clean-slate military

As unplesant as this topic can be, it should be addressed. What should be the purpose of the military in a clean-slate society?

How should such a society organise a military force? Should it be like the Swiss, the French (foriegn leigon), the Americans (volunteer), the Soviets (conscription) or some other method that has not been tried yet?

How should such a force be equipped? Paid? Trained?

Sorry for such an open question, but it can be an interesting one.

IMHO, like the american army, I think it should be completely voluntary.

Any hypothetical clean-slate country probably won't be economically productive enough to support a very large army, and would therefore be limited to smaller passive defense operations.

Thinking about this a bit more... Although Army service should remain voluntary (even through war?), Army training could possibly be mandatory for the youth, so long as the training period is kept short (perhaps a 6-month course that serves as an integrated part of the education system, between high-school and university studies).

In the case of Esperance City, the defence forces would probably only consist of a small navy, and perhaps a trained urban defence force (which would take advantage of the many secret implacements that would naturally be designed into the city's structure).

In my opinion, devices of nuclear deterrence (such as nuclear submarines or spaced-based nuclear delivery systems) would not be needed.

Instead, the focus should be on defensive systems (i.e. SDI).

In this respect, the compactness of the area needing protecting is both a plus and a minus. Obviously, being a smaller nation, Esperance City will be more vulnerable. However, its compactness would also make it easier to fully protect via SDI systems.

As has been mentioned, the small size of territory also makes border security more effective, thereby decreasing the threat posed by nuclear weapons delivered via non-conventional methods.

Undoubtedly though, Esperance City will eventually require an effective nuclear defense system.

A couple of Airship Battleships?

honestly terraformer/demochratic anarchy, I just really wonder what you see in balloons/blimps. Not that they can't be useful, but they aren't the solution to every problem. Just an overall question.

In this case, they would be put to very good use, but perhaps some sore of part balloon/part helicopter system. But not with one big rotor, maybe many smaller ones. I personally would suggest ion/plasma beams, used as conductors, to put a high voltage current through something.

I'm working off an idea I've had for a new shape of them that will generate lift.

Quote :

but they aren't the solution to ever problem

Eh?

I meant every problem. It just seems to me that you use them a lot. what is this new shape that generates lift?

Not saying. I've had bad experiences of talking about my ideas on the net.

well, if you trust me enough to tell me, you can PM me.

Okay.

Generally countries like that never have to go to war if they stay out of conflicts. they are never invaded, and I see no reason for a city to invade. I would suggest developing nukes, maybe nilfir nukes (http://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5871), with a small yield, and say
'don't invade us, we'll drop these'.

That's if NILFiR works. Have you contacted a university yet?

The city *is* going to be on the coast? I'd base it on Teirm (from Eragon), with the buildings getting proggressively higher the further in you go with a Citadel in the middle.

I always thought Rome had the right idea, the majority of it armies were non Roman's who joined up because twenty years service got you citizenship, a bit like the British ghurka's. It worked really well until it destroyed the empire.
Actually though a 21st century millitary is going to be highly automised, UAV's,UCAV's, driverless trucks, tanks, combat robots, unmanned missile ships. That's the future DARPA sees and it also happens that it's a future with a lot of great spin off benefits for the city in terms of civilian technology, driverless cars, household robotics, etc.

Yes, I think it would be great if the city were to encourage innovation and industry in the area of automation and robotics. I think Japan does this, and you can see the effects: they are world leaders in robotics and have made billions from their automation technologies. But I bet these technologies will have an even bigger market in the future. There's definately an opportunity here for a clean-slate city to excel in this field.

I really admire the way the Japanese economy works. Perhaps we can copy a few tips from them?

As for the Romans, they weren't so dumb either: Letting foreigners do your dirty work sounds like a good idea to me ;-)

Foreigners or robots...

