In the near future, the Pentagon plans to deploy a whole family of the latest exotic weapons systems. Skeptics argue that the lion's share of these expensive toys is focused on waging a war that might not actually happen.
The blow will be delivered without delay and will be fatal. DD (X), the destroyer of the American fleet, is capable of firing 20 artillery shells in less than a minute. On approaching the ground at a speed of 1330 km / h, these satellite-guided projectiles will change their trajectories, and all 100-kilogram landmines will crash to the ground at the same moment, turning everything around into debris and dust. If this firepower seems insufficient, the destroyer has 580 more ammunition in stock, as well as 80 Tomahawk missiles. After completing the impact, the ship will simply disappear. On radar screens, the hull of the stealthy destroyer DD (X) - a ship with a displacement of 14,000 tons - will look like just one of the fishing boats that have thrown their nets into the sea.
The main military goal of the United States has already been determined. "Our country is embroiled in a global war on terror that threatens the security of every American," said George W. Bush. "On the way to the goal, we use all our national power." It will take more than one decade to fight for victory. Bush compares this war to half a century of opposition to Soviet communism. The Pentagon named the campaign The Long War. In this context, Iran and Afghanistan look like only the first steps on this path. From this one could conclude that the 70 billion annual budget of the Pentagon, which should be spent on the development of new weapons systems, will be targeted in order to win the war against terrorists. However, if you look closely at the arsenal that is now being created by the Pentagon, completely different conclusions come to mind. Take the destroyer DD (X). If you listen to the critics, using it in the fight against terrorists would be like trying to crush ants with an 18-wheeled tractor.
Within the defense department there are competitors to the idea of a "long war". For many, China is rearing its head as a real threat. But to contain it, very different means are required than to defeat al-Qaeda - here the weapons created in the era of the Cold War are more suitable. About $ 10 billion a year is spent on ballistic missile interception systems, which were originally designed to counter Soviet strategic missiles.
$ 9 billion - for next-generation attack aircraft designed to counter MiGs. $ 3.3 billion for new tanks and combat vehicles, $ 1 billion for the modernization of the Trident II nuclear missile and $ 2 billion for a new strategic bomber.
Of course, the new strategic line does not bypass the attention of those who will fight in the "long war." It is planned to increase the number of special forces and robotic combat vehicles. Most of the military equipment approved for production is only indirectly related to the terrorist threat. This is not surprising. The larger the new weapons system, the more supporters it has and the more difficult it is to stop its deployment.
All this military equipment is insanely expensive - for example, DD (X) destroyers with a batch of 7 pieces will cost $ 4.7 billion each. It follows from this that the "long war" program and the program of confronting China should be based on the same weapons. Critics of this line say that the dispersal of forces will prevent the country from effectively operating in a "long war."Ralph Peters, a military commentator for the New York Post, writes: "With the military and marines under the greatest burden of protecting our national security, the Pentagon is proposing to reduce the number of soldiers and instead buy expensive, high-tech toys that are difficult to find use."
Lady of the Seas
By creating any piece of military equipment, you are playing a game of chance - trying to predict what the war will be like in the very distant future. Military shipbuilders take a heavy burden on their conscience - after all, they need to peer into the most distant prospects. Only one design development for a battleship-class ship can take ten years, and once launched, such ships must sail for half a century. The main function of the navy - the struggle for dominance over the blue waters of the endless open ocean - disappeared with the disappearance of the USSR. Today American ships are preparing for war in the littoral zone, in coastal waters. There is no agreement only on one thing - whose coastal waters will it be? And what should they do there? Maybe smash guerrilla havens while completing parts of the anti-terror campaign. Or maybe it will be serious hostilities off the coast of China or Iran. For Captain James Cyring, who leads the development of Project DD (X), the goal is to build a multipurpose destroyer capable of performing almost any operation at sea. The destroyer's dual-band radar system will be 15 times more effective than the current ones, and the electric motors will help to move quite quietly, remaining unnoticed by the enemy's submarine fleet.
Rear Admiral Charles Hamilton, Cyring's chief, points to an almost invisible console protruding from the cut-off of the destroyer's stern. This console with a small slip is designed to make it easy for the seals to slide into the water. Then they must sneak into enemy territory unnoticed and correct precision fire strikes from the destroyer's main caliber. The accuracy of the cannon firing is such that spotters, having occupied one of the houses on the enemy's territory, can cause fire on neighboring houses, and after a volley, change the cover. “We were considering the scenario in which the events in Mogadishu developed,” says Cyring. “DD (X) expects to create an impenetrable ring of fire around 'ours' in such a situation.”
However, Pentagon consultant Thomas Barnett sees the destroyer as a relic of the Cold War era. “Why,” he asks, “cram all the possibilities into one huge, expensive project? 'Seals' can be dropped from ships three times smaller and 500 times cheaper."
Today terrorists can be considered a serious threat. But in 15 years, and such a period will be required for the development and construction of a destroyer, the "long war" may already be over. "If we focus our full attention on GWOT," Hamilton uses the military acronym for Global War on Terrorists, "our fast-growing neighbor could grow its nationalist ambitions in the meantime." The already mentioned strategic report says that China has "enormous potential for military opposition to the United States." Navy guidance documents indicate how far DD (X) can go into the Yellow Sea - right up to the shallow coastal waters off China's east coast.
