Instigator / Pro
1
1760
rating
94
debates
77.13%
won
Topic
#5316
The number of aircraft carriers necesary to destroy the US military is lower than 11!!
Status
Finished
The debate is finished. The distribution of the voting points and the winner are presented below.
Winner & statistics
Winner
1
0
After 1 vote and with 1 point ahead, the winner is...
Benjamin
Tags
Parameters
- Publication date
- Last updated date
- Type
- Standard
- Number of rounds
- 2
- Time for argument
- Two weeks
- Max argument characters
- 10,000
- Voting period
- One month
- Point system
- Winner selection
- Voting system
- Open
Contender / Con
0
1494
rating
17
debates
35.29%
won
Description
No information
Round 1
Pro
#1
Thank you for accepting this debate, I think this will be fun.
Framework
Important terms:
- Aircraft carrier: a large warship which acts as a mobile base for combat ready military aircraft. When deployed they are escorted by a fleet of various other types of warships.
- Destroy: to damage something, especially in a violent way, so that it can no longer be used or no longer exists.
- Military meaning: Destroy is a tactical mission task that physically renders anenemy force combat-ineffective until it is reconstituted. Alternatively, to destroy a combat system is to damage it so badly that itcannot perform its intended function or be restored to a usable condition withoutbeing entirely rebuilt.
- Necessary: That which is absolutely needed : REQUIRED.
- The necesary number in this case is the treshold above which destroying the US military becomes possible.
BoP analysis:
- CON will not be required to provide an affirmative case, as he has no BoP, he just needs to refute my case. But I will be required to substantiate the resolution and fullfill my BoP.
- Me proving the resolution requires me to demonstrate that the destruction of the US military can be accomplished even if you have less than 11!! aircraft carriers.
- Because the destruction of the US military, if it could potentially be accomplished with less than 11!! aircraft carriers, would prove my point that 11!! carriers is not required.
Destroying the US military
What does it mean to destroy a military? Maybe CON is going to argue that destroying a military entails killing every single member and piece of equipment, but that would be unconventional, since even the US army protocol does not require total annihalation to call a military structure destroyed. Presumably, to destroy it means to damage it to the point where it becomes unable to carry out its duties of effectively protecting the people and waging war. The United States Armed Forces consist of six service branches, but mainly the army, airforce and navy. To destroy it, you only need to succeed in destroying headquarters and main bases, the logistical supply chain and crucial storage and production facilities. If those objectives are achieved, the US military structure as a whole would be damaged to the point where it needs to be reconstituated and rebuilt before it can resume carrying out its intended functions.
It is very crucial to mention that this is a hypothetical scenario. We are discussing how much military material would be necesary to destroy the modern US military. The feasibility of producing that combat force is not a factor at play. Lets say CON provided undisputable proof that 90 aircraft carriers would be necesary, and that creating more than 80 would be physically impossible. That would not contradict the necesary number being lower than 100, it would only show that the necesary number is unattainable. The infeasibility of aquiring 11!! aircraft carriers does not in any way disprove their ability to destroy the US military.
How many aircraft carriers
You may be wondering why the resolution ends with 11!! when I have never before used use exclamation marks in my resolutions. The answer is because they are not punctuation marks, they represent the mathematical function called factorial. Factorial is defined as the product of systematically multiplying the original integer with all the natural numbers between it and zero.
11! = 11 x 10 x 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 39'916'800 ≈ 40 million. When estimating 11!!, raising a million to the 40 millionth power: 10^6^40000000, is a massive lowball.
Since I am mainly having this debate for fun, I am going to investigate how the US military would fare against 0, 11, 11! and 11!! aircraft carriers, despite 11!! being the only relevant number.
0
Could the US military be destroyed without even a single aircraft carrier? The short answer is yes, because nuclear armageddon requires not a single conventional weapon. With a few thousand nuclear warheads aimed at the key links in the American military structure, and the largest army, fleet and navy bases, there is no doubt that the US military would be destroyed. The long answer is also yes, because even conventional warfare is not bottlenecked by number of aircraft carriers. Even a very realistic number of conventional weapons would be able to take out the US military. By that I mean, other countries already posseses enough aircraft, misiles, tanks, foot soldiers and warships to defeat the US military. The US military could be destroyed by a combined assault that doesn't involve a single aircraft carrier. The only thing preventing the destruction of the US military, is that the US has never waged war with the rest of the world.
11
Eleven aircraft carriers, that is the number that the US posses. A foe with the same number and quality of carriers as the US could definitely defeat their navy. Maybe only with a 50% chance, but that is still well within the real of feasibility. There is no way to demonstrate that America would always win naval engagenements. Furthermore, an enemy with as many aircraft carriers as the US, probably also matches their strenght when it comes to airforce and navy. So there is no way to conclusively prove that Americas military being destroyed by an enemy with 11 aircraft carries is not a possibility. CON could maybe argue against the previous section, saying that with only fighting against 0 aircraft carriers, that Americas navy could never loose, and that therefore at least one branch of the US military would surive nuclear armageddon. But apart from being wrong, since the US navy can be destroyed without aircraft carriers, and the military being destroyed is not the same as every single ship being sunk, that rebuttal would not apply here. A fleet with 11 aircraft carriers could definitely destroy the US navy, and the rest of the military could be nuked to oblivioun.
11!