- Mike

Well, as I said in the end it didn't work out so well for the romans because it all got so cushy for the citizens that the their armies basically became purely mercenary, and once they realized that the true power off Rome lay with the army that was the end. The emperor became however could pay the army the most to over through the previous one, which the army was always eager to do because that was how they got paid. There was a period of about twenty years were they went through emperors like klenex. Eventually though they just said screw it and stole everything.
As for Japan they have a government very keen on spending public money on cool r&d and and a manufacturing industry that adopted System 24 from the UK in the sixties and then never looked back.
A military question I've always pondered is, does it actually make sense having separate Air, Land and Sea forces. They almost never work alone anymore so any sort of artificial devision must sure just create communication and training issues.

Good last point. I think I heard a bit of rhetoric on this subject from the editor of defensetech.org. I tried to google the term "total force integration", which I have heard before, but it turns out that this refers to integrating the various divisions *within* the particular force (i.e. army, navy), not *between* them. I wonder what the term I am looking for is...

As for Japan spending public money on R&D: I had a thought the other day about this whole Iraq mess that America has got itself into, or should I say Bush has got America into (as the american public never voted directly to enter the war; the problem with representative systems): What would happen, if instead of congress deciding how best to allocate Americas spending money, the role was given to the US public?

I'm sure that would never happen, but perhaps this provides a good analogy to what might be possible for a clean-slate city-state. Imagine the effects of spending all that money on public projects instead...

It is best to remember though that the trillion dollars spent on Iraq are actually a trillion dollars spent on buying stuff, stuff built in America and no where else. At a time when much manufacturing is moving off shore defence is that last area of national manufacturing strength.
Defence spending is also different than any other sort of spending in that the economic judgement over how much treasure continuing to exist into next year is worth that vast sums can be spent on developing technologies that are commercially unjustified but once in existence potentially revolutionary.
Further there is great truth in the maxim 'there's no substitute for experience'. Once the main reasons, besides budget, that the US military is so formidable when it comes to killing people is that the US has taken to engaging in regular military adventures that maintain a level of experience in its armed forces that is only matched by the UK. This also allows the new systems and weaponry developed out of the experience of the last war to be trialled and tested in the next. If the third world war broke out tomorrow (decreasingly likely as Taiwan seems to be wimping out) China's biggest weakness would, I have no doubt, turn out to be that compared to the battle hardened US troops coming out of Iraq its army hasn't fought any serious warfare since korea, which they amply demonstrated in their brief, disastrous incursion into Vietnam.
Ironically the best thing that could happen for space exploration just now would be that WWIII because just as WWI was won by naval superiority and WWII was won by air superiority undoubtedly WWIII will be won by space superiority.

Thinking about it some more I could see that given the obvious manpower deficit a city state would have compared to other nations what we would require is a highly mobile strike force backed up by as much force multiplication as we could muster. The ability to put a couple of hundred people anywhere in the world with a few hours would be all that's required. A mobility force would be a highly integrated land/air/sea/space unit, without the manpower there would be no point to any really differentiated force as there would never be enough of them to hold any ground or be close enough to the objective to be of use.
If the CS government was indeed some form of corporacracy ( as I mooted elsewhere) this sort of highly mobile force could, beyond protecting the city, turn a profit if poorer, less advanced nations were, instead of having their own armies, to pay a yearly fee in exchange for this sort of military protection. This sort of arrangement would cost these countries less than an army of their own would, would remove the temptation to use the army for non-military purposes (population suppression) and reduce the likelihood of regional conflict.
Similarly this idea of subsidizing CSCS services for citizens by deriving profit from them from external populations could be applied to both health and education. But that is another thread.

Yes, that is a very interesting topic. This type of imperialism, I believe, can be a force for good. But you do have to be very very careful with the implementation, as such endeavors always have a way of either falling to corruption, or even if you maintain complete reverence, your good actions end up being smeared in some way.

So personally, I would prefer a completely passive military, useful only for defense and never for pre-emptive action.

