It's time once again for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.
The big event since I was last here was the Naval Gazing meetup in Dayton. Everyone had a great time, and I'm looking forward to next year. I also am curious how much people want me to start posting extracts from my tour script as blog posts versus waiting for me to get the audio we recorded out as a podcast with slides.
Overhauls are Russian Battleships Part 3, Battleship Aviation Part 2, A Brief History of the Submarine, FFG(X), Tomahawk Parts one and four, NWAS - Poseidon, my review of Greyhound, Don't Overread Moskva and for 2024 Pentagon Wars and Procurement, Simplified Ships and Shipbuilding, my review of the Western Museum of Flight and my thoughts on Hornet and visitor experience.
Comments
make sure you include the next-slide beep.
For what it's worth, I would appreciate the blog posts but already have too many podcasts.
It would be a one-shot thing, 2.5-3 hours. Thinking it over more, I may use that as my "break glass in case of emergency" blog post source, and it should be able to keep me in emergency posts for quite a while.
What would a convoy escort look like for sending lots of civilian ships through places like the current Black Sea / Bab el-Mandab / Straits of Hormuz where the threat won't be surface ships or submarines?
Cheap slow civilian standard hull with lots of VLS tubes and RAM, or containerized air defence?
Bring the old Iowas out of service, as they can probably still make 10 knots, and cover the upper decks with SAMs and 76mm guns?
Or maybe ships shouldn't be escorting at all? Something like a B-52 that can fly forever, loaded up with Sidewinders and a few LRASMs just in case?
@Hugh
The BKC-46 would have ample endurance, modern electronics, and you could launch the missiles either from hard points or internal stores.
However, I think the real answer is a minesweeper of some sort, either afloat or extending the life of the MH-53. I think the problem is that if you have passive threats then you just need a minesweeper or something at the COIN level to keep a suicidal jet ski at bay. But if they’re shooting actual missiles, then the airspace becomes contested, and suddenly you need a carrier air wing and escorts and …
@bean
Admittedly a bit outside your normal chronological focus, but have you been to Old Rhinebeck?
The big issue here is driving down cost, both system and per-engagement. You'd need cover from a proper AD platform against AShBMs, but beyond that, a properly-programmed Phalanx or a laser per-ship is going to do a lot. If you want outer cover, a helicopter with APKWS is a good choice.
I cannot think of a worse way to handle it.
That doesn't work on a lot of levels. You'd be really vulnerable to saturation attack, and if you aren't worried about enemy air defenses, LRASM is overkill, and you should just carry Paveway or LJDAM.
@redRover
I have not, but that does look interesting. Thanks.
@Hugh What bean said: "You’d need cover from a proper AD platform against AShBMs"
Whenever I read about current warship programmes and I see that they're still defaulting to the ol' "minimum anti-air fit of quad-packed MICA/ESSM" of the past two decades, I'm reminded of the warships of the 70s and Styx/Exocet. Equally obsolescent, equally in denial about the reality of the current threat environment. I think that nowadays any warship that is a warship, i.e. might be shot at, might need at the very least terminal ABM capability as a default minimum.
I am less sure that is the case for a couple reasons. The first is that a lot of AShBMs are, AIUI, pretty bad, so you can to some extent just accept the risk. Second, there are options besides "shoot them down". I did some experiments in Command, and with detection from an Aegis BMD ship, it was possible for most combatants to get far enough from their initial position before impact that the missile didn't see anything. Third, because they go so high, they're easy to see, and you can cover a reasonable area with a single escort. The problem with drones is that they fly low, so a single escort can cover only a relatively small area, but a single Burke at the heart of a convoy can easily cover not only the convoy but also a lot of area behind it.
It still seems like a category error - if the bad guys can see across the choke point,* you negate the space and range problems that give convoys more of a chance in the open ocean. They can practically phone in the triangulation from two guys with binoculars! Consequently, activity through the choke point is predicated on either a very passive opponent, in which case you primarily need minesweeping, or actively denying their ability to attack from land, in which case you need a carrier group. Modular APKWS or CIWS may help on the margin, but fundamentally it seems like the threat profile is closer to terrestrial war.
*At the narrowest points, Hormuz is 25mi across, Gibraltar 10, Bab el Mandeb 18, and so on. Technically not fully visible across from two sea level viewers, but the air draft on a ship is 80’+, and it’s not like an 800’ container ship is hard to see with even a very cheap quad copter at 100’.
Thanks everyone for thoughtful responses to my ignorant question.
@bean, new proposal for the Iowas. As it stands they are all going to slowly rust away, or be scrapped when there's a major economic downturn or major change in public attitudes. As the last of the battleships, they deserve a Viking/Klingon sendoff.
