It's time once again for the regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.
Overhauls are my review of Batfish, the list of US museum ships, Italian Battleships in WWII, NWAS Light Attack Part 1, NWAS Cruise Missiles Part 1, Zumwalt Part 2, my review of Hornet, Military Spaceflight Part 2, and for 2024, Military Spaceflight Parts nine and ten, Air Attack on Ships Part 6 and Southern Commerce Raiding Part 9.
I'm going to designate tomorrow (8/2) at 1 PM Central Time (GMT-6) as the Schelling Point for anyone who wants to hang out in voice chat on the Discord. I will probably be there, but might have other things going on.
Comments
It looks as if we finally have a CNO! Senator Dan Sullivan dropped his gambit to hold up Admiral Caudle's appointment until Congress re-opened Adak NAS.
Someone must have had a convivial chat with him all the while offering tea and biscuits. It worked he was, to use a passive phrase, convinced to knock it off.
Adak is great for ETOPS contingency planning, but not quite sure what the value add would be to stand up the station again.
Don't you have at least one more installment of the Suez Crisis series?
Yes. I have several more parts planned on that, but the muse hasn't been calling for that recently, so I've been writing other things instead. I'll get back to it eventually.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-05/australia-japan-navy-frigates/105613688 We (Australia) are going with the Mogami for the surface fleet upgrade.
So Type 26 is not going so well?
Type 26 (Australian version) construction just started, and the first ships aren't expected to be commissioned into service until 2034. If everything goes to plan.
In the meantime, our oldest frigates are now at the "held together by duct tape and prayer" lifecycle stage and paying Japan to build three Mogamis for us will likely be cheaper than paying to keep the ANZACs running until the mid 2030s.
Mostly what Hugh, said but while they are both flexible enough to have lots of overlap the Mogami has a bit more focus on surface to air and surface to surface vs the AWS first approach of the 26.
@megasilverfish
"Mogami has a bit more focus on surface to air and surface to surface vs the AWS first approach of the 26.
I would personally say otherwise. Mogami do not have any air defense, except last resort Rim RAM. Type-26 should be capable of firing LRASM from its VLS cells.
Every navy enthusiats usually call for their navy to buy Mogami, because it looks sexy. But Mogami is really cheap mass produced frigate tailored for operations in South China sea (mainly very specific ASW when you can not use helicopters often) under the cover of allied air forces. I would argue it is not really great choice even for Australia, but probably only choice they can get quickly enough.
*Type-26 is capable of firing CAMM and for ASuW should be capable of firing LRASM from its VLS cells.
I'm curious about your take on these two posts:
https://www.navylookout.com/is-the-royal-navy-at-breaking-point-or-a-turning-point/
https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/british-warship-passes-3000-days-out-of-service/
I've not read similar things about the French or Japanese navies. Maybe the Royal Navy is just not run well, and it not fit for purpose???
One possibility .. the Royal Navy is just not run very well, and not fit for purpose.
There are definite warning signs about the RN's capabilities, and I'm not going to definitively defend it as "fit for purpose". But without getting too deep, I think you've made one major mistake.
Do you read French or Japanese? These kinds of debate are carried out in the native language, because they are fundamentally domestic political issues. An outsider writing about these is almost certainly going to adopt a more balanced tone, and will probably be in a paywalled OSINT source for the tiny handful of anglophones who care deeply about this stuff. I have no idea what the discourse in either of those two countries looks like because I am fundamentally monolingual, and even Google Translate, while quite good, isn't going to work particularly well if you don't have a good understanding of where to look. It's a sad fact of modern life that you can easily set up a website, give it a prestigious-sounding name, and fill it with AI slop. (There's one I recently saw that talked about "here's how a fight between Boeing's X-32 stealth fighter and the J-20 would turn out", which, well...) Or even human-created slop, if you have an axe to grind.
I do read (english language) things about (for example) the new FDI French frigate, or the Sōryū-class submarines. I even read about the German army and it's many problems.
