Flower Class Corvette

The Flower class corvette was the epitome of a single purpose vessel (to be fair, most ships were in WWII).  It was designed and built to provide coastal convoy escort, specifically, anti-U-boat protection although it later proved adaptable to open ocean convoy escort thanks to its impressive range for its size.  While not designed or intended to hunt and kill U-boats, the class nevertheless managed to sink some fifty U-boats. 
 
 
Design Concept
 
It’s important to understand the ship’s intended role.  It was a convoy ASW escort.  Its responsibility was to deliver convoy ships not sink U-boats.  In other words, was designed to ensure that convoy ships arrived safely.  It was not designed to go hunt and kill U-boats.  The designers recognized that a mission kill, meaning forcing a U-boat to break off an attack, was just as good as a kill in that it delivered convoy ships safely to port.  Thus, the designers, wisely, didn’t try to load every known ASW weapon and sensor onto the ship.  That would have increased the size, cost, and complexity of the ship resulting in far fewer vessels being built which would have defeated the purpose of the class.  It is vitally important to recognize this concept:  greater individual ship capability would have negatively impacted the overarching goal of getting convoys safely to port.  We have completely lost sight of this balance between mission intent and individual ship design.  By insisting on building uber-capable Burkes (to the dubious extent that they still are) we’ve been forced to give up building true destroyers, frigates, and corvettes thus hurting our overall naval capability.
 

 
Another vital consideration for the designers was that trying to fit the ultimate, top-of-the-line ASW gear on every ship would have resulted in ASW equipment shortages for every other ship class.  In a time of war, resources (meaning weapons and sensors) are limited.  Maximum ASW fits for Flower class ships would have been a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul.  We have completely lost sight of this concept today.  By only building high end Burkes we have ensured that we will be unable to outfit any other ship type (of which we have none!) in a time of war.
 
 
Design Specifics
 

• ASW fit sufficient for its task but no more than that which contributed to its affordability
• Buildable at small shipyards
• Affordable in large numbers (394 ships built)
• Good range at 3,500 nm at its cruising speed of 12 kts;  compare to a Burke with a range of 4,400 nm at its cruising speed of 20 kts
• Commercial machinery operable by reserve and merchant sailors
• Sufficient speed (16 kts) for its purpose
• Built to the minimum requirements not the maximum

 
What would a modern Flower class ship look like?  In other words, what would a modern, low end, affordable in numbers, minimally capable ASW corvette look like without advanced radars, high speed, helo hangar/flight deck, dozens of VLS, etc. look like?  Well, here’s a few characteristics:
 

• Moderate stealth shaping (no exotic coatings)
• 1x 76 mm Super Rapid STRALES/DART
• 2x Mk32 Triple Torpedo Launchers
• 2x RBU
• VDS
• Hull mounted, small, multi-frequency sonar
• SQR-20 Multi-function towed array
• Acoustic isolation
• Low end radar
• 18 kt top speed
• 5,000 nm range
• 1x CIWS/SeaRAM/RAM

 
Discussion
 
The Flower class was built not to kill submarines (though they managed to kill some fifty U-boats!) but to accomplish a mission which was the safe delivery of merchant ships to port and it filled that purpose admirably.  Given the mission, the designers recognized that a mission kill was just as good as an actual kill and cost a lot less money thus allowing the class to be built in large numbers across numerous yards.  The large numbers of vessels contributed to the mission success.  Mere presence achieved mission kills since submarines will go far out their way to avoid detection and this occurs whether the surface ship even knows the submarine is present or not.  In other words, presence equals mission kill which makes simple presence (numbers) a weapon in itself!  We need to re-learn those design lessons and re-embrace the low end, single purpose ship suitably updated and adapted to modern warfare. 

Surface Ship Aviation

It has been some 80+ years since WWII and in that time we have seen some truly remarkable advances in tank design, aircraft design, missile development, sensors, etc.  One would think that ship design would have advanced at least as much and yet this is clearly not the case.  Not only has ship design not advanced, in many respects it has regressed.  Armor, weapon density, survivability, redundancy, endurance, sailing range, etc. have all regressed.  Well, at least we can say that surface ship aviation has advanced with the development of the helicopter … right?  Or has it?  Let’s look.
 
As a reminder, WWII US cruisers typically carried four seaplanes operated from two catapults and recovered with one or two cranes.  The seaplanes they used included, primarily, the OS2U Kingfisher and, at other times in the war, the Curtis SC-1 Seahawk and Curtis SOC Seagull.  Today, Burke class destroyers Flt IIa and beyond carry one SH-60 type helo (theoretically capable of two but never done, as far as I know) and provision for a small Fire Scout type UAV which have rarely been used and are being phased out (see, “Fire Scout Status”).  Flt I/II Burkes, have no hangar and carry no helos.  The Constellation class carries one SH-60 type helo and one Fire Scout type UAV.  The LCS carries one SH-60 type helo and one Fire Scout or smaller UAV.
 
