Are blue water conflicts a thing of the past?

[SeaQueen]

Originally Posted by LoBlo

From all the hours of playing DW, it seems like the most interesting part of the Cold War was really the parity that existed. Like two title weight contenders in a big title fight... best of the best going at it. Otherwise, the technology gap is really unchallenging with kills per platform pretty one-sided.

That's not necessarily the case, though. There's ways to beat the technology gap. Sometimes it's the crudest attacks that are the most difficult to defeat. Small boat swarms, for example. A surface combattant and his helos might be able to blast a bunch of them, but the one you miss is the one loaded with explosives. That will sink or put a warship out of action. Support them with shore based ASCMs or from missile boats and you've got a potentially lethal force. Try doing a swarm of boghammers, where random ones have a script to do a suicide attack, support them with shore based ASCMs and missile boats against a pair of FFGs protecting a super tanker. The super tanker almost always takes a pounding, if you don't know which boghammers are supposed to go for the tanker and which are supposed to go for the FFG. They can also take out your helos.

The other thing that makes it difficult for us is that to win we have to really WIN. It's sufficient in a lot of cases, though, for potential opponents to simply not lose. For example, Hezbollah v. Israel. Israel blew the snot out of Hezbollah, but in the end, Hezbollah still exists so they call it a win, in spite of taking terrible losses. That's a really tough problem. Nobody really understands how to fight these sorts of shadow organizations with significant military capability. The solution to these kinds of problems (if there is one) almost certainly lies in diplomatic and political solutions rather than military confrontations, which seem to only strengthen these sorts of groups even if, from a military perspective, they lost the fight.

All of this is really not captured by most wargames. It's hard to because when you try to capture that aspect of things, it usually says more about the person making the model than it does about the actual situation. I mean... think about it, how do you model say... a hypothetical US intervention in a genocidal civil war like Rwanda. It's easy to model the battles or the logistics, you could even capture things like getting relief to refugees and quantify things like the number of refugees processed. The political implications of all this is tough to wrap your brain around in a computer model, though. I think a wargame like this could be really interesting, but how to do it is really an opened question.

I think two super powered forces in coastal waters (USN vs European Coastal defenses would be the only real parity I can think us) would probably be the most interesting of all scenarios.

I don't see it. They just don't have (need or want) the capability to defeat a superpower.