to launch initial attacks from further away, given the increasingly effective anti-access weapons systems around the world (like the new Russian S-400 missile system, arguably better than anything the US currently has).’

We ought to push hard the evolution of long-endurance unmanned submarine systems, for intelligence, sub hunting, missile launching and mine laying/detecting.  Underwater vehicles will likely be much safer in a future war than surface vessels, and much likelier to be able to get close to enemy shores.  The current limit on such vehicles is the power source – batteries just aren’t high enough capacity yet. But this will change.

We ought to be paying attention to our industrial base. The US is down to only seven major domestic shipyards capable of building, maintaining or repairing large navy ships. In World War II we had 29. As it is we are seeing delays in replacing our end-of-life carriers and submarines because of shipyard capacity. For example, on our current building schedule we will have a shortfall of attack submarines for over a decade, between 2025 and 2041, partly because of funding issues but also because of shipbuilding capacity. (The current requirement to keep 10 attack submarines deployed around the world every day requires 48 total attack submarines in the inventory)   If I were an opponent, I would seek early on to put a few of these shipyards out of action.

Will any of this happen? It depends on whether Congress and the administrators in power over the next decade or so get real about the threats, or continue to dither and hold unrealistic expectations about a peaceful world.

Recommended: Anti-Access Warfare: Countering A2/AD Strategies

People may resent the amount we spend on our military, but in fact it is American power that keeps free access to the seas around the world, and it is the sea that carries the vast majority of the trade that keeps our economy, and the economies of our trading partners going, so like it or not it is very much in our own self-interest to act as the policeman of the high seas.  Retreat from that obligation would be very foolish and short-sighted indeed, much as it might please the pacifists among us.

There is no nation that currently threatens us on the high seas, but there are several that have spent a great deal on their military to deny us access to their local waters, the Peoples Republic of China being the most worrisome. Not only would the PRC like to deny us the ability to protect Taiwan if/when they decide to take it back (an eventuality for which they have been planning and arming for decades now), but they claim almost the entire South China Sea (the so-called nine dash line), an area that carries one-third of the entire world’s shipping. And of course Iran can always threaten to close the Strait of Hormuz, shutting off 20% of the world’s oil supply. Both have invested heavily in anti-access weapons. Clearly there are issues here we ought to be thinking about.

Sam Tangredi’s 2013 book Anti-Access Warfare: Countering A2/AD Strategies is worth reading for anyone who wants to be better informed about the challenges our military may face in the future, and the weapon developments and investments we ought to be making to meet that possible future. This is not a causal read – but it is worth it.

Now that we know more....

Now that we know more about the shooter in Las Vegas, one important thing is pretty clear: none of the steps currently proposed by gun-control advocates would have been effective in stopping this tragedy.   The shooter appeared perfectly normal to his family and  those who knew him. He had no known political agenda, or even interest. He had no criminal record. He had no known history of mental illness. He bought at least one shotgun at a gun store and passed the background check.

He seems to have amassed a sizeable collection of guns (42 at last count), and modified some of them to fire automatically. And apparently even his brother didn't know he had done this. I suppose a national register of all gun purchases might have raised a flag, but even then there are perfectly normal collectors who might own that many guns. He was wealthy, so it would not have been unreasonable for him to have been (or posed as) a collector.

But certainly the usual steps proposed by gun-control advocates, such as universal background checks, would have been ineffective in this case. That doesn't mean they aren't still good ideas, and worth doing. They will stop some shooters. Burt let's be clear - none of the proposed steps would have stopped this shooter.  Only eliminating all guns in the civilian population might have been effective, and that is clearly a political non-starter in America, and probably unenforceable in any case.

The Las Vegas shootings

According to first reports, the shooting in Las Vegas Nevada last night is by far the worst mass shooting in recent American history, with at least 50 dead and hundreds more wounded. The shooter was a white man, apparently not a recent immigrant, and most likely not Muslim. So this is not a terrorism incident – this is likely another mentally unstable lone wolf attacker. And according to police he had a huge arsenal in his hotel room.

What does this say about American gun laws? Clearly no one is going to take guns away from Americans, but surely we need tighter controls on who can purchase and own guns and ammunition. It won’t stop all incidents like this, but it will surely cut down on the number. There is no reason why people who have a history of mental problems, people who are very young, and people who have been convicted of an armed crime should be able to purchase guns and ammunition legally, and without a thorough background check. Nor is there any reason why gun owners shouldn’t be held legally and financially liable for damages their guns cause, whether fired by them or stolen/loaned and fired by someone else.

The NRA will of course fight such steps tooth and nail, but isn’t it time we got real about this problem. We place restrictions like this on drivers of cars; why not on gun owners as well? This is not a second amendment issue – this is common sense.

