By this point, the Naval Gazing Meetup is an annual tradition, and this year, we're going back to the spiritual home of the blog, Iowa, on May 8th-May 11th. I have an AirBnB as a base in Long Beach, although I suspect it may fill up. If so, I will try to arrange a hotel reasonably nearby.

Why should you come?

1. Seeing cool stuff. Iowa is amazing, and you'll get to see parts of the ship that not a lot of people get to visit. For Friday, I'm also planning a trip to the Western Museum of Flight in Torrence, although that won't take more than a couple of hours. Read more...

The Fatherly One and I went to visit the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, as it was the last of the big air museums neither of us had been to. I had high hopes, as all of the official museums I had been to were quite good, and it more than lived up to them.

An SBD, survivor of Midway¹

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Now, the first and most important thing I look for in a really good air museum is a lot of planes that are rare or have an interesting history, and Pensacola delivered in spades. Everything from the first plane ever to fly across the Atlantic in 1919 (an NC-4 flying boat) to the first plane to land at the South Pole (an R4D) to the only survivor of the Battle of Midway (an SBD that they fished out of Lake Michigan after it crashed during training). Plus a lot of very rare planes from both the early days of naval aviation or the dawn of the jet age. I would have put it very high on my list just from the airplanes alone, even if they had been presented like the planes at Pima. Read more...

Reader Alexander, who has previously reviewed the Newark Air Museum is back with another British air museum, this time the RAF Museum in Cosford.

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The RAF runs its own museum, split over two sites. I've visited their Midlands museum at Cosford a couple of times now and it's a good one. There are a great number of aircraft, missiles, engines and vehicles spread across four halls. The largest is the Cold War exhibition, where you can see all three V bombers under one roof. Two are veterans of the Black Buck raids, and their Valiant is notable for dropped Britain's first H-bomb. Amongst other artifacts here is a collection of missiles, including ballistic missiles, early ATGMs, land and naval SAMs and a range of air launched weapons. There are a couple of open cockpits with staff on hand, keen to explain the extent to which ejecting will reduce your height. Read more...

One of my hobbyhorses, which I have generally tried not to go on about here, is the proper naming of ships. Unfortunately, the recent activities of now-former Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro, who used his last few days in office to go on a naming binge, have forced my hand.

Names for USN ships are selected by the Secretary of the Navy,² but for a long time, the traditional naming scheme was more or less adhered to. Specifically, battleships were to be named after states (a requirement that was only removed in 2023) while cruisers were named for cities, destroyers for naval heroes and carriers after ships from the early American Navy, and later for battles, while submarines were named for fish. This began to break down after WWII, the first obvious breach being the carrier Franklin D. Roosevelt, named after the recently-deceased president.³ This was the beginning of an interleaved set of "great person" names for the carriers, with Forrestal and John F. Kennedy popping up in the 50s and 60s before the naming scheme switched fully with the Nimitz class. At the same time, the submarine scheme began to switch from fish to, first, "Congressional supporters of the Navy's nuclear program" and then to cities, as, according to Admiral Rickover, "fish don't vote". Read more...

It's time once again for our regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.

A reminder that signups are open for the Naval Gazing meetup at Iowa in May. It's going to be a great time, and you should come.

Overhauls are Carrier Doom Part 3, the King George V Class, German Guided Bombs Part 1, Hornet Part 3 and for 2024, Fuzes parts three and four.

I recently read Gary Sheffield's book Forgotten Victory about WWI, and on the whole, very much liked it. It's not really intended as a complete overview of the war so much as a corrective to false narratives (mostly "lions led by donkeys") that have grown up around it, so it's mostly about the BEF on the Western Front, but it also covers the start and end of the war and some other topics (including a brief section on the role of sea power that I completely endorse). I didn't learn a ton, having absorbed most of the thesis by osmosis over the years, but if you're interested in WWI, it's a good corrective to broader works like Keegan or A World Undone, both of which lean into "lions led by donkeys" quite a bit.

2024 is behind us, which means it is time for that most prestigious of awards given out by Naval Gazing, the William D Brown Memorial Award for the biggest naval screwup that didn't kill anybody.