 
Aircraft
 
Just as the value of an aircraft carrier is wholly dependent on the size and abilities of the air wing, so too is the surface ship aviation value dependent on the aircraft they carry.  Following is a comparison of the primary aircraft from WWII surface ships and today’s surface ships.

OS2U Kingfisher

Discussion

 
The main function of ship’s aviation both in WWII and today is scouting/targeting.  In WWII, ship’s planes, with a few hundred miles of search radius and an enemy ship speed of advance of only 30 kts maximum, a ship/scout could ensure the ship’s safety for the better part of a day.  Today, with enemy weapons having a speed of advance of several hundred miles per hour or more, long range searches are more critical than ever and yet today’s shipboard aircraft have around half the range of WWII aircraft.  Does that make sense?  What ship designer thought, “Hey, let’s cut the range of our shipboard aviation in half and go with that.”  and everyone agreed with him instead of laughing him out of a job?
 
The other notable regression is in the number of embarked aircraft.  A WWII cruiser carried four aircraft.  Today’s ships carry one full size helo and a small UAV.  Quite a drop!  Admittedly, a WWII cruiser is a bit bigger than even a Burke but the WWII cruiser also didn’t have the 100 ft flight deck and enormous hangar that a Burke has.  Approximately one third of a Burke’s total length is devoted to aviation.  WWII ships devoted almost no length to aviation.  Catapults were placed wherever there was a small amount of room available, including on top of gun turrets!  

The one area where an argument can be made that aircraft have significantly improved is anti-submarine warfare (ASW).  Helos have proven quite useful and effective at this thanks to sonobuoys, dipping sonar, and air-dropped torpedoes.  Unfortunately, the reduction in number of embarked aircraft have rendered the ASW helo only marginally useful unless several ships can pool their aircraft.  As the saying goes, if you have one helo, you have none.  This is recognition of the very high maintenance demands of helos and their inability to maintain a high readiness rate.
 
So, while ASW helos are theoretically significantly improved, the reality of reduced numbers and readiness rates have rendered any theoretical improvement only marginally useful.
 
As with so many other aspects of ship design, today’s surface ship aviation capabilities have not significantly improved and have, in many ways, regressed.  Today’s ships carry fewer (half or less) aircraft with significantly shorter ranges.  
 
How can we address the shortcomings in surface ship aviation?  We have, potentially two possible alternatives to today’s aviation problems:
 
1. Revert to shipboard seaplanes.  With modern engines, enhanced aerodynamic designs, stealth shaping, etc., we should be able to design a ship’s seaplane with range in excess of a thousand miles and a reasonable degree of stealth for survivability and the ability to scout without being instantly detected.  Four (to use the historical number) such aircraft would go a long ways towards providing ships with effective situational awareness and target detection.
 
2. UAVs.  We’ve discussed the use of small, stealthy UAVs for shipboard surveillance many times.  Operated by the dozens at a time, small UAVs can be quite effective while representing little financial risk if some are lost (see, “UAV’s – Numbers Matter”).

USS Massachusetts vs. Jean Bart

One of the lesser known engagements of WWII involved the gun duel between the US battleship USS Massachusetts and the French battleship Jean Bart.  The allies wanted to deny the use of the French battleship to the enemy and executed an attack by a small naval force.  Here’s a brief summary of the engagement.
 

At about 0700, as the Massachusetts, Wichita, and Tuscaloosa were preparing to engage French shore batteries, Tuscaloosa approached the entrance to Casablanca Harbor and reported that her scout plane was being fired upon, two French aircraft were closing, and two submarines were standing out from the harbor.
 
The cruiser subsequently shot down one of the French aircraft. The formidable French shore battery known as El Hank (four 8-inch guns) opened fire and straddled Massachusetts with its first salvo.
 
The unfinished and immobile French battleship Jean Bart opened fire with her operable forward quad 15-inch turret from pierside in Casablanca Harbor and hit a couple hundred yards from Massachusetts. Massachusetts received the “play ball” code at 0704, and she and Tuscaloosa concentrated their fire on Jean Bart. Massachusetts fired nine full 16-inch gun salvos (9 x 9 = 81 rounds) and hit Jean Bart five times within 16 minutes. The first shell hit in an empty magazine.
 
