It's time once again for our regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.
Overhauls are Mine Warfare Part 2, A Brief History of the Aircraft Carrier, Eilat, and for 2022, The Defense Information Pipeline and Hypersonic Weapons.
Also, I'm going to try another virtual meetup before the end of the year. We'll do it next Saturday, 12/16, at 1 PM Central (GMT-6). Meetup will be held in the Discord.
Comments
I'll use this empty thread to ask a relatively basic question, hopefully someone shows up who can answer. What is the USN's intended way of surface-to-surface ship combat? Is it Harpoons all the way down (prior to LRASM, anyway), launched from aircraft normally, and from escort ships as a fallback?
This feels a bit confusing since having just one single missile (even with variants) for the entire task of fighting enemy's surface fleet seems a bit sparse, especially by the US armed forces standards, and yet I'm not aware of any others (again, pre-2010s or so). And it's not even a heavy missile, and it's subsonic as well, and I'm pretty sure I've seen it described as being for self-defense. Are/were there just some other systems that I'm missing?
To somewhat broaden the question: what would a modern naval battle plausibly look like?
Missile defence working well enough that you lose by running out of defensive missiles, sci-fi shields-at-X% style?? Being caught while your defences are off/malfunctioning/looking the other way?? Submarines as all that matters, or not??
@SurvivalBias
Up until quite recently, surface warfare basically wasn't a thing in the USN. If we had to, we'd use Harpoon, but it wasn't a major role. That was the job of aircraft or submarines. (Keep in mind that this is pretty much the closest we've come to facing a peer threat since 1944 or so.) I'm still not sure it's seen as a major mission by the surface fleet. VL-LRASM is moving slowly if it's moving at all (I thought it was dead from 2019 to 2022) and Harpoon is still disappearing.
The last time the a ship of the United States Navy sunk an enemy warship in battle was April 18, 1988. The Iranian fast attack craft "Joshan" fired a Harpoon missile at the USN, which was defeated by electronic warfare. USS Simpson, a Perry-class frigate, returned fire with four SM-1 Standard missiles, mission-killing the Joshan, and then sank her with gunfire.
Standard in surface-to-surface mode, or even ESSM, is a pretty good way to mission-kill an enemy warship, but can only reach out to the horizon or a little beyond. That could be a weakness as Harpoon goes away.
The same day, the frigate Sahand was sunk and another damaged by carrier aircraft.
This may be the most recent sinking of a major warship by naval forces; the others I know of since 1945 are Eilat 1967, Khukri, Khaibar and maybe Ghazi 1971 and General Belgrano 1982. (Santa Fe 1982, Tripoli and Princeton 1991 and Cole 2000 didn't actually sink, the others in 1982 and Moskva 2022 were by land-based forces.)
This suggests the possibility that no currently active warship has ever sunk a major warship in combat.
@muddywaters
Interesting, though it sort of begs the question of if that's because surface warfare was too lethal (and thus avoided, but will come back if the other side atrophies) or if it reflects a lack of naval warfare generally, or something else?
Like, (not to overstretch the analogy) land warfare procurement and practice had been warped by thirty years of asymmetric warfare post Berlin Wall, but now that there is conventional war again in Ukraine, it is turning back to large quantities of mayor weapons systems (and drones, etc.), rather than COIN type operations. (Though I suppose Gaza is the counter example)
@redRover: I wasn't limiting to surface warfare (though SurvivalBias might have been) - several of my list involved submarines.
My guess is that it's a general lack of war between states large enough to have major warships.
Gaza is AFAICT not COIN, at least right now (there might be COIN a few months from now). Hamas is a real, but sucky, conventional army. Israeli tanks are playing a key role here.
It’s also a bunch of murderers and rapists, but plenty of historical armies were better at murder and rape than at winning.
@Ariel
Kind of. I haven’t been following it that closely, so this may be mistaken, but my understanding is that while Hamas is relatively organized and fulfills (fulfilled?) the functions of government, their actual military ability and tactics are limited to those used by insurgents. To my knowledge they basically only use small arms and man portable weapons, without any mechanized or combined arms capability.* Which isn’t to say it’s low intensity, because it’s not.
*The rocket attacks on Israel are the major exception to this, but given how they’re designed and used (as an area harassment weapon) I don’t think it changes the point that they primarily fight as insurgents with no more than small arms and man portable rockets.
The "IN" in "COIN" does not stand for "infantry". A light infantry force attempting to hold a city against enemy attack is engaged in conventional warfighting, not insurgency. If you're trying to hold against the enemy at their strongest rather than running away to fight another day where they're weaker, you're not doing an insurgency.