I wont insult your intelligence by explaining why the process of destroying the US military does not strictly require 40 million aircraft carriers.
11!!
This number is really fun, and is the reason why I made this debate. Please follow my thought process:
- The number of particles in the observable universe is somewhere around 10^80, but the gravitational force they generate is insufficient to keep the universe from expanding.
- Forget aircraft carriers. If you had 10^6^40000000 electrons, that would increase the total mass of the universe by a few million orders of magnitude.
- Earth would instantly collapse into the single largest black hole ever seen, and the gravitational waves would move outwards in every direction at the speed of light.
- Anything that these gravitational waves touches, would instantly be dragged towards us. The incredible mass would singlehandedly reverse the expansion of the universe.
- The only things that would not be destroyed by the 11!! aircraft carriers, are the things that move away from us faster than the speed of light.
So yeah, the US military would not survive 11!! of anything, anywhere. The number of carriers needed to destroy the US military is clearly lower than the number necesary to destroy the universe.
Conclusion:
The resolution is true with 100% certainty, there can be no reasonable doubt about that fact. This was a fun topic to explore, but not very fair for CON, thats why I made it unrated.
I eagerly await seeing the ace he claims to have up his sleeve. Perhaps my argument is not Kritik proof.
Con
#2
Benjamin's claim:
The number of aircraft carriers necessary to destroy the US military is lower than 11!!
Benjamin's claim reworded incorrectly:
The number of aircraft carriers necessary to destroy the US military is lower than 11 factorial factorial
All sentences need punctuation, obviously.
Benjamin's claim reworded correctly:
The number of aircraft carriers necessary to destroy the US military is lower than 11 factorial!
So, the enemy has 40 million aircraft carriers. That's still really really bad, but who's to say that those aircraft carriers are fully stocked?
Here is a list of everything needed to operate an aircraft carrier:
- Permission from the UN to sail your aircraft carrier across international waters.
- A crew of five thousand people with adequate supplies for all of them.
- Large amounts of enriched uranium for the multiple nuclear generators onboard.
- 3 million gallons of jet fuel.
- Five dozen fighter jets.
- Trained jet pilots.
- Cleaning supplies.
I can assure you that 40 million non-functional aircraft carriers would do absolutely nothing to the US military.
Vote 7000series if you are a patriot.
Round 2
Pro
#3
I have rewritten your argument in syllogistic form:
P1. A hundred bullets fired in the opposite direction will never kill someone.
C. The number of bullets necesary to kill someone is higher than 100.
Can you spot the problem? I'm sure you can 7000series, you are a smart guy. A bullet is not the same as "a bullet fired in the opposite direction", because the category of bullets also encompass those metal projectiles that fly in the correct direction. So with the correct type of bullet, you can kill someone with less than 100, just as with the correct type of aircraft carrier, that being fully stocked ones, you can destroy the US military with less than 40 million.
All sentences need punctuation, obviously.
Not debate resolutions on this site. The majority of them have no punctuation, or maybe a questionmark, not an exclamation markPlus, I have literally never writen a resolution that ended with an exclamation mark. And doing that would create great confusion. It makes no sense that I would write 11!! and mean (11!)! rather than 11!!, so PRO is pulling this from his ass.
I can assure you that 40 million non-functional aircraft carriers would do absolutely nothing to the US military.
Agreed. If I used the phrase "non-functional aircraft carriers" in the resolution then we would need more than 40 million of them. But still probably less than 10^6^40000000.
But if you have nukes, which one does, then you don't even need a single aircraft carrier to destroy the US military.
Con
#4
According to the English language, Benjamin's claim is that:
The number of aircraft carriers necessary to destroy the US military is lower than 39,916,800!
Oh no! 40 million fully stocked aircraft carriers could absolutely obliterate the US. But wait!
- A newborn baby does not know French by default.
- A pizza does not have toppings by default.
- An aircraft carrier is not fully stocked by default.
40 million useless aircraft carriers could not defeat the US in naval combat. Readers, it is that simple.
VOTE CON
And yes, the US military could be defeated without the use of aircraft carriers, but that is outside the scope of this debate. This debate is ultimately about naval combat.
Criterion
Pro
Tie
Con
Points
Winner
1 point(s)
Reason:
I buy Pro's interpretation of the resolution. Using one exclamation mark to indicate factorial and then a second exclamation mark for emphasis seems way less intuitive than just a double factorial. And as Pro points out, plenty of debate resolutions on this site don't have punctuation.
It seemed undisputed that 11!! aircraft carriers would destroy almost everything in the universe, so such a large number satisfies the resolution, regardless of whether or not the aircraft carriers are fully stocked. Even then, I did think it more intuitive that whoever had the aircraft carriers could at least use them. The "bullet in the wrong direction" analogy seemed like an accurate parallel. (Assuming that the attacker had nukes also seemed outside of the resolution, but they're not required if the attacker has 11! or 11!! aircraft carriers.)
Vote bump
I have something up my sleeve too. . .
11!! is 39916800 factorial, which is greater than 10^(10^7). Pretty sure that's what Benjamin has up his sleeve.
Maybe a country with 11 aircraft carriers could beat the US if the US got caught completely off guard, but that's not very likely.
In prolonged naval warfare, the invading force generally has a disadvantage.
One sufficiently large nuke will fracture the planet, killing all... No aircraft carriers necessary!
But US military has 11 aircraft carriers?