Tarawa, one of the Gilbert Islands, was targeted by the US as the first stepping stone in the drive across the central Pacific that had been planned since just after WWI. It marked a new kind of amphibious operation for the Americans, landing on a small atoll into the teeth of Japanese defenses, and far from land-based air support. The assault on Tarawa, and the simultaneous attack on nearby Makin,¹ involved approximately 200 ships, 27,600 assault troops, 7,600 garrison troops, 6,000 vehicles and 117,000 tons of cargo.

Bodies on the beach, November 22nd 1943

The troops who landed on Betito Island, the fleck of Tarawa with the all-important airfield, belonged mostly to the 2nd Marine Division, staged out of New Zealand. They were carried to their target by the Southern Attack Force under Rear Admiral Harry W Hill. This force of 16 transports, 3 battleships, 5 cruisers, 5 escort carriers, 21 destroyers, 2 minesweepers, 1 LSD and 3 LSTs began landing operations early on the 20th of November, 1943.

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The military procurement process is famously bad, and it’s easy to come up with stories of the US government overpaying for whatever the item du jour is. I’ll be the first to admit that the DoD has serious issues, and that the system is far from perfect. But the military is also a very demanding customer. For instance, if a piece of software on your computer crashes, the consequences are likely to be fairly minimal. If a piece of military software crashes at the wrong time, people are likely to die. Here’s a tale of one tiny piece of the development of some of that software. Everything included is true, although some details have been obfuscated.

A Large Military Airplane

It was decided that a Large Military Airplane (LMA) needed a moving map. After some analysis, it was decided to develop it from the moving map software already in use on a Small Military Airplane (SMA). Everyone involved thought the software was fairly close to the requirements, and merrily set to work. Read more...

The modern era of amphibious operations is usually identified to have begun with the invasion of Gallipoli during WWI. The Allies were attempting to open a sea route to Russia though the Turkish Straits between the Mediterranean and Black seas. Their initial naval assault had failed badly,² so a plan was made to land troops to silence the guns protecting the strait.

Troops unloading from River Clyde at Gallipoli

Unfortunately, the Allies did almost everything wrong. The plan and equipment had to be improvised in the month between the decision to go ashore and the actual landing in April of 1915. No serious planning had been made for large-scale amphibious operations before the war, and the five divisions assembled,³ despite representing some of the best troops available, were insufficient for the job. Like so many invasions before, this one was made in boats rowed ashore. The only specialized landing ship, River Clyde, was a converted collier intentionally grounded near Cape Hellas.⁴ The Ottomans near the beach were insufficient to throw back the landing force, but they inflicted savage casualties due to the lack of fire support and the general chaos. The commanders had not given sufficient emphasis to the need to move inland and the allied advance, like that of the Persians millennia before, bogged down, giving the Turks time to respond. Read more...

Amphibious warfare is the oldest form of naval warfare, dating back to the day when a tribe first crossed a lake to take their enemy by surprise. Since then, the art of moving soldiers across bodies of water into enemy territory has been practiced in a staggering number of variations worldwide. In the late Bronze Age, the Sea Peoples practiced amphibious warfare in the eastern Mediterranean, invading and toppling several civilizations.

Ships beached at Marathon

The first well-attested amphibious operation is the Persian landing at Marathon in 490 BC. Darius of Persia wanted to bring Athens under his control as a base for conquering all of Greece, and dispatched a force across the Aegean to do so. The Athenians managed to prevent the Persians from moving inland from the plain of Marathon, then attacked them five days after they landed, ultimately throwing them back into the sea despite being badly outnumbered.⁵ It's possible that an attempt to reembark part of the army and attack Athens directly was involved. In any case, the Persians learned the first lesson of amphibious warfare: An army must move quickly off the beach, and not allow itself to be bogged down. They would not be the last to pay for this lesson in blood.

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I’ve mentioned Aegis several times, but haven’t really explained what it is. As it, and systems like it, are very important parts of modern naval warfare, this is a gap I intend to rectify.

