Aircraft carriers are not particularly well suited to be supplied by cargo aircraft.

The largest cargo aircraft with the strengthened landing gear, arresting hook, and catapult attachment used to be the C-2 Greyhound. It had a range of approximately 1,500 miles with a 10,000 pound cargo. It was retired on July 28th, 2026. The C-2 has been replaced by the CMV-22B Osprey. It has a range of only 1,150 miles and a more limited cargo capacity of only 6,000 pounds. 6,000 pounds isn't nothing, but it's not a lot either.

There's not a lot of stuff within 1,150mi of the Arabian Sea. Your two options are one of the US bases in the southern Persian Gulf (Kuwait is too far) and Diego Garcia. Neither are ideal. In both cases you're doing a transfer out in the field.

On the other hand, the C-5 Galaxy can carry 120,000 pounds to a range of 4,800 miles. You can fill it with food in the continental US, fly to Hickam AFB in Hawaii, refuel, and fly the rest of the way to Guam. On the return leg, an unladen C-5 can fly directly to the 22nd Airlift Squadron's home base California without a layover.

The C-17B Globemaster is smaller than the C-5, although it's nearly as capable. With a 160,000 pound cargo, it has a range of 3,200 miles, (the C-17A has a shorter range) which is just short of the 3,800 miles to get from Hawaii to Guam. I don't know how much cargo it's capable of carrying 3,800 miles, but on the order of 100,000 pounds is a reasonable guess. It is also capable of an empty flight back to the US without a layover.

Surely airlifting supplies to a carrier in a war zone is not totally comparable to airlifting supplies to a base in a US territory?

Carrier resupply while underway is primarily by a sort of temporary cable tramway erected between the carrier and the resupply ship.

Supercarriers came into existence at ~70,000t and transitioned to ~100,000t. You'd need to scale another step up or three, to 140,000t, 200,000t, or 280,000t, in order to see something capable of landing and taking off a cargo-laden C-130 in regular operations.

You're just revealing your ignorance of Navy supply chains with this comment, and I say that as a veteran who has no support for the ongoing shitshow, only sympathy for my former colleagues trapped underway.

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The diet in Guam is already heavily dependent on shelf stable foods. I know this from personal experience but theres a surprising (to me) amount of research on it as well (c.v., https://www.guampedia.com/health-consequences-of-modern-diet...). However, it is worth noting that food on a military installation =/= food nearby, for many obvious and non obsvious reasons.

Sure but that won't happen in Guam or Hawaii. Guam would be evacuated first.

Also these same things apply to any other major power (perhaps more so) who would also see their resources stretched then and their bases deprived of food to reduce combat effectiveness.

Can't recall them going offline island wide when I was there (given there are two on not quite opposite sides of the island). I do recall one having downtime when the other was up and having to deal with that.

When were you there?

For this to be true it would also mean that assumptions about capabilities in a negative light are also wrong. If one were to say the US is extremely weak, that would be an assumption about a capability that is now by your decree also just wrong.

In other words, this comment is rather meaningless when read plainly - I mean that factually, not as an insult.

To try to guess at a plausible answer, any monitoring / remote management stemmed from wanting to keep an eye on temps over time. Freezers can go out of temp for only so long before its all bad.

Tada. It saves someone from making the rounds with a clipboard and writing down temps every X hours.

I agree its unneeded, just I can see the thought process.

But is it materially different? Or is it a difference in quantitative increase of likelihood of the exploit?

The thesis "everything hackable" will be hacked, and with the advent of hacking LLMs, the boundary between criminal hacking and civil hacking is being blurred, it's no longer attributable to a criminal intent, hacking commands are just something that happens through no criminal intent.

Practically, the hackers, whether human or syntehtic, are a catalyst, they accelerate the rate at which a bug that causes damage will manifest, and perhaps the magnitude of the manifestation, but the essence of the negative manifestation of that bug is the same. Whether it was triggered by a solar ray flipbit or by a rogue LLM or by a russian hacker, the essence of the issue is the same.