A greater security risk than wikileaks, is an analyst at Naval War College (NWC). In stories floated around the main stream media (web since mid July) hype machine US super carriers have become dinosaurs because the People’s Republic of China might have a new accurate tactical ballistic missile with a range of up to 900 miles. Navy carriers could need to stay out 900 miles instead of 500 miles. At 500 miles strike aircraft need refueling so what is the difference? What good are a few strike sorties a day anyway? I digress.
This kind of leak confirms the Chinese should build these things as it verifies US vulnerabilities. Both of which should be considered threats to navy shipbuilding job security. This is a severe threat to getting the huge sums of borrowed money for the new generation of super-duper carriers which are useless but even more so due to advances in missile technology. And the scores of billions spent on missile defense, the scripted successes of Aegis/SM3 don’t make any difference due the short “flash to hit” time and the accumulated waste on the failed missile defenses won’t suggest any carrier battle group go anywhere near these shooters. Chairman Mullen should be firing the NWC, but this leak is meant to put the empire security budget front and center and to scare people into bankrupting the US for the war machine.
I have been looking into the US Government 2010 Budget, which is being spent as we abide the warm months:
Other Disceretionary 20% (tons of little percentages) Social Security 19.6% total outlays Empire/Security 18.7% Medicare 12.8% Medicaid/CHIP 8.2% Interest 4.6%
What some deficit hawks worry is interest to service the federal debt rises in the 50 year horizon from the low interest rate service now benefitting from 10 years of wild monetary expansion and the lack of demand from the ravages of the great recession.
I have seen some projections where debt service rises to greater than both SS and the war machine in the 50 year horizon.
What about SS at 19.6% of outlays makes it the object of cuts to keep the empire security aparatus rolling in money?
And what about the other discretionary a pile of things that add up to 20% of outlays in 2010?
The 57% of entitlements are on the table because the hurt is endured by the meek masses who will inherit the earth but only at the second coming, when the folks pillaging the meek are judged and justice meted out.
Maybe we should save the rich from Gehena and take care of the meek and sell out the empire and corporate welfare?
thanks for pointing this out. i need to point out, however, that social security and at least part of medicare are “off budget” for a good reason. they are people buying something they need, with the government in the role of a mere facilitator.
try presenting your figures with only the real budget… feel free to count SSI and whatever part of Medicare is paid by the general budget. Heck I’d even let you count the amount of money that “rich” people contribute to Medicare above a fair insurance rate.
The point is to try to keep our thinking straight about these things and not let the bad guys frame the debate.
Drawing on my long gone days as a Fire Control Tech-Missiles (we maintained the equipment which did target acquisition on incoming missiles and jets and directed the right missile or gun at them) I would have great doubts about the effectiveness of that missile against a carrier.
First how would the Chinese get target acquisition? Land based radars do not have the over the horizon (and then some) capability, nor would it be easy to get a ship or plane close enough to give a precise location with course and speed. Ballistic missiles work pretty good against land based targets because cities and missile sites don’t sail around at more than 40 knots, nor do they have the ability to make sharp turns. I don’t know what the flight time for a Chinese ballistic missile is at 900 range but it has to be a few minutes and in even three minutes a carrier can a couple of miles from its predicted location and typically I wouldn’t think a tac nuke has that much blast radius even if you got an air burst or a surface burst. Because nukes don’t really work when they go off underwater, not against a surface ship, because water doesn’t compress, you don’t get the same kind of shockwave you get with a surface blast. In my time the only active nukes used by the Navy was in ASROCs, or Anti-Submarine Rocketsm, but they would only be used if you knew you could get the bird within a couple hundred yards of the sub to either create of hull breach or at least blow out the subs sonar making it blind and harmless.
Plus if the launch site is reasonably close to the coast you would have a good chance to blow the missile out of the sky during launch phase, whether you could duplicate that in reentry phase is a good question, but we were pretty good ‘hitting a bullet with a bullet’ even thirty years ago.
You get some of the same arguments about Iranian Silkworms and other surface to surface cruise missiles, not is targeting a challenge, the United States Navy has some very effective close in ship defense, plus you would have to program the incoming missile somehow to ignore the destroyer and cruiser screens and home in on the carrier inside the battle group.
Obviously I am not privy to the kind of information that analysts at the NWC have, but I don’t think they have changed the physics of radar and target acquisition.
