A national security official under Joe Biden who reviewed the document is said to have turned pale on realising Beijing had “redundancy after redundancy” for “every trick we had up our sleeve”, The New York Times reported.
Last year, Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, said that “we lose every time” in the Pentagon’s war games against China, and predicted the Asian country’s hypersonic missiles could destroy aircraft carriers within minutes.
I wonder what modern day relevant military super vehicle would be for the navy.
Submarines that can store a couple thousand attack drones? Emerge from hiding below the water and then a bunch of drones just take off to attack various ships and planes in the area?
Since seawater is radio opaque and visually not very transparent, a submarine meets 2/3 of the criteria of being invisible… which leaves sound and magnetic field (of which the latter is rather local).
So definitely a submarine, but how does it propel itself, and how does it avoid emitting and reflecting sound?
Or perhaps, no large crewed vessels at all, since it’s unpopular to lose them to sea drones made with garage level tech.
Perhaps the art of fighting is turning entirely towards small systems, ones that carry just enough to hurt the intended target type badly, and not a kilo more.
China itself seems to be learning lessons. One of their concepts is an unpiloted cargo plane to deploy a drone swarm. Applied to sea and to a situation of projecting power to distance - an uncrewed submarine to deploy a torpedo swarm. It wouldn’t return home, just deny a certain part of the sea to opponents. It could be slow, quiet and sleep at the bottom ahead of a conflict - and open up when needed.