Which is more wise? To act on what may be morally right, but risk having your actions mis-construed; or to be passive but yet regarded as a saint?

Passivity in war is never regarded as saintly. Switzerland was definitely no saint in WWII yet was militarily passive. The USA stayed out for the first two years and there's no one going around thinking the US was saintly to do so.
The world let Rwanda burn but our non intervention was anything but saintly.
Can you look at Sudan and honestly feel saintly for you governments failure to put troops on the ground?
Would it not be more saintly to put in a thousand special forces by parachute into Burma to guide in targeted aid drops and get them were needed?
Is it really more saintly to build a big wall around yourself and peer out over the top watching the barbarians killing the helpless?
If the only peril of acting for the moral good is having some people think less of you then you're not doing it right and those aren't people worth your time. The real peril is ballsing it up to the tune of 2 trillion dollars and seeing no way out.

On another issue, airships have already been mentioned here but I'd like to suggest the possibility of replacing the conventional aircraft carrier with a stratospheric airship aircraft carrier. Nuclear powered capable of extended operational flight, it could carry hydrogen burning aircraft fueled from electolysed clouds. It could reach an area of combat far quicker than a conventional carrier and would be much less of a sitting duck. Just a thought.

On such an Airship the Hydrogen gas bag should go in the center.

Contracting out your military? There's an interesting idea, although what about world wars? Or if you can only protect one country but two are under attack?

lkm wrote:

Passivity in war is never regarded as saintly. Switzerland was definitely no saint in WWII yet was militarily passive. The USA stayed out for the first two years and there's no one going around thinking the US was saintly to do so.
The world let Rwanda burn but our non intervention was anything but saintly.
Can you look at Sudan and honestly feel saintly for you governments failure to put troops on the ground?
Would it not be more saintly to put in a thousand special forces by parachute into Burma to guide in targeted aid drops and get them were needed?
Is it really more saintly to build a big wall around yourself and peer out over the top watching the barbarians killing the helpless?
If the only peril of acting for the moral good is having some people think less of you then you're not doing it right and those aren't people worth your time. The real peril is ballsing it up to the tune of 2 trillion dollars and seeing no way out.

Hard question to answer. Isn't that kind of what the UN is fro, though?

I am strongly against using the military as a source of income, just on principle. However, what about publicizing the military, I.e. military companies?

The benefit of a military that pays for itself is that as a tax payer you don't have to. It can also be large and more highly trained and equipped than could be justified otherwise. As part of a corporacracy this would be seen as a normal state of affairs, just as the health service would seek custom from surrounding countries to subsidize the service for citizens. In effect the military would be a PMC (private military company).
The fundamental failing of the UN as a organisation, besides the security council veto, is that it doesn't have an army of its own due to American distrust of it when it was set up. UN peacekeepers are all loaned by member nations and operate under national command structures. The upshot of that is that it has no reliable access to troops, the troops it can get are largely third world and poorly trained and it has no direct command or authority over them. The result being an inability to deployed as many people as required as quickly as required along with the possibility of abuses then being carried out under its flag by troops it can't court marshal or reprimand in any way and are generally sent home with no punishment.

What happens when a private military corp decides it wants a slice of CS, or the whole thing?

Well there are two answers to that, the first is that it is no different that any other millitary coup, which has always been the perenial fear of having a standing army, that they would just take over, hence the exist of the second amendment in the US constitution and the fact that there several countries which just don't have armies in the traditional sense. The solution to this however hasn't really changed: having a profesional well trained army which knows its place. Further to that in the real world the modern western state has a vast and complex system of administration which is very difficult to just barge in by force and effectively govern without prior experience in the different areas of government. All this is why military coups are far more common in broke african states with poorly trained armies than western style democracies, and why the Thai coup didn't really stick and the Turkish coup didn't happen, both being about a military trying to protect the country from a percieved threat from the government.

