Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea
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Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea
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Re: Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea
#2In the same category, half a century later: aircraft carriers.
Although I'm not sure this qualifies as "hacker", let alone "news".
Re: Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea
#3The relevant part (to us hackers) is the use of maneuver warfare vs "phalanx" fighting.
Think of Msft, Oracle, IBM, Apple as the phalanx fighters. They lock shields and charge, spending millions (billions) of dollars (instead of soldiers).
The problem is their tactics are clumsy. Imagine all the Microsoft VP's circling the wagons around really bad _implementations_ (the ideas aren't bad) - I'm sure you can thing of some.
If you are lean agile Mongol (hacker) you can easily run around them and attack them from the back.
Your OODA loop is much tighter. You can maneuver and decide much better than a big hierarchical organization.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
See: The Smartphone Wars: Tightening the OODA Loop http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2975
Re: Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea
#4In the same category, half a century later: aircraft carriers. Although I'm not sure this qualifies as "hacker", let alone "news".
Aircraft carriers are somewhere in between. The aircraft they carry are part of maneuver warfare.
Re: Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea
#5Having a large battleship collection does allow you to line them up nicely for review:
Re: Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea
#6"Just as Western Civilization staggered and faded after the fall of Rome, Western Civilization has never really recovered from the shock of the Great War. Cultures which endured and developed over a thousand years were wiped out, never to return again. Western culture, abstract thought and artistic development: nothing important has developed since 1919; we’re still reeling from the shock."
What a load of bollocks. The author hasnt heard of the situationism, dada-ism, Zerzan or Sartre but for sure the western civilization has.
Further on "The Mongols never had the societal organization the West did, so they could never take advantage of their successes, and their various empires only served to make the Russians and Chinese paranoid, and Eastern European women more exotic looking.".
This is also bollocks, the mongols successfully ruled a vast area from China to Europe, the silk road was again revived, you could travel from Poland to Peking and not get robbed. The mongols collected all the taxes from such a vast region, even after Djenghis Khan died, thats some hell of organization right there.
On manuvre warfare, Alexander The Graeat (or as persions like to call him Alexander the Gay) certanly knew about this.
Re: Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea
#7This is not exactly convincing. Battleships, far from being a ridiculous idea, were a logical and necessary step for any navy wishing to project power at sea. They were so heavily armoured and gunned that for a long time, from the late 19th Century to just before WWII, the only realistic defence against a battleship was another battleship.
While the Battle of Jutland may seem silly, the alternative would have been a bunch of smaller ships duking it out (probably for a similar result) or only one side possessing battleships and annihilating the other side.
Manoeuvre warfare with a lighter fleet was not an option, as smaller vessels had smaller guns that frequently could not even penetrate a battleship's armour. So a battleship would've been able to pick off opponents at ease while they struggled to cause any damage. It's no good getting inside your opponent's OODA loop if you can't cause any damage.
And the technology that would have permitted another nation to bypass the idea of a battleship altogether and attack it from a different angle just did not exist at the time. It was only decades after Jutland that naval aircraft and aircraft carriers became fast and advanced enough to make the aerial bombing and torpedoing of enemy vessels a real possibility. These days missiles are the great equalisers.
Manoeuvre warfare is fantastically effective when the circumstances allow for it, but the available conditions, technology and personnel can sometimes make it ineffective. For instance, the German Blitzkrieg was extraordinarily effective against the static French defences in 1940, but the same forces and tactics came unstuck in 1941 when faced with a vicious winter and the Russian scorched earth style of defence.
With reference to the hacker context, the lesson is that simply moving quickly isn't enough. You also need to understand what a competitor's real weaknesses are as well as understand which parts of their strengths you're incapable of attacking. If your enemy has battleships and all you have are frigates, then maybe you shouldn't be fighting them at sea.
Re: Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea
#8Big warships could accomodate bigger cannons. Bigger cannons could deliver bigger shells further, enabling your warships to hit the enemy while keeping out of their range.
These capital ships aren't being built today because missiles and fighter planes suddenly negated their advantage, not because they weren't a good idea to begin with.
IMHO it's an overwhelming act of condescension pretending to be smarter than thousands of admirals and military advisors, many of them with lots of real world experience fighting wars and stuff.
Re: Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea
#9This is not exactly convincing. Battleships, far from being a ridiculous idea, were a logical and necessary step for any navy wishing to project power at sea. They were so heavily armoured and gunned that for a long time, from the late 19th Century to just before WWII, the only realistic defence against a battleship was another battleship. While the Battle of Jutland may seem silly, the alternative would have been a…
You've actually got a really good idea. The author touches on it VERY briefly when he says "If the nations of the world had the equivalent cost invested in submarines or destroyers, maybe the same thing would have happened.", but I get the feeling that that is more lip service than him providing (what he thinks is) a legitimate counterpoint.
Good insight!
Re: Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea
#10I've observed a principle that militaries build to win the last total war they fought. This is why guys like Billy Mitchell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell) were ignored about the importance of air power leading up to WWII. The status quo was to gear up for another WWI, complete with entrenched and barely mobile front lines.
But of course the German Blitzkreig, a brilliant archetype of maneuver warfare, overran these emplacements, the fixed system of defense built by the French being the best example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maginot_Line).
The US military has been developed for the last 60 years to re-win World War II; even the Cold War was really just the US and Russia building to re-win WWII until Russia ran out of cash.
As one can see given the issues that the US military has had in Iraq and Afghanistan the WWII methods of battle, which have devolved back to phalanx warfare, are struggling (again) to defeat maneuver warfare.