The U.S. military has a long, long history of exaggerating the military capability of its adversaries, going at least as far back as the ‘Missile Gap’ of the late 50s, a gap like many since turned out in retrospect not to exist but served its purpose of scaring Congress into authorizing new weapons programs. A more recent example is the Chinese ‘String of Pearls’ a supposed attempt by China to establish a series of Navy bases around the Indian Ocean, some in countries that are allies of the U.S. or in occasional adversarial relations with China or both. In reality the String of Pearls is more likely to be a series of port improvement projects to serve Chinese commercial needs. But in any case useful in arguing that we need to keep 12 (or is it 14) carrier groups around.
Okay not quite as bogus as i thought but still pretty damn sketchy.
Apparently the Chinese have two satellites up, one optical and the other SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) so it is quite possible they could pin-point the location of the carrier if they knew the general area of operations. But a SAR seems to be more of a mapping radar than a targeting one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_aperture_radar while optical images can be blocked by night or cloud cover or that old WWII standby the smoke screen.
The missile, the DF21D, is a two-stage ballistic which by definition take a ballistic path towards its target, i.e. up and down. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-21. The article i found on this claimed the missile could target different parts of the ship with the first breaching the hull and starting fires, the second targeting the engines, and accompanied by air attacks, and a third wave that would sink the carrier. Well there are all kinds of weaknesses here, I can’t see how any ballistic missile could breach the hull of a carrier, the flight deck extends so far out around the ship that any ballistic trajectory would seem to land on the flight deck, moreover even if the explosion somehow blew a hole in the flight deck, it would also have to blow through the hanger deck to get within the actual skin of the ship, which wouldn’t be a hull breach anyway, and you can only do so much damage with a maximum 600 kg payload, particularly since I misread ilsm original post and jumped from ‘tactical’ to ‘tactical nuke’ when in fact the DF21D is reported to be conventionally armed (though others in the same family are nuke capable, so who knows.
But the real cat was let out of the bag in the article and the wiki article with this: “This would be the world’s first and only ASBM and the world’s first weapons system capable of targeting a moving aircraft carrier strike group from long-range, land-based mobile launchers.[11][12] These would combine maneuverable reentry vehicles (MaRVs) with some kind of terminal guidance system.”
Yep there is the rub. it would seem that neither satellite has the capability to actually illuminate the target, nor is it likely you could get a ship or plane close enough to do it, and building in target recognition into the warhead with enough discrimination that it could reliably tell a carrier from an escorting cruiser seems a stretch.
And finally neither of the satellites is geo-synchronous, instead they are in a fairly low orbit (653 km) meaning that any given time they might be on the other side of the earth.
There may be some way to compensate for all this, after all a lot of serious people seem to be taking it seriously. Then again they are still pushing for Strategic Missile Defense systems (Star Wars) that don’t work and in the scheme of things probably can never work. But generate huge weapons contracts. But still I would want some questions answered before I buy into this long distance carrier killer concept. Being able to interdict the Straits of Taiwan? Certainly. Controlling the ocean 900 miles out from the Chinese Coast? Horse of a totally different color.
Since Climategate several have been tracking the number of errors/exaggerations associated with the warming is bad for us crowd. Below is a list of the top ten with the following 84 contained at the reference site below. Just for Dale we have: 66. NEW!Ocean acidification-gate Threats of ocean acidification are exaggerated.
1. Acceleration of sea level rise-gate Claims of accelerating sea level rise are misleading. 2. African agriculture claim-gate IPCC wrongly claims that in some African countries yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50 percent by 2020. 3. AIT-gate and British High Court 35 errors or gross exaggerations are found in Al Gore’s Oscar winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth. 4. NEW!Alaskan glaciers-gate Loss of glaciers in Alaska was grossly exaggerated. 5. Amazon rainforest-gate and here (NEW!) and here (NEW!) IPCC cites “robust” source: green activist organisation WWF. WWF’s source was merely an anonymous brief on forest fire risks posted in 1999 and taken down four years later. 6. Antarctic sea ice-gate Antarctic sea ice underestimated by 50%. 7. NEW! Authoritarian science-gate The science says… Science is increasingly used as an instrument of authority to impose public policy. 8. NEW! Australia-gate Australia temperature adjusted upwards to show more warming. 9. Bangladesh-gate IPCC inflates Bangladesh doomsday forecasts in 2007 4AR. 10. NEW!Biofuel-gate Efforts to save the planet by using bio-fuels are in fact rapidly destroying it. … Remaind can be found below […]
Reagan based a lot of his military theory on Tom Clancy. I was USAF long range air defense radar for a part of my career. Finding, fixing and firing solutions are way harder than anyone wants you to know.
