It's time once again for the regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, even if it's not military/naval related.
First, book update. I'm currently up to about 38,000 words revised, still mostly working through pre-dreadnought stuff.
Second, I'm going to designate this as the semi-regular suggestion OT. What sort of posts do you want to see more of? Obviously, no guarantees, but I'll definitely take it into account.
2018 overhauls are Russian Battleships Part 2, Carrier Doom Part 4, SYWTBABB-Strategic Background, Early US Battleships, Aegis and Amphibious Warfare Part 1. 2019 overhauls are The Mk 23 Katie, Commercial Aviation Part 6, The King George V Class, German Guided Bombs Part 1, The PHS Corps and my history of Wisconsin. 2020 overhauls are Cool Facilities - Bayview, Operation Crossroads and Battleship Torpedoes Parts one and two. 2021 overhauls are Merchant Ships - Fishing, Squalus, SYWTBABB Leftovers Part 3 and Naval Airshps Part 2.
Comments
Some ideas for topics:
Warship design reviews: Digging though the design history of non-US ships would be tough, but evaluating the ships as they exist is a lot easier. You could do ship classes one by one or look at similar designs (e.g. the half dozen most common 6000-8000 ton AAW frigate classes in service with western navies) and judge them.
Complete Guide to Missiles: You have some of this in the standard missile history, but take a burke (or hypothetical destroyer), break down the stats for all the missiles it carries in a typical load, explain what they're for and how they're different. Bonus points for working in non-US stuff and diagrams.
I suggest a Naval Balance of Power series focusing on various theaters of potential conflict. What forces are typically available in, say, the Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, or Arctic? Who can operate with impunity, who could face restrictions, and who is not even on the map? Does the picture change if we allow for a couple of weeks or a month of escalating tensions?
Naval Exercises (especially among allies and other countries); especially how difficult they are and kind of the levels they operate at. I could contribute to this if it would help.
This thought inspired by the amusing ZOMG PANIC I see on Twitter every time China, Russia, and Iran have a naval exercise.
I like best ... learning things I don't know.
I'm currently curious about CEC and Link-16 and all the other net-centric stuff.
I'm also like "what they could have done better". For example, if you have ways the Iowa/Ticondaroga/Essex/etc could have been better built/designed for the same money that would be awesome.
Finally, thanks for writing all this. It makes many people, including me, happy.
@cassander
Doing multiple classes at once raises the research burden substantially. Not saying it won't happen, but that definitely makes me less likely to do so. As for missiles, I do intend to do ESSM, which will almost complete the Burke set. I'd do VLASROC, but there just isn't that much to say about it. Maybe as part of a discussion that talks about US lightweight torpedoes, too.
@Johan
Not a bad idea, although it's likely to be more descriptive than predictive, because prediction is hard, particularly if I have to do it for lots of navies at once.
@Blackshoe
If you want to do that, be my guest.
@Kit
That's one I've already covered and am not particularly likely to go back to. It's really hard to write about without getting into massively boring detail. If you want more, Norman Friedman's Network-Centric Warfare is probably still on the discount rack at USNI, and it's really good.
This is one that I always find tricky, because it's easy to turn into armchair second-guessing which forgets the constrains the original designers were working under.
You are most welcome.
We currently have claims (eg. https://zeihan.com/ ) that the USA is in the process of pulling out of controlling the world's oceans back to a fortress USA (or at most North America).
And this would mean that world trade will collapse with the return of mass piracy, and ocean travel hotspots becoming dominated by regional powers.
How much of this is exaggeration to sell books and lecture series? Even if the Yankees Go Home, how capable are Japan/UK/France to keep the ships sailing? (To choose the powers that spring to mind.)
@bean
You could just do single classes, if that's easier. I worried about not having enough material if you did one class at a time.
Doctorpat:
Which means the US won't do it.
Doctorpat:
Wouldn't surprise me if the US relies on their help already.
@Doctorpat
First, what a terrible website design. Normally that sort of whizzery is reserved for corporate stuff, not a guy's own site.
Second, I do not think Zeihan is in close contact with reality. One of his books got reviewed for the ACX contest last year, and I was not impressed. I don't think that the American commitment to free trade is as transitory as he thinks it is, or that we can disentangle ourselves from the global economy easily. Maybe if we got a competent isolationist president, but I suspect that the competent "isolationsts" won't actually be deep enough into isolationism to go through with it.
If nothing else, there's a lot of institutional inertia around the military/alliance complex we have. There may have been a time when the US could have radically changed its strategy, but that time was north of half a century ago. Definitely no signs of the massive naval cuts you'd expect there. And Zeihan is also curiously ignorant of the Chinese naval program, which looks a lot like you'd expect if they were reading his books and basing their fleet plan on it. (There's also his ignorance of the importance of the Yangtze, which seems weird in someone so obsessed with rivers.) On the whole, I am very unimpressed.
Has anyone watched the low-budget 2012 mockbuster American Warships? The high-level plot summary is basically the same as the contemporary Battleship. The effects are terrible, but they did at least get Carl Weathers to cameo, and there's a degree of self-awareness about fighting alien blue-water ships (why???) with a mothball fleet is just a really fun fantasy. After lampshading the central conceit, the naval stuff makes more sense than in Battleship, at least, if you can forgive budget-related continuity errors. Liberal use of stock footage of WWII AA guns shooting at things. There's a Naval Gazing reader-insert museum curator character caught on board while trying to prepare the Iowa for its retirement, and the filmmakers clearly had fun even though it's stupid on so many levels.
Did Bean already review this one? There are some interesting parallels to Under Siege.
... actually, I wrote that about halfway through, and the climactic battle reminded me of Birdemic but less realistic. Production values went from bad to worse, but I was impressed overall because I was expecting ... even worser, given the $1M budget? I'm going to go watch The Final Countdown now.
