Southeast Asia has long been one of the world's maritime crossroads. The Strait of Malacca, connecting the Indian and Pacific Oceans, has been important to sailors carrying goods between East Asia, India and Europe since Antiquity, and continues to be vital to international trade today. Southeast Asia is also dotted with islands, which has long incentivized its inhabitants to participate in maritime commerce. Unfortunately, all too many of them decided the best way to participate was as pirates, a problem that troubles the region even today.

A battle with pirates off Borneo

Many of these pirates chose to base themselves up rivers, making it exceptionally difficult for official naval forces to track them down and destroy them. The novel Flashman's Lady contains a meticulously-researched account of one such expedition in Borneo, led by James Brooke, the White Rajah of Sarawak.¹ But while fighting piracy on rivers continues to this day, Southeast Asia is far better known for the French and American riverine campaigns in Indochina, particularly the Mekong River and its delta.² Read more...

It's time for our regular open thread.

In the naval news recently has been the mess that is the Secretary of the Navy's replacement/resignation. Richard Spencer has resigned/been fired in a case that looks to have something to do with the trial of Eddie Gallagher, a SEAL accused of war crimes. Gallagher was acquitted of murder and other serious charges, but convicted of posing for a photo with a slain member of ISIS. Trump has for some reason fastened onto the case, granting clemency, restoring Gallagher's rank, and tweeting that Gallagher would not be stripped of his status as a SEAL before he retired. Spencer has been publicly in favor of letting the process run its course without Trump's interference, but appears to have brokered a deal to make sure it would produce the result Trump wanted. Somehow, Trump lost confidence in him, and fired him via tweet. Personally, I won't mourn Spencer's departure. He's done a better job than his predecessor, Ray Mabus, but that's a bar that could probably have been cleared by appointing a cabbage. His replacement is to be the current ambassador to Norway, retired Rear Admiral Kenneth Braithwaite.

Please remember to be nice to the other side, and not to venture too far from the issue at hand. The broader culture war ban is still in effect.

Also, a reminder that the Naval Institute Press Holiday Sale ends in two weeks, the same day the next OT goes up, so I'd recommend getting your shopping in now.

Overhauled posts since last time are the Battleships of Pearl Harbor Part 3, Iowa parts five, six and seven, Mine Warfare Part 1, and Russian Battleships Part 1 for 2017. 2018 overhauls are Commercial Aviation Part 1, Missouri Part 3, the internment of the High Seas Fleet, Crew art aboard Iowa, So You Want to Build a Battleship - Design Part 2 and G3 and Nelson.

The Harpoon missile has been a mainstay of the American arsenal for the last 40 years. Launched by surface ships, aircraft, and submarines, it has also found use in land-attack versions, and continues to be modernized and upgraded today.

Iowa launching a Harpoon

Harpoon, technically AGM/RGM/UGM-84,³ began life in the mid-60s as a weapon for patrol aircraft to shoot at surfaced submarines.⁴ While submarines generally prefer to spend their time underwater, the Soviets had yet to perfect the art of the underwater missile launch, and both cruise and ballistic missile submarines would have had to surface to use their weapons. The SS-N-3 missiles that armed most of the anti-ship cruise missile submarines required midcourse guidance from their launch platform, increasing the window of vulnerability even more. But in 1967, even before a contract had been placed, the Israeli destroyer Eilat was sunk by Soviet-supplied anti-ship missiles, kicking off a mad scramble for similar weapons. Read more...

In early April 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, a few desolate rocks in the South Atlantic. The British mobilized their fleet in response. The carriers arrived off the Falklands on May 1st, swiftly defeating the Argentine Air Force. The Argentine Navy tried to interfere the next day, but withdrew after the cruiser General Belgrano was sunk by a submarine. Two days later, the Argentinians struck back, sinking the frigate Sheffield with an Exocet missile. Two weeks later, on May 21st, British troops landed at San Carlos Water on the west coast of East Falkland. The Argentine Air Force quickly got wind of this, and launched numerous sorties against the invasion fleet. The brutal battle ran for five days before the Argentinian attacks petered out. Unfortunately, the 25th saw the destroyer Coventry and the cargo ship Atlantic Conveyor sunk by air attack. A few days later, the British began their breakout, defeating the Argentinians at Goose Green in the first land battle of the war.⁵

An Argentinian Hercules

While the 29th was most notable for the capture of Goose Green, it was a busy day elsewhere. The final bomb on Sir Lancelot was disarmed, clearing the ships in San Carlos of unexploded bombs for the first time in 8 days. The Argentinians also paid their first visit to San Carlos since the 25th, when two aircraft made a recon pass, with one of them, a Dagger, falling to a missile. At almost the same time, the tanker British Wye was coming under attack 780 miles to the northeast from a rather unlikely airplane. The British had been well aware of the air threat to their long and perilous logistics chain, and had made sure to remain out of range of Argentina's Canberra bombers. The Argentinians had countered this by fitting Pucara bomb racks to some of their C-130s, one of which found the tanker and dropped eight bombs on her. Fortunately for the British, the only hit bounced off the forecastle, but the merchant ships were quickly rerouted to keep them out of C-130 range as well. Read more...

Gentlemen,

So far, the war with Italy goes well. We have taken some damage, but dealt significantly more in return, and Germany has remained neutral. We have also used airplanes at sea, and are poised to bring more planes into the fleet with our new AV conversions. However, we are faced with a number of choices, most notably over the direction of our future shipbuilding programs. The Rouen class battlecruisers complete in a few months, and we presumably want ships to follow them on the slipway, particularly as two new CLs are also about to commission.

Read more...