The last shell to hit glanced off the number 1 turret’s armor and bounced into the city, apparently without exploding, as it later became a souvenir at French navy headquarters. The hit, however, jammed the drive train of the turret and put Jean Bart’s main battery out of action for eight hours. Jean Bart’s 15-inch guns had sufficient range to reach the landing area at Fedala, but Massachusetts’s quick action eliminated that threat. El Hank, however, was not easily silenced and would dog U.S. ships all day, despite hundreds of rounds fired its way.[1]
 
The French warship able to fire just seven rounds at the U.S. battlewagon before the turret rotating mechanism jammed. USS Massachusetts‘ heavy 16-inch projectiles caused significant damage to the Jean Bart, although few actually exploded because they had been fitted with fuses manufactured a generation earlier. Had they had exploded; it is likely Jean Bart would have been crippled.[2]

This action again demonstrates multiple lessons such as the value of concentrated firepower, armor, etc.  I won’t belabor those as we’ve covered them many times.  Instead, I’d like to focus on one aspect of this action that jumps out and that is the concept of risk and reward.
 

USS Massachusetts

Jean Bart post WWII - note the unique 4-gun turrets

 
Risk/Reward – There is no avoiding the fact that risk and reward go hand-in-hand in combat.  People and equipment must be exposed to risk in order to accomplish anything worthwhile.  We’ve forgotten this and have come to believe that we can conduct wars without risking anything. 
 
For example, the idea of sending a ship to conduct a one-on-one duel with another ship that is supported by land batteries, is highly risky and not something we’d even consider today.
 
The corollary to risk/reward this is that losses will occur and we have to be willing to accept them and be able to absorb them.  This is the polar opposite of today’s military philosophy.  Today, we’re building staggeringly expensive ships and aircraft that we are loathe to risk because we can’t absorb their loss and can’t replace them in any useful time frame.  This risk aversion means we can’t accomplish anything worthwhile.  We have expensed ourselves into an almost unwinnable position.
 
We need to stop building ‘unriskable’, irreplaceable assets and return to simpler, single function assets that can be produced quickly and in quantity and that we’re willing to send in harm’s way.
 
 
 
_____________________________

 
[1]Rebellion Research website, “Operation Torch : The Naval Battle Of Casablanca, 8–10 November 1942”, Admiral Samuel J. Cox, USN, 17-Oct-2021,
https://www.rebellionresearch.com/operation-torch
 
[2]The National Interest website, “Navy Battleship Massachusetts vs. France’s Battleship Jean Bart: Who Won?”, Peter Suciu, 15-Jan-2024,
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/navy-battleship-massachusetts-vs-frances-battleship-jean-bart-who-won-208607

Carrier Scouting

ComNavOps constantly harps on targeting (see, “Weapons Don’t Matter”).  As I always say, a million mile missile is useless with ten mile targeting.  Closely related to targeting is scouting.  You want to know where the threat is and is not.  In a sense, targeting is a subset of scouting; the final ‘phase’ of scouting before the strike. 
 
Unlike targeting which is purely offensive, scouting supports both offense and defense.  If you know where the threat is, you can prepare your defenses accordingly.  Scouting provides the commander with situational awareness and, as such, it is just as important to know where the enemy isn’t as where he is.
 
Let’s look a bit closer at carrier group scouting.  As always, we begin with historical examples.
 
 
WWII
 
Many of us don’t realize that the standard operating procedure of American carrier groups in WWII was to send a dozen or so scout planes (generally SBD Dauntless aircraft) out at dawn every morning to search the surrounding seas for any sign of enemy ships or aircraft.
 

SBD Dauntless

In the book, Queen of the Flat-Tops, Lt.Cmdr. Mort Seligman, executive officer of the Lexington (CV-2) had this to say about scouting: 

“We are under a handicap out here.  The limited range of our scouts makes it necessary for us to be forever on our toes.  If we want to find out what the enemy is doing we’ve got to move up to within easy range of his land-based aircraft to find out.
 
“On the other hand, the Japanese, by using these 3000-mile Kawanishi [flying] boats, can see a lot farther than we can.  They range out over the ocean and watch every movement within some 1,000 miles of their bases.  There’s little we do in daylight that they can’t know about.  It costs them a plane every so often because we shoot them down every time we come across them.  But with these clouds out here this isn’t always possible because even though we know they are there we can’t always find them.
 
Once their day patrols have come out and they know their waters are clear for 500 miles around, they can relax.  Even if they find us they have time to bring up air defenses before we can get in our poke.  That limits our attacks almost to early morning only after an all-night fast approach.  And it makes it very difficult for us to gain the advantage of the element of surprise which is a much more important factor in war than most people realize.”[1]

Lt.Cmdr. Seligman succinctly defines both the problem and solutions for the carrier group:
 

• Problem:  Our carrier scouts were shorter range than the Japanese land based scouts.


• Solution:  Seek out and destroy the enemy’s scout planes (counter-scouting) and conduct high speed, night run-ins to the target to launch dawn strikes before the enemy can get their scouts out and alert their defenses.

