Currently topping The Atlantic's "Most Popular" list is an article claiming "A Whole Age of Warfare Sank With the Moskva". Unfortunately, it bungles the history involved completely, to the point that you get an emergency Naval Gazing.
The author begins by talking about the Battle of Hampton Roads, ending the section "In one day, every wooden ship of the line of every naval power became immediately obsolete." This is clear nonsense. Hampton Roads gets a lot of press because it was the first clash between ironclads, but it was clear that the ironclad was on its way. Britain and France had both begun to build fleets of proper ironclad battleships (and not just coastal vessels like Monitor and Virginia) and events at Sinop and Kinburn had shown both the vulnerability of wooden warships and the durability of the ironclads. But we don't talk about Crimea, so that's all overlooked.
Then he turns to Pearl Harbor, and things get worse. "If the battle of the ironclads settled once and for all the wood-versus-iron debate, Japanese carrier-based aircraft settled the battleship-versus-carrier debate by sinking the cream of America’s battleship fleet in a single morning." I'm not sure what's most baffling here. The suggestion that there was a debate between wood and iron, or the idea that Pearl Harbor somehow settled the debate between battleship and carrier. Pearl Harbor is unique in scale and the fact that it happened to the United States and without warning, but it wasn't even the first time carrier-based planes had sunk anchored battleships. It's also worth noting that if the carriers had been in port, they would probably have fared quite a lot worse than the battleships did, as indeed they did under air attack in general. A better point to locate "the demise of the battleship" is three days later, when Force Z was sunk while alerted and at sea, although even then, battleships at sea proved surprisingly hard to sink through the end of war and played a valuable role through the early 50s.
All of this is leading up to the main point, questioning if Moskva's sinking is ushering in a new "age of warfare". To which I can only say that the late 60s called and want their theories back. Moskva was far from the first warship sunk by anti-ship missiles. That honor arguably belongs to HMS Egret, although the threat didn't receive wide public attention until the Israeli destroyer Eilat was sunk by anti-ship missiles in 1967. And the result at the time was a great deal of hand-wringing and claims that the surface ship was obsolete. But that was over half a century ago, and while ASMs had some subsequent success, navies have learned to deal with them. A modern warship is far less vulnerable to missile attack than its predecessors were 40 years ago thanks to systems like Aegis, and everything we know about Moskva points to her being sunk not because her defenses were overwhelmed by a new generation of extremely deadly missiles but because her defensive systems were turned off. It wouldn't be the first time that had happened, either. A more representative example is the USS Mason, attacked three separate times by anti-ship missiles in 2016, all of which either missed or were shot down.
The author then launches into a long discussion of the USMC's new "Force Design 2030", which involves the Marine Corps dispersing across the Pacific to launch missile attacks from small islands on Chinese warships. I have mixed feelings on it. On one hand, it is nice to see some part of the US military doing something that looks like a very serious attempt to fight in a new way. On the other, the way that they've chosen doesn't make a lot of sense. Maybe we're just cursed to screw up badly every time we try to do "Transformation". In particular, the supposed superiority of the "anti-platform" seems at odds with what the Chinese themselves are doing.
But then we come to the end, where the article completes the bingo card of bad historical analogies by bringing up the Maginot Line. While this is a byword for failed military solutions, it in fact did exactly what it was designed to do by forcing the Germans to go around it. The French plan was to defeat the Germans in Belgium and northwestern France, something they conspicuously failed to do for rather complicated reasons.
This article is an excellent example of Santayana's dictum that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", in this case with scare-mongering about the anti-ship missile. Making it even worse, the author is clearly trying to draw from history, but without taking the time to get deeper than a few well-worn and deeply-flawed tropes.
Comments
Just to check: is it really not failed one? Plenty of systems familiar to me (not military ones!) worked as designed but were a complete failure nevertheless because design was a failure.
But may it is more common in programming.