The second answer is I suggested the military contracting as part of the corporacracy model of government, i.e were the government aimed to make every arm as profitable as poossible, thus the military would be part of the state, its division head would have the same promotion oportunities as every other division head, it's the same company. It's like suggesting Vauxhall should buy GM.

Just as an example of warfare in the twenty first century the Russian invasion of Georgia has been a good example of unrestricted warfare. Well planned, well coordinated, and with good denialability.

I have served in the military and my experiences were bittersweet. A moderately strong military in this country I consider to be important. I don't think a full fledged draft is a good idea, but maybe a year long citizen readiness training for all citizens, no exceptions, might be a good idea. No exceptions, everybody must go through it. Male, female, black, white, gay, straight. At the age of eighteen there would be a citizen requirement to go through this training. This way ALL citizens are trained in case of war so that if we ever go to war we are at least partially prepared. After this training, if a person wants to pursue a military career then it would be voluntary.

With a clean slate there would be changes to the military structure. First no separate military branches. Given today's technology there is already a significant crossover between the different branches, this separation is an unnecessary redundancy.
Next, there is no separation between officer and enlisted. This is an archaic carryover from the old elitist class system with no justification at all. There are many enlisted people that make better leaders than many officers. Granted education can be an important factor but not the only factor. There is already a point where the duties and responsibilities of enlisted and officer converge and that point is at the ranks of E-7 and O-1. Eliminate the ranks of E- 7,8 and 9 and instead promote enlisted members to O-1,2 and 3. A college graduate would come in at O-1 acknowledging the academic ability, but the E-6 would be promoted to O-1 acknowledging the experience.

Adressing the airship topic, Airships, blimps ballons etc. are still quite useful as observation platforms, but as a weapon platform it's just too vulnerable with today's technology. At the beginning of WWI they were quite effective but near the end, the aircraft and weapons technology was too deadly. They became as obsolete as battleships after WWII.
The US experimented with the flying aircraft carrier concept in the 1920's or '30's. Slow biplanes were difficult to recover, so high speed jets today would be a challenge at the very least.
Airships for commercial uses might be very useful however. Economical long distance remote transport. They could haul larger payloads than helicopters longer distances for much cheaper.

With todays technology anything that can be seen is vulnerable. 5 minutes after the start of the next war the only ships left in the navies of the world will be submarines because you just can't hide a carrier group, nor protect it. Airships have the advantage that you have three degrees of freedom to hide in, 360 degrees of fire, and high surviveability (shooting at giant bags of helium doesn't do much) . They can also cruise at significant altitude, beyond most surface fire.
WW1 airships were vulnerable only because the US had a monopoly on helium which meant the germans had to use hydrogen, and thus were flying bombs. What was hard to do with a wood and canvas biplane is, unsurprisingly, probably not that hard at all to do with todays flying supercomputers, they basically already do the same thing with in flight refueling.
The main benefit though would be in the ability to rapidly deploy a carrier force.

You have brought up some good points. An airship would make a good gun platform along the lines of an AC-130 gunship. In this particular application it could be VERY effective.
However, even filled with helium, airships are vulnerable. A napalm bomb with a proximity fuse would take out an airship in short order.
An airship carrier force for rapid response could work. They could get there well ahead of naval carriers and launch a preemptive strike. Launching isn't the problem though, it's recovery. To rectify this the aircraft wouldn't come back to the airship, they would land in the ocean and be recovered by the incoming naval carriers. The navy experimented with this concept with F2Y/F-7 Sea Dart.

If the carrier airship resembled a battlestar type layout, say a large skycat with runway nascelles wouldn't high speed jets find landing easier at lower relative speeds than they do on a conventional carrier?

Very creative!! An airship is about the same size as a naval aircraft carrier. Carrier pilots talk about how it's like trying to land on a bobbing weaving postage stamp! This would be very similar, except if you screw up you take out the aircraft and the airship and it's crew and instead of falling maybe sixty feet into the water, possibly surviving, you fall 10,000 feet!
Also a naval carrier flight deck takes a lot of punishment. An airship flight deck that rugged would most likely be too heavy to lift and with the aircraft and crew and equipment I would say impractical at the very least.