 
Of course, in the open ocean, out of range of land-based scouts, the enemy naval forces had the same scout range limitations we did and the scouting contest was even;  both sides had an equal chance of finding the other first.
 
Prior (or in addition) to carriers, one of the functions of cruisers was to operate floatplanes to conduct scouting.  The Brooklyn class cruiser, for example, operated four floatplanes using a pair of stern catapults and a recovery crane.
 
That summarizes the issue for WWII surface and carrier groups but how does the issue translate to modern times?
 
 
Today
 
The same general issue and constraints apply today with the carrier at, perhaps, a somewhat worse disadvantage. Let’s consider some aspects of modern naval scouting.
 
Scout Planes – Part of the problem is that we have no carrier scout aircraft.  The E-2 Hawkeye is most emphatically not a scout aircraft and they are never deployed too far from the protection of the carrier.  We lack a dedicated scout aircraft with great range and great sensors (passive and active).  Instead, we would have to use F-18 Hornets as scouts and the Hornet simply hasn’t got the range (or sensors) to be an effective scout.  The F-35C offers a slight improvement in range and survivability but is still not an effective broad area maritime scout.
 
Conversely, China has very long range, land-based bombers, maritime patrol aircraft, and UAVs that can serve the scout function, just as Japan did in WWII.
 
Sensors – Enemy scout assets include land-based, very long range aircraft, satellites, UAVs, etc. which, in the aggregate, offer potentially multi-thousand mile scouting as compared to our few hundred mile range carrier scouting capability.  Of course, we also have the possibility of using satellites and UAVs as scouts but given that we’ll be operating far closer to China than to any US bases, we’ll be much more limited in the degree of scouting support we can expect.
 
Strike Range – WWII carriers only had to scout a couple hundred miles out to be assured of safety since that was the limit of carrier aircraft strike range.  Today, cruise and ballistic missiles have extended the potential strike range – and, hence, scouting range requirement - to thousands of miles.
 
Counter-Scouting – One of the F-14 Tomcat’s roles was counter-scouting.  Their job was to eliminate the Soviet Tu-95 Bears before they could find our carriers.  Counter-scouting, today, includes countering satellites, submarine surveillance, over-the-horizon radars, SOSUS-type listening arrays, aircraft, etc.  This can no longer be done just by the carrier’s organic assets.  For example, countering satellites is a strategic responsibility outside the carrier’s capability (barring ship launched anti-satellite missiles).  Countering sea bed listening arrays is, again, a strategic responsibility.
 
 
Conclusion
 
While we may optimistically hope that we can get land-based scouting support, the reality is that our nearest source of scout aircraft in the Pacific theater will be Guam or some such base that is thousands of miles from likely carrier operating areas and that makes any scouting support sporadic, at best, and utterly ineffective, more likely.  Our carriers need an organic scout aircraft that is available whenever and wherever needed
 
Night, and the corresponding dawn search from WWII, is no longer sufficient given that darkness is no longer the ‘shield’ it once was.  We need to be able to scout 24 hours a day and, again, land-based scouts simply cannot provide that capability on a sustained basis.
 
Interestingly, the F-35C could serve as an effective scout plane if it were given a dedicated set of effective passive and active sensors.  The F-35C has a useful degree of stealth, though not up to modern combat standards, and this would allow it to conduct scouting missions survivably and with a fair chance of not being spotted, in turn.
 
The F-35C can also effectively perform the counter-scout role against non-combat aircraft and would even have a chance against combat stealth aircraft, though not dominantly so.
 
It’s clear to see that counter-scouting must extend many hundreds of miles in all directions, on a continuous basis.  This last part is vital.  Given the speed of modern aircraft, it is no longer sufficient to scout/clear an area once a day.  We must have nearly continuous coverage.  An enemy scouting asset can appear far too quickly and cover far too much area to assume an area once cleared will stay clear of enemy scouting assets.  This suggests a heavy reliance on long endurance UAVs.  Ideally, we’d have long endurance, stealthy, UAVs operated by the dozens from a dedicated UAV carrier (a converted merchant ship).
 
The Navy has to start getting serious about combat instead of just being focused on new hulls.  We need to focus on mine warfare, mine countermeasures, logistics, large caliber naval gun support, long range fighters, small ASW ships, close in defensive AAW weapons, and scouting  …  you know, all the things that aren’t shiny and sexy but that win wars.
 
 
 
 
________________________________

 
[1]Johnston, Stanley, Queen of the Flat-Tops, Bantam Books, 1942, ISBN: 0-553-24264-4, p.130

US Submarine Losses in the Pacific

I generally avoid simply repeating information from other sources but I occasionally make an exception for truly amazing works.  One such is this link[1] to a brief summary of the numbers and causes of US submarine losses in WWII.  The Navy lost 52 submarines, almost all of them in the Pacific.  Amazingly, only one was lost in the open ocean of the central Pacific.  The rest were lost near land.

