The
lethality of the modern land battlefield argues against the survival and
effectiveness of unprotected infantry.
Indeed, it strongly suggests that only armored vehicles have any
reasonable expectation of survival long enough to be effective. For the infantry, this means that heavy
armored personnel carriers (HAPC) are mandatory. The U.S. Ukraine US
Similarly,
the naval battlefield will be one of immense lethality where only the big and
strong (armored) will survive. Of
course, this has always been a characteristic of naval warfare. Naval battles have always been short,
vicious, and deadly, especially for the smaller vessels like WWII destroyers
and even cruisers.
Consider
our modern U.S. Navy. Our 90 or so
surface warships, the Burkes and Ticonderogas, are likely one-hit kills or, at
best, mission kills due to the combination of near complete absence of armor
and reduced crew size for effective damage control.
Our
most powerful ships are one-hit kills?
Does
this seem wise?
During
WWII, ships had to be sunk or very badly damaged to knock them out of a fight
and it required immense amounts of ordnance to accomplish. Today, a single anti-radar, air burst missile
can achieve a mission kill.
Consider
the Burke class destroyer. For all its
many VLS cells and impressive Aegis radar arrays, its combat effectiveness
ultimately comes down to three SPG-62 missile guidance radars (illuminators). All three are exposed high on the
superstructure, unprotected by any surrounding structures to any great
extent. In other words, they’re out in
the open just waiting for some simple shrapnel to wander by. Worse, two of the three illuminators are
located within 10 ft of each other which begs for 2/3 of the ship’s fire
control to be eliminated with a single hit.
This violates the survival design maxim of separation of critical items
and there is nothing more critical to an Aegis AAW ship than its illuminators.
Consider
the recent history of “hits” on US Navy ships.
The Stark, Cole, Port Royal, Antietam, McCain, and Fitzgerald were all
rendered mission kills and most were nearly sunk by a single “hit”. Ponder what that means for the modern naval
battlefield. An entire battlegroup could
be wiped out or mission killed by a dozen individual hits. That’s a pretty low bar for the enemy to
achieve! In WWII, it required dozens
(usually many dozens) of hits on a ship to sink it or render it a mission kill. In fact, mission kills were fairly rare. A ship either sank or continued
fighting. Losing a few illuminators
should not be the end of a ship’s usefulness and yet that is exactly the
situation, today.
If
we’re going to intentionally and knowingly build one-hit ships then we ought
to, at least, be building them much, much cheaper. Losing a $2B Burke to a single hit is
criminal.
If
we want expensive ships then we need to build them to absorb damage and keep
fighting. That means firepower and armor
and lots of it. We need to remember what
a warship is for, what dangers it faces, and design accordingly.
Could you build an armored housing around an illuminator while keeping it working at full capacity?
ReplyDeleteTo an extent, yes. The illuminator is directional, meaning that it points at the missile being guided. Therefore, it only needs to expose a small transmitter 'window'. The rest of the unit could be armored, I would think. So, around 300 degrees of the illuminator could be armored.
DeleteI would say, since it seems impossible to have all this complex sensor tech not be one-hit mission-killed on a ship, why not have heavy-armoured artillery ships with no expensive radars and have the whole radar suite on aircraft instead? This way, the warships would also not be lit up like christmas trees the moment their missile guidance goes live.
ReplyDeleteSure. Of course, that assumes that there's a suitably equipped aircraft in the area and that it isn't fighting for its own survival and that its comm link isn't being jammed.
DeleteThe ideal would be to have redundant armoured sensors.
DeleteS1-4 are exposed and working, and destroyed by shrapnel
Armoured panels around S5-8 drop revealing them for active use
And when 5-8 are knocked out, 9-12 are brought out
That seems nice, but you'd need a lot of hull space in order to have all of these redundant armored arrays. I guess that synergizes pretty well with the idea of having single-purpose ships rather than striving for do-everything multirole destroyers.
Delete"I guess that synergizes pretty well with the idea of having single-purpose ships"
DeleteYes!
" redundant armoured sensors"
DeleteAlthough not armored, this is the idea behind having several SeaRAM and CIWS rather than using point defense that relies on one central sensor which, if destroyed, renders all the weapons useless. SeaRAM and CIWS, of course, have their own, self-contained sensors.
You'll recall that WWII ships had multiple fire control directors which could be cross-connected to control various mounts (there's your redundancy!) and also had local, optical fire control at each mount (there's your backup). We once knew how to design resilient warships but we've completely forgotten today.
At most WW2 ships had two directors to face any azimuth of attack.
DeleteLet us manage our imagery of what has come before.
Keep in mind local control was a very real possibility and gun crews trained for it.
The Iowa, for example, had two Mk38 directors on centerline mounts for the main battery and four Mk37 directors on two centerline mounts and one each p/s which provided three directors to either side of the ship for the 5" guns.
DeleteI believe the Mk37/38 directors could be cross-connected but I'm not 100% sure about that.
There were also numerous 40 mm directors on both sides of the ship.
