No, the best time to attack a naval landing is during the period of time that a beachhead is being established, as history has shown us. You'll need tanks then and there because if the enemy is halfway competent, then he'll send his troops to stop that beachhead at all costs.
Did you completely miss the "dedicated light tank" and "make the landers amphibious to do it" parts of my post? A
main battle tank has a great deal of things entirely unrelated to what you say the desperate need for tanks is, resulting in a vast amount of
dead-ass weight that an amphibious assault
does not need, weight that can be used for more boots, more guns, more ammo, more
everything that actually gets the job done. A handful of hours to get the Army tanks in first as the
very damn first thing after the beachhead is established gives an extremely narrow window for what can be called a
counter-attack for your point to be relevant, because that means that the
defense is over so it isn't a wave of reinforcements to still-active fortifications. That term.
Has a meaning.
And all your talk of spectacularly powerful defenses is
proving my damn point on that matter, because if you can counter tank rounds and all sorts of missiles with a reactive system,
just have the Marines bring an assload of that. Thereby eliminating all the ordinance that could dislodge them.
That would require guys in power armor and 'man-portable' (in the same way a TOW unit is 'man-portable') railguns for it to even work.
Not particularly? You just need to
match what the tanks are doing to eachother, and railgun functionality can be additive to some other accelerant to get it more compact and/or lower recoil. The way railguns
work has absolutely nothing needing the things to go for hypersonic, they can just make up the velocity for the same 120mm shells or whatever the tanks are using, and get it up to the same speed as before on a low-recoil system, allowing it to be done at least on a braced tripod, if the rails have too much kick for shoulder-fire.
And matching the portability of the TOW is precisely the point, because a crux of your argument is that infantry are becoming useless because
specifically the TOW's operational role is soon to be invalid.
Thing is, we don't know how to make 8" shells anymore. The knowledge and skills needed are long fucking gone. We can't just restart assembly of 8" shells anymore, we've lost all the equipment, all the knowledge, all the skills, and all the weapons that use it.
You mentioned their loss as if it were a pressingly immediate mistake gave the impression this was a recent matter, not
1975, and for us to have lost
all the designs for that is rather unlikely. And 8" is a hell of a lot less than the battleship guns, with a fuck of a lot less in the way of complications and precision needs, so they're not going to be some decade-long project. The initial design can be thrown onto damn grad students since it's all straightforward stress and energy formulae, the hard part's figuring out how to reach that stress threshold, and all the supermaterials you've gushed about are
pretty damn helpful in that matter.
The fucked-up state of the US military is
specifically because of trying to excessively plan for a decade ahead with research projects that keep going nowhere. They are most certainly looking at this as a pressing technical issue, if it is indeed an actually good system and not fucked by just throwing a hail of slightly bigger machine gun fire at it for a giant wall of false positives on the hilariously cheap because filtering out that cheap garbage is too big a target recognition hurtle for modern methodologies. Not merely modern processing power, but the
fundamental limits of what the underlying technology is capable of in a purely hypothetical sense without some unpredictable breakthroughs in basic principals of application or the underlying technology.
hat won't work with how sensor density has been increasing. Soon enough (and I mean 'the next decade') we'll have smart dust and that means everyone can't take a literal shit without the user knowing about it.
Citation on us having data processing components that are
physically capable of the pre-processing load to give a coherent data collection signal at the sub-milimeter scale? Let alone powering them for any meaningful period, sensors that work at that scale, transmitters capable of getting enough range
and bandwidth on such things, making them able to survive any meaningful microwave exposure...
And yet you call me out on "design considerations" when you are talking about cramming a vaguely usable sensory apparatus, processor, transmitter, power supply and more into a sub-millimeter object, and having it applicable to military situations by being both actually
good information and not trivially destroyed by a basic sweep of a non-lethal anti-personnel weapon. Electronics
do not like microwaves, and those happen to be very useful for making people run screaming without actually dealing damage.
Not a lot without a lot of compromises, and even then by the virtue of its movement system (a rocket, which is the epitome of 'every fucking gram counts'), you can't really armor it because there are things you can't armor well without completely compromising the abilities of the system... which can be easily destroyed by ADS.
Okay, use booster charges, or use your ten-times-the-per-unit-price to get the same speed and range on twice the mass and dump literally all of it into countermeasures. Mass is multiplicative to acceleration needs, if I recall correctly, it's velocity that goes exponential. Line the launcher with electromagnetic acceleration for just a bit of kick to shave off acceleration cost. Make the missile systems merely corrective guidance and a range boost, with the initial thrust being the launch platform.
Something that cuts into those problems. The older bazooka was such a system, having an explosive initial charge to bring it up to speed and the rocket to act as active stabilizing, resulting in the need to have the area behind the user clear to avoid the backblast. We have a lot of different technologies still able to be tried out before the defensive system can be considered proven in the general sense.
As for components that can't be armored, what would they be? The inherently redundant fins? The sensors that can be replaced with firmly embedded systems, such as receivers for the very "smart dust" you say is going to completely invalidate ambushes? The front-most point of impactor exit, which can be less than 10 mm
and include the face of the armor as part of it? The computation hardware that is ideally at the center of the rocket to have absolutely minimal response times
already? Can you substantiate that missiles
cannot be armored and remain effective, or only that it would be
very expensive compared to current cost to do so?
