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Originally Posted by goldorak
Why is that ? :hmm:
It doesn't make any sense.
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The Soviet Union collapsed. Nobody spends a lot of time worrying about nuclear war in the same way they did in the '80s, say. Back in the day, there were people in the Pentagon sweating bullets because they fully expected to get hit within the first few minutes of a conflict. Twenty years ago, everyone pretty much expected a conflict in Europe and it was going to be nuclear almost immediately. That's not really very likely now. Now a days, conventional wars are actually looking passe. Almost all of the thinking is about unconventional warfare, in which nuclear weapons have little role if any.
It's not that it isn't something people think about every now and then, it's just that it's not a major priority for the Navy's ASW programs. Now a days they're more worried about diesel electric submarines in coastal environments. Before, the Soviets planned to use their SSBNs as a survivable deterrent and the US seeked to threaten that, so that in the event of a nuclear war, they'd have the option of undermining the Soviet's most unpredictable threat. Now a days, they're thinking about inexpensive diesel electric submarines in a small, limited, regional conflict, positioned in such a way as to "deny access" to US carriers, amphibious forces, and logistics ships. The strategy is that if they can make it such that US will have to pay such a high price to intervene in a regional conflict that the US public will decide that it's not worth the enormous cost to participate in a conflict in a part of the world many probably can't even find on a map. If a foreign country, managed to sink even one US carrier or big-deck amphib, that'd be an enormous loss. It could be bigger than September 11 in terms of deaths. If that happened, it's not clear whether political support for such a war could be sustained or not. I could see it going either way, honestly. It really depends on what the politics of the time look like. Regardless, it's almost certainly be a blow to the US attitude that we can arbitrarily brush aside foreign militaries with our overwhelming conventional forces.
Back in Soviet days, though, we fully expected to lose multiple carriers in the course of the conflict. It was going to be grim and bloody. I don't think it's really possible for people today to really understand the fundamental shift in mentalities that's occured since the end of the Cold War. Nor do I think the public really comprehends how different warfare is today. Back then, people were talking about a global nuclear conflict in which the national survival of the United States and all of her allies was at stake, and the extinction of humanity was a possibility. Now a days, people are talking about small, regional conventional conflicts as well as unconventional war such as insurgencies, peacekeeping, counterterrorism, etc. Any conventional warfare that might break out is nowhere near the kind of global conflict people used to anticipate.
Actually, what I think is interesting, is that even as the US was preparing for The Big One, most of the conflicts that actually happened look at lot more like the conflicts people plan around today. It always makes me wonder if that's what they really ought to have been planning on back then.