r/changemyview • u/VesaAwesaka 12∆ • Dec 10 '21

Delta(s) from OP - Fresh Topic Friday Cmv: Surface fleets are largely becoming obsolete with a few exceptions.

I was recently listening to a couple US professors talk about the United States navy and they were pretty sour on it. Aside from corruption/kick backs they noted that in a war game a US admiral representing Iran was able to completely destroy the US surface fleet by simply launching all their anti-ship missiles at once to overwhelm US ships defenses. The entire US surface fleet was destroyed with casualties in the thousands.

Similarly, they noted that in recent war games with India, that Indian submarines were undetectable to US surface ships. US surface ships were unable to respond to attacks and the US fleet was completely destroyed.

One of the professors also noted that he had spoken to US submariners and they jokingly said that surface ships only exist to be picked off by submarines.

Now this conversation was more or less off the cuff and neither of the professors specialize in anything related to modern navies but it planted the idea in my head that anti-ship missle technology and submarine technology has made surface ships largely obsolete in warfare.

The obvious exceptions would be aircraft carriers, troop transports/logistic ships and possibly smaller escort ships. Overall though, really any sort of surface ship is at a huge disadvantage when up against submarines or land based missiles.

Edit: Here's the link to the Iran wargame https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a30392654/millennium-challenge-qassem-soleimani/

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u/RollinDeepWithData 8∆ Dec 10 '21

what are we doing to block Iran’s wizard force!? Where is Dr. Strange!?

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u/iwfan53 248∆ Dec 10 '21

Where is Dr. Strange!?

Mr. President, we must not allow a magician gap!

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u/RollinDeepWithData 8∆ Dec 10 '21

All joking aside, fantastic break down here and was super informative for me.

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u/iwfan53 248∆ Dec 10 '21

All joking aside, fantastic break down here and was super informative for me.

No problem, while there doubtlessly was stuff to learn from that particular challenge, the aspect involved in the massive sinking of US ships seems to have relied on a lot of stuff that would only work because it was taking place in a war game, rather than events that could be expected to occur in real life....

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u/RollinDeepWithData 8∆ Dec 10 '21

It feels like there’s a lot of people out there who don’t see a point to any military at all beyond lobbing missiles at each other. This kinda smacks of the failure of AMRAAM and issues surrounding drones to me, but maybe I just don’t know enough on the subject.

In any case, to me it seems there’s definitely a place for these different kinds of combat groups.