It's time once again for our regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.
The LA meetup last month was excellent, and everyone seemed to have a great time. Next year, the plan is to go to the Air Force Museum in Dayton. There may not be ships, but it is a really impressive museum, and unlike museum ships, I have much less concern about the size of the group. You should plan to come.
Overhauls are Battleship Aviation Parts One and Two, FFG(X) and for 2024, reviews of Bovington Tank Museum, museums around Boston, places we went during last year's meetup and my piece on Eagle.
Comments
When is the Dayton trip?
Probably May of next year.
Greetings from a longtime lurker--as a brief aside, probably my favorite series of yours is the Falklands.
Tangential to the SYWTBAMN series: what if an island country on the borderline of being able to afford a carrier or two (whether CATOBAR or STOVL) decided to forgo carriers and focus on surface warships? Being able to fly planes off carriers has many advantages, but it's obviously incredibly expensive--both in terms of ships, planes, and the amount of personnel (and training of the personnel!) needed. Carrier-based fixed-wing aviation does a lot of different things: strike, recon, AEW, CAP, etc. But virtually all of those can be handled (although not always as well) in other ways. Strike can be done by Tomahawks (or something similar). Recon by drones. AEW by helicopters. And with enough SAMs, you can protect the airspace over your ships without needing your own fighters.
I'll admit that my experiences are probably based too much on playing CMO and not enough on analysis of the real-world, so there may be things I'm overlooking. But I'd always get annoyed when playing scenarios when my carrier-based fighters have shorter-range missiles than my opponents; why fly a CAP if your fighters are just going to get shot down? Let the SAMs handle anything they throw at you. Missiles aren't free, of course, but you could buy a lot of them for the cost of two carriers and their air wings.
@KM, at the strategic decision making level I would say that you build a carrier if you think at some time you will want to send your airforce into someone else's airspace.
If you only have a defensive fleet and no desire to ever intervene in someone else's politics, sure just have aircraft based in your home country.
If you want to overthrow foreign governments who annoy you, you'll want aircraft carriers as it's very often difficult to persuade neighbours of the target government to let you base your aircraft in their airbases.
Tricky case is defending sea lines of communication, maritime trade. If you don't want to be an imperial power but you do rely on imports, an aircraft carrier may be necessary if you need to defend your ships a long way from home.
@KM
I would say that your problem is that you base it lot of about games.
You first need to understand that navies are defind by clash in some location as in video games, but by its mission. What you want from your navy? And this is political decision.
For instance South Korean politicians decided that the main mission is only to protect nearby waters, so they cancel their CVX aircraft carriers. And they are building lot of frigates and destroyers, because they plan to fight near their shores under protection of their Air force.
On the other hand, Italy has far less major surface combatants than Korea, but has two Aircarft Carriers. Korean Navy is far better in protecting their waters than Italian Navy. But Korean Navy would be far worse in major military intervention in Africa. The navies are defined by its mission, that is defined by politics.
There are multiple missions that can not be done without aircraft carrier.
1) Supporting land forces. Yes, you can fire Tomahawk, but it cost 3 million dollars and it has response time couple of hours. Paveway with the same warhead cost 10k and you can have couple of planes on alert.
2) Reconnaissance. Naval radars can see other ship for 40-60 kilometers, Helicopters have short range, low flight celling and bad radars.
3) Area air defence far from home. If you do not have your own fighters you can be just attacked by your enemy firing anti-ship missiles from behind range of your air defence.
4) Long range attacks. Yes, Tomahawk has range of 2500 kilometers, but will it find a ship there? With F-35 you can find 1000+km targets and attack immediately.
There are dozens other missions that only Aircraft Carrier can do, if you need anything from that missions, you will need an aircraft carrier. But even very strong navies do not need Aircraft Carriers for their missions (e.g. Japan, Korea, Russia), because thei missions are different.
*that navies are NOT defined by clash in some location as in video games,
This is the biggest thing I'm really thinking about. If you're focused primarily on defending your ships (and not on projecting power ashore), is it worth trying to do it with ship-based SAMs alone instead of relying on carrier-based aircraft to attack the planes (or ships, or ground units) that are firing the anti-ship missiles?
One of the problems with this approach would be not being able to reload VLS at sea and running out of ammo. A fleet without carriers wouldn't be ideal for a situation where you're just camped out near enemy territory and they have more missiles than you do. But if your goals are just moving your fleet from point A to point B, or if you're fighting near your own territory, or fighting over an island that's far from your own territory and your enemy's territory, it might be more manageable.
While I love CMO, and think it's great for giving reasonable answers to the question of "what would happen in this case", I think it's less great for doing this sort of "what should we buy?" analysis. As for the case for the carrier, a couple of things:
Fighters can extend your range past that of your SAMs. This is less of a concern today with things like SM-6, but still not not a concern. If all you have are SAMs, then the other guy can basically do whatever he wants so long as he stays out of range. Fighters can go out several times as far, pushing range well over the horizon. Otherwise, you get "let's hang a bunch of ASMs on our C-130s" and the like.
