Defensive Weapon Fits

Before the Navy embarks on their insane fantasy of arming amphibious and logistic ships with anti-ship cruise missiles and sending them out alone (distributed lethality) to sink fleets of Chinese warships, perhaps it would be better to start by arming them with a useful AAW defensive weapons fit.

 

For example, a WWII attack transport (APA) such as the Haskell class (455 ft long, 15,000 ton displacement) mounted:

 

• 1x 5"/38 dual-purpose gun
• 1x quad 40 mm gun
• 4x twin 40 mm guns
• 10x 20 mm guns

 

That’s 16 mounts with a total of 23 gun barrels of various calibers!

 

 

Compare that to today’s larger San Antonio (LPD) class (684 ft long,  25,300 ton displacement):

 

• 2x Rolling Airframe Missile (RAM) launchers (2x21 missiles)

 

The San Antonio is 68% larger displacement and has only 2 defensive weapon mounts!

 

Well, what about the mammothly larger America class LHA?  Surely that has many more weapon mounts, right?  The America (LHA) class (844 ft long, 45,000 ton displacement) AAW defensive mounts are:

 

• 2x Rolling Airframe Missile (RAM) launchers (2x21 missiles)
• 2x Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile launchers (16 missiles)
• 2x CIWS

 

The America is 2x-3x larger than the Haskell and has only 6 weapon mounts.  I know that a direct comparison of weapons from two different eras is meaningless but the point is the weapon density on the Haskells puts current ship designs to shame.  We built warships in WWII; now, build nearly defenseless cruise ships.

 

Alright, those are amphibious ships.  What about combat ships?

 

The Baltimore class heavy cruiser is crudely analogous to today’s Burke and mounted:

 

• 6x twin 5"/38 dual-purpose gun
• 12x quad 40 mm gun
• 24x 20 mm guns

 

That’s 42 mounts with a total of 84 gun barrels of various calibers!

 

Compare that to the Burke Flt IIA class:

 

• 1x 32-cell VLS
• 1x 64-cell VLS
• 1x CIWS

 

That’s 3 mounts.

 

Now, before anyone gets all worked up, I know there’s no way to directly compare a WWII gun system to a modern multi-cell missile system.  They’re just two different animals.  The salient point is the mount density relative to the size of the ship.  Even this is an imperfect comparison because the size of the mounts vary widely.

 

While a direct comparison between WWII weapons and today’s weapons is pointless, the overarching conclusion is inescapable:  WWII ships were built with a significantly greater weapon density.  We have lost sight of what the role of a WARship is today and how to design one.  Our ships are deployment cruise ships with weapons added almost as an afterthought. 

 

Rather than get caught up in a meaningless attempt to directly compare defensive weapon fits of WWII and now, let’s instead take a look the defensive weapon fits of our current surface ships compared to what we’ve learned from this blog about defensive requirements, all the while bearing in mind the mount density lesson from WWII. 

 

 

	Has a	Should Have
Nimitz
ESSM/Sea Sparrow	2	4
RAM/SeaRAM	2	7
CIWS	2	8
Ford
ESSM/Sea Sparrow	2	4
RAM/SeaRAM	2	7
CIWS	3	8
Zumwalt b
ESSM	? mounts, ?20? cells	? mounts, 20 cells
RAM/SeaRAM	0	6
CIWS	0	8
Ticonderoga
ESSM	2 mounts, ?30? cells	4 mounts, 30 cells
RAM/SeaRAM	0	6
CIWS	2	8
Burke, Flt IIA
ESSM	2 mounts, ?24? cells	4 mounts, 24 cells
RAM/SeaRAM	0	6
CIWS	1	8
LCS
ESSM	0	1 mount, 8 cells
RAM/SeaRAM	1	2
CIWS	0	4

 

 

^a The phrase ‘mounts’ refers to the number of VLS missile clusters.  Each cluster is a single missile mount and represents a single point of failure in the event of an enemy hit.  A single cluster, no matter how large, can be destroyed by a single hit.  It stands to reason that more mounts, spread out over the length of the ship, are less susceptible to damage.  This is simple dispersal of risk.  A Burke can only absorb two hits on its unarmored VLS clusters before being rendered BOTH OFFENSIVELY AND DEFENSIVELY INEFFECTIVE!  Two hits!

 

Compare this to a WWII cruiser/battleship with three heavily armored main mounts and several armored secondary mounts as well as dozens of defensive mounts, all scattered along the length and width of the ship.

 

^b For the Zumwalt, the concept of missile clusters doesn’t really apply since the unarmored VLS cells are dispersed around the periphery of the ship.  This is both good and bad since any single hit has a very high chance of destroying some VLS cells but, on the other hand, the number of cells affected by a single hit is limited.  Also, placing the VLS cells on the periphery of the ship almost assures that a hit will destroy several of the cells as opposed to placing the cells in a more centerline position.

 

 

There are, undoubtedly, going to be some people who look at the ‘Should Have’ column of the table and complain that the numbers are far too high, that the numbers simply aren’t realistic for modern ships.  These people are laboring under a constraining paradigm that they don’t even recognize as such.  I would remind those people of two things:

 

1.     WWII ships had a much greater density of defensive weapons.

2.     The cost – in money and ship’s space – for these extra weapons is miniscule compared to the construction cost of a new ship to replace the sunken ship – lost due to the penny wise, pound foolish lack of a some extra defensive weapons.

 

 

Some might also suggest that modern weapons, being more accurate, are not needed in large numbers like inaccurate WWII 5”/40mm/20mm AA fits.  On the face of it, this is appealing.  However, there are a couple of problems with this line of thought:

 

1.     No one knows that modern AAW weapons are actually more accurate.  In fact, the entire history of modern defensive systems strongly indicates otherwise.  The best, most successful set of data I can think of is the British in the Falklands and they only managed to achieve around a 25% success rate and even that rate was skewed by many of the targets being non-maneuvering, defenseless drones, for all practical purposes.

2.     In WWII, attacking aircraft generally attacked individual ships singly or in spaced out intervals despite their attempts to conduct simultaneous attacks.  Modern naval theory suggests the use of massed, simultaneous missile attacks.  So, even if one accepts the belief that modern defensive weapons have a higher accuracy, the massed attacks will require as many defensive weapons as possible to deal with the much greater numbers of simultaneous attacking missiles.

 

 

Conclusion

 

The rot of peace has eroded our design practices for WARships.  We’ve come to emphasize habitability for our glorified cruise ships rather than emphasizing weapons, armor, and sensors for combat. 

 

Our lax peacetime mentality has led us to believe that our ships will never take a hit and, therefore, our ship design philosophy has all but abandoned defensive AAW weapons.  The poster child for this is the Zumwalt with no AAW defensive weapons at all !!!!!

 

In a peer war, ALL ships will be subject to aerial attack.  Our WWII fathers knew this and armed even the logistic and amphibious ships accordingly.  We need to relearn those lessons and begin arming our ships for war, not for leisurely peacetime cruises.

 

Before we can even begin to contemplate idiotic ideas like distributed lethality, we need to arm our ships so that they at least have some chance of defending themselves.