Aegis destroyer USS Wayne E Meyer at LA Fleet Week 2016⁶

During WWII, navies realized that the increasing performance of airplanes, and the development of guided missiles, would render guns obsolete as air-defense systems. They began to develop missiles as an alternative, although none reached service before the mid-50s. The US 3T family – Talos, Terrier and Tartar – is a good cross-section of these early missiles. These early missiles had much greater envelopes than the guns they replaced, but they weren’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination. Targets were acquired by rotating radars, which would take several seconds to complete a search. Each missile required a dedicated illuminator to provide the signal it homed in on. Due to electronic interference, only two illuminators could be installed on each end of the ship.⁷ Due to the limited accuracy of early missiles, two missiles were fired at each target, limiting a ship to no more than maybe 8 missiles in the air at once. In theory, it should be able to fire about two missiles/launcher/minute, but in practice it was usually limited by guidance channels. Long-range missiles might be able to get off 10 salvos/end, more normal systems about half that. So a heavy escort could kill maybe 20 targets, a normal one 5-10, assuming that the missiles actually worked.

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After the end of the American Civil War, the US quickly went from having one of the world's most powerful navies to one of the least powerful. From 1865 to 1882, Congress left the navy to rot, and the US was soon behind such naval giants as Chile and Brazil. In 1882, an advisory panel recommended the construction of new ships, including battleships in 1885. The resulting ships, Texas and Maine,⁸ were second-class battleships of the generation immediately proceeding the Royal Sovereign, with en echelon turrets. Texas had two single 12" guns, while Maine had twin 10" guns. The secondary battery was 6 6" guns, although American industry was not up to producing 6" QF guns at this point, so the guns were not quick-firing. Both had armor protection over only a limited area, and would have been very vulnerable to QF gunfire. They took almost 9 years from contract to completion, and were thus obsolete before they entered service. Because of this delay, and of their origins as second-class ships, they had little influence on later US designs.

USS Maine in Havana Harbor before the explosion

Congress was still being stingy with funding, and in 1889, just before leaving office, Representative John R. Thomas managed to pass an appropriations bill mandating the construction of an "armored cruising monitor" of his own design. This would have been a low-freeboard ship with a twin 10" turret forward, a 6" gun aft, and a 15" dynamite gun⁹ in the bow. Thomas was a lawyer, not a naval architect, and the new Secretary of the Navy, Benjamin Tracy, managed to kill it off before it could turn out to be about the most useless ship ever built for the USN.

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A battleship as built can be seen as the sum of the answers to a whole series of questions, ranging from the highest levels of national strategy down to the most mundane issues of how best to operate a large and complex pile of machinery. A full and comprehensive analysis of all of these questions and their answers for even a single ship would require a whole book (actually several bookcases in danger of structural collapse), but I'll attempt a high-level overview here.

The Austro-Hungarian fleet on maneuvers

The first major question that shapes a ship is "What do we want our fleet to do?" The answer is informed by the strategic situation and the resources available, because there's never enough money as we'd like. We've previously looked at the basics of naval strategy, and the broad choices available to a navy. But how do battleships fit into this framework?

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Many have proclaimed the obsolescence of the aircraft carrier in the face of modern weapons. I've previously discussed the threat to aircraft carriers from missiles, both cruise and ballistic, and why neither is as effective as some pundits have claimed. However, the last major threat, from the submarine, is probably the greatest danger to surface forces. Modern submarines can be divided into two categories, nuclear attack submarines (SSN) and diesel-electric submarines (SSK), with very different threat profiles.

USS Oklahoma City (SSN-723)

The SSN is probably the greatest threat to the carrier, and the only real competition for the title of the modern capital ship. It has the strategic and tactical mobility to hunt a carrier on the open sea, and unlike any other weapon, it has a reasonable chance of reaching a carrier undetected and unattacked. Only 6 navies¹⁰ currently operate SSNs, and only the USN operates more than a dozen.

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The Russian battleship program continued to churn out ships in the early 1890s, producing ships in the pre-dreadnought mold. As with their earlier efforts, the result was a mix of good, bad, and bizarre ideas.

Navarin

The first Baltic battleship of this type, Navarin, was a radical departure from the previous ships. At a time when the British were shifting to high freeboard, the Russians built their first low-freeboard turret ship. Navarin was armed with a pair of twin 12" turrets and eight 6" guns, and originated as an attempt to hold down costs by building smaller ships.¹¹ Navarin's most notable feature was her four funnels, two pairs side by side. This quickly gave her the nickname "Zavod" (factory).

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An excellent article on the (British) MoD Civil Service

This comes from The Thin Pinstriped Line, one of the best places I know of for getting a look inside the guts of running a military.