There is a lot of text below, so I'll just put my tl;dr up top:
- California needs to preserve its qualitative edge as best as possible.
- California needs to balance growing its economy while growing its military and maintaining its qualitative edge and force multipliers (one might do well to look at Singapore).
- Moving to a high-low mix is potentially the best option for California, because you need to balance having enough "good enough" ships to overmatch the opposition, while still maintaining the qualitative edge (which is what the US did for much of the Cold War).
- Aggressively downteching too far bleeds away California's qualitative edge and force multipliers, and allows its competitors an easier time to close the gap; when both sides have qualitative parity, the side with the quantitative superiority has the advantage.
The problem is that that isn't sustainable. Winning a war that bankrupts you is a hollow victory. If you're losing very expensive, difficult-to-produce vehicles to extremely cheap and expendable attacks, you've failed to adequately prepare for the war you're fighting. Cost effectiveness is absolutely a major factor in warfare--money is an object, because money represents limited resources. Eventually, you go bankrupt. Even if you only get halfway there, that's still a hell of a lot worse than winning said war without going halfway bankrupt.
Money is an abstraction for resources--whether you're talking about fuel or materials or man-hours and human resources. Maintaining a qualitative edge is good and all, but if you hamstring your economy in the long-term to do it, you're just setting yourself up for a fall over the horizon. It's kind of like Starcraft--the more money you spend on combat units, the less money you spend on building your economy. The guy who builds a bunch of tanks but doesn't do anything with them is going to lose to the guy who spends that money building a much bigger economy and eventually builds ten times as many tanks, because he can afford it.
The reason the US can afford its best-in-the-world military is because of its best-in-the-world economy. By contrast, Russia has a military that is far larger and more expensive than its economy can healthily support, and its economy is feeling the strain.
Sure, that's all true, but on the other hand, if you don't have a quantitative edge, then you need to maintain the qualitative edge and force multipliers, because that lets you do a lot more with less. And consider the USN in the Cold War: the High-Low mix was a thing for all branches. The USAF had the F-15/F-16, with the F-4 and A-7 in the Guard and reserves (and even as early as the 80s was already starting to transition the ANG to the F-16). The USN had the Spruances and Ticonderogas as the high end combatants and the Oliver Hazard Perry-class FFGs as the low. The Army was fielding Apache and Abrams alongside Cobra and Patton.
Of course now everything has been so upgraded that the US has had a high-high mix for the last 3 decades (
) but what I'm trying to say is that if you abandon maintaining a qualitative edge on your competitors, while being unable to maintain a quantitative edge, that doesn't benefit you. Consider modern America's quantitative and qualitative edge. Against people with more stuff, the US has better, more effective stuff. Against people with better stuff, the quality gap is still
very close and the US can drown them in more assets. And against everyone else, the US has the mostest of the bestest.
Sure, California could entirely abandon its qualitative edge. But then that lets the rest of the world catch up. And when your capabilities are even, the side with more stuff gets the advantage. Like don't get me wrong and don't strawman me: I'm not saying to abandon the economy and dump everything into the military. You need to balance and grow both. Otherwise you're going to end up like India, which makes the F-35 program and American defense procurement look sane - Indian economic planners completely focused on skipping industrialisation and moving India to a services and knowledge-based economy in the 90s, which resulted in the industrial sector being underdeveloped, which is why India now has problems in trying to build its defense sector, and is heavily reliant on purchasing foreign arms, because their own homemade stuff is not good enough and the Indian military flat out refuses to purchase Indian weapons.
There's also the political aspect: the public is not going to put up with funding hugely expensive tanks that get taken out by dirt-cheap IEDs constantly if it doesn't perceive the military as adapting to the problem and finding some way to not squander said tanks.
Point of order, but dirt cheap IEDs weren't constantly taking out Abrams. Taking out an Abrams with an IED required massive investments of manpower and material with superbig 2000 lbs IEDs, which is the sorta thing that gets noticed pretty quick (and of course, there's also the TUSK urban combat kit for Abrams that was sent to Iraq).
