Garrison Davis

Now there's an important point made towards the end of that paragraph.

Persistent attacks force defenders to remain on high alert.

This is true, and it also brings us to another under-discussed aspect of attrition, the energy and time of the soldiers our administration expects to fight this war for them.

And we'll talk about that after another brace of ads.

And we're back.

Too often people who want to war game out how the US will perform in a given conflict just focus on the theoretical capabilities of the vehicles and weapons systems we own.

A Nimitz class aircraft carrier has this many planes and so it can unleash this amount of firepower on a target in this amount of time.

And that's a bad way to predict combat performance because it ignores the human element.

The USS Gerald R. Ford, a Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier, is what's commonly known as a supercarrier.

It can travel for 25 years before its nuclear reactors need refueling, and it has a complement of more than 4,500 men and women.

It is a small city at sea.

And I've talked in the past about how hard these things are to actually sink.

During the Ford's deployment to fight the Houthis, there were viral rumors stoked by AI misinformation that it had been seriously damaged or even destroyed by a Houthi ballistic missile strike.

Now, I pointed out at the time that this was fanciful.

The defense systems on a boat like this cost billions and provide excellent proven protection against most missiles, drones, and aircraft it's likely to encounter.

The entire naval battle group it travels with exists to protect and enhance the carrier's capabilities.

And even if it were stripped of all those things, these boats are just so damn tough to fucking sink.

In 2005, the US Navy conducted a live fire test to sink a retired Kitty Hawk class super carrier.

Per an article in Forbes, the carrier endured nearly a month of intense weaponized testing and was finally scuttled via internal explosive charges.

It should be added that the warship had been decommissioned nearly a decade earlier and was in poor material condition.