The whole plan failed, but the typical narrative is "the French thought that the Maginot Line would protect them, and didn't think about the Germans going around", which isn't what happened. It may well have been a bad plan, but it was at least a reasonable one instead of being stupid.
"Hey, we need a veteran to write an article about army things for us. Does anyone here know one?"
"Uhh, I know of one. His novels won a carnegie and he spent years in Afghanistan, so he must be an expert in all that stuff"
"Does he know about naval strategy?"
"Well his father is in my yacht club, so presumably"
Yeah, that's how it comes off. I thought of ending this post with a reminder that a military doesn't actually train that many people in understanding militaries, but couldn't think of a way to phrase it that wasn't a bit more confrontational than I wanted.
There is something amusing about implying that a ship being sunk by an antiship missile will usher in an unheralded chapter in naval warfare when the ship in question is covered in antiship missiles. That said I think the sinking does underscore how unforgiving modern naval combat can be, though I suppose in some ways the situation has been much the same since the advent of the submarine.
When I read this article on the Atlantic I just knew you were going to hate it! I thought the use of word "obsolete" was particularly ridiculous--the development of arms and armour has always been incremental and I struggle to think of any new technology which instantly made another obsolete. Repeating rifles (like the Spencer from the ACW for example) were a huge stop up from than a single shot (especially if you ignore the logistical challenges with ammunition). But even though having 5 times the volume of your enemies was a massive advance, it's not like the single shots were suddenly useless. Repeating rifles are so good now that I think it would be fair to say a Springfield is obsolete but it took years to refine the technology and tactics. I can't think of anything that happens overnight!
By the way, Bean, you likely saw this already as I am aware you read his blog, but Bret Devereaux provided a very similar rebuttal as yours in a twitter thread yesterday -- https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1528581923446181898
That is a really good point, and I wish I'd thought of it.
@James S
Someone pointing me to his twitter thread is how I found out about the article. I just thought that there was enough space between his version and what I wanted to see to write my own.
This argument that self propelled explosive weapons mean the large warship is obsolete isn't really dating back to the 1960s. It's really dating back to the invention of torpedo boats in the 1860s.
Meanwhile, the stereotype of the Maginot line reminds me of the same argument about the Great Wall of China.
"Oh the idiots. They built this huge wall and it didn't stop the Jurchen in the 1100s, the Mongols in the 1200s, the Manchu in the 1600s or the Japanese in the 1900s. What a waste of money."
I never thought about this, and just accepted the common myth, until I saw a documentary that was made in China, by Chinese. And while I know they are going to be biased, their arguments much more closely align with other facts. Namely that
It was never intended to stop a vast army every few hundred years.
It was intended to stop a few thousand raiders every couple of years who'd sack and burn towns and villages, a few hundred every couple of months who'd sack and burn farms, a dozen raiders every couple of weeks who'd rob and rape individuals.
This constant low level of raids meant there were hundreds of km of farmland along the borders with zero farms. And China wanted that land to be usable.
With the wall that area rapidly filled with productive, and taxable, farms. So the wall did its job. QED.
@doctorpat
my understanding is that it wasn't particularly good at stopping low level raids either, because the raiders would just bribe the gate guards.
People have also been yelling about how the fighting in Ukraine shows that modern man-portable ATGMs mean the end of the tank. (Meanwhile, the Ukrainians themselves - who presumably have a lot of information on just how effective modern ATGMs can be - keep asking for more tanks, please.) And while I haven't seen it (yet), I wouldn't be at all surprised to see people using the Russian failure to gain and exploit air superiority over Ukraine as a basis for similar arguments regarding manned aircraft. (Meanwhile, the Ukrainians themselves - who presumably have a lot of information on just how effective modern IADSs can be, or even just handing out tons and tons of MANPADS - keep asking for more aircraft, please.)
@cur, sure the wall wasn't a perfect barrier. Organised raiding groups could get through, but all the casual "what will we do this week?" type casual raids get demotivated. The evidence on the ground was that farming, which was previously kept far from the grazing lands, now expanded up to the wall.
