Dougie93

What, with that SECDEF you got now? Mattis is gone, I don't even know the guy they got in there now, never heard of him.

AFAIK, Article II imparts Donald Trump with the authority to launch a first strike.

Assumes you would never be at a counterforce option on a depressed trajectory, assumes NORAD wasn't directing you to launch on false warning. Is it true that the Captain could launch on warning of no contact with the NCA?

That's just your immediate action drill, but you're not sitting at fail safe at all times. I was never an automaton when I was in the military, I still thought about ramifications and whatnot, on my own time.

Beat what bone out of you? Your humanity and capacity for free and independent critical thought?

So what were your thoughts on having to launch? Just assumed you'd never have to do it, or did you wrestle with it?

The SEAL dry dock shelter is a removable module which can be switched around AFAIK

OIC, I thought this was with Trident II

Yeah, Johnny Vance has disappointed me. Not that he wasn't always a political operator, but he didn't just stand by, he threw Norman under the bus so fast Norman didn't even know what hit him.

What were you doing in the North Sea, I thought you guys were supposed to be on a slow patrol to nowhere out of the way? You're up in the North Sea with an SSBN? To what purpose?

Virginia the Cold Warrior? No its not, that was SSN-21 Seawolf Class, which was cancelled after four. SSN-774's are mutlimission submarines and their specialty is sneaking into the littoral and parking there to do SIGINT and support SEALs

How do you know they are up in the saddle on all Ivan's Boomers? Maybe in the Cold War they were all hands on deck to follow the Boomers from port back to port, but I don't know of they are still doing it, considering all the other things the Americans have to do.

They detected your periscope, from a satellite?

It's only bye-bye if there is an SSN up in the saddle, because if your not right on top of him, what are you shooting him with? Sharks with lasers on their noses?

If you have SSBN's you have an inherent counterforce capability.

As if he is really paying attention to the sh*t he is doing, he'sjust trying to win another election by populist axe grinding, he doesn't have a unified strategy to avoid a nuclear confrontation and he is continuing to deploy things in Europe which is making Mr.Ivan do crazy things in response already, like using CBRN on British soil apparently, which is crazy crazy by Cold War standards.

Donald J. Trump is the POTUS Anything can happen.

What you have and what you are prepared to launch in the face of anything less than an all out countervalue strike over the pole, are not the same thing.

AFAIK, Ivan sent the satellites out, and every plane they had available as soon as the battle group went dark, and couldn't find them.

Bah, whose afraid of Mr. Ivan? Ronald Reagan had it right in 1981, when the Carrier Battle Group suddenly went radio silent, crossed the G-I-UK Gap, and popped up again in the Barents at Murmansk and then started buzzing them with F-14 and A-6's. Message; we can take you any time, Ivan, just in case you were thinking otherwise. That's the only way to deal with Mr. Ivan, because Mr. Ivan is a bully, but he ain't at all that tough when you stand up to him.

I can't control the Poles; Ukraine tries to retake the Donbass, Russia launches a counter offensive, Poland enters Ukraine to defend them at the Dnieper, Russia puts the 1st Guards Army in Belarus on the Suwalki Gap, NATO mobilizes, Russia mobilizes, etc, etc

Takes too long to get to the Great Plains, if you're going at the Americans, you have to at least cripple that countervalue force, and to do so, you need to pop up out of the ice and launch on a depressed trajectory at the Miniteman III's, from Canadian waters.

Like I say, unintended consequences, NATO didn't push anywhere, a flight to quality drew freedom loving anti-Communists towards the Empire of Liberty, and I welcome them with open arms.

Seems entirely plausible and actually not all that difficult to me, nuclear missiles is hard, torpedoes is easy. Maybe the Americans are watching the approaches to King's Bay closely, but are they really all along the Potomac actively searching the bottom for AUV's?

On both sides. The Balance of Terror says balance for a reason. And Russia is not going to be able to keep up, which could incite another disorder in Moscow, and you can't keep going to that well over and over and expect Mikhail Gorbachev and kumbaya to be the result over and over. Unlike the Soviet Union, Putin is a person, and he may not want to go to the gallows without putting up a fight as the USSR did.