I'm not sure how turbulence affects airships but wouldn't a stratospheric airship be rock solid? Also if the airship is moving at 100 mph and the aircraft has a 140 mph landing speed then the it actual has an effective landing speed of 40 mph which must be safer. Thirdly given carrier landings can already be automated it seems absurd to think that these airship landings couldn't be entirely by autopilot. Fourthly you make the assumption that there are people involved here, that would be by no means certain, sixth generation fighters are unlikely to have pilots, and the number required for the carrier itself could well be far smaller than you might imagine through automation.

In the stratosphere there are some turbulence risks but they are minimal.
40 mph could be manageable
I can't speak for the British aircraft, but current US aircraft still land with the pilot in control. However this raises and interesting point. Harriers or some other VTOL aircraft could very well be made to work in this situation.
Oddly enough I was an aircraft mechanic in the USAF. (seriously!) For this idea to be practical it would be a desireable to be able to turn an aircraft for a second mission. Given the size and payload capacity of this airship carrier, it could probably be done.

OK so let's summarize.
An airship aircraft carrier would be plausible.
It would only be able to carry one aircraft plus the crew and equipment for one turn
The aircraft would have to be VTOL

I was thinking of the naval uav development d secifically this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-45
"The software Boeing developed to allow the X-45N to land and takeoff autonomously on aircraft carriers has recently been installed on the first F/A-18F, which has used it to perform autonomous approaches. All autonomous approaches ended with a wave-off. This was by design due to the lack of carrier suitability of the test vehicle's landing gear and the single-channel operation of the prototype autonomous approach system not having the level of redundancy required for safety-critical flight control software (i.e., no actual touch-downs were allowed nor intended).[citation needed] By early 2009 that Super Hornet should be able, and allowed, to hook the carrier's arrester cables autonomously,[12] setting the stage for carrier-borne UAV operations."
The largest Skycat designs lift up to 1000mt, if you allow say 10mt per aircraft, what do you guestimate mass wise support personel and equipment per aircraft?

Whoops, got my wires crossed between the Skycat 20 and 1000. Sorry about that!

Given this revelation the entire concept is plausible. A safe estimate of 10 F/A-18F aircraft, the necessary flight deck, and support personnel and equipment, and the ability to turn these aircraft once.
My suggestion would be put the flight deck on top of the airship between the two "hulls". Then put solar panels(!!) on the top of the two hulls to supply a portion of the power for the airship freeing up cargo capacity. This would allow the possibility to turn the aircraft a second time.

As a further leap of ambition, if your carrier aircraft were equiped with hydrogen fueled turbo-jets rather than conventional jet fuel the carrier could go arround eating clouds, condensing out the water, spliting it with power from the solar cells, or a reactor if we get really nuts, and then feeding the hydrogen to the fighters. This would allow a drastic increase in self sufficiency and improved logistics and loiter time.

I don't know of any fighter concepts that use hydrogen as fuel. I can't imagine that it could be competitive with conventional fuel fighters.

If you were considering fielding hypersonic aircraft you might well consider hydrogen as your fuel. Most scramjet designs seem to rely to on hydrogen both for combustion reasons and for the active cooling that it allows.

lkm wrote:

If you were considering fielding hypersonic aircraft you might well consider hydrogen as your fuel. Most scramjet designs seem to rely to on hydrogen both for combustion reasons and for the active cooling that it allows.

Given everything that we've talked about, a much simpler option would be to just load this airship with cruise missiles. Autonomous, fast, explosive and you could carry vast amounts since there would be no need for recovery or turnaround. It could be the equivalent of a combination airborne command post and guided missile cruiser.
In fact, airborne command post would be a fantastic use for a Skycat 1000. It would have indefinite loiter time and enough capacity to maintain a crew for a week. Also it could be refueled/resupplied in flight by a Skycat 20 or 200.