@Philistine, I've definitely seen people arguing "the drones in the Ukraine prove that manned aircraft, especially the F35, are obsolete". At a wild guess, there is an actual argument here, not on military grounds, but just because of western attitudes to pilot losses. But public panic about pilot losses go out the window once a war changes from a remote intervention on the other side of the world, and becomes a war of national survival.
Would drones work if Russia had decent EW?
Doctorpat:
If you have an all-volunteer military then they knew the risk when they signed up but even so if the job can be done without putting anyone on our side at risk then why risk anyone?
Apparently the Moskva is a first, but a much more specific one- the first large warship to be sunk by a guided missile launched from shore.
HMS Glamorgan was hit by a truck-mounted Exocet in the Falklands but didn't sink, and the Yugoslavians sank a small Croatian vessel with an ATGM during the siege of Dubrovnik in 1991.
Yeah, that makes sense, and I just don't care. The missile doesn't care where it's launched from, at least not after the first minute or so of flight, and as a result, this is an interesting bit of trivia, and not a reason to rethink anything.
Not many large warships have been sunk since WWII so there's a good chance any event will be a first.
Bean I respect your judgment on military matters in general but not on the utility of large surface warships in particular. I think you are biased. : )
Yes, the argument about anti-ship missiles rendering large surface warships vulnerable is not a new one.
But it's a good one, and the Moskva is yet another piece of evidence in its favor.
Were there to be a WW3 between USA and China, the surface warships would all need to stay out of missile range or be sunk ignomiously like Force Z.
This is my central claim. Do you deny this?
I guess I'd follow up with "And missile range is long and getting longer, such that the overall utility of surface warships per dollar of investment is just not as high as it used to be. Ships should now be thought of as nothing more than vulnerable transports for land forces, air forces, and anti-ship missiles. Regrettably necessary in cases where we can't transport the relevant material by land or air, and cost-effective in regions outside the reach of enemy missiles. Unfortunately the navies of the world, and in particular the US navy, haven't fully adjusted to this reality yet (though they are definitely moving in this direction, hence why the Moskva is covered in ASMs and hence why US carriers are retooling to use aerial refueling drones and otherwise do their thing farther from shore.)"
Do you deny that?
Ramblings/justification to follow:
First of all, this is mostly just a priori. Wargame it out. See how much it costs to produce a carrier, or cruiser, or whatever, and see how many ASM systems you can purchase for the same $. Now imagine the ship gets within range of the ASM systems... [insert something about how the ship gets spotted] ... massive salvo ... yes, theoretically decoys could defeat a massive salvo but it seems likely that the arms race between missile sensors and decoys will generally and increasingly favor the missiles as technology improves.
But I think the historical track record (even excluding the Moskva?) bears this out.
Quantitatively, the situation is like in WW2 where even battlefleets were vulnerable to kamikaze attacks... except now the kamikazes have more range and a k/d ratio 100x larger, and also they are cheaper to produce and don't involve killing your own people. The balance of power between surface warships and [guided long-range cheap method of attacking them] has substantially shifted in favor of the latter, despite improvements in anti-aircraft/anti-missile defenses.
I'd be interested to see data on this actually. How many kamikaze sorties were there, and how many ships were sunk by kamikazes? My guess is that it's something like 100:1 ratio. Whereas the ratio for modern anti-ship missiles would be significantly more favorable AND the missiles have longer range and are relatively cheaper (in the important ways, maybe not in nominal terms due to inflation and military procurement bloat etc.)
Wikipedia says 38 US ships sunk by kamikazes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Shipssunkbykamikazeattack Is it plausible that there were 3800 Kamikaze attacks? Idk but there were at least 1000 off Okinowa alone IIRC.
