the reason why "tanks/carriers are dead" takes keep being written is the underlying reality that "dead" here means "highly vulnerable in a conflict with high stakes" and thinking about the latter always makes people flinch because of the pandora's box it opens

americans have gotten spoiled by things like the assumption of being able to conduct SEAD operations at the start of every air campaign instead of the "good old days" of sending people into the teeth of a giant SAM net around Hanoi operated "unofficially" by Soviet technicians

moreover there's also no way to really test any of the theorizing (which isn't new) about vulnerabilities of 20th century platforms, which are always implicitly relative to fulda gap scenarios, without fulda gap scenarios.

so when you start thinking about a situation in which the enemy can devastate such platforms at will, you also start to see that

(a) your men and machines will be dropping like flies in general

(b) hmm is that a "nuclear launch detected" sound i hear

at this point people began to start uncomfortably fidgeting in their chairs during the think-tank conference and everyone politely agrees to move on to the next perennial obsession: arguing over what the standard infantry rifle should be!

it's not that the takes are necessarily *wrong*, its that the implications of them being *right* make it impossible to avoid the blackpilling effect by considering them in isolation. hence the recurring and cyclical nature of these arguments https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/1304940150238179328

the conversation people *want to have* is "tanks/carriers are dead because of the enhanced lethality and accuracy of conventional warfare, we need ___ instead."

the conversation they *get* is "omg everyone is going to die and how long until the nukes start flying???"

years ago, i read a monograph from the 70s arguing about (as people argue now) whether amphibious operations are dead. it was at least refreshingly honest about the political assumptions (the yardstick was opposed landings on USSR or China coastlines)

because when you read that you come to the conclusion that if we are talking about the serious possibility of large-scale amphibious operations against the Soviet or Chinese landmasses we may have more problems than just amphib ops looking questionable

naturally people end up just retreating to their comfort zones + bureaucratic inertia + undeniable reality that legacy platforms are useful in some shape or form for the peripheral wars the US mainly fights https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/1304943412886597633