Given uav's seem to be becoming just reusable cruise missiles and the future of cruise missiles is meant to be global strike, fifteen minutes to anywhere at mach 15, perhaps a middle ground would be best with mach 6 uav's launching pure scramjet ordinance.
If you were willing to put a small reactor on board it would be a perfect platform for the airborne laser , both as part of missile defense but also point defense as a carrier.
It also occured to me that in take off catapults wouldn't be needed as aircraft could just flop out and gain flight speed in a dive.
Looking closer at some of the skycat material there are existing designs for a roll-on roll-off skycat 220 ferry with a car deck ontop of a passenger deck. This would seem to be a good starting point, but I take it you have misgivings about the ability for aircraft to 'thread the needle' in landing inside a air tunnel?
Finally wouldn't it also be quite useful as a carrier aircraft for an assisted SSTO? Given the discussion regarding a 30mt craft being marginally possible if launched from a WK2 like craft couldn't an airship carrier be capable of launching at least microsats, if not man and his toothbrush RLV's?

There are different types of cruise missiles. Some are high speed short range, some are lower speed long range. As for mach 15, I don't know of any cruies missiles that are in this range, just ballistic missiles. But that is another possibility as well, flying ballistic missile platform.
Airborne laser is another excellent idea. They could be part of a defense umbrella.
Very true, catapults would be superfluous in this application, but arresting hooks would probably still be necessary. This is if you still want to use UAV's. As for the "threading the needle", if the flight deck were simply built on top with no roof then this risk would be minimised.
My original statement needs to be qualified. I was considering airships of traditional design. Skycat is a much more versatile design. I did however notice that the operating ceiling of Skycat was only about 10,000 feet, far below the stratosphere, this reintroduces the turbulent air issue.

Global strike is a declared aim of the US military, they want to be able to watch a target in real time via satalite, push a button, then watch it explode a few minutes later anywhere in the world. To do this requires scramjet powered cruise missiles, so that's what they're building.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-51
My concern with having the flight deck on the roof is two fold, firstly part of its lift is aerodynamic and the roof section seems to be its wing, as it were, so wouldn't landing there disrupt the airflow? Secondly having the flightdeck on the roof would surely seriously raise the centre of gravity of the airship, and isn't being top heavy a very bad thing for an airship? At the very least you would have to have counter balancing decking underneath the central gas bag.

Correction, I don't know of any OPERATIONAL cruise missiles in this range!  LOLI see your point with  the roof top flight deck.  I still think the central deck would work because the catamaran design should maintain stability, as for the lift factor, a modification to the shape of the center section could remedy this.  If we were to go the cruise missile route then landing wouldn't be an issue and battlestar style flight decks could work.  If we were to go the recovering aircraft route, I still say that those would have to be huge with excessively high ceilings needed for safety.P.S. I found a page http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4242974.html

That shows a number of new airship designs. The first one looks like they copied Thunderbird 2!!

If there were four hulls instead of two there could be a central rooftop flight deck with hangerdeck below while everything else could be on either side of the central hulls in the 'wings' lower cg. This configuration could create greater lift both aerodynamically and in increased gas volume. It might even be possible to move aircraft from the hanger to launch only decks in each wing so planes can be launched twice as fast as they're retrieved.

I like it.

Cruise missiles will fall out of favor when naval rail guns are fully developed.



The current plan is a 200 mile range on a diesel powered destroyer. You put a bunch on a nuclear power battleship, you could probably get a thousand miles.

Cruise missiles will always have an edge in terms of guidance and range. I was under the impression that rail guns were to be used for point defense, but I couold be wrong.
Personally I feel that just as WW1 was won by naval superiority, and WW2 was won by air superiority, WW3 will be won by space superiority. Anything that can be seen will be killed pretty quickly. Your destroyer, your battleship will not last long in that war.