The missile is really less a threat than posed by the Soviet AF long range bombers, and Reagan (Clancy theory) had a plan to send carriers northeat from the Iceland area.
Correct, the Chinese use it like the Allies used B-17 and B 24 raids. Make the other guy concentrate on defenses.
The one who loses does so by worrying defense.
Good excuse for more carriers to endure the casualties and more star wars.
Neither of which fit a startegy other than empire security, and rattling sabers with our bankers.
Just image a Battle of the Philipines Seas of Taiwan!
A shipbuilders dream.
1890 Alfred Thayer Mahan would have seen this as good.
Coaling stations and gret white ships.
The US needs a great white fleet to show the flag!
Even at the Cold War height of 15 carrier groups only 6 carriers could be deployed at any one time — at the very most — able to put a total of only 206 A- (F-18s) and B+ (A-6s) fighter bombers over enemy land: 24 F-18s and 10 A-6s per carrier. F-14s only very lately have had bomb racks added.
For half the Navy budget.
Good for third world conflicts — nothing to get into a non-arms race with China over.
Linebacker II: 750 B-52 sorties over the most heavily defended air space in the world at that time, Hanoi — 1000 SA-2s fired, 25 hits, brought down 15 bombers. Which bombers at first came in over the same route, night after night, three together to combine the power of their radar-noise jammers.
One night we lost something like 5 bombers — the formations broke up badly after bombing. After that the B-52s came in from different directions and surprise altitudes, much reducing losses.
Electronic counter-measures: against any first-class military power you can pretty much forget your radar based defenses.
The big ship, big budget US navy fears that the People’s Republic of China has read Mahan, but not gone for the big ship navy, rather gone for the same shore defenses the US already had in 1890 against larger naval power.
The Chinese way of conflict is to address the enemy’s weakness. Which is the US reliance on naval force that Mahan proposed, but which aside from dealing with the Japanese copy of the Royal Navy never had any strategic value. Strategy means nothing; building and mainatining aircraft carreirs is proiftable.
This entire argument goes to Alfred Thayer Mahan and nineteenth century theories of naval war. Unfortunately, the strategic thinkers in the US navy are not even as astute as Mahan and have not recognized the limitations of both Mahan’s theories and the British Royal Navy’s supposed superiority.
Who cares what happens 900 miles off New York or Shanghai, or Seoul? An aircraft carrier can never operate within range of land based air including relatively cheap zodiacs, unless friendly land based is close by. The PRC has enough land based air to keep the carriers out more than 400 miles. Beyond the range that the useless 40 strike sorties a day for meaningless unproductive bombing might make any difference. It ain’t like 1890 where Mahan had the US scared of British battleships making raids putting 12 inch shells on places which were not covered by Army shore batteries!! Little ports without coastal guns is the tradeoff for the build up of the US navy. No, it was to get colonies, Mahan’s ideas were misused to build the navy which took over the Spanish colonies.
Ballistic missiles do not do maneuvering targets very well otherwise the B-2 would never have been conceived. Moving targets need to be fixed, that is located with serious precision within time frames determined by the maneuvering target. The faster the target the harder it is to get the reentry vehicle to it within its error range.
The burn of the first stage determines a great deal about the impact point of a ballistic missile. The burn of the second stage even more refines where the missile lands. If the carrier moves significantly from either burn command the maneuvering becomes harder.
Carriers move at upwards of 35 Kts. If the aim point needs to be within 200 feet to get a non nuclear effective hit or kill then the carrier would need to be fixed each 60 seconds or so. That is quite a data feed and to adjust trajectory each 60 second or so requires some level of fuel and retrorocket above atmosphere and some aeronautical guidance and control for in the atmosphere. As a result there needs to be course correction but that would only get the warhead marginally into nuclear warhead kill ranges.
Terminal guidance may be there but the ability to get last minute target fix to the reentry vehicle is suspect and the potential to jam it is significant. Jammers are very cheap and the escorts have enough electric power and places for antennae to smoke the control bands.
That said, I suggestthe aircraft carrier is a dinosaur which should be pulled out of the equation.
It is just a battleship with longer range shooters.
And who in the US cares if China wants to push around South Korea? And why suggest gun baot diplomacy. That is so Sand Pebbels thinking.
You remember the USAF O-3 who worte those ideas in a letter to Aviation Week a few months after Desert Storm.
The navy made the AF back down on the theory true to any observer that a squadron of A-10’s out of a land base was more bombs on target than an a carrier air wing………….
That said accrding to Tom Clancy there were navy plans to send carriers up the coast of Norway toward the Soviet arctic as a flanking operation if things went south in Europe.