 

Below is a map showing the location of each loss.

 

Please follow the link and check out the site.  You’ll find it fascinating and informative.

 

 

Here’s a few open questions you might want to ponder or comment on:

 

• What does this suggest about future submarine actions against the Chinese?  
• What does this suggest about likely operating areas in future actions?
• What does this suggest about mid-ocean enemy submarine threats?
• What does this suggest about submarine support and basing requirements?
• What does this suggest about where our ASW resources should go in a war with China and how will we support and protect those resources?
• What does this suggest about the number of submarines we’ll need to prosecute a war relative to the number of submarines we have or are capable of building (2 per year)?

 

 

 

______________________________

 

[1]http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/SubLosses/SS_losses-Intro.html

Book Review – “United States Navy Destroyers of World War II”

We haven’t done a book review in a while so let’s do one!

 

The Fletcher class destroyer was the iconic destroyer of WWII but have you wondered why?  Why did it become an icon?  What characteristics made it so successful?  How did it evolve?

 

John C. Reilly, Jr.’s book, “United States Navy Destroyers of World War II”, answers these questions and many more.  As the name suggests, the book is an exploration of the pre-war evolution of US destroyers which culminated in the Fletcher class and its successors the Sumner and Gearing classes.

 

The book is soft-covered (there is a much more expensive hard cover version available) in an 8-1/2 x 11 inch format which provides ample area for the over 200 b&w photos, most of them quite close up and revealing all manner of detail about equipment.  Each photo is accompanied by detailed captions explaining what you’re seeing.

 

The book begins with a brief history of the beginnings of destroyers and then examines the evolution through the Farragut, Porter, Benham, Sims, Benson, and Gleaves classes and then, of course, the Fletchers along with the following Sumner and Gearing classes.  It is a treat and highly informative to flip through the pages and see the visual evolution of the classes as the form of the Fletcher becomes more and more evident with each succeeding class.

 

Of intense interest are the descriptions of the debates and considerations that went into each succeeding design and how real world experience fed back into the evolutionary process.  The role of the General Board and BuShips in developing designs really stands out and is made all the more emphatic when compared to the absence of any guiding design authority today and the almost random nature of today’s ship designs.

 

A chapter on anti-aircraft (AA) roles, evolution, and impact on tactics and ship design is utterly fascinating.  Diagrams of various AA projectiles is most illuminating.  Passages such as,

 

On 12 June [1940] the General Board forwarded a memorandum to CNO.  This summarized fleet AA firing of 1939-40 and concluded that ‘the firing is generally ineffective, that a large amount of ammunition is expended in obtaining only occasional effective hits, and that anti-aircraft gunnery – as at present developed – does not provide reasonable security against air attack.’[1]

 

emphasize the degree of testing and honesty about results that is sorely lacking today (not withstanding the Navy's pre-war torpedo testing fiasco!).

 

Additional topics such as the development of radar, the role of the torpedo, the rationale for armor, the shift in focus from anti-surface to anti-air, the importance of topside weight, the development of the 5” gun, and more are all detailed through the discussions of the development of the various classes.

 

I look at the development and evolution of the destroyer and can’t help but be impressed by the logic and common sense as well as the feedback of real world experience that inexorably led to the ultimate destroyer, the Fletcher class.  Every new design/class along the way built on the preceding class and represented a marked and steady improvement.  In contrast, we seem to have no steady development and improvement with today’s ship classes.  Indeed, each new design/class seems almost worse than the preceding one!

 

This book is a treat and a feast for the eyes and the mind and I highly recommend it.  A reader will come away with a detailed understanding of ship design, ship evolution, the role of equipment in the development of tactics, and many more aspects of ship development, in general, and destroyer development, in particular.

 

 

 

 

Disclaimer:  I have absolutely no connection, whatsoever, with the author, the book, or the publisher.  As a point of interest, I picked this book up decades ago for the price of $9.95. I shudder to think what inflation has done to the price!

 

 

_____________________________________

 

[1]John C. Reilly, Jr., “United States Navy Destroyers of World War II”, Blandford Press, 1983, ISBN: 0 7132 1026 8

Battleship Delivery

Here’s a quick, fun item …

 

How many battleships did the US build during WWII?  Several, maybe a dozen?  This may shock you but the answer is zero.  We didn’t produce a single battleship during WWII.

 

What???  That can’t be true!  We built the North Carolina, South Dakota, and Iowa classes, right?  Wrong!  Only 8 battleships were commissioned during WWII and all of them began building (laid down) before the war started.  In other words, we were unable to start and finish a single battleship during the war.

 

Following is a list of the BBs commissioned during the war.  Note that they were all laid down pre-war.

