Methods of gathering intelligence can be broadly divided into two categories: those where the target knows that you're watching, and those where he doesn't. Most modern methods of intelligence-gathering, such as satellites, airplanes and the internet, fall into the former category, and have the advantage that they're generally pretty effective and straightforward to implement. But they have one big downside. Because they know they're being watched, the enemy will try to control what you see. They can't do this perfectly, which leaves those as useful sources of information, but there are some things where you really want to know what the other side is doing when they don't think you're looking.

Human spies are of course the best-known example of this, but there is another, which has been almost as important over the last three-quarters of a century: the submarine. From the earliest days of the Cold War, NATO used these stealthy platforms to gather information the Soviet Union would rather it not have, doing everything from listening to communications off Russian bases to shadowing missile submarines and learning their patrol routines, plucking pieces of missile off the seabed and even tapping cables inside Soviet territorial waters.¹ The ability of a mobile platform to get in close while undetected and then leave again proved vital to victory in the Cold War, and these missions, shrouded in secrecy, continue to this day. Read more...

There has been a great deal of discussion about classified information in the US lately, and it seemed worth taking some time to explain the system to those who don't normally have much cause to deal with it.² I occasionally do, although not on a particularly high level, and most of what follows is based on research, not personal experience.

The US has two parallel systems for defense information that the government would like to keep secret. For nuclear matters, mostly relating to the design and production of nuclear weapons, the system is based on the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, and run by the Department of Energy. Everything else uses a common set of clearances, governed not by law but by a series of Executive Orders dating back to the 1950s, the current authority being EO 13526, issued in 2009. We'll primarily focus on this system, as it covers the vast majority of classified documents. Read more...

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

The biggest news lately is that I made a second visit to Russell Hogg's Subject to Change podcast, this time with John Schilling, to talk about Doctor Strangelove and nuclear war.

Slightly smaller news is that C# Aurora V2.0 dropped recently, with lots of new tweaks. I look forward to spending some time with it this weekend.

Book has been going reasonably well, as I'm now at 122,000 words and mostly done with the chapter on the Treaty Battleships. On a related note, does anyone know why the Italians never seem to have looked at a successor to the Littorios? I find it strange that there's no trace of one anywhere.

2018 overhauls are Missouri Part 2, Nautical Measurements, Falklands Part 5, Underwater Protection Part 1, my review of the International WWII Museum and The Standard Type. 2019 reviews are Spanish-American War Parts six, seven and eight, Turret Designations, Naval Weddings and Wedding Decorations. 2020 overhauls are my review of the Hanford Site and Powder parts one, two and three. 2021 overhauls are Lasers at Sea Parts one and two, Weird British Anti-Ship Weapons of WWII and Naval Radar - Some Advanced Stuff.

In our prior installment, we covered the Alabama’s fight with the Hatteras – a rare example of a Confederate raider fighting anything remotely resembling a proper warship. But, while the Alabama is probably the most famous of the Confederate raiders, the first of the Confederacy’s purpose-built raiders, the Florida, had slipped out of Mobile and past the Union blockade.

Florida burns a prize

This escape, along with Semmes’ defeat of the Hatteras, compelled Welles to remove several ships from the blockade in an attempt to capture or sink the commerce raiders, but to no avail. The Florida left a trail of burned prizes across the Atlantic, keeping several ships as prizes and outfitted them as makeshift commerce raiders in their own right, multiplying its impact. These ships, the Lapwing and the Clarence, had their own bizarre adventures: the Lapwing captured a ship full of guano, while the Clarence, commanded by Charles Read, set out to attack the ports of Hampton Roads or Baltimore. Taking a string of prizes, Read transferring the rebel flag from ship to ship as he captured more suitable vessels before sailing into Portland, Maine, and stealing the revenue cutter Caleb Cushing. The Cushing was quickly overtaken by an impromptu pursuit fleet and set alight by Read, who then surrendered. The Lapwing suffered the same combustible fate when she became unseaworthy. Read more...

While working on my section on Bismarck, I decided to look more deeply into the details of battleship range and the impact it had on designs. It's undoubtedly the most important obscure figure in battleship design, with many references not including it because the values available are so variable. Unfortunately, I quickly ran into a mess. A surprising number of ships I looked at, even in quite comprehensive sources, had only 2 or maybe 3 data points, spaced widely enough that it wasn't really possible to get a good sense of the shape of the curve involved.

The culprit behind all of this

In the end, I had only five reasonably good sources of data on the treaty battleships: data on Bismarck spread across two books, Raven and Roberts with Howe and FTP 218 covering the American battleships, along with a report on trial results from Iowa and New Jersey.³ Only the last actually had speed, fuel consumption and power in the same place and without suspicion that there was significant rounding involved in the data I was seeing. And when plotted, the numbers for the American ships were reasonably consistent, both between the two sources and between different classes, although while they were all around 15,000 nm at 15 kts, Iowa had an advantage at higher speeds thanks to her longer hull. But the same was not true of the curves for the European ships, which were much shallower. Bismarck in particular went from having approximately half the endurance of the American ships at 15 kts to about the same endurance as the SoDak/North Carolina at 24 kts, and more above that. Read more...

It's time for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't culture war.

