In early April 1982, Argentina invaded the British-controlled Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. The British, instead of accepting the fait acompli, mobilized their fleet. After a fierce battle in the air and at sea, the British gained the upper hand, and began landing troops on May 21st at San Carlos Water on the west coast of East Falkland. The Argentinians attempted to defeat the invasion with air attacks, but the British eventually prevailed, inflicting heavy losses. On the 28th, the British began the ground campaign, defeating the Argentinian garrison at Goose Green and opening the way to lay siege to the main enemy positions near Stanley. The first days of June saw the islands shrouded in clouds, but that didn't prevent the British from leapfrogging forward to Fitzroy and Bluff Cove, just to the south of Stanley. There, tragedy struck on June 8th, when an air attack caught several ships unloading. This didn't stop the British from launching their assault on the hills surrounding Stanley on the night of the 11th, securing three major hills. Two days later, the final assault took the last pair of hills, and the Argentine commander surrendered the next morning.¹

A Chinook lifts the damaged Wessex from Glamorgan

The weather in the Falklands had been bad, with Wireless Ridge and Mount Tumbledown being taken among scattered snowstorms. But on the 15th, the snow started in earnest, with several ships reporting the worst seas they'd seen since entering the South Atlantic. The ASW Sea Kings were withdrawn from the carrier's screen for the first time in over a month, and a Wessex (borrowed from Tidespring) on the deck of Glamorgan was badly damaged. The North Sea ferry Europic Ferry was being used to prep a Chinook brought south by Contender Bezant, and she rolled so badly that her crew seriously considered jettisoning it. Ultimately, the helicopter came through undamaged, and flew off when the weather moderated on the 16th. Read more...

Gentlemen,

The last year has been fairly quiet, as our plans for completing our existing construction have been carried out. We have commissioned 3 BBs, a CV, a CA, 2 CVLs and 2 CLs, although postwar budget crunches have limited new construction to a CA, a CVL and a CL. We have also scrapped the Devastations and Dupetit-Thouars. Fortunately, worldwide tensions are also low, except with Austria, who has been throwing its weight around again.

Our budget is currently balanced, and we have 2 CAs and 3 CLs completing in the next year, so plans need to be drawn up to replace them on the slip. At the moment there are no glaring weaknesses in our fleet, so we have a fairly free hand in deciding what to spend it on. Read more...

The world's surface has been largely carved up among the world's sovereign states, and each piece is owned by one specific state.² Boundary disputes do occur, but for the last century or more, the largest frontier of international territorial law has been at sea.

Various categories of territorial waters

From the 16th century until the early 20th century, international law was relatively simple. A state was generally accepted to be able to lay claim to and control any waters up to three nautical miles³ from its coast, and anything beyond that was the high seas, which were not controlled by any state, and were free to the use of all nations in peacetime. The three-mile limit is traditionally ascribed to the range of contemporary cannon, although it's more likely that it originated with the distance to the horizon from someone standing at sea level.⁴ Within this limit, a state essentially had the same jurisdiction that it did on land. By WWII, however, this consensus had begun to crack, and a number of countries began asserting much greater territorial jurisdiction, in some cases up to 200 miles out to sea. Much of this had to do with fishing rights, as conservation of fish stocks was an increasing concern. Expanded claims sparked conflict between those nations making them, including Peru, Indonesia, Ecuador and Chile, and the major maritime powers, led by the US, who refused to recognize anything beyond 3 miles. Read more...

Today, the Arleigh Burke class destroyers are the backbone of the US fleet, with 67 ships in service. The lead ship of the class, named for an Admiral who helped pull the US Navy up from some of its darkest days, was commissioned on July 4th, 1991, and three evolved variants were ordered in FY20,⁵ with more still to come. This longevity and flexibility is particularly impressive for a design that ultimately dates back to the 1980s and was intended to face a threat which no longer exists.

Arleigh Burke underway

Shortly after entering office, the Reagan Administration came up with a new strategy for fighting the Cold War at sea. Instead of passively trying to protect convoys crossing the North Atlantic, they would dispatch a carrier striking force into the Norwegian Sea, threatening Soviet bases in the Arctic and drawing out their bombers to be destroyed. One of the cornerstones of this strategy was Aegis, which gave reasonable confidence that the escorts could shoot down any incoming missiles, freeing the F-14s to go after the bombers in the so-called Outer Air Battle. Read more...

It's time once again for our regular Open Thread, and as the count of OTs has reached Naval Gazing's favorite number, the subject of discussion for the thread is "Why the USS Iowa is the best battleship ever."

As usual, you're allowed to talk about anything you want, so long as it's not culture war.

2018 overhauls are the reviews of Salem and Groton, So You Want to Build a Modern Navy - Strategy Part 3, Falklands Part 6, the Nimrod program and Auxiliaries Part 3*. For 2019, overhauls are my pictures of the Tinker airshow, Falklands Part 18, Fire Control Transmission, Naval Ranks - Officers, Riverine Warfare - South America and Fouling*.

