I saw the incredible waste this produced. If the military didn't squander so much of our tax money, you could build more ships. I believe your fantasies about welfare waste could be far out done by examples of military waste. If we followed what you want to do, domestic infrastructure would be ignored for the sake of the military. Some say this is what happened to the USSR. To have a strong military, you have to have a strong economy. The economy is dependent on the infrastructure of the country, and the health and education of its people. We have been doing a poor job of maintaining our infrastructure, and educating our children compared to what we do for our military.
Maybe somebody(s) know more than all of us! That is, from the perspective of using the Navy to project the US whenever and wherever we are needed, maybe an ever increasing "fleet" of drones coupled with a 300-ship Navy is just the right mix going forward??? I am impressed that the Air Force seems to have embraced drones and training more pilots to operate them efficiently and effectively. Just a thought...
:lol: The USAF requires traditional pilots (officers) be trained to pilot them (and land them). The Army allows non-officers to qualify and uses auto-landing. Guess who has a better service record? That's right. Not the USAF. more
no but it does take a military budget to create a rail gun that will completely replace a 5" bow deck gun on must cruisers and destroyers...the batteries that will power this railgun are also going to power the ships engine and the aux systems as well...and actually if you want to talk about drones the navy has sea/surface/air drones MQ-8 Fire Scout Scan Eagle Recon/Attack Drone Sea Stalker Surface Drone (looks alot like a MK-V S.T.A.B or Seal Tactical Assault Boat)...they are developing these in coronado i saw one tooling around in the bay while i was at NAB Coronado and i know they had this on a episode of future weapons US Navy Developing Submarine-Launched Drones - Neatorama i forget the name of the subsurface one but it is used for anti-mine warfare and could possibly used one day for unmanned attacks on ships or targets in a harbor or on close range targets at sea did anyone see cindy sheehan and her anti-war cronies protesting the use of drones on al qaeda and taliban targets?seriously she is protesting a use of a weapon to take out the enemy that wont endanger troops lives ut: but in the end drones are only as good as the humans who control them... and nothing beats a humans reasoning judgement and skill onsite some people question if we need all this advanced equipment to fight a war and if we are making it too playstation-ish ...but honestly if dropping a bomb or firing a missile on a target from a drone means we can devote more troops elsewhere instead of hunting people through terrain that is hard to navigate and potentially miss out on a chance at getting them alot of the services have retooled their efforts for wars not against a giant army like the threat during the cold war but clandestine/littoral/surgical missions just think back to the beginning of the iraq war...when we did the decapitation strike against sadaam...if we had some hunter killer drones scanning we would have been able to detect we didnt get our target and begin an active search for him...probably would have had him nailed months sooner but really all this techno gear really doesnt compare to the awesome power that a Iowa Class Battleship brought...that was america's big stick...those 16" guns could strike more fear into a country than any army brigade or air force fighter wing could ever hope to accomplish...
It was also a giant target. My dad was an officer on the admiral's staff on the New Jersey off the coast of Beirut in 1983....one of the last actions for an Iowa class battleship where it used its 16in guns (I think the Missouri shelled Iraqi positions in 1991 as the 'last').