Compare to anti ship cruise missiles. How many anti-ship cruise missile sorties have there been in the last 50 years? How many ships have been sunk by them? OK, so the k/d ratio isn't 100x larger, it's probably more like 10-30x larger. Still. And the Moskva is a big one too, if we adjust for tonnage the ratio looks more favorable to the missiles... most of the ships sunk by kamikazes were destroyers or landing ships...
I'd also like to see data on air sorties in ww2 compared to in recent decades. My recollection from what I know of Midway, Coral Sea, etc. is that it took something like 100 sorties per sunk ship during these clashes. Certainly more than 10, probably less than 1000. So, similar to kamikazes I guess. Yes, most of those sorties didn't result in the loss of the plane and pilot, but enough of them did... you probably had to be prepared to sacrifice at least 10 planes+pilots per enemy ship sunk, and the modern situation with anti ship missiles looks better than that PLUS the missiles are cheaper than a plane+pilot.
You can say "The Moskva was an anomaly, the Russians were incompetent" but that's pretty weak IMO, since you then go around and cite the Mason example even though the Houthis were presumably incompetent too (the article you link seems to say about as many missiles failed to hit their target due to lack of range as were successfully defended against! Also, where did Houthi rebels learn to operate anti-ship missiles?) Anyhow incompetence and missteps are a part of war, and should be planned for.
@Daniel Kokotajlo, there is an old study "An Analysis of the Historical Effectiveness of Anti-Ship Cruise Missiles in Littoral Warfare" by John C Schulte, student at the US Naval Postgraduate School, 1994. Was used by Capt. Wayne Hughes as a source in his "Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat" book, which gets recommended a lot for civilians like me who want to learn more. The study itself got declassified a decade or so back and can be found online.
However, it is getting quite old. Can anyone suggest a more up to date paper / book?
@Daniel
That's an interesting perspective, and a proper answer will have to wait for a time when I didn't just get back from a long party at David Friedman's house. The short answer is that there are a lot of different scenarios, and a lot of different trends pushing things in different directions. Taking, say, 1982 (Sheffield) as our baseline, we see better and easier sea surveillance today, but also significant improvements in shooting down missiles. And yes, missiles in recent years are smarter and better at evading defenses, but those are rare, as are really good surveillance systems. If you handed me $10 billion and said "there's more where that came from if you need it to build me the ultimate anti-ship missile system", I could come up with some very good stuff. But that's a threat only China can really muster. In most cases, the threat is a lot lower, and surface ships are really useful in a lot of cases where they aren't facing anti-ship missiles.
Thanks for the thoughtful preliminary reply; I look forward to more discussion someday!
I totally agree that against non-peer adversaries the threat is a lot lower and surface ships are really useful.
(Just a ping in case you were planning to respond but forgot!)
Yeah, sorry about that. Here goes:
My basic thesis in this post is less to do with the general utility of anti-ship missiles and more to do with the fact that what happened to Moskva isn't actually evidence of anything beyond the need to keep weapons systems online, a lesson we could also draw from Stark. In a world where SAMs had a massive edge over ASMs and the only way to get one through defenses that were on is to run a ship out of missiles, Moskva still would have been sunk, so we really can't count this as evidence either way.
More broadly, the argument outlined both by you and by the original article sounds a lot like the arguments that the torpedo boat and submarine would render the battleship obsolete, and that airplanes and missiles would do the same to the surface ship. History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme, and my lesson from those cases is that this is an argument which sounds good but doesn't hold up all that well.
I am less certain that this is wrong than I was when I wrote "Why the Carriers Are Not Doomed" five years ago. (Also, wow, has it really been that long?) But I still think it probably is wrong, and more that the case for it is far from airtight. The only historical case I can think of with a high percentage of ASM hits is probably Operation Praying Mantis. Most others are at or below 50%, even neglecting defenses.
This, I definitely disagree with. In the vast majority of cases where we aren't at war with China, surface ships are still as useful as they've ever been.
