It's time for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as you avoid culture war stuff.
The list of updates is particularly long, as I'm beginning another round of yearly overhauls. From 2018, I've updated underbottom explosions, Survivability - Mission Kills, The Last Days of the High Seas Fleet, Samar, Turret and Barbette, The Space Force and the FAA and Russian Battleships Part 4. The 2017 overhauls are A Brief History of the Battleship, Iowa Parts One and Two, and Fire Control Part 1.
Comments
The final report on the Lion Air crash is out.
http://knkt.dephub.go.id/knkt/ntsc_aviation/baru/2018%20-%20035%20-%20PK-LQP%20Final%20Report.pdf
It's interesting, if generally unsurprising.
I think the more underremarked phenomena is that Boeing appears to be moving towards the Airbus philosophy of having a computer fly the plane and the pilots ask the computer to do something, rather than the pilots flying the plane and the computers giving suggestions.
Yesterday I attended an exceptionally interesting talk, entitled "A Revised Navy Fleet Design," given by my company's chief analyst, Trip Barber (for many years head of N81: OPNAV assessment division). It was quite expansive, but I think it would be worthwhile for me to boil it down to its key points and post it here for discussion.
Trip proposes a very fundamental re-evaluation of our fleet design and force structure in response to changes in technology and the balance of power. I'm not sure I agree with all of his proposed solutions, but they're based on a very comprehensive and pragmatic approach to the problem.
I'm exceptionally busy at work and at home right now, so bear with me, but I'll do my best to get it done soon.
I would love to see that. If you want, it might even make a good top-level post instead of being an OT.
@bean
On that front, we've just released our our annual forecast of aircraft deliveries, retirements and MRO costs, and are working on the summary paper as we speak. I was planning on sending you a copy, but I could maybe work up a post if you wanted.
@RedRover is this the first time that the transcript has been published? I remember hearing something about that, but it might have just been the raw recording that'd been withheld
@cassander
I'd definitely be interested in a copy, and if you want to do a full writeup on something related, I'm certainly not going to say no.
I came here to ask if Bean was still interested in guest posts, and, well, behold half a dozen posts about just that very thing!
I was going to ask because I wrote a nice long paper on Confederate high seas strategy during the Civil War and thought that topic might be something the Naval Gazing folks would be interested in.
When you say you updated some past posts, it would be nice to know whether you added major content or fixed some minor grammar issues.
@Suvorov: Yes, very much so!
@Suvorov
Yes, I'm definitely interested in guest posts. Send it to battleshipbean at gmail and we can work on getting it up.
@Daib
It's almost always updates of links and grammar. I'll occasionally drop in an extra footnote or something, but that's pretty rare. Content updates are more likely to happen when I'm reading something relevant for fun, and I could do a better job of keeping track of those.
Just binge read your entire Falklands series last night. Had no idea it was such a bloody affair. I was born a few years afterwards, and the news coverage seems to have become more triumphant in syndication.
Here's an interesting article from The Diplomat that argues that the world's first seaborne airstrike was not the Christmas Day raid on the zeppelin base at Cuxhaven. Instead, it argues that that the first bombing by a carrier-launched plane occurred when a Japanese aircraft launched from the carrier Wakamiya attacked the protected cruiser Kaiserin Elizabeth with hand-dropped bombs on September 6, 1914, predating the Cuxhaven attack by 3 months.
The US Navy runs a bunch of hospital ships, such as the USNS Comfort. Sometimes they make charity visits in poor countries.
They have two, Mercy and Comfort, both originally built as oil tankers and converted in the 80s. The last time Comfort deployed in support of a war was in 2003, while Mercy hasn't done so since 1991. However, both have had quite active careers in humanitarian operations. Mercy does regular trips throughout the Pacific Rim, while Comfort focuses on the Americas. Both have been prominent in natural disaster and humanitarian response.