But getting back to the RN, I think I saw somewhere that given 2 weeks they could not sail six warships.
It's not that there's no discussion of defense issues in other countries in the English-language press. There absolutely is, but it's a fundamentally different conversation because the bar to you hearing about stuff is a lot higher, and people who do the work of pulling stuff across it tend to be more balanced and academic. Now, occasionally you can get readiness issues crossing this threshold anyway, for instance with the stuff in Germany, but it has to be pretty egregious. To pick on the French, De Gaulle hasn't had the best readiness, either, and I would bet a substantial amount of money that this has caused a fair bit of angst in the French press. But as an outsider, I look at the situation, say "having one carrier isn't great because she's only operational about half the time, but she's useful when she is", and move on with my life. So the only notice of readiness issues comes in places largely read by professionals, because the general public doesn't care enough unless the problems are "things are on fire and falling off", which hasn't been the case for at least 20 years.
@Kit I think I know European military sector pretty well. The reason why European countries do not have a big problem in military shipbuilding is that they are very good at it (especially Italy, France, Netherlands, Denmark, but basically everyone, including Germany, suprisingly). You can disagree with it, but everyone who buys military warships worldwide, buys them in Europe, even the Turkey, South Korea and Japan have started to rise. So if the European navies ask for something and it is not extremely ambitious (S-80,Type-45,De Gaulle), they usually get it on time and for good price.
Royal Navy have a general problem with funding. But they did not have a problem with shipbulding, they had a huge problem with very ambitious IEP propulsion (the same that Zumwalt use). And to be fair it was pretty visionary idea, because you can put any energetic weapon (like lasers) with basically unlimited power on Type-45, you can also theoretically add EMALS to Queen Elizabeth because of that. So it was not a bad idea and it is probably future of warship propulsion (DDG-X will have it), but it was extremely ambitious.
In Europe naval procurement is disaster only in Germany. But to be fair, everything is q disaster in Germany. Schroder and Merkel basically made German government into bureocratic hell and any military procurement in Germany is in such a bad shape, that India and the US look good. Funny thing is that foreign governement orders German ships all the time and there is never a problem :D
Do they do air combat (top gun type) training at night, or is that too dangerous/unlikely to occur in reality?
And if so, what does that imply for actual air combat, both fighter vs fighter stuff and as it relates to bombers/cruise missiles/ interceptors?
They generally don't do dogfighting-type training at night. There are certain restrictions on how they do training, such as "no head-on attacks" because the risk of mid-air collisions is just too high. They do lots of other training at night, because they often prefer to operate there, but dogfighting requires both sides to see the other, which is a lot harder then, so there's not much point.
So at work (DoD Acquisitions-y stuff) we have a park dedicated to military stuff that we're going to get a tour from one of our HR-y offices. I've been told that tour is just going to be a thing where the host (no military experience) reads off the placards on display, and since I have experience with some of the stuff on display, I could really benefit everyone else by just taking over and talking about (at least the naval-y stuff).
Among the naval-y stuff is...an anchor and some shells from an IOWA-class. I was mildly surprised to discover that there was no post about IOWA's ground tackle, other than the one with the pictures. So bean, any fun trivia or stuff I can talk about on the tour (there's also some BL&P shells around that I can discuss as well).
I don't really have much besides what's in that post. Ground tackle was never an area of particular interest for me, so I had two minutes of "look how big the chain is, and this is why you don't want to let the anchor run away" in the tour before getting back to the big guns. My recommendation would be to use the anchor as a springboard to talk about the process of anchoring in general, because I suspect you can do that reasonably well.
Curious what the shells are. Let me know if they're anything beyond the standard 80s-vintage training rounds. Driving band will usually have some details.
bean-did the tour and got some photos, will email you once I can get them off my work phone easily.
One interesting note: they have two different types of fuses. Not sure why they would be different, other than that's the stack of ones up for donation were in a mixed pile.
Relatedly, there were also some interesting comments about the process for how museums get stuff from the military.