 

 

	Laid Down	Commissioned
South Dakota	5-Jul-1939	20-Mar-1942
Indiana	20-Sep-1939	30-Apr-1942
Massachusetts	20-Jul-1939	12-May-1942
Alabama	1-Feb-1940	16-Aug-1942
Iowa	27-Jun-1940	22-Feb-1943
New Jersey	16-Sep-1940	23-May-1943
Missouri	6-Jan-1941	11-Jun-1944
Wisconsin	25-Jan-1941	16-Apr-1944

 

 

 

We only started (laid down) 2 battleships (Illinois and Kentucky) during the war.  Neither was finished and both wound up being scrapped prior to completion when the war ended.

 

In contrast, 19 fleet carriers commissioned during WWII and 16 of those were laid down during the war.

 

No particular point to this post, just a fun fact!

Atlanta/Juneau Anti-Aircraft Cruiser

The WWII Atlanta/Juneau classes of anti-aircraft (AA) cruisers were a fascinating development.  In the initial design discussions, the ships were intended as flotilla leaders but they were quickly optimized for the anti-aircraft role as war established the primacy of aircraft.  Based on additional combat experience, the initial Atlanta class was further optimized as the follow on Juneau class.

 

USS Juneau, CL-119

Typical later war weapon fits are listed in the table below.

 

 

	5”/38 dual	40 mm quad	40 mm dual	20 mm dual	20 mm single
Atlanta Class	6 (12 barrels)		8 (16 barrels)		16 (16 barrels)
Juneau Class	6 (12 barrels)	6 (24 barrels)	4 (8 barrels)	8 (16 barrels)

 

 

Atlanta class had 30 gun mounts with a total of 44 gun barrels of various types.

Juneau class had 24 gun mounts with a total of 60 gun barrels of various types.

 

The Atlanta/Juneau classes were extremely efficient and effective anti-aircraft platforms, for the time.  Battleships, of course, had far larger anti-aircraft weapon fits but they were extremely expensive and we only had a handful of those ships.  The AA cruisers offered a cheaper, yet still effective, supplement to the battleships.

 

The anti-aircraft cruisers had what was, for the time period, a complete fit of long range (5”), medium range (40 mm), and close in (20 mm) weapons providing total coverage and, most importantly, they had large numbers of each.

 

USS Spokane, CL-120

Atlanta/Juneau and Burke Comparison

 

Weapon Distribution – In comparison to the Atlanta/Juneau weapon densities noted above, a modern Burke has just three defensive mounts (2x VLS clusters, 1x CIWS).  Admittedly, a direct comparison of ‘mounts’ is meaningless but it does offer an impression of the density of weapon mounts on a WWII warship versus today’s barely armed ships.  The number of mounts is meaningful.  A single hit on one of the Burke’s two VLS clusters would eliminate 1/3 or 2/3 of the ship’s total weapons, depending on whether the forward or aft cluster was hit, and just two hits could eliminate the ship’s entire weaponry.  This is unconscionable in a warship design.

 

More importantly, the WWII ships had a balanced and heavy distribution of long, medium, and short range defensive weapons.  Contrast this to Burkes which have good fits of long (Standard) and medium (ESSM) range weapons but almost no short range (CIWS) weapons – a shocking deficiency for an anti-aircraft ship.

 

Armor – The Atlanta/Juneau classes had armor appropriate for their size with nearly 4” side armor and 1-3/4” deck and turret armor. 

 

As in the larger cruisers, the belt armor was split into a wide band over machinery spaces with narrower underwater sections fore and aft over magazines.  The inner bottom extended up the side to the (flat) protective deck.  Magazines would be separated from the ship’s side by fuel oil aft and by a wiring passage or cofferdam forward.[1, p.233]

 

In contrast, the Burke class has only scattered Kevlar spall liner protection.  There may be some armor surrounding the below deck VLS space, presumably intended not as protective armor but to direct VLS explosions upward rather than inward.  I’ve been unable to verify this.

 

The obvious observation is that the WWII ships were built to stand and fight and were intended to be able to fight hurt, stay in the fight, and remain effective for as long as possible.  Burkes are bordering on one-hit mission kills, if not outright sinkings, and have little hope of staying in a fight and fighting hurt.  In fact, the experience of the Port Royal Aegis cruiser grounding strongly suggests that the radar array and VLS alignments are so delicate that a single low intensity vibration (explosion shock … or gentle grounding) is enough to render the equipment unusable.  See, “Port Royal Grounding Lessons”.

 

Survivability – As noted, both the presence of significant armor and the weapons density offered a much greater chance of ship survival than the Burke’s nearly non-existent armor and only three weapon mounts.  The sheer number of weapon mounts, fire control directors, and local backups on the WWII cruisers guaranteed that the ship could continue fighting effectively even after absorbing multiple hits.  In contrast, a single hit on either of the Burke’s VLS clusters will likely render the entire cluster unusable resulting in the instantaneous loss of 1/3 or 2/3 of the ship’s weapons, depending on whether the forward or aft cluster was hit.

