Down through history nations and the military have developed battle strategies and developed weapons based on the last war. The generals and admirals fought in that war, won and are convinced that the strategies and weapons from the last war only needed to be improved to win in the next one. It's usually the losers who learn from their mistakes and devise new tactics around new weapons.
In general, it is the tactics that have not caught up to the weapons that are brought to the battlefield. During the American Civil War both sides, under West Point trained officers, adopted the Napoleonic method of fighting. That was what was taught at the academy. That method assumed that the enemy was close when you let go the first round of shot and would not have time to load more than one more round if you quickly rushed them with bayonets. It was based on the round ball being shot through a smooth bore musket. The smooth bore musket was not very accurate, so the idea was to point the gun in the general direction of the enemy and let go. That is why you see masses of soldiers lined up in tight formations and fairly close together when they dressed the battle line. The idea is, if you put enough lead out in front, you are likely to hit somebody. The smooth bore musket didn't even have sights. The command was Ready---Fire. Aim was added after the rifled musket came on the scene.
Rifles were in use before the Civil War but, because of their slow fire rate and smaller bullet they were generally confined to select units, such as snipers or sharpshooters, not to the infantry.
Then along came the rifled musket and the minni-ball. Suddenly the range of the gun was extended up to and over 700 yards with greatly improved accuracy. The minni ball solved the problem of slow and difficult loading of the rifled musket, so it came in to general use by both armies. The massed formations of troops were now just sitting ducks to be mowed down at a long distance. But, the generals had a hard time figuring out another way to do battle. So the slaughter just escalated. Picket's charge is good example of how not to charge a fortified defense across an open field.
The French built the Maginot line, a series of fortifications along the German-French border, based on their experience with trench warfare in WWI. History showed how effective that was. The French built the wrong weapon. They ignored the writings by such strategists as Rommel and De gaulle, who were talking about a different kind of war, fought with fast moving armor, with tanks as a spearhead.The French planning had the tank in support of infantry. That resulted in a slow moving heavily armed vehicle. After all the tank only had to move as fast as the infantry.
The machine gun in WWI changed the battlefield forever, but the French and British generals were too set in their ways to change their tactics. They just kept sending thousands of men out of the trenches into a hail of machine gun fire, where they died by the thousands.
The Navy, embedded with a large number of battleship admirals, built some of the greatest battleships ever designed going into WWII. The Iowa class battleship (ordered in 1939 as the first of a class of 4) had no real rivals, except perhaps the two big Japanese battleships. So, the Americans and Japanese had spent huge sums of money, material and manpower building the dreadnoughts of the seas----none of which ever fired a single shot at another ship during the entire war. Their primary job was the provide an escort for the carriers, a job that could probably be accomplished just as well, if not better, by cruisers. They were the only Battleships in the American Navy that had sufficient speed to keep up with the fast fleet carriers. All the battleships in the Pacific did get used in shore bombardment, but that seems to be something that was asked of them because they needed something for the big, expensive, ships to do. As it turned out, the shore bombardment was largely ineffective against the Japanese dug in positions on Peleliu, Guam, Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The primary engagements for any battleship during the war was a couple of obsolete Japanese ships during the Battle of Guadalcanal and the Battle at Leyte Gulf. In fact, the battleship had little to do with the outcome of the war in the Pacific. I don't know of any battleship in the American or Japanese Navy that was sunk by surface action.
Today we are spending billions of dollars on weapons based on the experiences in WWII. We are trying to build better planes, missiles and bombs with greater accuracy and building stealth into everything. We now have the B2 bomber and the now cancelled F117 stealth fighter. Not satisfied with that, billions of dollars have been invested in the very expensive F22 and F35 stealth fighter/attack aircraft.
The B2 cost 929 million dollars per aircraft resulting in only 21 aircraft being delivered due to high cost. ( The total program cost for the plane ended up at 2.1 billion dollars per airplane). The B2, with the end of the cold war, has lost it's reason for existing; if it ever had one to begin with. It was used several times in the Mideast wars, but that was just for it to have something to do. Everything the B2 accomplished could have done with guided missiles from a Navy cruiser or missile destroyer. In fact the B2 has little reason to be in the American arsenal except for flyovers at parades and football games. Everything it can do can be done better by guided missiles.
The F22 fighter/attack plane is very expensive, which limited the numbers that could be acquired. In total 187 planes were delivered at a cost 412 million dollars per aircraft for the whole program. The deliverable cost was 62 million dollars each. Originally there was talk of a Navy version, but that fell through the cracks as not being practical.
The F35 is supposed to be the end all in fighter/attack design. Three versions are being built, the F35A for the Air Force, the F35B for the Marines and the F35C for the Navy. It is supposed to be a multipurpose plane replacing the F15, the F16, the F/A18, the F/A18A and the Marines Harrier. It is expected to do all those jobs. But, as experience has shown, if you design a plane to do multiple jobs, it won't do any one job really well. The plane is built on stealth and the ability to cruise for a short time above mach one without using after burners. The Air Force awarded the contract to Lockheed, which has shown to be a little lax when it comes to managing a large undertaking like the F35 program. They are the Air Force's pet these days because their success with the planes turned out by the skunk-works, including the F117. In 2014 the program was 163 billion dollars over budget and seven years behind in development. It was touted to be more efficient per flight hour than the F16, but ended up at 20% more expensive. This is Lockheed's first venture as the lead contractor for the development of a major airframe in the modern jet age. F16, F15, F/A18 and F/A 18A were all developed by General Dynamics, McDonald Douglas and Boeing. Lockheed's entry into the true fighter game was the acquisition of General Dynamics. The F117 is really just a platform for developing stealth technology and is far from a true fighter. The F 22, also built by Lockheed, was just too expensive to field in any large numbers.
