Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Seems like at current levels of technology navies are just outmoded? A lot of fundamental issues are stacked against them. Sea and air based suicide drones are available to countries with very low levels of development. Missiles available at levels barely above that. On the other hand anti air is more costly to develop and operate.
We see this dynamic a lot in the Ukr-Rus war, modern western AA and the higher end Russian stuff can be overwhelmed with saturation attacks via mixed drones + missiles. At sea this problem is compounded given that you are even more limited when it comes to your supply of AA missiles and can't easily be resupplied. Also with the advances in surveillance there is no way to hide at sea. You are basically a floating AA with a limited supply of missiles sitting on a featureless plane. Seems like this dynamic will just get worse with computer vision and other basic AI features becoming more and more available which can overcome EW.
On the other hand when it comes to shutting down land based missiles and drones the task has become nearly impossible. They can be hidden from satellite and drone surveillance on land though this is more difficult than in the past, but the biggest problem is shutting down supply. There is no obvious "missile factory" or industrial supply chain that we can target or sanction because we've globalized industry which means parts can just be sourced from all over the place and the weapons pieced together on site or at a neighboring country and then shipped in bypassing sanctions. Again we see this with the sanctions failing when it came to Russia and the US looking like lunatics complaining about China exporting washing machines due to "dual use" components helping Russia's war. Navies just kinda suck now.
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