Even the Atlanta class light cruiser had two armored, centerline 5" directors plus 40 mm directors. I don't know whether those could cross connect or not.
I apologize for an off-topic comment but will there be something about sinking of Norwegian frigate Helge Ingstad? It looks pretty interesting. The whole incident seems to be frigate crew's fault (They had their AIS off.). The case is similar to the collisions of USS John S. McCain and Fitzgerald.
ReplyDeleteMaybe all modern warships are equally fragile. This can make future naval battles even shorter, more vicious and deadlier. But as in WW2, Napoleonic Wars or Peloponnesian War, both sides will have analogous equipment.
The previous post about sensors was about the Helge. As far as addressing any specifics, I have seen no public information about details that would be sufficient to allow me to draw any valid conclusions or make any worthwhile points beyond the previous post's point about our overdependence on high tech sensors at the expense of common sense. Do you have some specific aspect that you think is noteworthy?
Delete"both sides will have analogous equipment."
This is true. The issue then becomes which side can make better use of the equipment and which side is better prepared to operate without the equipment due to damage, jamming, countermeasures, EMCON, etc. Everything I've seen suggests that the Chinese are currently much better prepared and trained than we are.
Oh, I overlooked the previous post. Probably because I was reading on my cellphone. I was interested in similar aspects of the collision, particularly the GPS part. It looked like they did not know where they were, although they had (according to the OpenSeaMap) several lights to take a fix. This looked similar to the USS Port Royal grounding.
DeleteI do not know what the regulations are for warships. On a small sailboat it is obligatory to have a paper map and handbearing compass on board. It also interested me that the crew of the tanker saw Helge first on radar and not from the navigational lights. There are no reports about fog.
"It looked like they did not know where they were"
DeleteThis is the baffling part - not the 'didn't know where they were', although that's bad - that regardless of being lost or not, to not see and avoid a collision is an utter lack of common sense and common sense training. Even if you have no radars operating you should have human eyes looking 360 degrees out around the ship at all times (more so if you don't have radar operating!). The inability to eyeball see an oncoming ship and maneuver out of the way is a criminal flaw in training, common sense, and ship command.
No different than the situation on the two Burkes that collided with merchant ships. You don't need Aegis radars to stand on the bridge and look around you. Common sense. Of course, we've seen in the US Navy that the minimal manning effort has caused a reduction or elimination of lookouts.
Some further perspective on the US Army: on the whole, the Army flits between various extremes. On one hand you have the heavy monstrosities of the Ground Combat Vehicle and Future Combat Systems programs, and then you have the light infantry mafia which insists that foot-mobile light infantry and the airborne is all you need. A lot of times the Army doesn't know what it wants - it's worth noting that for all of its problems that have been proclaimed on this blog, on the whole the USN and USMC have been more sucessful in seeing through programs and procurement and getting something that works, as opposed to the Army's many procurement fiascoes of the last quarter-century.
ReplyDelete(As examples, consider the USN's adoption of NWU and the USMC's adoption of MARPAT camo patterns. Pattern chosen, bam, done. Meanwhile the Army holds a test competition, the results show a clear winner in Multicam, but the Army deliberately chooses ACU that doesn't blend in with *anything*. And then a decade plus later, the Army decides to go to Multicam *anyway* (after letting the cool kids in SF buy their own Multicam), but then whines to Crye, the designer/patentholders for Multicam, about making issue gear in multicam cheaper. To which Crye goes "WTF we don't control what your suppliers charge you!" and then the Army demands Crye hand over the entire multicam pattern/patent to them. Crye agrees and quotes a very reasonable price that takes into account loss of future earnings, the Army has a bitchfit and goes with OCP-Scorpion, aka off-brand Multicam.)
Ironically the JLTV program is one of the army's successes, coming in on time without any major issues, no delays, and the JLTV itself actually works (because it's basically a heavy truck for doing heavy truck things, and Oshkosh is damn good at making trucks).
Missiles with airburst fragmentation warheads (like an over-sized Claymore mine) would likely render every surface warship we have combat ineffective. No need to even hit them to sink them.
ReplyDeleteYes and no, the exact mechanics of the airburst depend on how big the blast is, how much fragments are being thrown around, etc etc.
DeleteWith a missile impact, the missile damages the ship in several ways: shockwave from the blast, structural damage from the blast, flash igniting flammables and causing fires, and rocket fuel causing fuel fires. With an airburst detonation, the main form of damage is going to be shrapnel; distance will dissipate blast effects (a shockwave 200 feet away form you isn't the same as a shockwave right on you), flash can't ignite the air, fuel won't get spread around for fuel fires.
" The Russian lesson in artillery in Ukraine should have been eye-opening for the US and allies."
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure why... everything I read had the Russian artillery was parked in Russia shooting with impunity and no risk of counter battery fire or air attack.
I grant the Russians like artillery and self propelled air defense - which is likely a good ideal if you don't have absolute confidence in air superiority (which the US seems to assume out of hand). And they seem to be doing a good job with both.
"Does this seem wise?"
No. Unless you are running a business not a military.