Thus the 15 carriers……………… For an expensive side show.
In early 1970’s I was stationed at an Alaskan Air Base up by the Arctic Cirlce. I got down to portage glacier a time or two between keeping the Soviets off your six.
I got back in the late 90’s and saw that Glacier was hugley receded. Amybe it is moved back clsoer to the parking area, I have not been abck in 10 years.
Maybe the ones up by Denali park are growing, but I don’t know and then there is the ice island that left Greenland the other day.
I also checked the Aussie guy. Not much there.
All the stuff you posted which I looked at has no date and no confidence estimates.
But I am okay with letting it all go. Cutting oil dividends is far more horrible than avoiding mass starvation in a generation or two.
There is uncertainty science and that begs addressing maxi disaster with mini impacts to the wealthiest.
But the few own the talking machines and the many endure the tradgedy.
I can live in Alaska and when I decide I am too old to burden the tribe I will wander off on the tundra and inhale the methane released from the thawed permamfrost.
llsm who are you going to believe? CoRev or your lying eyes?
And the bottom line is exactly what you point out. Whether global warming is happening or not, and whether or not it is due to man’s activity, it is in our natural interest to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, particularly those we get from overseas. Why people like CoRev think it is a bad idea to starve Hugo Chavez and the thoroughly anti-Christian rulers of Saudi Arabia and Iran is kind of beyond me. In his sphere of reference is there no better way of saying FU to Islamo-fascism than denying them our oil money?
Bruce/ILSM, only fools deny that the planet is warming. We are recovering from the Little Ice Age. Warming is the natural extension from that recovery, but, and a very big BUT, the natural state for this planet in the past several million years has been in glaciers.
What skeptics argue is that the catastrophic predictions are wrong. These have become more absurd with time (see the Polar Bear argument), and NONE have ever been proven to be caused by a warming climate.
Our planet actually has a very stable temperature range, +/- 5C. They have been maintained long, long before man ever appeared, but we get the continuous argument that man’s the cause for a fraction of degree C rise. We can make a case for some of the rise, but no one knows how much.
I wish you would concentrate on the politics and leave the science alone. I am a great believer in conspiracy theories myself. Did I tell you the one about Social Security?
So it wouldn’t surprise me if some politicians and economic interests are gaming the global warming to their own purposes. But your skepticism about the science is so unconvincing that it weakens your argument about the politics.
Dale, your grasp of the impacts of the science is absurdly silly. that’s why the emphais on the lies and EXAGGERATIONS. The core underpinning of science is skepticism, until something is proven. CAGW is far from proven, infact disproven. AGW is also far from proven as to what is its estent. GW is clearly happening, and happily is better than the alternative.
The planet is still recovering from the last glaciation, until it stops. Just know that the next glaciation is cooked into the orbital and climate physics of the planet. The glaciation phase changes are not abrupt in man measured time frames.
Here’s an explanation of the differences between skeptics and believers of the CAGW argument. C=Catastrophic.
“This WUWT post is the key to the skeptical scientist and the reason Anthony has put together a huge surfacestations quality effort. Ross and Steve have just published a paper which shows that the trends in models are outside of the satellite temperature measurements by 2 to 4 times. I think it’s one of the most important results in climate science that I’ve seen this year. http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/08/07/time-to-fix-the-thermometers/ If you combine Ross, Steve, Chad’s work at the link with even a slightly reduced trend from UHI (surfacestations project), models need to be recomputed to match observations. More importantly, because the warming we’ve measured is less than predicted, the conclusions need to be revised.”
Read the predictions and you will find them largely based upon these model outputs. 2 to 4 times too high over observations????? Oh, and we are about to turn over into a natural several decade cooling phase. Y’ano just like in the 60-70s that spawned the Ice Age predictions. Just like the past warming phase has spawned … well y’all know what they spawned.
It’s all about the oscillations, climate and public opinion, until the climate oscillations become extended. And, those are 60-70% on the glacial phase for the past several millions of years.
A greater security risk than wikileaks, is an analyst at Naval War College (NWC).
In stories floated around the main stream media (web since mid July) hype machine US super carriers have become dinosaurs because the People’s Republic of China might have a new accurate tactical ballistic missile with a range of up to 900 miles.
Navy carriers could need to stay out 900 miles instead of 500 miles. At 500 miles strike aircraft need refueling so what is the difference? What good are a few strike sorties a day anyway? I digress.
This kind of leak confirms the Chinese should build these things as it verifies US vulnerabilities. Both of which should be considered threats to navy shipbuilding job security.