 

On a related note, testing the effects of a typical anti-ship cruise missile on a VLS cluster is one of the many realistic tests the Navy desperately needs to conduct to get a handle on the true combat-worthiness of today’s ship designs.

 

Conceptual Design – The AA cruisers were the epitome of a focused, single function ship.  They were intended to shoot down aircraft and that was all.  As the war progressed, extraneous equipment such as depth charges, sonar, and torpedo tubes were generally removed and replaced with additional guns.  In comparison, the Burkes are the epitome of do-everything design with the attendant corollaries of do nothing well and cost a lot.  In a sense, the Burkes are the epitome of a failed and flawed, unfocused design philosophy.

 

 

Conceptual Anti-Aircraft Ship

 

Let’s take the lessons of the Atlanta/Juneau anti-aircraft cruiser and apply them to a modern, conceptual anti-aircraft ship design and see what we get.

 

First, what is the job of an anti-aircraft ship?  This is not a trick question.  The answer is simple … it’s anti-air warfare!  It’s not anti-submarine.  It’s not land attack or deep strike.  It’s not helo operations.  It’s not amphibious attack or logistics or harbor tug.  It’s anti-air warfare.  Pure and simple.  One function.  Do it and do it exquisitely well.  Be optimized for it. 

 

With that single function focus firmly in mind, here’s the weapons and sensors such a ship would have:

 

• 4x 16-VLS clusters (disperse the risk) with 32 quad packed ESSM (128 total ESSM) plus 32 Standard
• 6x SeaRAM
• 8x CIWS
• 4” side and 2” deck armor[2]
• 2x main fire control radars (TRS-4D or similar)
• 4x backup fire control radars (SPQ-8B or similar)
• Electro-optical back up fire control systems

 

This conceptual design provides long, medium, and short range anti-air weapons and offers the ability to stand and fight, even when hurt.  It emphatically addresses the flaw (well, one of the flaws) in the Burke class which is the near total lack of close in defensive weapons.

 

There would be no flight deck and hangar as AAW does not require aviation capability.  On the Burke, for example, aviation facilities comprise a solid third of the ship’s length (!) and represent significant size, weight, and cost.

 

There would also be no hull mounted sonar, stern towed array sonar, or ASW function.  Eliminating those functions further reduces the size, weight, and cost of the ship.

 

Being physically smaller, the ship can’t help but be stealthier and some judicious shaping and repackaging (à la Visby) could make it even more stealthy which would make it more survivable and effective in its role.  You see how easy ship design should be?  All you have to do is pick a primary function, stick with it (and only it !), and the rest is easy.  But, I digress …

 

So, our conceptual anti-aircraft ship will be 2/3 the length of a Burke, have more weapons, and cost a third less!  What’s not to like?

 

 

 

___________________________________

 

[1]Friedman, Norman, “U.S. Cruisers, An Illustrated Design History”, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, Maryland, 1984

 

[2]Armor recommendation is for whatever a modern equivalent to WWII armor thicknesses would be.

Fletcher Program Lessons

The Fletcher class destroyers were numerous and highly successful.  We’ve noted various ship design elements that contributed to their success, such as the prevalence of their armor and density of their firepower.  Beyond that, however, there are additional, more general, lessons to be derived from their production and it’s those that we’ll look at today.

 

There is no better introduction to these lessons than the opening statement from the General Board about the Fletcher destroyer program,

 

The Board asked all concerned to think in terms of keeping displacement, and thus size, to ‘the practicable minimum in order that they may present minimum targets and that ratio of cost to number may be as great as possible.’ [1, p.80]

 

Right there … the very first statement from the Board sets a design philosophy that is the very antithesis of today’s programs.  The Board recognized that when prosecuting a war, numbers of ships were of critical importance and the way to achieve that was to keep size to the practical minimum. 

 

Consider the size of the Fletcher versus our current ‘small’ warship, the Constellation frigate:

 

 

	Fletcher	Constellation
Lenth, ft	376	496
Displacement, ton full load	2500	7300

 

 

We instantly see that the Constellation is 32% longer and 192% heavier for a ship, a frigate, that is supposedly smaller than a destroyer!  We built 175 Fletchers and are planning to build 20 Constellations.  That discrepancy in production numbers totally encapsulates the General Board’s concern about cost and numbers and we are violating the Board’s wisdom every time we begin a new shipbuilding program.  As a result, we are witnessing a non-stop decline in the number of ships in the fleet.

 

One could not ask for a more graphic example of the General Board’s concern.

