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.
Comments
Inspired by some of the William D Brown award candidates, why do warships seem to be more at risk from accidents in harbour than at sea?
When the Russians claimed that Moskva caught fire, exploded, and sank while underway; nyet, nothing to do with any Ukrainian action; that seemed unlikely. Yet even competent navies like the British and Japanese managed to explode battleships in harbour. (Vanguard, Mutsu.)
Absence of crew? Presence of harbour workers? Other suggestions?
Some of it is just statistical. Both Vanguard and Mutsu spent a lot more time in harbor than out of it, and that's basically 100% of it for Vanguard, IIRC. Some of it is that stuff happens in harbor which you don't do at sea, be it heavy maintenance work or brewing homemade alcohol (a leading theory for Mutsu). And some of it is that in harbor, you have fewer people paying less attention in case things go wrong.
More broadly, it's easy to miss how much time warships spent in harbor before WWII. There weren't the sort of deployments you get today, with a handful of exceptions (such as the Great White Fleet) so outside of training, they mostly stayed in port. Not always their own ports, either, but you'd do a couple years on a station, with a forward homeport, instead of the kind of 6-month rotations that the USN uses now.
Request for a review of the Israeli or Singapore navy. Both have an interesting job to do, unlike the blue water navies of the US, China, etc.
I'm particularly curious how they expect to have any ships afloat 37 minutes after the enemy air force decides to sink them.
They still need patrol boats for operations less than war.
True. If that was the plan you would have smaller and much less expensive ships. But both navies operate some serious warships. It's not just Coast Guard operations.
I wish I'd taken better notes at the Singapore Navy Museum, which was excellent, and clearly put together to sell their mission. As best I can recall, a lot of it is nearby maritime security, because planes are bad at stopping and sending over boarding parties or hunting for mines.
It takes a lot longer than 37 minutes to go from "deciding to sink them" to actually getting jets in the air, much less missiles on target.
More substantially, there's often a big gap between the military you would want for a full-scale hot war with your most serious possible enemy and what you should actually build, because most of the time you won't be in a full-scale hot war with that enemy. And we've been seeing an increasing blurring of the lines between "coast guard" and "shooting war", most notably off Yemen recently. The Singaporean Independence-class seems like a pretty good embodiment of my "minimum viable warship" theory for a Navy which expects to operate close to home. It's got a gun, the ability to deploy boarding parties and various unmanned systems and a VLS MICA system so that it isn't a trivial target if, say, one of the pirate/bandit/terrorist groups that operate in that part of the world ends up with a few Silkworms (or if something like Konfrontasi happens again). The only thing missing from my formula is the helicopter, but it's probably not going far enough from Singapore for that to be an issue. The RSN also has actual no-kidding frigates for deployment work. Israel doesn't, for complicated historical reasons.
Oh, and the other reason they'll likely survive is that the bulk of the job of providing them with air defenses falls to the Air Force. These are navies intended to operate close to home, which means that not all of their assets need to go on the ships themselves.