This is a severe threat to getting the huge sums of borrowed money for the new generation of super-duper carriers which are useless but even more so due to advances in missile technology.
And the scores of billions spent on missile defense, the scripted successes of Aegis/SM3 don’t make any difference due the short “flash to hit” time and the accumulated waste on the failed missile defenses won’t suggest any carrier battle group go anywhere near these shooters.
Chairman Mullen should be firing the NWC, but this leak is meant to put the empire security budget front and center and to scare people into bankrupting the US for the war machine.
I have been looking into the US Government 2010 Budget, which is being spent as we abide the warm months:
Other Disceretionary 20% (tons of little percentages)
Social Security 19.6% total outlays
Empire/Security 18.7%
Medicare 12.8%
Medicaid/CHIP 8.2%
Interest 4.6%
What some deficit hawks worry is interest to service the federal debt rises in the 50 year horizon from the low interest rate service now benefitting from 10 years of wild monetary expansion and the lack of demand from the ravages of the great recession.
I have seen some projections where debt service rises to greater than both SS and the war machine in the 50 year horizon.
What about SS at 19.6% of outlays makes it the object of cuts to keep the empire security aparatus rolling in money?
And what about the other discretionary a pile of things that add up to 20% of outlays in 2010?
The 57% of entitlements are on the table because the hurt is endured by the meek masses who will inherit the earth but only at the second coming, when the folks pillaging the meek are judged and justice meted out.
Maybe we should save the rich from Gehena and take care of the meek and sell out the empire and corporate welfare?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fy2010_spending_by_category.jpg
ilsm
thanks for pointing this out. i need to point out, however, that social security and at least part of medicare are “off budget” for a good reason. they are people buying something they need, with the government in the role of a mere facilitator.
try presenting your figures with only the real budget… feel free to count SSI and whatever part of Medicare is paid by the general budget. Heck I’d even let you count the amount of money that “rich” people contribute to Medicare above a fair insurance rate.
The point is to try to keep our thinking straight about these things and not let the bad guys frame the debate.
Coberly,
True!!
But the propagandists always talk unified budgets.
We need to recognize that the reason the owners have not gutted SS is the fact they are working from lies.
Drawing on my long gone days as a Fire Control Tech-Missiles (we maintained the equipment which did target acquisition on incoming missiles and jets and directed the right missile or gun at them) I would have great doubts about the effectiveness of that missile against a carrier.
First how would the Chinese get target acquisition? Land based radars do not have the over the horizon (and then some) capability, nor would it be easy to get a ship or plane close enough to give a precise location with course and speed. Ballistic missiles work pretty good against land based targets because cities and missile sites don’t sail around at more than 40 knots, nor do they have the ability to make sharp turns. I don’t know what the flight time for a Chinese ballistic missile is at 900 range but it has to be a few minutes and in even three minutes a carrier can a couple of miles from its predicted location and typically I wouldn’t think a tac nuke has that much blast radius even if you got an air burst or a surface burst. Because nukes don’t really work when they go off underwater, not against a surface ship, because water doesn’t compress, you don’t get the same kind of shockwave you get with a surface blast. In my time the only active nukes used by the Navy was in ASROCs, or Anti-Submarine Rocketsm, but they would only be used if you knew you could get the bird within a couple hundred yards of the sub to either create of hull breach or at least blow out the subs sonar making it blind and harmless.
Plus if the launch site is reasonably close to the coast you would have a good chance to blow the missile out of the sky during launch phase, whether you could duplicate that in reentry phase is a good question, but we were pretty good ‘hitting a bullet with a bullet’ even thirty years ago.
You get some of the same arguments about Iranian Silkworms and other surface to surface cruise missiles, not is targeting a challenge, the United States Navy has some very effective close in ship defense, plus you would have to program the incoming missile somehow to ignore the destroyer and cruiser screens and home in on the carrier inside the battle group.
Obviously I am not privy to the kind of information that analysts at the NWC have, but I don’t think they have changed the physics of radar and target acquisition.
The U.S. military has a long, long history of exaggerating the military capability of its adversaries, going at least as far back as the ‘Missile Gap’ of the late 50s, a gap like many since turned out in retrospect not to exist but served its purpose of scaring Congress into authorizing new weapons programs. A more recent example is the Chinese ‘String of Pearls’ a supposed attempt by China to establish a series of Navy bases around the Indian Ocean, some in countries that are allies of the U.S. or in occasional adversarial relations with China or both. In reality the String of Pearls is more likely to be a series of port improvement projects to serve Chinese commercial needs. But in any case useful in arguing that we need to keep 12 (or is it 14) carrier groups around.
