It's time once again for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't culture war.
Reminder that Miramar is next weekend, and there's still time to join us there. Also, will everyone who is planning to meet up send me an email so I can coordinate better day of.
2018 overhauls are my reviews of Salem and Nautilus, SYWTBAMN - Strategy Part 3, Falklands Part 6, Nimrod and Auxiliaries Part 3. 2019 overhauls are Riverine Warfare Africa and South America, my pictures from the Tinker Airshow, Falklands Part 18, Fire Control Transmission and Naval Ranks - Officers. 2020 overhauls are Operation K, ICNW Part 5, Missile Defense Through the Decades - A Worked Example and Falklands Part 23. 2021 overhauls are Liberty Ships Part 1, Standard Parts one and two and Missile Defense Tests Part 2.
Comments
Can we expect that you will do A Brief Overview of the French Fleet at some point in the future?
I might. Those kind of things depend on how much interest I have in the subject and what sources I have available.
Early report from San Diego: Midway is as good as I remembered, and the Maritime Museum is what I was hoping for in San Francisco. Would not recommend trying them on the same day.
Fat Leonard has been re-arrested in Venezuela. Apparently he was trying to make it to Russia.
Details here: https://gcaptain.com/venezuela-arrests-fat-leonard/?subscriber=true&goal=0f50174ef03-2acd33b9a1-170341634&mccid=2acd33b9a1&mc_eid=b526f7015d
In Korean news, KAI has proposed to adapt their in-development KF-21 fighter for carrier operations with a tailhook and a significantly larger, folding wing, in either CATOBAR or STOBAR configuration depending on what the Navy orders. Of course this may well end up having no more substance than Lockheed's proposal for a "navalized F-117N" back in the 90s; apart from anything else, it's not clear that the Korean navy has any plans to ever buy a non-STOVL aircraft carrier. But it's an interesting sign of the times that KAI would even suggest such a thing.
Re the KF-21 for carriers, maybe they're thinking about a budget version for the Brits? Right now the RN has IIRC one squadron of F-35Bs, which apparently swaps between carriers as they come in and out of maintenance.
More seriously, sell/joint venture for the Indian navy? India has carriers, but they might not be too confident of getting any more Migs for them in the near future.
Maybe. OTOH, the Korean navy has expressed interest in getting into the carrier aviation game, and the recent funding stoppage for their CVX program is said to be so they can evaluate the idea of going with something bigger than STOVL carriers. Also, I'm not sure where the possible export market would be: only the US, France, Russia (sort of), the PRC, and India even operate conventional fixed-wing aircraft carriers, and all of those but Russia (which may not be able to get Kuznetsov running again anyway) already have programs underway to develop their own new carrier-based fighters - meaning they're currently ahead of the proposed naval KF-21 derivative. Way, WAY ahead, in China's case. It's certainly possible that India's TEDBF drags out like LCA did, making an opening for a notional "KF-21N" there; but FWIW at this point HAL has more experience in designing and building carrier-based fighters than KAI does. And anyway, in that situation I would expect India to bridge the gap by buying more of whichever Western type they pick to supplement their MiG-29Ks.
Technologically speaking how difficult is it to do what happened to Nordstream? (i.e. should the list of suspects be limited to advanced militaries or could any nearby navy have done it, or even non-government groups?)
Doing underwater work like that isn't trivial, but it's also not impossible. If Bond Villains were real, it would be within their reach, but they aren't, so we can basically limit the list to governments. And at that point, it's pretty obvious who it is. (Russia, for those playing at home.)
Hmm. I have learned something today. I've spent the last ~20 years thinking that the USMC's peak strength ever occurred in December 1918, based on some comments in USMC history books I read. As it turns out, this was its peak strength up until that point, but the 75,000 on active duty at that point was less than half of USMC strength today, to say nothing of WWII, when they got close to half a million. This is something that has been confusing me for a long time, and I'm glad it's now cleared up.
So some of the Burke Missile Defense ships are getting independent SeaRAM systems to complement (substitute for?) their AEGIS. Are these ships only vulnerable to surface attack while their radars are in missile defense mode, or did the BMD modifications make them incapable of normal operation?
@Echo: see here.
That's the bit I was curious about. "had their radar transmitter tubes replaced" sounds like the "incapable of normal operation" thing, but the follow-up line "while in BMD mode" made it sound like something where the captain just yells "BMD mode, transform!"
So, I was on a BMD-modified Flight I Burke (Ramage). How that worked is that while in BMD mode, we had fairly limited ability to conduct the kind of all-around-all-the-time air search that SPY-1 can usually do. The exact details are probably sensitive and I didn't know them in any case, but as I understand, it's a limited field-of-view issue: assuming a missile came from the direction we could look in, we could conduct engagements with SM3 and SM2 at the same time, but the field of view was the big problem.
Phalanx does of course help to patch the hole, but RAM would be way better.
Cooperative engagement capability is the other way around this, but there was - and maybe still is - an expectation that a DDG playing BMD picket wouldn't have another DDG riding shotgun and wouldn't always have a Hawkeye overhead. (And of course, pre-Flight-IIa Burkes don't have any kind of onboard aircraft, so, no AEW of their own.)