One of the weapons currently on the horizon of naval warfare is the laser. While laser weapons have been discussed since the 60s, and the first laser weapons went to sea in the early 80s, it's only in the last decade that there's been a serious prospect of deploying lethal lasers in action. But there's a great deal of confusion around the potentials and limitations of laser weapons. How do they work, and what will they do to naval warfare?¹

An Argentine aircraft attacks the British in the Falklands

Before I get to those questions, I should probably address something I'm sure many of you are asking about. Yes, the first operational laser weapons were deployed in the early 80s, aboard the ships of the Royal Navy. This device, known as Outfit DEC, was not designed to directly damage attackers. Instead, it was a blue-light optical dazzler, designed to blind the pilots of incoming aircraft. Even looking away wouldn't be enough, as the wavelength would cause the canopy to fluoresce. It is claimed that some ships deployed with Outfit DEC to the Falklands, and there are persistent rumors that several Argentine aircraft crashed while attacking the fleet as a result of their pilots being blinded. I am skeptical of this, as the air war has been extensively studied and every loss analyzed in detail. No Argentine aircraft flew into the terrain inside San Carlos water, and reports on Outfit DEC don't give the names of the pilots involved.² Read more...

As usual, it is time for our open thread. Talk about whatever you want, even if it's not naval/military related.

The time is approaching for our next virtual meetup (July's being in-person), and I had a thought for adding some discussion fodder by watching an episode of Victory at Sea, a series of half-hour WWII documentaries. They're on YouTube, and generally have lots of interesting footage. Thoughts?

2018 overhauls are The 15" Battleships, Museum Ships - United States, LA Fleet Week 2016, Information, Communication and Naval Warfare Part 1, So You Want to Build a Modern Navy - Aviation Part 3 and Anti-Submarine Warfare - WWII - The OIC. 2019 overhauls are Lion and Vanguard, Wolverine and Sable, Italian Battleships in WWII, So You Want to Build a Battleship - Trials and Commissioning, How to Build a Battleship - 1942 and The Maximum Battleship. 2020 overhauls are Nuclear Weapons at Sea ASW Parts one and two, Coastal Defenses Part 5 and Spotting.

Reader Suvorov continues his series about Confederate commerce raiding during the American Civil War.

In our last installment, we covered the Florida, the South’s first success in overseas construction of commerce raiders. Although the crew of the Florida ended up debilitated by yellow fever, their ability to dash through the blockade and return safely to Southern soil was another mark against the Union Navy.

George Preble

In response to criticism, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Wells and President Lincoln cashiered Commander George Preble, the unfortunate captain of the Oneida, which had been one of the ships that had failed to capture Florida. While it’s possible that Preble was being scapegoated, there does seem to have been, in the early years of the war, a problem in the command climate of Union ships: one author recounts that a captain off the coast of New Orleans was supposed to have hailed passing ships to try to obtain permission from his admiral to pursue a Confederate vessel. Read more...

Even before surface-to-air missiles went to sea, there was interest in fitting them with nuclear warheads. Surprisingly, this had less to do with trying to take out multiple targets at once, unlikely as air combat tactics adapted to the threat of nuclear warheads, and more to do with increasing the probability of a kill, particularly in the face of heavy ECM, which could be expected to push miss distances out past the limits of conventional proximity fuzes.

Talos missiles aboard Little Rock

A secondary benefit was the ability of a nuclear warhead to damage enemy nuclear weapons beyond its normal damage radius, thanks to an effect known as preinitiation. This happens when neutrons begin a chain reaction before the fissile material is fully compressed, and can cut the yield of a megaton bomb to only a few kilotons for as much as five minutes after the first weapon goes off. Initially, plans were made to fit Talos with a warhead version of the Mk 12 nuclear bomb, although more for use in the planned land-based variant that would be used by both the Army and Air Force. In the Army's hands, it would be used both for shooting down airplanes and as a surface-to-surface missile, but both services eventually gave up on Talos, leaving it as an all-Navy show. The W12 warhead died fairly quickly as well, as it was too heavy, and a new warhead was developed for the missile, the 5 kiloton³ W30. Read more...

Earlier in the month, I hosted a meetup aboard Iowa and John Schilling, CatCube and Randy M came to visit. One of the highlights was a chance to visit Turret 1, which was opened up since my last visit to the ship two years ago. We got in through the hatch on the back of the turret, although I didn't think to take pictures.

The inside of Turret 1

The first thing I noticed was how spacious the inside of the turret was. This is the result of the rangefinder that was originally inside the turret being removed in the 1950s. This made it much more spacious than the previous turrets I've been in, most notably one aboard Massachusetts. Read more...

I recently watched the 1992 movie Under Siege, about a plot to steal nuclear Tomahawks from the battleship Missouri as she's on her way home from Desert Storm. It's thwarted by Stephen Seagal, playing an ex-SEAL turned cook, who has to go up against a rogue CIA operative (Tommy Lee Jones) and the ship's XO, with the aid of a Playboy Playmate who came onboard as part of the cover story for the attack. It is about the best possible movie that could be made up from those ingredients, and I actually enjoyed it.

