President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

I'm not sure I follow. The story reads to me that U.S. reconnaissance capabilities allow us to locate and track enemy ships in near real time. Other nations do not have such capabilities, thus making it extremely difficult for them to sink an aircraft carrier because it can be 10 miles away from the location the enemy thinks it is by the time a missile reaches its target.

What am I missing?

 

Strike capabilities involve having your radars on to detect and engage the adversary. And having your radars on gives your own position away. If you wait for your opponent to strike first, they can have a lock on you, unless you are in EMCON (Emissions Control, i.e. Radars off). And if you are in EMCON, you have less situational awareness. There are lots of cat and mouse levels to all this.

 

Jeez, can't they just engage the cloaking device?

 

Again, I'm not following. The paragraph is talking about the enemy trying to strike a carrier "at range," far enough away that radar is not a factor. The enemy needs to "operate off data provided by other assets," and the lag that comes with the transfer of information, plus the transit time of a missile, allows the carrier group to move.

Whereas our ships are able to use data provided by satellites, submarine listening posts, drones, patrol aircraft, etc., which is funneled through communications nodes to allow us to track enemy ships in near real time, even "at range."

The point I was making was that it hadn't occurred to me how difficult it is to track a massive ship such as an aircraft carrier (as obvious as it sounds the minute I read it). It's still a drop in the bucket of a vast ocean. And it is interesting that other nations haven't developed the "reconnaissance strike complex" that we have.

I'm not sure where in any of that you got the idea anyone is saying reconnaissance is simple. If anything, my post and the article were talking about how difficult such reconnaissance actually is.

 

bp23,

I have to be careful what I say, but two things: it is easier to locate a carrier battle group than you think, and if as an adversary you fire X number of supersonic or ballistic missiles at that group, the missiles will arrive well before the group is 10 nmi away.

 

OK, I give up. This conversation isn't going anywhere.

 

I've read Red Storm Rising and The Hunt for Red October, too.

 

This may be the most important thing he's written since he left the White House.

 

What made him go with the British spelling, practising?

 

Because he was writing for an Australian newspaper? Or it got changed by an editor down there (assuming that, unlike here, stories are read before they go into the paper?)

 

Ahh didn't realize (realise) that was an Aussie paper.