Recommended: The Abbie Hoffman of the Right: Donald Trump

David Brooks has a brilliant piece in today's New York Times Op Ed page: The Abbie Hoffman of the Right: Donald Trump. Well worth reading and thinking about.

Can democracy work with an uninformed electorate?

Here is an interesting question: can democracy work in the long run with an ignorant electorate?

Is the American electorate ignorant? The many surveys by people like the Pew Research Group suggest so. A recent 2017 Pew poll revealed that less than half the respondents knew that Neal Gorsuch is a Supreme Court judge, despite all the fuss earlier in the year when he was appointed. Only about a third knew the current unemployment rate. Only about 60% knew that the UK was proposing to leave the EU. In a 2015 poll, only about a third knew that water boils at a lower temperature at higher altitudes.

A 2014 Annenburg survey by the University of Pennsylvania found that a third of the respondents couldn’t name a single one of the three branches of government, and 42% had no idea which party held the majority in the Senate. A recent Fusion poll showed that three quarters of Millennials (ages 18-34) had no idea who the Senators from their own state were. In a 2002 National Geographic poll, only about 17% could find Afghanistan on a world map – even worse, 11% couldn’t find the USA on a world map and a third couldn’t find the Pacific Ocean on a world map.

Sounds to me like an ignorant electorate. Hillary Clinton made a big deal about winning the popular vote, but in fact the reality was that she and Trump each got votes from about 30% of the voting-eligible population, and the largest proportion – about 40% - didn’t bother to vote at all.

So now we have politicians like Bernie Sanders proposing economically infeasible ideas like free college for all and free medical care for all, and politicians like Donald Trump (if you can call him a politician) proposing tax cuts at a time when we are running a half-trillion dollar a year federal deficit and should be raising taxes to eliminate the deficit and pay down at least some of the federal debt, and the uninformed voters seem to be buying it.

So with a voting population that is this uninformed (and perhaps many politicians who aren’t much better educated), how can a democratic system work? And especially how can it work in a world that has grown so complex and technological?

It is an interesting question.

The Sanders single-payer health insurance proposal

Bernie Sanders proposed a single-payer health insurance plan back during the 2016 presidential primaries, and I see that the far left, including 2020 presidential aspirants like Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Kalama Harris are climbing on the bandwagon, along with a number of Democratic senators. Apparently this is emerging as a key proposal for the Democratic far left in the upcoming election cycles.

It sounds great, EXCEPT that no one is talking about the costs. Sander’s proposal during the primaries had an estimated cost of $1.4 trillion per year, based on an analysis by Gerald Friedman, an economist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. That is almost surely optimistic, since most estimates like this are lowballed to make the proposals sound reasonable.  In Sander’s case, he assumed about $6 trillion in “savings” over the next ten years as a way to lower the costs. Others come up with higher costs. Kenneth Thorpe, a professor of health policy and management at Emory University, put the cost at $2.4 trillion a year. A team from the Urban Institute put the number at $2.5 trillion a year. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projected $2.8 trillion a year. Let’s be very generous and assume a realistic cost estimate might be around $2 trillion a year, higher than Sander’s low-ball estimate but lower than most other independent estimates. Is this economically feasible?

Well, as I pointed out in a series of posts some months ago, the federal government is already running a deficit of about half a trillion dollars per year, and the federal debt is already at about $20 trillion, which is 108% of the GDP, the total value of all goods and services the nation produces in a year. So it would be pretty disastrous to increase the annual federal deficit; in fact we should be reducing it. But let’s assume we just keep the annual deficit the same, meaning that Sander’s plan would have to pay for itself. What would that imply?

Currently personal income taxes are the source of most of the federal government’s revenue (not counting pass-through revenue like Social Security). Corporation taxes contribute only about 9% of federal revenue, and various excise taxes and fees contribute about another 9%.  All the rest, about 82%, comes from personal income taxes. Those income taxes provide about $2.4 trillion per year. So if we want to add another $2 trillion in expenses for a single-payer government-run health system without increasing the federal deficit, that would imply that personal income taxes would have to almost double.

Will American voters accept an almost 80-100% increase in their personal income taxes?  I don’t think so, and I don’t think any politician who proposed that would get elected.   

No doubt politicians like Sanders will continue to avoid the cost issue, and provide fuzzy estimates based on unrealistic assumptions about the amount of “waste and fraud” they will find to offset the costs. But realistically a government single-payer plan covering everyone will require raising our taxes to European levels, which often run 45-55% for the middle class. I would guess that sort of tax increase would be politically unacceptable to American voters, so I assume this far-left socialist populist movement is in the long run a dead end for the Democratic Party.

In fact, there is evidence of that. Sander’s own home state of Vermont tried it and then pulled the plug on the plan.  Colorado had a referendum on a single-payer plan last year and 80% of the voters rejected it.  That ought to be a warning to the Democratic Party.