Many have proclaimed the obsolescence of the aircraft carrier in the face of modern weapons. I've previously discussed the threat to aircraft carriers from missiles, both cruise and ballistic, and why neither is as effective as some pundits have claimed. However, the last major threat, from the submarine, is probably the greatest danger to surface forces. Modern submarines can be divided into two categories, nuclear attack submarines (SSN) and diesel-electric submarines (SSK), with very different threat profiles.

USS Oklahoma City (SSN-723)

The SSN is probably the greatest threat to the carrier, and the only real competition for the title of the modern capital ship. It has the strategic and tactical mobility to hunt a carrier on the open sea, and unlike any other weapon, it has a reasonable chance of reaching a carrier undetected and unattacked. Only 6 navies¹ currently operate SSNs, and only the USN operates more than a dozen.

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The Russian battleship program continued to churn out ships in the early 1890s, producing ships in the pre-dreadnought mold. As with their earlier efforts, the result was a mix of good, bad, and bizarre ideas.

Navarin

The first Baltic battleship of this type, Navarin, was a radical departure from the previous ships. At a time when the British were shifting to high freeboard, the Russians built their first low-freeboard turret ship. Navarin was armed with a pair of twin 12" turrets and eight 6" guns, and originated as an attempt to hold down costs by building smaller ships.² Navarin's most notable feature was her four funnels, two pairs side by side. This quickly gave her the nickname "Zavod" (factory).

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An excellent article on the (British) MoD Civil Service

This comes from The Thin Pinstriped Line, one of the best places I know of for getting a look inside the guts of running a military.

An understanding of the basics of naval strategy is vital to making sense of the logic behind the construction of the battleship, and also to understanding naval warfare today. Modern naval strategy began with Alfred Thayer Mahan's seminal book The Influence of Sea Power upon History. He outlined how control of the sea had granted Britain victory over her enemies during most of the 18th century, and theorized that a power which could control the sea would have outsize influence over events on land. Events since then have borne him out.

Alfred Thayer Mahan

Even today, the sea remains the best way of moving large quantities of heavy objects about the globe. Over 90% of global trade goes by sea. Despite American airlift capabilities, any large-scale deployment of US troops would require equipment and supplies to be transported by sea. Two schools of thought have developed to deal with these basic facts: sea denial and sea control. Read more...

It's not uncommon to see articles proclaiming the doom of the aircraft carrier in the face of the threat from China or other powers. Fortunately, the authors of such articles rarely understand warfare that well. Finding the carrier in the first place is not that easy, and then you have to kill it. Last time, I discussed the threat from conventional cruise missiles. But the weapon most commonly touted as making carriers obsolete is the DF-21D Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile (ASBM). The theory is that due to its speed and ability to evade defenses, there’s no practical way to protect against it. As you might expect, the story is much more complicated and much more favorable to the carrier.

A DF-21D missile

The DF-21D first came to US attention in 2009, prompting concern in the navy and panic outside of it. Defense analysts and talking heads said that there was no defense against it. At the time, that was only partially true, and important context was left out. In certain circles, however, this was uncritically accepted and interpreted to mean that no defense against ASBMs was possible. One so-called defense expert even went to the point of claiming that no defense was possible against any weapon on a ballistic trajectory, including a Harpoon in pop-up mode.³ This is frankly absurd, as the same logic leads us to conclude that it's impossible to play the game of baseball. Read more...

In the late 1880s, the pieces came together to create a new type of ship that would dominate the seas for most of the next two decades. After 1906, these became known as pre-dreadnoughts. While all of the elements that made them up had been used on previous ships, the end result was to bring an end to the experimental ships and produce the largest fleets of armored capital ships ever seen.

HMS Resolution, of the Royal Sovereign class

As the 1880s drew to a close, Britain faced a serious challenge to her traditional naval dominance. For the previous two decades, the drain of fighting colonial wars had kept the Navy budget low, while other powers had built up their fleets. However, these wars had largely come to an end, and in 1889, the Naval Defence Act was passed, formally establishing that Britain would match the fleets of the next two greatest powers combined, and authorizing 10 battleships over the next four years.⁴

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Stability is one of the most important factors to consider when designing a ship, but it’s often overlooked in popular references. Staying upright is an important function of any ship, and insufficient stability resulted in the loss of Vasa and HMS Captain, as well as three destroyers during Typhoon Cobra. One key means of avoiding this fate in bad weather is to keep the ship's center of gravity low, which often restricts design and particularly modification, a notable case being the installation of light AA batteries during WWII.

HMS Captain

There are three important points in defining a ship’s stability. The first, two, the centers of gravity (CG) and buoyancy (CB), are the points through which all of the forces of a given type can be assumed to act. Naively, we’d expect the ship to be stable if the CG is below the CB, so any roll would produce a righting arm. While a ship with such characteristics would be stable, the vast majority of ships achieve stability through a different mechanism.⁵ Instead, ships take advantage of the fact that their form near the waterline causes the CB to move to the side that is more deeply submerged, creating what is known as a righting arm (GZ) and pushing that side back up. In normal operations we can assume that the CB is essentially ‘hanging’ from a point, called the Metacenter (MC), making it easy to find how much the CB has moved at a given angle of heel.

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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 CVBG⁶ 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.⁷ 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,⁸ 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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