The navy is building ships with radar suppression capability. That works great against present threats from RADAR and heat seeking missiles in today's world. Of course that isn't the only defense the ships have against attacks by missiles and aircraft. Attacking a modern Navy ship these days would not be good for your health if you use conventional weapons.
But, another war between the major powers will likely not be fought like an upgrade to WWII. Maybe we are already building obsolete weapons for that kind of war, assuming it doesn't go nuclear on a global scale.
The other guys have spies in the sky just as we do. They know where every surface ship is located. All the stealth technology in the world doesn't hide from visual observation. It is likely that every major surface ship, air base, fixed military station or non-hardened missile site would come under attack within a few hours after the outbreak of a major conflict. The only ships that have a chance of going without being attacked are the submarines. Few of our military installations, outside of the Navy's war ships have the capability to defend against a concentrated attack of non-nuclear guided missiles. The
hardened military installations and surface ships could survive a non-nuclear attack, although with heavy damage possible.
Let's start with stealth. Huge sums of money has been spent to develop stealth capability. Along with RADAR absorbing material for construction, the planes have been designed to deflect the radio wave, such that the return image is very small, to the point of almost being nonexistent. We have one problem. We didn't think of it first, a Russian scientist did. The required shape of the airframe made the aircraft unstable and impossible to fly until a new generation of controls was developed called fly by wire. But, our lead in stealth technology is only temporary. Other nations, notably Russia and China, are well aware of the theory behind stealth and will not be long developing similar capability---if they haven't already.
And, there has never been a weapon system of any kind that hasn't been countered by some development to defeat it. Stealth is no exception. A F117 was shot down by a SAM already. How long will it be before stealth is nullified by some advance in technology. When that happens we will have multimillion dollar planes that really aren't any better at their jobs than the F16, F15, or the carrier based F/A18A Super Hornet. Perhaps, not as good. And, because they are so expensive, we may be loath to commit them to danger.
The Navy's F/A18 Hornet and F/A 18A Super Hornet and the Air Forces' F16 and F15 can do everything that is required on the battlefield at this time, or in the foreseeable future. But, lack of funding is seriously compromising the availability of the planes. The last I heard, only half of the F/A 18's, F16's and F15's are airworthy due to budget cuts. We spend money on planes we really have no foreseeable need for and sacrifice the maintenance on planes where we do have an immediate need.
What we should be spending that money on for future planning is unmanned aircraft and space warfare. That is the future. It certainly isn't popular with the Air Force. They have all those pilots who need new toys to play with, but the presence of humans limits the maneuverability of a plane while wasting significant resources to keeping the pilot alive and to supply them with information for maximum effectiveness. What the fighter of the future might require is not a qualified pilot, but a teenager with an X-Box controller in his hands.
Without a human to worry about, planes could be designed with much greater maneuverability and cost a lot less. With the advances in artificial intelligence and modern sensing capability, the situation awareness and reaction time of an unmanned plane engaged in combat would be greatly increased over what a human can do. A computer controlled plane can react in microseconds to any threat, can pull huge G forces in maneuvering and target an enemy with far greater accuracy than any human. The current planes are designed to take up to about 9 G's, because the human sitting in the cockpit can't take anymore anyway. Think about something else. The pilot is being supplied so much information it is impossible to keep track of all of it. So a great deal of time, effort and money has been spent to design displays and other means to aid in simplifying the display for the pilot, so that they have situation awareness without being overwhelmed. Guess how that is done? AI does it. All that effort is just to create an environment for the pilot to act quickly. The pilot sees what the AI wants him to see. In one sense, even with a human aboard, the plane is being flown and fought by the AI already aboard. It wouldn't take much more just to leave the pilot on the ground.
If a non nuclear conflict breaks out between two nations with advanced technology, almost the first thing that will have to go is the spy satellites that look down and map everything on earth. You can not allow an enemy to have that kind of visibility into the movement of troops, the deployment of ships and other useful knowledge gained from spy satellites.
We will have a scenario that is much like what happened in WWI. The first fighters were developed to shoot down the flimsy observation planes used by both sides. Fighters were then developed to protect the observation planes. It became evident to each side that they had to gain air superiority, spurring the rapid development of better and better aircraft.
The modern fighter is just an extension of that scenario. Such a scenario is likely to be repeated if another major conflict breaks out, except it will be moved up a level into lower orbits in space where the observation satellites are stationed. Satellite destroyers, for want of a better name, likely unmanned, will have to be developed to shoot down observation satellites. The enemy will counter with destroyers to attack your Satellite destroyers and the war in space will then escalate. It is easy to see where this could be headed. Space based weapons emulating the WWII bomber will be next. How ready are we to repel an attack from space?
The Chinese have already demonstrated the ability to destroy a satellite. If we lose eyes over a potential battlefield and the enemy has such eyes, the outcome would become very chancy indeed.
If, however, the
conflict goes nuclear, then you might as well bend over and kiss your
butt goodbye. There will be another mass extinction event.