Okay not quite as bogus as i thought but still pretty damn sketchy.
Apparently the Chinese have two satellites up, one optical and the other SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) so it is quite possible they could pin-point the location of the carrier if they knew the general area of operations. But a SAR seems to be more of a mapping radar than a targeting one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_aperture_radar while optical images can be blocked by night or cloud cover or that old WWII standby the smoke screen.
The missile, the DF21D, is a two-stage ballistic which by definition take a ballistic path towards its target, i.e. up and down. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-21. The article i found on this claimed the missile could target different parts of the ship with the first breaching the hull and starting fires, the second targeting the engines, and accompanied by air attacks, and a third wave that would sink the carrier. Well there are all kinds of weaknesses here, I can’t see how any ballistic missile could breach the hull of a carrier, the flight deck extends so far out around the ship that any ballistic trajectory would seem to land on the flight deck, moreover even if the explosion somehow blew a hole in the flight deck, it would also have to blow through the hanger deck to get within the actual skin of the ship, which wouldn’t be a hull breach anyway, and you can only do so much damage with a maximum 600 kg payload, particularly since I misread ilsm original post and jumped from ‘tactical’ to ‘tactical nuke’ when in fact the DF21D is reported to be conventionally armed (though others in the same family are nuke capable, so who knows.
But the real cat was let out of the bag in the article and the wiki article with this:
“This would be the world’s first and only ASBM and the world’s first weapons system capable of targeting a moving aircraft carrier strike group from long-range, land-based mobile launchers.[11][12] These would combine maneuverable reentry vehicles (MaRVs) with some kind of terminal guidance system.”
Yep there is the rub. it would seem that neither satellite has the capability to actually illuminate the target, nor is it likely you could get a ship or plane close enough to do it, and building in target recognition into the warhead with enough discrimination that it could reliably tell a carrier from an escorting cruiser seems a stretch.
And finally neither of the satellites is geo-synchronous, instead they are in a fairly low orbit (653 km) meaning that any given time they might be on the other side of the earth.
There may be some way to compensate for all this, after all a lot of serious people seem to be taking it seriously. Then again they are still pushing for Strategic Missile Defense systems (Star Wars) that don’t work and in the scheme of things probably can never work. But generate huge weapons contracts. But still I would want some questions answered before I buy into this long distance carrier killer concept. Being able to interdict the Straits of Taiwan? Certainly. Controlling the ocean 900 miles out from the Chinese Coast? Horse of a totally different color.
Since Climategate several have been tracking the number of errors/exaggerations associated with the warming is bad for us crowd. Below is a list of the top ten with the following 84 contained at the reference site below. Just for Dale we have: 66. NEW! Ocean acidification-gate
Threats of ocean acidification are exaggerated.
1. Acceleration of sea level rise-gate
Claims of accelerating sea level rise are misleading.
2. African agriculture claim-gate
IPCC wrongly claims that in some African countries yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50 percent by 2020.
3. AIT-gate and British High Court
35 errors or gross exaggerations are found in Al Gore’s Oscar winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth.
4. NEW! Alaskan glaciers-gate
Loss of glaciers in Alaska was grossly exaggerated.
5. Amazon rainforest-gate and here (NEW!) and here (NEW!)
IPCC cites “robust” source: green activist organisation WWF. WWF’s source was merely an anonymous brief on forest fire risks posted in 1999 and taken down four years later.
6. Antarctic sea ice-gate
Antarctic sea ice underestimated by 50%.
7. NEW! Authoritarian science-gate
The science says… Science is increasingly used as an instrument of authority to impose public policy.
8. NEW! Australia-gate Australia temperature adjusted upwards to show more warming.
9. Bangladesh-gate
IPCC inflates Bangladesh doomsday forecasts in 2007 4AR.
10. NEW! Biofuel-gate
Efforts to save the planet by using bio-fuels are in fact rapidly destroying it. … Remaind can be found below […]
True,
Reagan based a lot of his military theory on Tom Clancy. I was USAF long range air defense radar for a part of my career. Finding, fixing and firing solutions are way harder than anyone wants you to know.
The missile is really less a threat than posed by the Soviet AF long range bombers, and Reagan (Clancy theory) had a plan to send carriers northeat from the Iceland area.
Correct, the Chinese use it like the Allies used B-17 and B 24 raids. Make the other guy concentrate on defenses.
The one who loses does so by worrying defense.
Good excuse for more carriers to endure the casualties and more star wars.