Fixed-wing AWACS is much, much better than helicopter AWACS. You get more payload, and a lot better endurance. The second probably isn't noticeable in a short scenario.
If you're projecting power ashore in a less hostile environment, JDAM is a lot cheaper than Tomahawk, and you can have the pilot look through the targeting pod before dropping one.
Fighters have more flexibility than SAMs. If there's someone doing something suspicious, you can send them over to look. This is not a thing SAMs can do.
If you're going up against a serious opponent, then you probably want some form of fighter cover. If you're South Korea, this can come from ashore, but for everyone else, carriers are very useful.
If anything, the Falklands series is one of my better answers to this question. That campaign would not have been possible without the carriers.
@KM I would say it is more about no-escape zone. Plane could see a fleet on its radars about 400km away (based only on radar horizon) and most of modern ASM have about this range. But even if you had air defence missile of this range the fighter would be 200km away when the air defence missile reach the point from which the fighter fired the ASM.
That is the reason why modern naval air defence basically switched to missile defence. Without air force cover you will be just attacked until attacker fire all his ASM or you fire all your SAM and in current 100k cruise missile (people call them drones) era the attacker is in massive advantage.
I think there is somewhere (for me extremely suprising) blogpost talking abot F-35B havinng basically half the combat radius of F-35A, so max range of your F-35As on land will be the same as your F-35B on the carrier 500km from home. So it is propably useless. But I think far from home you can not survive without carrier.
Perun's latest YouTube video "Ukraine Strikes Russia's Bombers" is out, covering the recent Ukraine drone attack on Russian airfields.
A point he makes at the end is that western militaries (and I suppose China) should not be thinking that the Ukrainian attack is the worst that could happen. Ukraine got hundreds of precision-guided munitions within short range of extremely valuable military targets even though Russia was already at war, already had security forces and military defences on alert, had already dispersed the potential targets. What could a better resourced attacker do on the first day of a conflict?
Not covered in the video, what could the naval equivalent do? How easy would it be to get a shipping container within a couple of km of major warships?
Hi, noob here. Just finished reading Hornfischer's Neptune's Inferno and had a few questions about the First Naval Battle of Guadalcanal (Friday Nov 13):
1) Was there a scenario where Callaghan's Task Group 67.4 (2 CA, CL, 2CLAA, 8 DD) could have engaged the Japanese bombardment force (2 BB, CL, 6 DD) with a better tactical result? i.e. duel between U.S. cruisers (8-in guns) with SG-radar versus Japanese battleships (14-in guns) plus Japanese advantage of nightfighting and DD torpedoes)? Hornfischer alludes to the recognition by the TF 67.4 officers that it was a suicide mission in any event.
2) There seems to be consensus that Callaghan was out of his depth (at least in relation to Adm. Scott or Lee), gave little to confusing orders during battle and wrongfully ignored use of radar. But, if a point-blank melee and bar room brawl was the best course of action to negate the enemy's superior firepower (somewhat similar to Nelson at Trafalgar), then was Callaghan ultimately correct in his actions (i.e. self-sacrificing throwing the TF into the breach in order to achieve strategic victory of delaying Henderson Field bombardment)?
There has apparently been a rise in fiber optic directed drones in Ukraine, even down to fairly small sizes. While in some ways this is nothing new to naval warfare (torpedoes have had wire guidance for ages) it seems like a new phenomena for aerial / anti-surface weaponry, particularly at longer ranges. (at shorter ranges, things like the TOW were wire guided back in the 60s!).
Does this change the tradeoff on electronic warfare as a deterrent for smaller drones, and consequently their effectiveness? IIRC, one of the primary arguments against the effectiveness of drone swarms is that the AEGIS can fry their radios and electronics - but it seems like that would be much harder if they're using a non-RF guidance system, where the faraday cage can be that much larger.
@redRover My first thought is that a thin fiber optic line floating on the surface would be vulnerable to getting snapped in half by a big enough wave. Although a small drone's prospects in rough weather were never very good to begin with so maybe this is irrelevant.
Even without an antenna I'd still worry about a big enough radar melting the plastic body of a cheap drone.
@coffeebean
Maybe - optical fibers are quite thin and thus weak in absolute terms, but they’re also basically glass fibers, so the per unit strengths should be relatively favorable, particularly as the fiber is only dealing with its own weight and not being used as a tether or anything. If it gets hit by something in the water I can see it breaking, but otherwise I don’t think waves on their own would do it, particularly if they’re rollers rather than breaking waves.
I don't think fiber-optics solve the Aegis frying problem. You'll be a little more resistant because you don't need to have something explicitly designed as an antenna, but Aegis puts out a lot of power. Unless you are extraordinarily careful in design, it's still going to be vulnerable, and that sort of care isn't compatible with off-the-shelf tech. For instance, if you're talking about a quadcopter, you probably have the motors directly under the rotors. Much easier to design and build, etc. But you need wires going to those motors, and those will be antennas with enough power directed at them... Sure, you could put the motors in a faraday cage and run mechanical linkages, but that's introducing a lot of complexity and you can't just order those from Shenzhen the way you can normal quadcopter components.