A few items of business. First, if you're interested in going to Miramar, please RSVP on the stickied post. Second, Johan Larson is setting up a military reading group on DSL, and for the first month, the book is the excellent Blind Man's Bluff, about submarine espionage during the Cold War. If anyone has been looking for an excuse to read it, now is the time. Third, I'm at 113,000 words on the book, currently working on the technical sections for the treaty battleships, and starting work on the Iowa chapter.

2018 overhauls are The 15" Battleships, Museum Ships - United States, LA Fleet Week 2016, Information, Communication and Naval Warfare Part 1, SYWTBAMN - Aviation Part 3 and The OIC. 2019 overhauls are Lion and Vanguard, Wolverine and Sable, Italian Battleships in WWII, SYWTBABB - Trials and Commissioning, How to Build a Battleship - 1942 and The Maximum Battleship. 2020 overhauls are NWAS ASW Parts one and two, Coastal Defenses Part 5 and Spotting. 2021 overhauls are The Under Siege Review, Pictures - Iowa Turret One, NWAS Nuclear SAMs and Confederate Raiding Part 5.

As I mentioned back in June, I'm going to the Miramar airshow this year. The plan is that the Fatherly One and I will attend Saturday, September 24th, and would be interested in meeting up with anyone else who wants to attend. Feel free to bring friends/family who don't read the blog, too. We plan to get grandstand seats ($19 online), which based on my experience last time are well worth the price. If you're going, or at least interested, RSVP and we'll try to meet up at the show. Looking forward to seeing everyone there!

Numerically, the biggest program currently under development for the US Navy is the Light Amphibious Warship (LAW), a new vessel intended to support the Marine's new Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO) concept. This concept, intended to keep the Marine Corps relevant in a war with China, would see reinforced platoon-sized units of Marines operating from small islands in the Pacific, providing anti-ship missile fire, weapons and fuel to aircraft, air defense and surveillance capability. The LAW would be tasked with transporting these units from island to island, giving them the mobility to stay one step ahead of the Chinese. Current plans call for up to 35 LAWs, with some cuts in the LHD/LHA and LPD forces to offset their procurement.

A LAW concept from Sea Transport Solutions

But what will the LAW actually look like? According to USNI News, the LAW should be between 200' and 400' long, displace 4000 tons or less, have 4000-8000 ft² of cargo space, quarters for 75 Marines, make at least 14 kts, with 15 preferred, and be able to unload cargo directly onto the beach, with a draft of 12' or less. Defensive armament will be limited to light guns, and efforts will be made to keep costs down to $100 million. As it turns out, there is already a vessel that meets most of those criteria. It's 328' long, displaces 3000 tons, can carry up to 140 passengers and beach itself without any problems. The only downside is that it can only make 12 kts. Read more...

While the Polaris program, which first took nuclear missiles beneath the sea, was a triumph of program management and engineering, the same could not be said for its replacement. That program, known as Trident, was the result of a mindbogglingly complicated bureaucratic fight, but its ultimate product, the UGM-133 Trident II, has already completed three decades as the backbone of NATO's deterrent, and is expected to serve at least another 20 years.

Trident's origins date back to the DOD under Robert McNamara, when, in an effort to kill a new Air Force ICBM program, they conducted a study to find the most cost-effective retaliatory force they could. Sea-based options (both submarine and surface) came out looking very good, although the surface-launched missile died out quite quickly, leaving only the Underwater Launch Missile System (ULMS). The initial plan for the submarine was to carry the missile in external canisters, which allowed much greater volume than the internal tubes of the Polaris submarines. That in turn was important because the Special Projects Office (SPO), the Navy group in charge of the Fleet Ballistic Missile (FBM) program, was trying to keep down development costs, and increased volume meant they could get more range without having to use new technology. The increased range would be particularly valuable in the face of potential improvements in Soviet ASW, a serious concern in the late 60s and early 70s. It also opened the possibility of "launch" at all depths, and of leaving the canisters so the submarine could be well away before the missile launched. Ultimately, this plan was shelved in favor of the Polaris/Poseidon scheme, as the advantages didn't seem worth the required changes. Read more...

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

Two major updates. First, while I know I've been bad about virtual meetups recently, I plan to do one at the usual time (1 PM Central/GMT-6) next Saturday, July 30th. Second, the word count in the book has reached the number of this OT in thousands. Teams link.

I recently watched the documentary series Sea Power on Netflix (not the one of the same name on Amazon Prime) and have very mixed feelings on it. On one hand, they did a lot right, with the first and last episodes in particular focusing on pretty much exactly the points I would have put in my outline if I was writing something like that. And the last three episodes made extensive use of Norman Friedman, who is always good, although I would hope that his points aren't particularly novel to longtime readers here, as I ripped them off years ago. On the other hand, there were plenty of details they got wrong, and they managed to step on two of my particular sore points by talking about the Iowa reactivation as a counter to the Kirovs and bringing up the old, discredited stories about the battlecruisers at Jutland. Particularly annoying was the use of Timothy Shutt as a talking head. I have nothing against him personally, but he's a literature professor whose qualification is a series of audio lectures on great naval battles and who was the only one of the talking heads that I regularly found problems with. On the "interesting but not bad front", it's a French series, which meant that some things got emphasized which would have been unusual in a documentary made in English, but also that the pacing was a bit off.

2018 overhauls are Missouri Part 1, SYWTBAMN - 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 Naval Rations Parts two and three and NWAS Light Attack Parts one and two. 2021 overhauls are Norway Part 4, Zumwalt Parts one and two and Naval Radar - Introduction.