The thing is, there are plenty of groups that want drones in the direction you are stating and groups that don't want it to go that way. Then there is the fact that there are groups in the latter whose lives depend on the latter happening and would likely dedicate their lives to ensure it doesn't happen come hell or high water.
And the chances of the latter winning out, those who's lives depend on the militaries of the world being complete morons with cyber security? Unless you think there's some major group within the US military who's life is somehow dependent on our drones being hackable. This the "deep state" conspiracy nonsense again, where you think there's a cabal of politicians and military-industrial complex barons deliberately going for sub-par methods?
If you think
North Korea, a country that is
openly working to develop ballistic missiles to nuke the United States, has the technical ability to force friendly fire from drones, or will acquire it with anything remotely resembling its current regime that's still dominated by CRT monitors and can't get basic cataract surgeries for its absolute elites, alongside the above "deliberately keep the military vulnerable so we keep control", then you are assuming that shadowy cabal or whoever trusts
North Fucking Korea with the ability to hijack a sizable chunk of the US military, or alternatively that the hellholes like North Korea actually have such control over their public major enemy. Or China, for that matter.
Thing is, last I've checked sat-hacks are a thing... so the band of chucklefucks that you're fighting might simply hack your satellite and use that to spoof the drones.
One, that's why I said "Ideally not even GPS", two, a tightbeam can very much be ground to ground. Or anything else in-atmo. And all the same sorts of security stuff applied to the drones can be put in a new line of communication satellites to close those hacks by having the
very next best thing to an airgap, launched with specifications in secrecy and disguised as a completely different kind of satellite. Not like it's going to see its signal intercepted easily, since that ulterior motive is performed via tightbeam.
Again, you are predicating a vision of future warfare specifically on
failing to adapt to
already known vulnerabilities. When there is a fuck of an arsenal of history on anti-tank methodology to comb over for approaches that may work, such as the aforementioned mashup of incendiary granular impactors, which can have the warhead itself be ablative
and ablate the target, and depending on the specifics of the payload, the payload itself can be a type of "armor" by eating all the kenetic energy before the actually sensitive shit in the back at the cost of reduced payload, which isn't nearly so important for an ablation attack like trying to cook out the crew or melt down the tank.
Hard-Kill ADS not only works against missiles but also against RRs (and the more expensive/powerful ones can even track and stop tank rounds) as well mind you.
What's the traversal rate of the "more powerful" ones that can track tank rounds? Can they turn 5 degrees in a twentieth of a millisecond? Ten degrees? If you fire a semi-guided double projectile sabot from 500 yards, do those high-end systems even have the rate of fire to hit two half-energy sabots in the traversal period? Or hell, a double-barreled turret going with two simultaneous full-energy sabots if it actually can deal with tank shells and this is a
widespread system, or directed pulse communications to coordinate fire from several turrets to that window.
What makes you so sure the arms race on its implementation ends with defensive dominance? We haven't seen that since some time before gunpowder (outside not-get-hit methods), and you have given no hard data. If railguns are going to become a thing, they are a fundamentally easy to miniaturize technology, the difficulty has been
powering them as the
primary accelerator. Throwing rails in everything they'll fit in for mild percentage increases isn't going to be some spectacular cost if we make any sort of powered equipment standard issue, because those increases can still be
turned off, and every one of those little improvements makes the harder-to-improve tracking, as in
turret traversal to switch targets, and rate of fire questions ever increasingly important.
While soft-kill ADS systems can't hack the Mk1 eyeball (yet), I wouldn't be surprised if things evolve that way, eventually.
Again with thinking we're going to do brain-hacking. When we are dealing with political meltdown from a total failure to do anything resembling that. The capability you are worrying about here is something that has not actually begun in any meaningful sense, because psychology has no fucking clue how to make a universal message. If they did, we would not see the political situation in the world today.
Sure, we have some fucked-up crazies, but they generally have highly vulnerable early lives for other reasons, people who aren't in that group almost never enter it in adulthood, and even in the former it's often "playing the crowd" with several incidents of an appointed speaker completely ignoring the "but we can't say what we think" to reveal much of the crowd is people who just don't have the spine to announce their disagreement.
Controlling people's
thoughts requires very extreme control over almost every aspect of their life to begin with, it's not the sort of thing you can bootstrap to without a great deal of very blatant government involvement, and even then it would take some serious leaps over
fucking China's implementation to pull it off. Education system may be fucked, but not in the ways that signal mass indoctrination. And all signs point to wokeness being an emergent property of a vocal fringe (some 8% of the population, despite the overwhelming dominance of practically all media exposure), not a coordinated effort.
---
You have not once pointed to a
concrete technical difficulty so far. Just said "Oh, you're spewing bullshit because this
kind of thing", without any
hard numbers to show it to be so, then following with your own paranoia and elaborate delusions of the Next Big Thing being the end of doctrine affecting advancements, as if no counter to the new Big Thing
can be made.