Neither of which fit a startegy other than empire security, and rattling sabers with our bankers.
Just image a Battle of the Philipines Seas of Taiwan!
A shipbuilders dream.
1890 Alfred Thayer Mahan would have seen this as good.
Coaling stations and gret white ships.
The US needs a great white fleet to show the flag!
And close down SS.
Actually bio gate is for independence from the oil cabal
Corev,
I saw you over at Menzie Chin’s the other day.
Even at the Cold War height of 15 carrier groups only 6 carriers could be deployed at any one time — at the very most — able to put a total of only 206 A- (F-18s) and B+ (A-6s) fighter bombers over enemy land: 24 F-18s and 10 A-6s per carrier. F-14s only very lately have had bomb racks added.
For half the Navy budget.
Good for third world conflicts — nothing to get into a non-arms race with China over.
Linebacker II: 750 B-52 sorties over the most heavily defended air space in the world at that time, Hanoi — 1000 SA-2s fired, 25 hits, brought down 15 bombers. Which bombers at first came in over the same route, night after night, three together to combine the power of their radar-noise jammers.
One night we lost something like 5 bombers — the formations broke up badly after bombing. After that the B-52s came in from different directions and surprise altitudes, much reducing losses.
Electronic counter-measures: against any first-class military power you can pretty much forget your radar based defenses.
Dan
was he wearing his dinosaur suit?
you know, the ones the dinosaurs wore while saying this climate change stuff is nothing to get hung about?
on the other hand, this time the climate change is going in favor of lizard skin speedos.
Smile when you say that cowboy!
Yup! Been hangin out there, especially when Menzie puts up one of his posts calculated to get a response from conservatives.
Bruce,
Sorry I have been away from the house all day.
The big ship, big budget US navy fears that the People’s Republic of China has read Mahan, but not gone for the big ship navy, rather gone for the same shore defenses the US already had in 1890 against larger naval power.
The Chinese way of conflict is to address the enemy’s weakness. Which is the US reliance on naval force that Mahan proposed, but which aside from dealing with the Japanese copy of the Royal Navy never had any strategic value. Strategy means nothing; building and mainatining aircraft carreirs is proiftable.
This entire argument goes to Alfred Thayer Mahan and nineteenth century theories of naval war. Unfortunately, the strategic thinkers in the US navy are not even as astute as Mahan and have not recognized the limitations of both Mahan’s theories and the British Royal Navy’s supposed superiority.
Who cares what happens 900 miles off New York or Shanghai, or Seoul? An aircraft carrier can never operate within range of land based air including relatively cheap zodiacs, unless friendly land based is close by. The PRC has enough land based air to keep the carriers out more than 400 miles. Beyond the range that the useless 40 strike sorties a day for meaningless unproductive bombing might make any difference. It ain’t like 1890 where Mahan had the US scared of British battleships making raids putting 12 inch shells on places which were not covered by Army shore batteries!! Little ports without coastal guns is the tradeoff for the build up of the US navy. No, it was to get colonies, Mahan’s ideas were misused to build the navy which took over the Spanish colonies.
Ballistic missiles do not do maneuvering targets very well otherwise the B-2 would never have been conceived. Moving targets need to be fixed, that is located with serious precision within time frames determined by the maneuvering target. The faster the target the harder it is to get the reentry vehicle to it within its error range.
The burn of the first stage determines a great deal about the impact point of a ballistic missile. The burn of the second stage even more refines where the missile lands. If the carrier moves significantly from either burn command the maneuvering becomes harder.
Carriers move at upwards of 35 Kts. If the aim point needs to be within 200 feet to get a non nuclear effective hit or kill then the carrier would need to be fixed each 60 seconds or so. That is quite a data feed and to adjust trajectory each 60 second or so requires some level of fuel and retrorocket above atmosphere and some aeronautical guidance and control for in the atmosphere. As a result there needs to be course correction but that would only get the warhead marginally into nuclear warhead kill ranges.
Terminal guidance may be there but the ability to get last minute target fix to the reentry vehicle is suspect and the potential to jam it is significant. Jammers are very cheap and the escorts have enough electric power and places for antennae to smoke the control bands.
That said, I suggestthe aircraft carrier is a dinosaur which should be pulled out of the equation.
It is just a battleship with longer range shooters.
And who in the US cares if China wants to push around South Korea? And why suggest gun baot diplomacy. That is so Sand Pebbels thinking.
ddrew,
You remember the USAF O-3 who worte those ideas in a letter to Aviation Week a few months after Desert Storm.