 

If you’re going to fight a war, you need numbers.  The General Board knew this.  We’ve forgotten this most basic of requirements.

 

Now let’s look at other lessons offered by the Fletcher program.

 

 

Shipyards – Consider the following list of companies that built Fletchers during the war:

Federal Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, Kearny, New Jersey
Bath Iron Works, Bath, Maine
Boston Navy Yard
Charleston Navy Yard
Consolidated Steel Corporation, Orange, Texas
Gulf Shipbuilding Corporation, Chickasaw, Alabama
Bethlehem Steel Corporation, Staten Island, New York
Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation, San Francisco, California
Bethlehem Steel Company, San Pedro, California, Terminal Island
Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding Corporation, Seattle, Washington
Puget Sound Naval Shipyard

 

The lesson is blindingly obvious.  We don’t have enough shipyards.  During war, shipyards will not only have to provide new construction but will be overwhelmed with battle damage repair efforts.  We don’t have enough shipyards to do either task, let alone both simultaneously.

 

Destroyers Under Construction At Tacoma Yard

Standardized Design – The reason why we could have eleven shipyards all build Fletchers was because we had a standardized design.  With that, it was just a matter of distributing construction drawings to the yards.  Today, we keep changing the basic designs, non-stop, in an effort to insert a constant stream of new technology.  There’s nothing wrong with periodically inserting new technology but not on a continuous basis.  Save up changes and then occasionally do a technology insert.  Honestly, I doubt there’s even a reason to do a technology insert.  A much better approach is to occasionally design a new ship that can incorporate the backlog of new technologies.

 

 

Short Production Run – The reason we didn’t need radical new technology inserts during the Fletcher production run is that the run was short.  The entire production run lasted only two years!  You just can’t get too out of date in just two years.  Contrast that with the Burke production run which began in 1988, has lasted 34 years, and shows no sign of stopping!  The Navy trumpets that fact proudly when, in reality, it’s an embarrassment and indictment of our entire naval design and production system.

 

At the end of the Fletcher production run, we began the Sumner/Gearing programs which incorporated the lessons of the war.  The Fletcher’s short production run gave us the flexibility to design new destroyers that better met our needs.  Contrast that with the latest Burkes.  Because we’re unwilling to terminate the obsolete Burke design, we’re being forced to settle for sub-optimal radar outfits and performance in the new Flt III Burkes.  The WWII ship designers dealt with sub-optimal situations by designing a new class of ship.  Today, we accept and embrace sub-optimal because we’re too frightened (and incompetent!) to start a new class with a new design.  Even the concept art that has been floated showing the next generation destroyer shows what is, essentially, a Burke with a few tweaks.

 

 

Cost – We are far too focused on construction costs, today, and with good reason.  Our construction costs have ballooned because we’ve ignored all the lessons of wise and proper ship design.  This has led to runaway costs which then become the primary driver of ship design.  We should be designing to combat-requirements but, instead, we’re designing to business cases, cost constraints, and fear-induced conservatism.

 

WWII Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Harold Start, had this to say about the Fletcher ship costs,

 

He did not think individual ship costs were critical: ‘the best possible vessel should be designed without consideration of this relationship.’ [1, p.80]

 

 

Combat Performance – The Fletcher achieved armor, speed, firepower, and range all in a single design.  Today, we seem to believe that none of those are achievable individually, let alone as a group in a single design.  At best, we treat those criteria as a ‘pick one’ type of design limitation.  We’ve forgotten what we once routinely accomplished in ship design.  If we wanted, we could design a destroyer with 10,000 nm range, 35+ kt speed, multiple inches of armor, and more firepower than anything we have today and all in a Fletcher size ship.  We’ve just forgotten how.

 

 

 

Summary

 

The General Board of WWII knew exactly what they were doing when it came to warship design.  They didn’t hide this knowledge; it’s readily available for our enlightenment if only we’ll accept it and avail ourselves of it .. but, we steadfastly refuse.

 

Arguably, the most important of the various lessons is that of short production runs.  From that flows all manner of good program characteristics.  A two year production run does not allow for any significant obsolescence and, therefore, does not require that we build in a single iota of ‘future proofing’ or modular updating which are all the rage today.  Short production runs encourage (nay, demand!) continuous new classes of ships that can then incorporate technological upgrades – there’s your future-proofing!  With no need to overbuild for future considerations, costs and size are kept to a minimum.

 

We need to return to the wisdom of the General Board, acknowledge the lessons they offer, and put them into practice.  A 40 some year run of Burkes is an abomination and an acknowledgement that we don’t know our ship designs from a hole in the ground and that we have no clue how to run a successful ship program.

 

 

 

_________________________________________

 

[1]Reilly, Jr., John C., United States Navy Destroyers of World War II, Blandford Press, Dorset, UK, 1983, ISBN 0 7137 1026 8