The point is not to give up the qualitative edge entirely; it's to avoid going to extremes of quality so that you get critically low quantity. The US would not have won the Battle of Midway if Yamamoto hadn't concocted a brilliant plan to squander his quantitative supremacy by dividing up his carriers and placing all but four of them too far away to be of any use in the main battle. The M4 Sherman was not the equal of the Tiger in direct combat, but the design of the M4 was such that the US could afford to build tons of them, ship them across the Atlantic, and support much larger numbers.
It sounds like the Sri Lankan navy, in your example, tried to fight an enemy with an edge in neither quality nor quantity, so no fucking duh it had so little success.
Militaries will use expensive munitions and vehicles for grossly disproportionately insignificant targets, but only when there are no better alternatives available, and even then, they'll only do this as long as it takes to figure out a way to avoid wasting so much money to accomplish the same task.
I feel I should point out that the Sherman wasn't really as poor a tank as WW2 pop culture makes it out to be, and the Jumbo had the same frontal armoring as the Tiger, and the 76mm gun was in fact pretty competitive as a tank gun... Also, your reference to Midway doesn't really help you as much, because overall at that period of time the qualititative gap between the USN and IJN wasn't
that great. *shrug* Which just reinforces what people been saying: if you abandon the significant qualitative edge and downtech, that allows competitors to eventually close the gap with you and then that favors the people who can put more ships to sea, more planes in the air.
Sure, maybe you can't make a srsface blue water navy, but going to a high-low mix in order to preserve as much of the institutional knowledge, industrial capability, and qualitative edge is not a bad idea. It's just that you've come across as wanting to completely abandon the high for the low. And I like how you identify the problems the Sri Lankans had, without realising that your massive downteching puts California at risk of being in the same position. *shrug*
And cost is something debatable, isn;t it? The US has always preferred to spending money over spending lives. And it all depends on how you calculate it, doesn't it? Consider JDAMs and dumb bombs. A dumb bomb is about 2k USD, a JDAM is 25k. One might think it's a no-brainer to use the dumb bomb over a JDAM, but on the other hand, if one looks at Gulf War Air Power Survey, they did some tallying up: 28 PGMs dropped (700k), 26 hits, vs dumb bombs: 168 bombs dropped (336k), 2 hits. Which means that 700k was spent to get 26 hits, or about 26.9k/hit. Meanwhile, the "cheaper" bombs spent 168k for one hit. To get 26 hits with the same ratio of bombs to hits, that means you'd need to increase by 13 times, meaning you drop 2,184 bombs to get 26 hits, which costs you
4,368,000. That's not counting the costs of another 144 sorties and associated losses, btw.
Trying to tie everything to cost-effectiveness in a vacuum leads you to a penny-wise, pound foolish approach.
The issue is that, while the vehicle that the M2 Bradley ended up as was successful, the M2 Bradley was never supposed to be an American BMP. It was supposed to be a successor to the world-renowned APC. A cheap, reliable, simple, and effective vehicle meant for transporting a bunch of troops from point A to point B with modest armor protection and a machine gun for fire support.
The light tank/half-APC that the M2 ended up being was very much not that vehicle. And because it wasn't, you got the US military constantly using Humvees in situations they were never designed for, which did get soldiers killed. Furthermore, no matter how you looked at it, the development process for the M2 Bradley was rather farcical.
No, it was always supposed to be an IFV and an American BMP.
@Apocal has a good post on that over on SB. Saying the M113 had modest armor protection is overselling it: it's pretty vulnerable to artillery, and you can penetrate the frontal armor with HMG fire (and that's not even getting into the variants which had aluminium-magnesium alloy armor, that's like soaking your body armor in gasoline before putting it on
). An APC transports troops to a point away from the objective and then pulls back because it's suppressed by HMG fire from the strongpoint. An IFV, like the Bradley, transports troops to the objective, and stays there and supports them with the autocannon, and it suppresses the strongpoint, because to deal with an IFV you need to break out AT weapons.
And quite frankly, the M113 isn't really
that much more protected vs the Hummvee. It's hardly more survivable. You send M113s into the same places Hummvees were going in Iraq and Afghanistan, they're going to get just as dead.