I will freely grant that even given very generous assumptions about missile defense, it's cheaper to buy the missiles to sink a ship than it is to build the ship. But that doesn't seem like the right comparison. First and foremost, surface warships are versatile. An ASM can't escort freighters off the Horn of Africa, and it's terrible at presence visits. Second, ASMs don't fire themselves. You're going to need an entire system for targeting, and surveilling hundreds of thousands of square miles is far from trivial. It's doable, but I think only China is actually doing it at the level needed. And you're going to need launch platforms, which if they're planes or ships are going to be very expensive in their own right. Trucks are less so, but they're also a lot less mobile, and unless your country is very small, you need enough of them to overwhelm the enemy wherever they turn up. And third, the vast majority of the world's ASM stocks are not the super-modern stuff with lots of fun capabilities. They're pretty basic 70s vintage stuff designed to sink frigates.
I'm not sure this analogy supports your case. The kamikazes didn't stop the USN from taking Okinawa. They made it bleed pretty badly for it, but it was ultimately a manageable threat.
More broadly, I'm skeptical of what you're trying to do with that analogy because of how much is wrapped up in the details of technology and tactics. In the early war, air attacks got through a lot of the time. Then we have Philippine Sea, where Spruance stops the Japanese dead despite getting his attack off second, and the kamikazes were a reaction to that, which the USN then figured out how to respond to, although less successfully than they did with the more conventional air attacks. We can draw whatever conclusion we want by pointing to the appropriate part.
1405 planes in the big attacks off Okinawa per Morison. More small attacks on the off days, and also kamikaze use elsewhere in the Pacific. But at a guess, that's half of stories, which puts it at 2800.
First, I would point out that "missile didn't hit due to lack of range" would support my contention that employing these is harder than it looks. Second, I desperately wish there was more information available on the Mason engagement, but there just isn't. Beyond that, I do think that Mason is a better engagement to look at given that the crew actually had their radar on. At the very least, it's a useful counter to "the missile will always get through".
Iran.
Yes, but the Russians spent the first few weeks of the war in Ukraine setting new records for it.
Infantrymen are desperately vulnerable to literally every weapon on the battlefield, but that hasn't made them "obsolete." In terms of pure mutual cost per kill, artillery is vastly more efficient than infantry, but armies are not as a result composed entirely of artillery batteries and spotter drones.
Analysis of comparative vulnerability and cost are certainly not useless, but at some point you have to consider the aim or goal of the use of armed force, and when you do things get substantially more complicated (and interesting) than just "A is cheaper than B so it's better."
Infantrymen can be built in nine months by unskilled labour. Warships cannot. Which is why the US has half a million of the former, and less than a thousand of the latter.
My comparison was not between an infantryman and a warship, so that criticism of the point is completely bootless.
Even then, a newborn (the product of 9 months unskilled labor) is not an infantryman. At least in the US, each soldier costs somewhere north of $50,000 to train and equip. Equipment alone runs somewhere around $15,000-20,000. There's also a probably much larger liability for pension and healthcare farther down the line, if we're considering the "total cost of ownership" from the government's perspective.
19'ish years. 13'ish if you can deal with degraded efficiency.
All attempts to use newborns in warfare have ended in failure. Even the plan to use them as a distraction, mostly because it was too much trouble to get them away from their mothers. As a result, even the US Air Force considers them to be ineffective as infantry, although there are reports that the Space Force is considering a new study.
I believe the total cost, including schooling for just getting to the START of infantry training is about 19 years at maybe $200k.
eg. School costs alone are $100k at least (varies according to different school systems) and if you want to claim that teachers are "unskilled labour" I'll stand out of splash damage range.
Even if you're willing to accept a conscript army (but much moreso if you want an all-volunteer force), there are going to be other factors that need to break the right way during that 18-19 years to produce a viable candidate to even enter infantry training. Those may not require "skilled" labor from the parents and other involved adults, but they will require A LOT of time and attention invested.
bean:
I thought they were going to study using them as computers built by unskilled labor.
From The Feeling of Power by Isaac Asimov