Item — HN Reader

The point is a country like Iran can, in 2026, force the US Navy to keep an large stand off distance. How much further could a country like China keep the Navy back? What about in 10 years?

Eventually you are beyond the range of being able to project force or risking losing billions invested in one asset to a $50k missile. That is where reality is heading.

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Seems like USN can still do whatever it was made for from this large standoff distance, also seems like it wasn't made for chasing individual nondescript trucks in a hundreds-miles-long mountainous shoreline.

> USN can still do whatever it was made for

One of the primary functions of navies historically has been to secure vital shipping lanes. It’s a big deal that USN can’t seem to fulfill that function anymore.

I'm not sure that the USN would have been any more effective 30 years ago if it tried to make a narrow waterway that is off-shore from a medium-strength world power accessible for safe commercial ship traffic. Effective anti-ship missiles have been around for a long time. Given how understandably sensitive commercial ship crews and owners are to even slight danger, there's just no way to reduce the risk to the necessary near-zero without a prolonged air campaign and/or land invasion to support the naval effort.

A medium-strength world power that it Iran only figured out how to make anti-ship missiles only 25 years ago. They sure got their hands on Chinese ones a bit before that, but that quantity just didn't amount to strait-blocking capability.

> I'm not sure that the USN would have been any more effective 30 years ago if it tried to make a narrow waterway that is off-shore from a medium-strength world power accessible for safe commercial ship traffic.

Yeah I'm not too knowledgeable about this subject, I'm just theorizing.

My thesis is that the only ways that someone could control a waterway was through naval power, air power, or missile power. Air and naval power is negated by a stronger air force/navy, and 30 years ago missiles were only available to a small number of advanced economies nations. Now, high-quality (or at least credibly dangerous to shipping) missiles and drones can be manufactured cheaply by many nations.

It can be safely said that current carrier groups were not built for that, they were built for power projection on land.

The problem is that nowadays essentially nothing can really secure vital shipping lines ...

Ergo navies don't exists.

The technology has changed. The navies used to be able to protect shipping. Now the task is much more difficult.

Just as battleships replaced ships of the line, and were in turn replaced by carriers, all due to technology changes.

Maybe there will be drone swarms or some other future magitech being able to protect shipping.

Or maybe the civilization will collapse due to internal (income inequality, widespread employment of AI), external (ecological disasters) or other (demographics, nuclear WW3) pressures before such technologies are developed.

The USN, specifically aircraft carriers, where designed to project power. No one on the world stage is looking at the USNs inability to open the Strait of Hormuz and seeing successful power projection.