The navy made the AF back down on the theory true to any observer that a squadron of A-10’s out of a land base was more bombs on target than an a carrier air wing………….
That said accrding to Tom Clancy there were navy plans to send carriers up the coast of Norway toward the Soviet arctic as a flanking operation if things went south in Europe.
Thus the 15 carriers……………… For an expensive side show.
Brother CoRev,
In early 1970’s I was stationed at an Alaskan Air Base up by the Arctic Cirlce. I got down to portage glacier a time or two between keeping the Soviets off your six.
I got back in the late 90’s and saw that Glacier was hugley receded. Amybe it is moved back clsoer to the parking area, I have not been abck in 10 years.
Maybe the ones up by Denali park are growing, but I don’t know and then there is the ice island that left Greenland the other day.
I also checked the Aussie guy. Not much there.
All the stuff you posted which I looked at has no date and no confidence estimates.
But I am okay with letting it all go. Cutting oil dividends is far more horrible than avoiding mass starvation in a generation or two.
There is uncertainty science and that begs addressing maxi disaster with mini impacts to the wealthiest.
But the few own the talking machines and the many endure the tradgedy.
I can live in Alaska and when I decide I am too old to burden the tribe I will wander off on the tundra and inhale the methane released from the thawed permamfrost.
Massive ice island breaks off Greenland
Nothing to see, move along folks.
llsm who are you going to believe? CoRev or your lying eyes?
And the bottom line is exactly what you point out. Whether global warming is happening or not, and whether or not it is due to man’s activity, it is in our natural interest to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, particularly those we get from overseas. Why people like CoRev think it is a bad idea to starve Hugo Chavez and the thoroughly anti-Christian rulers of Saudi Arabia and Iran is kind of beyond me. In his sphere of reference is there no better way of saying FU to Islamo-fascism than denying them our oil money?
Bruce/ILSM, only fools deny that the planet is warming. We are recovering from the Little Ice Age. Warming is the natural extension from that recovery, but, and a very big BUT, the natural state for this planet in the past several million years has been in glaciers.
What skeptics argue is that the catastrophic predictions are wrong. These have become more absurd with time (see the Polar Bear argument), and NONE have ever been proven to be caused by a warming climate.
Our planet actually has a very stable temperature range, +/- 5C. They have been maintained long, long before man ever appeared, but we get the continuous argument that man’s the cause for a fraction of degree C rise. We can make a case for some of the rise, but no one knows how much.
It’s about politics and little science.
Bruce, you do not know my views re: energy. You are inserting just another diversionary tactic.
CoRev
I wish you would concentrate on the politics and leave the science alone. I am a great believer in conspiracy theories myself. Did I tell you the one about Social Security?
So it wouldn’t surprise me if some politicians and economic interests are gaming the global warming to their own purposes. But your skepticism about the science is so unconvincing that it weakens your argument about the politics.
Dale, your grasp of the impacts of the science is absurdly silly. that’s why the emphais on the lies and EXAGGERATIONS. The core underpinning of science is skepticism, until something is proven. CAGW is far from proven, infact disproven. AGW is also far from proven as to what is its estent. GW is clearly happening, and happily is better than the alternative.
The planet is still recovering from the last glaciation, until it stops. Just know that the next glaciation is cooked into the orbital and climate physics of the planet. The glaciation phase changes are not abrupt in man measured time frames.
Here’s an explanation of the differences between skeptics and believers of the CAGW argument. C=Catastrophic.
“This WUWT post is the key to the skeptical scientist and the reason Anthony has put together a huge surfacestations quality effort. Ross and Steve have just published a paper which shows that the trends in models are outside of the satellite temperature measurements by 2 to 4 times. I think it’s one of the most important results in climate science that I’ve seen this year.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/08/07/time-to-fix-the-thermometers/
If you combine Ross, Steve, Chad’s work at the link with even a slightly reduced trend from UHI (surfacestations project), models need to be recomputed to match observations. More importantly, because the warming we’ve measured is less than predicted, the conclusions need to be revised.”
Read the predictions and you will find them largely based upon these model outputs. 2 to 4 times too high over observations????? Oh, and we are about to turn over into a natural several decade cooling phase. Y’ano just like in the 60-70s that spawned the Ice Age predictions. Just like the past warming phase has spawned … well y’all know what they spawned.
It’s all about the oscillations, climate and public opinion, until the climate oscillations become extended. And, those are 60-70% on the glacial phase for the past several millions of years.
HAPPY HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI DAYS!
Easily the best decision of Truman’s Presidency, well maybe behind the Marshall Plan.
Islam will change