As the Brown Award's prestige increases, more and more navies go to greater lengths to take home the trophy:

• Military Sealift Command ran the oiler Big Horn aground off Oman
• The People's Liberation Army Navy sank a new nuclear submarine pierside.
• The Baltic Navies allowed vital cables to be repeatedly disrupted.
• And the Iranian Navy, seeking a second award, flipped a frigate in drydock, then sank it completely while attempting to salvage it.

Read more...

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 Carrier Doom Parts one and two, Reactivation, Bringing Back the Battleships, The Ticonderoga Class and for 2024, Fuzes Parts one and two.

Abstractions are important for thinking about the world, and particularly for STEM types, taking a thing, putting it in a box and thinking about the box is basically what we do. If we had to reckon with the full complexity of everything at all times, nothing would ever get built. But as Joel Spolsky famously said, all abstractions are leaky, and the leakage can easily mess up any analysis if the person doing it doesn't know when things are likely to leak and how to deal with it.

I bring this up because outsiders attempting to analyze defense problems often make this mistake, particularly in the tech-adjacent sectors that I tend to see a lot of stuff from. Ideas go in the box, and then the box is folded, spindled and mutilated in complete ignorance of the gusher of complexity this produces. An excellent example of this is Austin Vernon's post on shipbuilding, where he attempts to diagnose the problems the USN is facing from a position of knowing very little about warships.⁴ Read more...

In the Naval Gazing Discord recently, there was a discussion of the development of the Oliver Hazard Perry class frigates. Now, it's reasonably well-documented that the initial batch of Perrys were designed to carry the SH-2 Sea Sprite helicopter, but when the SH-60B Seahawk was introduced, the flight deck had to be lengthened to accommodate the bigger helicopter. This was done by extending the stern, which lengthened the hull slightly, bringing overall length from 445' to 453', although waterline length remained constant at 408'.

Rodney M. Davis, a long-hulled Perry showing the sloped stern

But while looking into this, I found a weird discrepancy in the reported displacement. My 1993 copy of Ships & Aircraft of the US Fleet gives the full-load displacement of the short-hull version as 3,658 tons, but says "except 3,900-4,100 tons for ships with LAMPS III modification". Now, this is a big, big jump, particularly towards the upper end of that range, which other sources often extend to 4,200 tons. When you're talking over 10% of initial displacement relative to full load, that's a lot and tends to really screw up the ship. It's rare that the designers leave that much margin, particularly in something like the Perry, which was intended as a pretty austere design. The even bigger question is exactly what was added. The difference between the two designs is fairly obvious if you know what to look for (the short-hulled ships have a pretty much straight stern, while there's a pronounced rake on the long-hulled vessels) but when the length is changing by less than 2% (and it should be a fairly light 2% because it doesn't go below the waterline) and the displacement changes by 10-15%, you start to wonder what is going on. The only other change noted in the books is the towed array, which is an SQR-18 on the short-hull ships and SQR-19 on the long-hulled ships.⁵ Firm details on the SQR-18 are lacking, but the entire SQR-19 system weighs only 27 tons, so that's out as a cause of the discrepancy. Read more...

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 Armor two, three and four, A Spotter's Guide to Modern Warships, Commercial Aviation Part 4, New Year's Logs and for 2023-2024, Iowa Ground Tackle.

To close off the year, I have a review of a pair of Danish Cold War forts, contributed by reader John Olsen, who previously wrote up the frigate Jylland.

In the early years of the Cold War, two coastal fortifications were built to close off Danish waters to Warsaw Pact maritime units. Both of them were closed after the Cold War ended, and both can be visited as museums today. This is a review of both museums, based on visits in 2023.

Stevnsfort Cold War Museum

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Introduction

Located well south of Copenhagen, the Stevns coastal fortification was one of two forts built in the early Cold War to close off Danish waters to Warsaw Pact maritime units. The primary armament of the fort consisted of two twin 5.9” guns from the WW2 German battleship Gneisenau, supplemented with 20mm and 40mm AAA guns. A HAWK SAM battery was added in the eighties (HAWK being an abbreviation for Homing All the Way Killer). Completed in 1953, the fort was formally closed in 2000, re-opening as a museum in 2008. Read more...