In early April 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, a few desolate rocks in the South Atlantic. The British mobilized their fleet in response. After a fierce battle in the air and at sea, the British gained the upper hand, and began landing troops on May 21st at San Carlos Water on the west coast of East Falkland. The Argentinians attempted to defeat the invasion with air attacks, but the British eventually gained the upper hand. On the 28th, the British began the ground campaign, defeating the Argentinian garrison at Goose Green and opening the way to lay siege to the main enemy positions near Stanley. The first days of June saw the islands shrouded in clouds, but that didn't prevent the British from leapfrogging forward to Fitzroy and Bluff Cove, just to the south of Stanley. There, tragedy struck on June 8th, when an air attack caught several ships unloading. This didn't stop the British from launching their assault on the hills surrounding Stanley on the night of the 11th, securing three major hills. The final assault was scheduled for the 13th.⁶

Yarmouth and Andromeda seen from Cardiff

The 12th was fairly quiet, with the usual shuffle of ships between San Carlos and the transport area. Exeter, after nearly two weeks guarding San Carlos, was swapped with Cardiff, from the Battle Group screen. Argentine air activity was minimal, with only a transport flight after dark, which the British failed to interdict with their artillery. The most notable event took place thousands of miles away, when transport Norland reached Montevideo and landed over a thousand Argentinian prisoners, who were repatriated across the River Plate by the Red Cross. Even as this was going on, dispatch ship Hecla set off from the Falklands for Montevideo with wounded. Only two frigates, Active and Arrow carried out the nightly bombardment, with Arrow firing the last 103 rounds of 902 she had fired since entering the war zone. She and Yarmouth were the only undamaged survivors of the original escort group, a testament to the brutal attacks the British had endured. Read more...

One subject that comes up a lot in discussions of modern naval warfare is missile defense, and I decided to try to get some reasonably hard data on the subject by using the amazing Command: Modern Operations game/simulation tool. This is a piece of software sold as a game, but also used by professional analysts. It's a fantastic resource for answering these kind of questions, and I used it to look at the period 1975-present.

The basics of the test were simple. I set up two bunkers, each armed with eight P-15 Styx (SS-N-2) anti-ship missiles in the Palos Verdes peninsula, near San Pedro, and stationed the target near Catalina Island, about 22 nm away. The bunkers would detect and engage the target immediately, firing off all of their missiles, while the target ship would shoot down as many as it could.

The first target was a 1972-spec Charles F Adams class destroyer, which I fired 16 missiles at. The Adams had a twin Mk 11 launcher for RIM-66A SM-1MR missiles, with 2 illuminators. Began engagement at around 10 nm, Ph 0.35.

Read more...

Gentlemen,

We are victorious in our war with Germany! They have decided to end the war on reasonably favorable terms due to their inability to challenge the Allied blockade. Unfortunately, we didn't have the leverage to extract major concessions, but the war indemnity will be nice. Fortunately, the budget cuts will be compensated for nicely by ships commissioning over the coming months, so we won't even have to halt our building programs. We should even be able to lay down some new construction late in the year.

The question, as usual, is what form that construction should take. We have two CVLs and a CV finishing this year, and another CV might work quite well to boost the fleet's striking power, potentially allowing us to replace Duquesne with something more compatible with our other carriers. Another option would be CAs or BBs to counter the German BC fleet. Read more...

NTDS, the Naval Tactical Data System, revolutionized fleet air defense when it arrived on the scene in the early 60s. Now, ships could automatically share their tactical pictures, updated by computers, which allowed the fleet to keep up with the speed of jet aircraft. However, NTDS was limited to the larger ships, carriers and cruisers, by its cost and size, and cheaper systems would be needed for smaller ships or cash-strapped navies. Several nations developed their own systems, but the US Navy was never able to modernize the existing fleet, as systems foundered due to the cost of the war in Vietnam and the postwar budget crash.

Iowa's Flag Plot, which would hook into NTDS

By the early 70s, NTDS itself was in trouble. Its software was modular, which made it easy to add new capabilities as they became necessary, even at the behest of the ship's own crew. However, the result was a system ever more overloaded, particularly as the NTDS architecture focused on one task at a time, giving the illusion of multi-tasking by flipping through modules. As more software was written, the interval between repeats rose, and the system soon became unusable. The system could only accept operator inputs in certain timeslots, which meant that the time to move the cursor across the screen rose from 3 seconds to 16 seconds, and in a few cases response lag to button pushes rose to over a minute. This meant that NTDS had serious problems tracking targets, with 15 to 25% of tracks during testing being 5 or more miles from their actual location, and a lag of 3.2 minutes from a new one showing up on radar to being entered into the system. Read more...

Until the late 1930s, flying boats were the vehicle of choice for long-range aviation. Using runways provided by God instead of man, they could economically operate from remote locations and had proved instrumental in the formation of most of the early international airline networks, most notably Juan Trippe's bridging of both the Atlantic and Pacific with Pan Am.

A Pan Am Boeing 314 Clipper

Nor were navies blind to the possibilities of flying boats, capable of operating from forward areas with only the aid of a tender and with greater performance than anything that could be flown off of a carrier. Besides the obvious role of long-range reconnaissance, there was also the possibility of using them as bombers against both enemy ships and land bases. This was particularly attractive to the US Navy, who couldn't be sure of control of land-based bombers, and as a result, their patrol designation was replaced in the mid-30s with that of patrol bomber, the first result of which was the famous PBY Catalina. Unfortunately, improvements in aerodynamics and landplane performance were increasingly hard to reconcile with the demands of taking off from and landing on water, and by the outbreak of WWII, the PBY and flying boats in general were no longer on the cutting edge. Read more...