Mostly remote controlled battleships were possible with WW2 technology (HMS Centurion) and today we should be able to remove the humans entirely and add autonomous weaponry. (OK, robotic operation of the 16" guns might be difficult.) Turn the Iowas into the first Very Large USVs.
And send them through the Straits of Hormuz to tank Iran's entire inventory of drones and missiles.
@bean AShBMs will only get better and ships in build today are expected to be used for the next 30 years. If they're fitted at least FFBNW for ABM capability that'd be alright. But I doubt they are, looking at the sensors and so on. The 3rd point brings up the question, is it reasonable to expect all warships to be escorted by a dedicated AD destroyer?
@redRover
"Just secure the bank" works reasonably well in a world where it's all guns, and decently well if you only have short-range missiles. But Shaheds can reach out for a couple hundred miles, and while you should shoot as many archers as possible, you need to be ready to deal with the arrows. Air cover can help with that (although Super Hornet can't carry APKWS) but you're going to want point defense, too.
@Hugh
You will remove them from a museum and use them that way over my dead body. If we actually want to tank attacks that way, a converted oil tanker is a lot better option.
@Matt C
It's worth remembering that AShBM is a pretty broad category, in the same way that "cruise missile" is a broad category that includes everything from "quadcopter with grenade" to BrahMos, and it comes with some fairly serious physical limits. The ability to evade the targeting basket may not be solvable by simply fitting a wider field-of-view camera, because the warhead still has to be able to maneuver to intercept, and that can be surprisingly restrictive because hypersonic aerodynamics are a pain.
More importantly, when we talk about ABM capability on ships, we tend to think in terms of countering IRBM/ICBM threats, which is what takes the full Burke suite. But something like Khalij-e Fars is much, much lower and slower, topping out around Mach 4. Which, sure, is faster than almost all cruise missiles, but not that much faster than the top-end ones, and it has the downside of being on a ballistic trajectory. I would guess that 10 years from now, a typical MICA/ESSM ship has a couple cells filled with a missile defense variant and SCUD-equivalents are just another threat they train against. But for a lot of reasons, targeting chief among them, I don't see stuff in the DF-21+ category becoming nearly as common as Khalij-e Fars.
@bean
I would phrase it as “control of the bank is necessary but not sufficient to allow passage”.
If you don’t control the bank, then passage of cargo ships is basically infeasible, particularly as the choke point narrows. (As a somewhat absurd extreme, think about forcing the Bosporus without control of the banks).
If you control the shores, it makes the opponents task of targeting harder and narrows the permissible slop in the kill chain - instead of visually targeting drones, you need a radar or some kind of targeting relay, which both makes accurate targeting harder and gives more time to deploy countermeasures, etc.
I'm not sure you can get the sort of control you're talking about without deploying way more force than is even vaguely feasible. All you really need is a cell phone and internet access to be a reasonably decent spotter, and interdicting everyone like that isn't really possible. I think you sort of have to assume that you'll be spotted and targeted with some degree of precision, at which point the conversation becomes a complicated one about drone target acquisition and evasion. When I get some time, I may play with this in CMO and see what sort of tricks I can get up to.
Hugh Fisher:
bean:
What about using HMS Victory?
bean:
If you insist...
bean:
So why doesn't the US have cell phone tower seeking missiles?
So why doesn’t the US have cell phone tower seeking missiles?
Militaries probably do, or could build them quickly, but they wouldn't be very useful. Nearly all the time the target is the guy with the phone, not the cell tower. Knowing which tower they're currently connected to narrows the search down, but they could be anywhere within a fifty to hundreds of metres distance radius.
If you're willing to destroy everything in the vicinity, the conflict has moved well beyond COIN. If you're not, destroying cell towers actually makes your own traffic analysis and interception harder, because the bad guys will switch to fibre optic or something.
@bean
Sure, though I think it still complicates the targeting - instead of simple line of sight control of the projectile, they have to launch the drone or missile on data that has to filter through the targeting chain, and then fly for tens of extra miles to reach the target. That’s certainly all doable, even on a budget, but it seems like a more limited capability with more failure points than launching visually.
It also seems like a somewhat situational problem - if you run the choke point once with a fully naval convoy, that is different than trying to run it daily with a few container ships or VLCCs in the convoy.
We certainly have planes capable of detecting cell towers and systems that can route bombs to them. The problem with that is twofold. First, the bad guys can use many other systems, some of which are a lot harder to interdict (radios, landline comms, satellite phones) and second, taking out the cell network is pretty serious collateral damage these days.
@bean Well, yes, that's my point: in 10 years' time, every ship will need the ability to intercept Fars-type sub-hypersonic ballistic missiles as a baseline capability for self-defence against antiship ballistic missiles. Conversely, anything without that capability would be like defending oneself using Tartar missiles against Kh-22s.