Last time, I discussed the first problem in killing a carrier, that of finding it. That alone is a challenge, but the problems for the attacker aren’t over at that point.

USS Theodore Roosevelt

The second line of the defense is the proactive measures the US will take to reduce the threat facing the carrier group. The USN learned at Pearl Harbor that it is better to give than to receive. First, submarine-launched Tomahawks will attack the enemy’s key infrastructure. Command and control facilities, communications links, logistics depots and air and naval bases will be targeted, reducing the enemy’s ability to find, fix, and attack the carrier groups. Tomahawks from the carrier’s escorting destroyers and air strikes from the carrier’s own airplanes will take over as the CVBG¹ closes with the enemy coast. If an attack is detected before missile launch, airplanes will be vectored out to meet it. During the Cold War, US doctrine was that fighters would deal with airplanes, and SAMs took over after missile launch. Similar tactics are likely to be used today. Making hard estimates of effectiveness of these measures is very difficult, particularly as they depend heavily on circumstances, but they will be very important in a real war. Read more...

Should we reactivate the battleships? That was a common question I got while tour-guiding, and even more common online.² As such, I figured I should lay out my position in some detail here.

Iowa moored in Los Angeles

In accordance with Betteridge’s Law of Headlines,³ my answer is no. Reactivating the battleships would be a waste of money and manpower. The military capability of the ships would be extremely low, and the cost would be excessive.

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Traditionally, one of two reasons is given for the reactivation of the Iowas in the 1980s. Either they were intended to provide fire support for amphibious landings or they were supposed to fight the Soviet Kirov class cruisers. Unfortunately, neither stands up to close scrutiny, and we have to look deeper for the logic behind the battleships being brought back into service. To do that, we must first turn to what systems were installed during the reactivation.

Iowa being towed out of mothballs, 1982

The most important of these was the BGM-109 Tomahawk, a long-range cruise missile that came in three varieties: nuclear land attack (TLAM-N), conventional land attack (TLAM-C) and anti-ship (TASM). It was originally developed in the 70s to exploit a loophole in the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, which restricted ballistic missiles but not cruise missiles, and then converted into conventional and anti-ship versions. Each ship received 8 quad Armored Box Launchers (ABLs), four between the two funnels and four around the aft main battery director.

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Claims that US carriers are very vulnerable to missile attack, and will be sunk immediately in any upcoming war, are quite common. They’re also wrong. The carriers are surprisingly survivable, and the prowess of missiles is usually grossly exaggerated.

USS Nimitz, USS Ronald Reagan and USS Theodore Roosevelt operating together, November 2017

The first line of defense is the fact that the sea is very big^{[Citation Needed]} and ships are small and mobile. Obviously, improved radar and modern navigational systems have made it easier to find and track ships at sea since WWII. Clouds and darkness are no longer serious obstacles, and it’s harder (though not impossible) to mess up your navigation. But there are still problems. A typical radar system will tell you that there is something there, but it won’t tell you what it is. You can make guesses based on where contacts are, but a smart opponent will do all he can to frustrate this. Carrier groups, for instance, never operate in the “bullseye” formation made famous in photos, and often do their best to look like merchant traffic.⁴

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Over the 70 years since the end of WW2, the nomenclature of warships has become very confused. This is for several reasons. The demise of the treaty structure removed the legal restrictions preventing categories merging. The minimum size of ship required for effective operations grew, while at the same time the need for numbers held down sizes on the top end. Different countries adopted different naming schemes for political or historical reasons, and classifications evolved over time. I’ll do my best to explain all of this, but it is of necessity an imperfect science. This list skews a bit towards what you'd see on the oceans today, or at least since the 80s, but it should be helpful in understanding what was going on since the 60s, or even earlier in combination with the previous list.

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Comments are enabled, and we've switched from me having to approve them to using a captcha. This should make it easier and less frustrating to try to comment here.

I can give accounts which will bypass the captcha. Email battleshipbean at gmail if you want one with the username (no spaces, but you can also tell me what you want your default display to be) and password you want.

Comment Policy: Be nice to one another, don't go into politics (except defense policy, where appropriate), and try to stay vaguely on topic. Also, Iowa is the best battleship ever built. If you want to speculate about a ship being better than one of her sisters, that's allowed.