@bean Thank you, but that raises only more questions! You say "aircraft", but as far as I can tell they also only have Harpoons in terms of anti-surface-ship weapons, right? (Unless one imagines F-18 doing a WWII style bomb-run).
And while I understand that the Soviet fleet was no peer for USN at any point, all those missile cruisers that they had still were very much meant to kill carriers, and had the means to do so in principle, if left to their own devices. So what was the primary way of countering them? Just some combination of subs and not being found?
(As a side note re "last time X happened" - as far as I can quickly google, last times US submarine sunk either another submarine or a surface warship were both in WWII, but both still seem to be major missions for submarines. So I'm not sure such examples alone explain why something is no longer a major mission)
@SurvivalBias
Re aircraft, these days the Hornets have LRASM, but that's a development within the last 4 years or so. Yes, it does seem a bit weird that we didn't have a longer-range anti-ship weapon before, but I'd point out that Harpoon has about as much range as a high-altitude aircraft can meaningfully use on its own. Longer-range missiles are going to need some sort of targeting data relay. That wasn't impossible back then (the Soviets did it with special scout aircraft that would sweep ahead of the bombers), but it was kind of a pain, and the USN apparently didn't think it was worth it.
As for the missile cruisers, I think it was a combination of Harpoon, TASM and Mk 48 torpedoes. Also HARM and laser-guided bombs.
As for submarines, worth noting that modern nuclear submarines are a very different thing from the old diesel ones. They have the mobility to be a very serious problem for surface ships, as we saw notably during the Falklands.
Perhaps guerilla warfare is a better term?
But I am not sure they’re trying to hold it, in the sense of a tactical victory, so much s as harassing the Israelis into leaving. I suppose on some level that’s a meaningless distinction, as war is ultimately about political ends, but it still seems like there is a difference between a primarily tactical approach to victory, and one of attrition that concedes most of the tactical victories to the opponent.
I think there is perhaps a comparison with the various stages of ISIS or the Viet Cong’s (vice NVA) tactics and goals over time, and where and how they shifted.
@bean
Got it, thank you. I guess it kinda makes sense, that between the nuclear weapons and just sheer complete dominance, the USN didn't expect to fight any serious ship-on-ship battles. But it's also kinda hilarious, the whole situation looks to me like the Soviets go "we're gonna build the biggest, fastest, smartest anti-ship missiles to kill your carriers dead!", and the US just go "eeergh, yeah, whatever".
If someone is trying to launch missiles at a US carrier, that kind of definitively means there's a US carrier that can launch a strike against them, and probably do it first. From 1968 onwards, that meant a salvo of anti-radiation missiles that outranged any naval SAM, followed by precision-guided standoff weapons putting large HE warheads on target from beyond the reach of anything but the heavy SAMs whose radars stopped working a few minutes ago. Initially AGM-78B + AGM-12C, improving from there.
There was a brief window of vulnerability in 1962-68, when Russia had long-range SSMs on ships with early long-range SAMs. Well, long-ish range by 1960s standards. but enough to seriously counter US strike planning based on dumb iron bombs.
Don’t forget that the USN now has TASM. Err… Tomahawk Block Va aka Maritime Strike Tomahawk, which has put a seeker back on to Tomahawk, but with enough of them any random combatant can have them. Still under production, but the entire stock is expected to become some variation of the block V config at some point.
Movie recommendation for Naval Gazers: "Godzilla Minus One". It may not be obvious from the advertising, but there's more naval content than giant monster content, and it's very well done. The basic premise is that Godzilla shows up in Japan in 1947, and the only people willing and able to take a stand are some IJN veterans with whatever old IJN hardware they can find in early postwar Japan.
The producers are perhaps a tad optimistic about how much IJN kit would still be around in 1947; I counted one ship that our history says was scuttled in 1946. But nothing outrageous, and nothing not justified by the rule of cool. Then they do a good job of portraying a bunch of broken men with broken ships and planes and a very few guns, dealing with a Giant Freaking Monster that's completely outside their experience.
The naval stuff is good, the visuals are good, the characters are quite good, and Godzilla is appropriately impressive and scary when he appears. If you liked Battleship but thought it was a bit silly, this is the non-silly equivalent. Check it out while it's still in US theaters.
@muddywaters Re: "what would a modern naval battle plausibly look like", I found an interesting read at
https://cimsec.org/distributed-maritime-operations-a-salvo-equation-analysis/
About the size of a small book, but tries for an answer. I do wonder what the NG crowd think about it.
Oops, the link above was supposed to be
https://cimsec.org/fighting-dmo-pt-1-defining-distributed-maritime-operations-and-the-future-of-naval-warfare/