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.¹ 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.² Read more...

Gentlemen,

The year since the end of our latest war with Italy has been an exciting one. We have commissioned Lille, widely recognized as the most powerful warship afloat. We have laid down a trio of CLs and 10 DDs, giving us the largest and most modern force of that type afloat. Our researchers and agents have brought us a bounty of technology, ranging from engines to guns to armor. A recent clash with the US in the Caribbean has lead to an increase in our budget, and we have begun an aviation program, with an airship base in Norway and the fitting of a few ships to carry scouting planes.

But it has also brought challenges. The recent victories of the Liberals in Britain have resulted in the RN's budget being slashed to the point that the German fleet might overtake them soon, and our nation has been unable to keep up. Our diplomats assure us that the situation with the US can be managed, but that does pose another risk to our interests. The first of the new destroyers will commission in four months, opening the way for continued capital ship construction. A number of sketch designs have been prepared for your consideration. Read more...

Guided weapons were first deployed during WWII, most famously by the Germans in the form of the Hs 293 and Fritz-X guided bombs. But the Germans were far from alone in their efforts, and I've also discussed the efforts of the US Army and various other powers to develop air-to-surface guided weapons. However, the weirdest and most interesting program was that of the US Navy, who took a common airframe and build a bewildering array of weapons around it, ranging from the successful to the absurd.

Pelican

The USN's guided weapons program was built around a common airframe developed by the National Bureau of Standards and usually carrying a 1,000 lb warhead, with a wide variety of different guidance systems. The first versions, known as Robin and Dragon, used standard radio guidance, with or without a TV camera to pass images back to the operator. These were not hugely successful, and the program was soon terminated in favor of radar guidance. The first result was Pelican, which would home in on radar signals reflected from a target illuminated by the launching aircraft's radar. After some teething troubles in the guidance system were ironed out, it worked rather well by the standards of the time.³ However, the delay had opened the door for another guidance system, which the Navy decided to put into combat use.⁴ Read more...

I've previously discussed the early German guided bombs at some length, but the Germans weren't the only power to try to make guided weapons during WWII.⁵ Most of the other powers also tried to make their weapons more accurate, sometimes with hilarious results.

GB-1 glide bomb

By far the most prolific of these efforts were those of the US. The normal wartime procurement pattern was for the US to produce a system or two that worked well, and Germany to saddle itself with a dozen different ones, all inadequately debugged and competing for resources. Guided weapons are one of the few cases where this was reversed. The Germans only had a handful of programs, mostly in different niches, while the US tried several systems for each role, and only a handful saw combat. Read more...

It's time for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as you avoid culture war stuff.

The list of updates is particularly long, as I'm beginning another round of yearly overhauls. From 2018, I've updated underbottom explosions, Survivability - Mission Kills, The Last Days of the High Seas Fleet, Samar, Turret and Barbette, The Space Force and the FAA and Russian Battleships Part 4. The 2017 overhauls are A Brief History of the Battleship, Iowa Parts One and Two, and Fire Control Part 1.

Today is the traditional day to celebrate the United States Navy, even if it has been deprecated in recent years thanks to a conspiracy of a mustache-obsessed CNO and pro-Air Force elements in the Pentagon. OK, that was mild hyperbole. Officially, Navy Day was deprecated in favor of Armed Forces Day at the order of Lewis Johnson, SecDef to Truman, who tried to gut the Navy in favor of the Air Force. The ceremony was partially recreated when historical research showed that the Continental Navy was founded on October 13th, 1775, and Elmo Zumwalt ordered celebrations to be held on that day, which cannibalized unofficial Navy Day celebrations. But I'm a traditionalist, so I'm going to celebrate it today.

Missouri and Renshaw during Navy Day 1945

It's also the second anniversary of Naval Gazing as an independent blog, and an excellent year it has been. I've continued to enjoy writing, particularly with the recent reduction in pace, and interacting with my readership in the comments. Seeing people reading my stuff and thinking about it is one of the great joys of doing this. Read more...

Gentlemen,

We are at war with Italy for a third time so far this century. Not much has changed in the 18 months since the last one ended, except that we have commissioned a pair of new battleships, while Italy still has only one Irresistible-type. As such, we currently plan to essentially implement the strategy we used last time. We have solved most of the bottlenecks that kept our forces out of Sicily, and after a minor victory in the opening battle of the war, are prepared to fight for control of the Mediterranean.

There aren't a whole lot of decisions pending, beyond what shape our destroyer force should take going forward. We have recently increased the maximum size of our ships of that type by 50%, but with the increased size comes an increase in cost. Four sketches have been prepared, covering a wide range of options. Read more...

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Leyte Gulf,⁶ probably the pinnacle of the Pacific War and by some definitions the largest naval battle in history.⁷ More than that, it was uniquely complicated and multifaceted: it included every form of naval warfare yet devised, from amphibious operations to carrier duels to the last-ever engagement between battleships. And above it all, Samar, that astonishing moment when a tiny force of American ships stood up against the mightiest fleet Japan could assemble and turned them back.

Douglas MacArthur and his staff observe the invasion of Leyte

Leyte Gulf was sparked by the American selection of the Philippines as the next stepping stone on the road to Tokyo, fulfilling Douglas MacArthur's promise to return and liberate it from the Japanese. The island of Leyte, in the center of the archipelago, was selected as the first target, giving the Americans a forward base from which they could spread out and liberate the rest of the Philippines. After extensive strikes from the carriers covering the operation, troops began going ashore on October 20th, initially in the face of only light opposition. The Japanese decided that the time was right to launch their fleet for the "Decisive Battle" they had been attempting to fight since the start of the war. Read more...

The damage of an explosion doesn’t scale linearly with size. The general rule of thumb is that the radius for a given amount of damage scales with the cube root of the weight of the explosive charge. This means that trying to destroy a larger area by just making bigger bombs has sharply diminishing returns. It’s much more efficient to drop multiple smaller bombs, particularly on soft targets like trucks and troops in the open. Taking this to its logical conclusion, the best way to destroy a soft area target is to drop dozens or hundreds of small bomblets on it. The easiest way to do this is to package a cluster of bomblets into something that can be handled and used more or less like a normal bomb, and these devices were soon dubbed cluster bombs.

A B-1B dropping cluster bombs

The first cluster bombs were developed before WWII, primarily to carry incendiary bomblets.⁸ Incendiaries are particularly well-suited to cluster deployment, as starting a fire is fairly easy if the bomb lands in the right place, and cluster bomblets multiply both opportunities to land in the right place and the problems of firefighters trying to contain the resulting blaze. The Soviets used an early version of this in the Winter War with Finland, with Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov claiming that they were dropping food to starving Finns. The Finns, who were not starving, dubbed the devices Molotov bread baskets, and later said that they were giving the Soviets drink to go with the food when they improvised incendiaries from bottles, creating the Molotov cocktail. Read more...