As battleship construction resumed in the late 1930s, designers were faced with an array of challenges that had only been on the drawing board when battleships were last built. These significantly changed the nature of the protection game, although they resembled the All-or-Nothing schemes of the last WWI-era battleships. Iowa's armor scheme was developed to meet these challenges, and examining it will show how they were met.

Iowas armor scheme. See here for larger version without labels, or alternate here.

Iowa’s belt is 12.1” of US Class A armor⁵ on 30 lb STS,⁶ sloped at 19 degrees inboard.⁷ This slope makes it lighter than a vertical belt would be for the same immune zone,⁸ but requires the belt to be mounted inside the hull. This means that the damaged waterline of the ship is somewhat narrower than the undamaged waterline, compromising damaged stability. This tradeoff was forced by the treaty limits and the need to get through the Panama Canal, and the next class, the never-built Montanas, would have reverted to an external belt. To enhance the belt, the outer hull plating near the belt was 60 lb STS, an amount that should be sufficient to remove the AP caps from any shells, increasing the resistance of the belt by 30% or more and protecting the waterline from splinter damage.

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The terminology of ships during the first half of the 20th century is rather confusing, so to explain things, I've put together a pair of glossaries, one for each of the world wars. Each entry will give a sketch of the kind of ship you’d be likely to find under each description. These are not intended to be completely comprehensive, as I just don’t have time. I’m sure my nitpickers valued commenters will be able to come up with all of the cases I missed. I've also written a similar guide to contemporary ships.

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Today marks two months of regular Naval Gazing here. I bring this up because it seemed an appropriate point to ask again for thoughts on upcoming topics. I asked in early November, and got some good feedback, but it's been a while and my direction is taking more shape. So here is my existing topic list. Vote for what you want, or suggest things that aren't on it:

• Updates/expansion on the basic technical posts (weapons/engineering/etc.)
• More on design history⁹
• More early battleship battles
• More on WWI¹⁰
• More on WWII, either battleships or other matters
• Leyte Gulf
• Amphibious Warfare
• More on Net-centric warafare
• So you want to build a battleship - design, construction, finance, operations, disposal
• Torpedoes
• More on fire control and gunnery
• The USS Missouri on Thimble Shoal
• Mothballing
• Jackie Fisher
• The Falklands (War, or the Battle of the Falklands, I guess)
• Naval auxiliaries
• I have permission from Iowa's tour lead to repost some of his sea stories that he wrote up for the tour guides
• Ship control
• Merchant sailors in WWII/Operation Pedestal
• Never-realized design concepts of various powers
• More on modern naval warfare¹¹
• Histories of specific battleships. I expect to start with the other Iowas, but would then move on to other ships with interesting/well-documented histories.
• Repairing a warship
• Analysis of ideal battleship armor schemes¹²
• Anti-submarine warfare
• Dry docks
• Battleship tactics

Again, even if you don't normally comment, or think the idea you have is probably stupid, please post it. I've gotten some really good ideas from people who almost never comment. I can only promise I'll do my best to get around to things voted for some day, but I do take it into account when deciding what to do.

Also, does anyone have ideas for how to make good maps relatively easily? I do want to revise the Jutland series, but the mapping is going to be a pain. Read more...

Dreadnought's armor scheme was surprisingly close to that of her immediate pre-dreadnought predecessors of the Lord Nelson class, and was in fact the only area where no great advance was made. This was partially because a major increase in protection would have been prohibitively costly, and partially because the Lord Nelsons themselves marked a significant improvement in armor, as the abolition of the 6" battery allowed much of the side armor, designed to protect the QF guns, to be eliminated.

Dreadnought's armor scheme (above) and a section view (below).

Due to the increasing power of guns, the area over which designers could provide adequate armor to keep shells out entirely was decreasing. It was concentrated in a thick lower belt near the waterline (11"/279 mm on Dreadnought), to stop shells from holing the ship in areas where adequate compartmentalization could not be provided, such as engines and magazines. To keep shells from going over the top of this belt, naval architects would provide a thinner upper belt (here 8"/203 mm), which would keep out light shells and set off heavy ones. The splinters from the heavy shells would be kept out of the vitals by an armored deck (1.75"/43 mm). Often, the edges of the armored deck were sloped down to meet the bottom of the belt, reinforcing it in case of penetration. Sometimes, an upper splinter deck was placed over the top of the upper belt, in case the ship took hits at long range, or when rolling enough to make the main armored deck vulnerable. Read more...