@doctorpat
If the US was swallowed by a colossal earthquake tomorrow, I still don't see we'd see either of those things happen. Every non-failed state in the world has more than enough coast guard to suppress piracy, which is trivially easy in a world where scan eagles exist.
More generally, geopolitical grasp expands with reach. America is too rich, powerful, and messianic enough to ever really go isolationist. we had a tradition of that left over from when we were on the far side of the world and lacked power, but we started reaching out almost as soon as it was feasible for us to do so, and we're not going to stop unless someone stops us.
@bean: I will see what I can put together in a week or two, and let you look it over and see if there's enough there worth posting.
Inspired by kit's q about "What could have done better?"-designs that just didn't end up working, either because they were overly ambitious, or were designed for a role that never mattered, or just were dumb.
Finally, since they came up in the last part of Norway, something on coastal defense ships (and/or 20th century monitors? I could see it being difficult to get good sources on that, since most of those ships didn't serve in English-speaking Navies.
RE: Requests
I would love to see 'Spotter's Guide: 1860 edition'. Every time I read about the period, nothing makes any sense.
I have a source on British monitors, although not so much on the coastal-defense ships. There is a book on my wishlist about those, but it's rather on the expensive side. But it might be worth seeing what I can get out of what I have.
This is a feature of reality in that period. 1840-1890 is really confused in terms of ship classification compared to the years both before and after it. But it might be worth taking a look.
@Blackshoe
Should Bean greenlight your proposal I know I would be interested in reading about how exercises are carried out.
I know this is a really big topic, but I have always wondered about how the Navy goes from strategy to task. We all know about national strategy documents, but how does the Navy decide how to structure and field its forces (OTE) in light of its doctrines and strategies? Somehow, obviously, the decision makers have to take the budgeted dollars and convert them to task fulfilling Naval assets. How do they do this?
@Bean
Whatever you decide upon to cover it always is interesting. Chapeau bas to you for the amount of preperation work you must have to do each week to provide such quality content.
If you have a couple thousand dollars to spare, you can send your kids to a military dude ranch, Camp Sousley. It's also available for corporate team-building events. I mean, who doesn't think the Accounts Receivable team should know how to breach and clear a room?
I'm a bit surprised the actual military doesn't do something similar, at least for high schoolers who are considering joining the military.
When I did my ride on the America, a significant fraction of the group were people the Navy was trying to recruit. I suspect something like that just isn't efficient in terms of recruits per dollar.
In other news, Netflix has a new feature about the 737 crashes. link
That's just going to be a thing that makes me stabby, isn't it?
Today is the 116th anniversary of HMS Dreadnought's launch, only 5 months after she was laid down.
@Johan Larson: we do, it's called JROTC (and the Sea Cadets and CAP and a few other things). It uh doesn't work great
@Neal: I can work that in there. A discussion of meeting the strategic ends from the service is a really big one that I don't want to put in there, but I could probably work it out in an OT thread here, actually.
Inter Library Loan come through, and I have a copy of 'British Public Opinion in the Wars of German Unification'!
@bean Is there anything in particular you would like me to make notes on?
Not really. My interest in navies during that era is mostly focused on ones that had battleships, which Germany didn't. If you find interesting stuff and want to write it up, drop me an email.
@bean, Germany (Prussia) may not have, but Danmark and Austria did. I think the Danes had the first turret ironclad.
I vaguely recall you saying a while back that the Schleswig Wars were on your to-do list.
No, because that would be Monitor. Rolf Krake may have been the first in Europe.
It's on my "I might look into this someday if I ever feel like it" list. Preparing for Weltpolitk is on my Amazon list, but nothing more.
I got that one from the library a few years back. I wish I would have taken better notes. It reminded me strongly of 'So, you want to build a modern navy?' with all of the set backs and frustrations along with the big picture questions of "How much navy do we want?" "What do we want to use it for?"
It's all over for the House of Windsor: HNLMS TROMP sails up the Thames.
They've survived worse, particularly given that Tromp was dead for 13 years by the time of the raid. In 1941, minelayer HNLMS Van Brakel damaged a boom on the Medway, to which the reply was "What, again?".
(Van Brakel was a captain during the Raid on the Medway, and he forced a boom during the action.)
(Was going for the Glorious Revolution joke)
Ah. I'm not sure that Liz II is unpopular enough to get kicked out, nor are any of her immediate family married into the Dutch Royal Family. (Actually, looking into it a bit, it seems that the Dutch monarchs aren't even descended from Queen Victoria, which is surprising.)
Also, aren't Charles & sons Glucksbergs rather the Windsors? (barring them changing the rules again when I wasn't looking)
They did change the rules, yes. There was talk of them using Mountbatten (the British branch of that family), but it was shut down.
I guess I should write up my review
'British Public Opinion in the Wars of German Unification’
First and foremost, the author is an anti-atlantisist, believing that close cooperation with Germany serves Britain's interests better than the same with the USA. Maybe you don't care. Maybe that makes you hate his guts...
Half of the book is an in depth summery of the events surrounding the 2nd Schleswig War, the 7 weeks war, and the Franco Prussian War. This is very well done and probably worth $15 all on its own.
The other half is a retelling of what every British newspaper had to say about said events, which is as exciting as it sounds.
Big surprises include:
*The Italian cause was unbelievably beloved across all social classes. This caused all sorts of problems.
*Opinion was most sympathetic to whoever was loosing.
*The Crimean War bought more good will for Napoleon than I expected.
@bean, I looked and looked, but I can't find a link to your Amazon wishlist.
No reason you'd be able to. It's private, and even the public one hasn't been posted here. It was just a statement that it's a book I'm looking at buying at some point.