Because Missouri was still in service while the movie was being filmed, most of it was shot aboard Alabama. The filmmakers worked around this quite well, and even I usually couldn't tell they were aboard the wrong ship unless I went looking for it. The one exception was some scenes on broadway, which is much narrower on a SoDak. Also, there were a couple of sets, most notably the bridge, where the conning tower seemed to have been magically removed. (Pearl Harbor did the same thing, and I suspect that filming in the cramped space around the actual conning tower isn't really possible. Running the ship from there would have been hard enough.) But on the whole, it was well done, and I rarely found myself actually looking for mistakes. There were also things which impressed, even though they were wrong. At the end of the movie, the bad guy launches two Tomahawks towards Hawaii, and there's references to things like TERCOM and DSMAC on the screens, precisely the systems which would have made it impossible to actually shoot Tomahawks at Hawaii. (Of course, they then trigger the self-destruct on the Tomahawk after Seagal gets the codes in a fight with the main bad guy, a system that doesn't actually exist.) Read more...

It's time once again for our open thread. As usual, talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't culture war.

I had a great time two weeks ago on the Iowa, and thought I would post this photo of those who showed up.

John Schilling, Randy M, me and CatCube

2018 overhauls are Ship History Missouri Part 1, So You Want to Build a Modern Navy - Coast Guard Part 2, The QF Gun, Yalu River, DismalPseudoscience's review of Mikasa and German Battleships in WWII. 2019 overhauls are Signalling Parts two, three and four, The Pepsi Fleet?, Falklands Part 16 and Pictures - Iowa Communications. 2020 overhauls are The Last Sailing Battle, Naval Rations Part 2 and Part 3 and Nuclear Weapons at Sea - Light Attack Parts one and two,

The basic principle behind radar is fairly simple. The radar sends out a pulse of radio waves, some of which bounce off of whatever happens to be in their path. These reflections are picked up by the radar and used to build a picture of whatever happens to be out there. But this simplicity masks deep complexity, as various portions of this are implemented in different ways, and even from the earliest days of radar at sea, ships carried multiple sets optimized for different missions.⁴

The first USN at-sea radar test aboard the USS Leary, 1937

The first radars, as developed in the late 1930s, were extremely crude. A transmitter would send out a short pulse through an antenna shaped to focus the signal in a particular direction, and then switch over to listening for the echos through the same antenna.⁵ The returned signal would be displayed using a device known as an A-scope, a special cathode ray tube. Essentially, the A-scope would draw a horizontal line for each pulse, deflected up (or down) depending on the received signal strength at a given range as measured by the round trip speed-of-light delay. An object reflecting the beam would appear as a spike or trough on the line, depending on how the A-scope was set up. This gave the operator precise knowledge of ranges, a vast improvement over previous methods, but only in the direction the antenna was pointing. Checking different bearings required rotating the antenna, often manually, and left the operator with the job of keeping track of what was going on around him. This didn't make it impossible to use radar data to build a picture, as the British did with the Chain Home radar feeding information to the Dowding system, but this took lots of manpower and organization. Read more...

In the 1990s, the US Navy found itself at a loose end, as the missions that had defined the late Cold War faded in importance and it reoriented itself towards land attack. The main result was a new destroyer, designed primarily to provide fire support for troops ashore, but with some multi-mission capability. Unfortunately, they decided that this class would be truly stealthy, which drove up size and trapped the ships in a spiral of increasing cost and falling numbers, with a 32-ship program being cut to only three ships by 2008, and coming close to being shut down in 2010 thanks to the resulting cost increases.

USS Michael Monsoor

The first ship, USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000)⁶ was ordered in 2008, and followed by Michael Monsoor, named for a SEAL killed in Iraq, and Lyndon B Johnson, named for an obscure naval officer who served briefly in WWII. The three ships were laid down in 2011, 2013 and 2017 respectively, but the start of construction did little to slow the cost growth, as the combined procurement cost of the three ships rose from $9 billion in FY09 to $13.3 billion in FY21, not counting R&D costs of something like $10 billion.⁷ The program's weirdness continued as the ships neared completion. Instead of integrating the weapons and then accepting and commissioning the ships, the first two units were officially commissioned in 2016 and 2019, and then sent to San Diego for weapons integration. Zumwalt finally completed this process in 2020, although initial operational capability has continued to slide, and is currently scheduled for Q4 2024. Read more...

The largest surface warships in the American inventory are the three destroyers of the Zumwalt class. These ships are undoubtedly among the most futuristic-looking on the seas, but many have questioned their utility, thanks to the program's troubled history, and the fact that the mission they were built for stopped making sense a decade or so ago.

USS Zumwalt

The Zumwalts, much like the Littoral Combat Ship, dates back to the 1990s, when the US Navy was attempting to define itself in the post-Cold War world. The mission it had built itself around for the previous 40 years, facing down the Soviets at sea, was gone, and it turned instead to the job of influencing events on land. A cheap ship optimized for land attack seemed like a good complement to the multi-role Burkes and Ticonderogas, particularly as it could be fitted with a new gun that would give at least a partial replacement for the capabilities of the recently-retired battleships. Read more...