[From Global Security.org quoting Pentagon points (about the Ford Class).]
'Each ship in the new class will save $5.3B in total ownership costs over its 50 year service life, compared to the CVN 68-class. Half of the total ownership cost for an aircraft carrier is allocated to the direct and indirect costs of manpower for operations and maintenance of the ship. The CVN 78 is being designed to operate effectively with 800 fewer crew members than a CVN 68-class ship.'
Total Ownership Cost is the blather I want to here from a auto dealer, (or when building a highly automotive factory) not about something that is suppose be the ultimate driver of US dominance of the world's oceans in peace or war. Its worth pointing the taking points for the Spurance retirement were the same, crew size cost over the lifetime of the ship. While I think Growler seems to be a nice buy (in terms of cost) – its justification again was replacing a plane that had too many crew.
In a sense the USN is oft times simply not building for war but for peace and forays into the (forever) War on Terror or sideshows - evacuation of civilians, soft power, and fights against second to third rate powers. You don't really need durability/damage control/redundancy/amour if most times you already decided the enemy wont really be shooting back, and you are always going to have total situational awareness and networking or whatever. So really only one person needs to try and watch how many different screens, and of course the tiny damage control party responding to some event won't have difficulty assembling, and all that nifty gear will in fact never be shocked. The question asked is not what is worst case event this ship will have to face, but assuming the best how many crew can we cut. The fact so many Burkes have only one CIWS weapon is another sign of that kind of thinking – one works perfectly fine in an optimized test vs the lowest threat missile drone we have so why worry.
The eye opening part (to those who have forgotten such things) is the sheer destructiveness of artillery. From a Washington Post article quoting Gen. Robert Scales (Ret.),
Delete"July 2014 Battle of Zelenopillya, in which a single Russian artillery “fire strike” almost destroyed two Ukrainian mechanized battalions in a few minutes."
We are so focused on precision, data, and avoidance of collateral damage that we've forgotten what good old fashioned area bombardment will do.
It should also be eye-opening that artillery could so easily wipe out mechanized battalions when we're moving towards "jeep" based light infantry units - they won't last 10 seconds against artillery!
More from the article,
Delete"The Ukrainian experience serves as a deadly analogue for what might happen to U.S. artillery should we fight the Russians or a Russian surrogate. New Russian firepower systems now outrange ours by a third or more. They have improved on our steel-rain technology by developing a new generation of bomblet munitions that are filled with thermobaric explosives. These munitions generate an intense blast wave of exploding gases that are far more lethal than conventional explosives. A single volley of Russian thermobaric steel rain delivered by a single heavy-rocket-launcher battalion will annihilate anything within an area of about 350 acres."
"is the sheer destructiveness of artillery."
DeleteThe sheer destructiveness of artillery that is massed and faces no risk at all of counter battery fire or air attack is in fact parked in Russia with effective impunity.
The Ukrainian military was hardly a peer enemy the Czar's army after years of $100 per barrel oil prices.
Is the 'Highway of death' (Iraq) a good indicator of what US air power can always do or just what it can do massed and unopposed? If am I not mistaken US artillery in similar circumstances delivered very much the same results to units of the Iraqi army
The Ukrainians were static but not dug in, and had failed to deal with Russian drone surveillance. They certainly were not going to escalate even if they realized Russian artillery was massing so close. In every possible way the Russians had the advantage of intl and the freedom to use their artillery as they chose w/o risk.
No doubt the Russians enjoyed every advantage. The point is that they had artillery and it was highly effective. Further, they're continuing to invest in and develop ever more effective artillery and munitions. In contrast, the US has abandoned cluster munitions, is not pursuing thermobarics, as far as I know, is shedding artillery and tanks from the Marine Corps, is reducing numbers of heavy mortars, is failing to develop self-propelled artillery, and is moving to a light infantry system as opposed to heavy APCs for transport. We're becoming more vulnerable to artillery, not less, and we're becoming less effective in our own artillery. The US vision of light infantry flitting about the battlefield is one that will result in massive casualties.
DeleteThermobarics are very nasty and some are getting close to the lower end of tactical nukes without the radiation. Might be interesting to see what potential they have against ships in more detail. I'm not sure how hardened ships are these days against surface blast effects and I can guess what the testing for this has been like recently. Certainly it would a nasty mess of an amphibious landing.
Delete"The Ukrainian experience serves as a deadly analogue for what might happen to U.S. artillery should we fight the Russians or a Russian surrogate. New Russian firepower systems now outrange ours by a third or more. They have improved on our steel-rain technology by developing a new generation of bomblet munitions that are filled with thermobaric explosives. These munitions generate an intense blast wave of exploding gases that are far more lethal than conventional explosives. A single volley of Russian thermobaric steel rain delivered by a single heavy-rocket-launcher battalion will annihilate anything within an area of about 350 acres."
DeleteThis is one of my overarching points - that all the data in the world is useless without the firepower to take advantage of it and that firepower makes up for a LOT of missing data. The old fashioned area bombardment doesn't require much data but is highly effective!