Modular model
As soon as you leave Siring's conference room with his materials on the destroyer DD (X) and cross the corridor, you will have a different view of the world. Captain Don Babcock is overseeing the development of an entire family of new LCS (littoral combat ships) vessels. They do not have giant superguns of a geopolitical scale, but they will certainly come in handy for a real fight against terrorists.
Their speed (80 km / h) is about 50% higher than that of DD (X), they are well camouflaged, special gates at the waterline level make it easy and safe to dump saboteurs like "SEALs" overboard. And finally, each of them with all the stuffing costs $ 400 million, which is ten times cheaper than a new destroyer. The navy can rivet dozens of such boats and launch them all over the ocean. It will be a quick and responsive response to an equally mobile threat. For about a decade, the military wants to receive 55 of these 3,000-ton ships - this will be about 1/6 of the total number of the Navy.
Unlike DD (X), LCS is not going to target thousands of different operations. Each ship will deal with a specific task - hunting for submarines, removing minefields or fighting single opponents. Each LCS will initially go into service with a 40-man crew and a basic weapon kit including a 57mm cannon and a missile intercept system. Then the ship is completed for a specific task. For this, "target modules" are used - standard 12-meter freight containers. They include sonars for hunting submarines, and unmanned helicopters for combat operations on the ocean surface, and robots for defusing mines. If the destroyer DD (X) can be compared to a Swiss army penknife with many different blades (albeit weighing 14,000 tons), then the LCS is more suitable for comparison with an electric drill, on which many different attachments can be fixed. As Babcock says, "The time has come to radically change course."
Those who make decisions at the top also agree with the imminent changes. True, the outlines of the basic model LCS remain vague so far: it has not yet been decided which is better - a muscular speedboat or a 125-meter trimaran.
In any case, no one even thinks of abandoning the very idea of a ship of the future, which can be rebuilt as new tasks arise. If gangs of terrorists begin to actively explore the sea, such a ship will receive more guns and, say, a room for prisoners. If the threat from China's diesel-electric submarines becomes real, then the LCS will be quickly re-equipped to wage war in the depths of the ocean.
Air superiority
The JSF (Joint Strike Fighter) program is the exact opposite of the strategy from which the LCS concept was developed. Rather than creating specialized weapons for each specific threat, the Pentagon hopes with a single fighter to meet all tactical aviation needs for decades to come. This even refers to the hostilities of the "long war". However, the use of fighters to bombard guerrilla bases makes sense only if the price of the aircraft is low, and their number is large enough. Sending a $ 60 million single-engine JSF to jam just one Chinese radar seems like a waste of money. What can we say about the use of a two-engine aircraft worth $ 250 million to suppress the radio communications of a saboteur with a makeshift mine buried somewhere near the road? Moreover, the radio signal jamming systems mounted on the Hummers cost $ 10,000 and do their job quite well. At the same time, the aforementioned radio suppression functions remain one of the main arguments of Lockheed in favor of mass production of the F-22 Raptor aircraft. For the supply of these devices to the Air Force, the company has $ 4 billion every year. This aircraft was created for battles with Soviet MiGs, and for 15 years it has been looking for a worthy job for itself. Retired Major General Tom Wilkerson, who once flew an F / A-18, believes the Raptor and JSF are an overkill: “Why start from scratch,” he asks, “when F / A-16s equipped with new electronics are quite good? The new aircraft will simply have no one to fight with."
Weapon of the future
On the battlefields of the "long war," the work of soldiers and sailors is becoming more and more expensive. The cost of equipment per US soldier has skyrocketed from $ 2,000 during the Vietnam War to $ 25,000 today. The Army's infantry weapons development program, devouring $ 3.3 billion annually - the so-called Future Combat System (FCS) - offers a bunch of useful things for the fighters of the "long war". Here are the latest night vision devices, and improved body armor, and robotic "mules" for transporting equipment, and sensors that can be left on the ground so that they spy on the enemy for days on end and send messages to their friends over the radio network.
The most expensive element of the FCS program remains the modernization of the current fleet of heavy equipment - tanks, howitzers and other combat vehicles, which are usually not used in battles with rebels. At the same time, the design of the new generation Hummer is stuck somewhere in the early stages, a new series of radio transmitters has not reached the battlefield, and the development of a new combat uniform is several years behind schedule. During the 20-year development of the FCS program, the cost of it was inflated from the planned $ 93 billion to the current $ 161 billion. Most of the excess costs were allocated to those weapons systems that are least useful in the war on terrorism.
Victory in the last war
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, almost all controversy about what kind of military equipment the United States needs has disappeared. Congress hasn't tried to economize on defense programs. However, the pool of money is not endless, and tomorrow's grandiose plans for military development could undermine today's capabilities in the fight against terrorism.
The strategic plans of the US military department announced that in the next five years, special forces units will receive 14,000 more soldiers. At the same time, the total planned size of the ground army is cut by 30,000. In particular, this is done in order to save funds for the implementation of the FCS program. The Air Force will lay off 40,000 people, freeing up even more money for new fighters.
All these points, according to Pentagon consultant Barnett, are complete nonsense, especially now, when the US President and Secretary of Defense continue to talk about reorienting the army to the global war on terror. Until an unambiguous political decision is made that one of the threats has absolute priority over the others, the Americans will be wasting thousands of lives and tens of billions of dollars. “It's time to adapt to the new world in which we now live,” says Barnett, “and we are already doing this, both at the level of doctrine and in practice. The idea of purchasing the most bulky weapons systems alone has too many supporters - those who are trying to revive outdated ideas about war."