The first American in space was a naval aviator, as was the first American to orbit the Earth.⁶ The first man on the moon was a naval aviator, as were five of the six commanders of Lunar missions who followed him. And the USN was primarily responsible for the recovery of every single manned mission from Alan Shepard's first steps into space until the beginning of the Shuttle program. Today, the 50th anniversary of Apollo 12's landing on the Moon with an all-Navy crew,⁷ seems a good time to examine some of these contributions.

Al Bean about to step on the Lunar surface

The sea and space have been linked since time immemorial, when early mariners studied the stars to guide them across trackless seas. The United State's first space agency, the Naval Observatory, was created in 1830 to support celestial navigation. It was one of the country's leading astronomical institutions during the 19th century, playing a major role in measuring the distance to the sun by observing the transit of Venus and providing the telescope used to discover the moons of Mars in 1877. As academic astronomy grew in strength, the Naval Observatory began to focus instead on providing precision timing and reference frames, and remains a world leader in these fields. It also houses the Vice President and operates an observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. Read more...

Billy Mitchell is a controversial figure in the history of aviation and naval warfare. His claim that the airplane had rendered the battleship obsolete, and his relentless campaign to make the airplane the center of America's national defense, set off first great inter-service conflict. But how closely does the popular account match what actually happened in the early 20s? And was Mitchell right about the vulnerability of the battleship to air attack?

Billy Mitchell

Mitchell had joined the Army Signal Corps in 1898, and was one of the service's first proponents of the airplane. He took private flying lessons and ended up as the senior combat aviation commander in the American Expeditionary Force in France during WWI. Despite a number of personality clashes with other officers, he did an excellent job, flying numerous combat missions to see the ground his men would be fighting over and directing the largest single group of aircraft ever placed under a single command during the war. He expected to be rewarded with command of the Army's postwar air arm, and was bitterly disappointed when this did not come through. While in Europe, he became a devotee of the idea that the nation needed a unified air arm, on the model of the recently-founded RAF, and began to evangelize for this upon his return to the US. Read more...

It's our regular open thread. Talk about anything you want.

The best time of year is upon us! No, not the holidays directly. The Naval Institute Press holiday sale! Everything is half off, and with free shipping. The Naval Institute Press produces about 75% of the books I use as the basis for this blog, so this is the best possible time to expand your naval library. Just be sure to use the coupon code HOLIDAY at checkout. It runs through 12/13, so be sure to get your orders in by then.

Good choices include the 14-volume set of Morison's History of US Naval Operations in WWII, Norman Friedman's US Battleships, World Naval Weapon Systems and Network-Centric Warfare, and the superb Nelson's Navy on the RN of that era. But there's a lot of other great stuff available, too, and I'd encourage you to take a look, particularly through the Clear the Decks discount collection, many of which are in the $5 range.

Several of you expressed some interest in donating to Naval Gazing, and I thought I'd provide you with the opportunity. Just to be clear, I have a good job, and definitely don't need the money. There are lots of people who could use it. But if you feel inclined, click here to donate through Paypal. Everything I get will go to the Naval Gazing Library Expansion Project. Again, don't feel any compulsion to give.

Overhauled posts since last time are Fire Control Part 2, Ballistics, US Battleships in World War II, Iowa Parts three and four, The Battleships of Pearl Harbor Parts one and two and The Battle of Lissa for 2017 and the museum ship lists for Europe and the rest of the world, ASW - Operations Research in the Atlantic, my review of the 45th Infantry Division Museum and Falklands Part 8 for 2018. As usual, the updates are confined to link updates and refined grammar.

While gravity bombs of various types are powerful and effective weapons, all of them suffer from one major drawback. They require the launch platform to close with the target, which can take it straight into the envelope of whatever defense systems are protecting it. Guided bombs raise the altitude ceiling, keeping the strike aircraft out of the envelope of short-range SAMs and AAA guns, but these are usually integrated with long-range high-altitude SAMs, which aren’t so easily avoided. The answer is standoff weapons, which hopefully allow the aircraft to stay out of range of the target’s defenses. Generally, these weapons would be used to degrade or destroy the target’s air defenses, opening the way for cheaper, shorter-range weapons. Normally, “standoff” means “missile”, but this isn’t always true, and we’ll start by looking at unpowered standoff weapons, which achieve their range by gliding.

AGM-62 Walleye

The concept of a gliding bomb is not new. The German Fritz-X of WWII was a glide bomb, although it differed from modern weapons of the same type in falling quite steeply. Several other nations also built more conventional glide bombs during and immediately after WWII, with only limited success. The 50s saw little work on weapons of this type, as nuclear weapons greatly reduced the need for precision guidance. During the 1960s, this kind of logic was seen as no longer appropriate, and programs began to develop new precision weapons, taking advantage of electronics unavailable to their WWII-era predecessors. These bombs, like the Air Force HOBOS and Navy Walleye, were designed with some glide capability. Both used contrast seekers, which used an analog TV camera set up to look for sharp changes in image value and home in on them. This was pretty effective when it worked, but it required the target to stand out clearly from the background, meaning it was limited to daylight and good visibility. The need to lock the seeker on before launch meant that the airplane often had to get rather closer than it would have liked to the target, and the weapons themselves were considerably more expensive than Paveway, so they saw only limited use during the Vietnam War. Read more...

Continuing my tour of interesting military facilities around the country, we turn our attention to the Army, specifically the Army Soldier Systems Center at Natick, Massachusetts. This is where the Army does research on improving the lives of soldiers. Not by giving them better guns, but by improving their equipment, ranging from boots to uniforms to tents.

A test in the Doroit Climate Chamber

Natick's facilities are mostly divided between two main organizations, the Combat Capabilities Development Command Soldier Center and the Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine.⁸ Between them, they operate a number of unique facilities which provide a fascinating look at the level of effort which goes into even the smallest piece of military equipment.⁹ Read more...