The fear should be that if, heaven forbid a war breaks out between the US and China or Russia then the US will be sending the most elite force of terrorist busters the world has ever known against a conventional advanced enemy that has been training for a bloody long time for the occasion. The AWACS guided flankers, the teen series SAM umbrellas and the modern naval fleets really dont care much if their facing a pilot whos been spending the last 5-10 years putting JDAMS on target from medium altitute with basically no surface to air or air to air threat so to speak of.
The fact that the majority of the US military is slowly unlearning how to fight a conventional war in its rush to defeat the ‘terrorists’ to the point that it may not have the basic skill and training levels required in the dark arts of conventional warfare.
China isn’t a force on force issue. I would assume you would mean a Taiwan situation. First of all there China, while they sabre rattle, aren’t stupid most days of the week. We are not going to attack one piece of hardware on their mainland because that would go right to nuclear war. China has said that already. So… Taiwan. Any Taiwan situation where the old guard Chicoms decide on a military campaign to force the issue means many senior Chicoms have their rice bowl upset with all the current graft they are getting from the current economic condition. War would only upset this and make a lot of people there very unhappy as their graft/payoffs would dribble down to nothing with a sudden closed trade gravy train from conflict. Going back to my force on force not needed as a response,…. China gets a lot of their oil via the South China Sea <-> Indian Ocean. They don’t have a great deal of oil reserves either,…They don’t have a hardcore blue water navy to keep all of that traffic from getting cut off. Not to mention other merchant traffic. So again, the Chinese aren’t that dumb. They aren’t dumb like us and just do war for no end gain or plan.
Russia. Doubtful here too, as the most potent thing they have right now is their nuke force.
Conventional air war is not our problem. There isn’t any crisis here. Other countries using legacy jets will die in the face of F-22 like solutions. Fact: Our aircraft and netcentric warfare means a lot of targets die in any weather with sub 2 meter accuracy.
Navy aviators have in fact said that 4-5 Super Hornets in one sortie can take out more targets than what took a whole squadron of Navy strike aircraft to do, in Desert Storm and oh by the way, if it is a fixed target, it dies even if the weather is bad. Not possible with dumb iron and LGBs. A mission carrying dumb iron is a wasted and dumb mission today. We have gone from the era of sorties per target, to the era of targets per sortie.
The smaller carrier air wing is a cost/efficientcy thing for peace time. Pushing that ratio further. A carrier today with less modern cheap near all weather PGM jets can hit far more targets in a day of work ( 2-3 sorties per airframe ) than the carrier of yesterday. We are talking dead targets. Not the old way of having a whole flight or squadron go after 1-2 targets in an area and shotgun it with dumb iron, and the occasional fair weather PGM. Add to that, in times of war , they will put extra squadrons on the carrier deck as needed. No big deal. Carrier aviation, inspite of some bland airframe selections because of dumb decisons, won’t be too bad off. And yes it could be improved. However, with advanced sensors, networks/netcentricity, shorter kill chains and cheap PGMs as a staple diet for strike warfare, the only one at a disadvantage is an enemy. Our problem isn’t the things you outlined. Our problem is engaging in an endless cycle of no-gain_Team America/World Police expeditionary warfare which burns up a lot of cash. A process that hasn’t stopped since the end of the cold war.
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