I have very mixed thoughts about the new Midway movie. On one hand, I'm all in favor of more naval movies, and it looks very pretty. On the other hand, notably absent from the list of characters is Frank Jack Fletcher, who was in actual tactical command at Midway. This does not auger well, particularly as I like Fletcher a lot. (The best possible explanation is that they read too much Morison and not enough other stuff. Fletcher is the only case where this is an actual problem. But I doubt it's that simple.) I also have reservations about "from the director of Independence Day", a movie that recorded one of the highest "ranting, do not watch again" scores ever recorded.
Knowledge gap I just noticed: did battleships always fire all their engaged turrets at once, or did they ever stagger them? I remember that you want at least three shots per salvo for spotting, which means pre-dreads have to synchronize. But with, say, a 3x3 main battery, would it be optimal to fire them one at a time, each incorporating corrections from the last, and cut the feedback loop length by two thirds?
Split salvoes weren't uncommon, usually to make spotting faster. Usually, they'd only be firing two salvoes. On four-turret ships, this was done by firing two turrets in each salvo. On ships with an odd number of turrets, you're more likely to end up splitting across turrets, say two guns from one and one gun from each of the other two.
I don't recall going to a three-way split being common. Rule of thumb is that a heavy gun usually fired about every 30 seconds. A three-way split gets you 10 second gaps, which is too small of a time for feedback, and might not even be long enough for the shell splashes from the earlier salvo to collapse. The Russians may have looked at this, but it's been a while since I looked at their spotting doctrine.
The last issue is that time of flight often was the real driver behind spotting time. At maximum range, Iowa's shells took over a minute to fall.
Spotting is somewhere on my list of things to cover, but FC tends to be slow to right about, and I have several major technical topics higher on my list right now.
I bring good news! The USNI Christmas sale has started, bringing 50% off on everything and free shipping! I'll look over what's on offer, and provide suggestions in the next OT. Let the avalanche of books begin!
I've recently been made aware of the program from the 1941 Army-Navy football game, which was played on November 29 that year.
One of the many illustrations is a photo of a battleship with the caption "It is significant that despite the claims of air enthusiasts no battleship has yet been sunk by bombs."
The battleship in question is the Arizona.
@AlphaGamma
I believe in modern parlance that is what is referred to as an "oof".
Any thoughts on this piece about the Ford?
At first glance I thought is was just slagging the ship, but it seems to be actually saying that the Navy is mishandling the narrative about the ship, in trying to sell the class as the economical choice to the Nimitz rather than the advanced successor.
Oh, yes. I've heard of that one, and it was technically true at the time. The Italians had lost battleships to air attack at Taranto, but they were torpedoed, not bombed, and they weren't underway. Bombs generally weren't very effective against battleships. Arizona, Roma and Tirpitz were the only ones sunk by bombs in wartime, and Arizona and Tirpitz were stationary, while Roma was a special case. Every other battleship sunk by air attack took torpedoes, IIRC. (Again, wartime only. Yes, I know about Ostfriesland.)
On a broader note, there were people in the Navy who did genuinely believe in the invincibility of the battleship. There are people in the Navy today who believe that the LCS is a good idea. Fortunately for them back then, few were in high-level leadership positions.
@Chuck
Interesting. Manning reductions are always hard and risky, and I wonder how much trouble the Brits are going to have with Queen Elizabeth, which is much more minimally manned than Ford. On the other metrics, I wonder if the business case is as bad as all that. The Nimitzes in the fleet today are extremely well-debugged, but at the limits of their growth potential. Ford is currently in the debugging stage, and I'm sure that her sortie generation rates on her first deployment will be unfavorable compared to Nimitz. I'm also sure that 10 years from now, she'll be doing a lot better.
If powered flight was impossible what would navies look like today? I assume battleships would still be around, would they be much larger? Would submarines have big guns?
I doubt submarines would have big guns. It's been tried a couple of times, and just never worked very well. Torpedoes are better.
Beyond that, the world as a whole looks so different from the one we have that I'm not sure what we can say about navies in it.
If surface ships have no access to UAVs, helicopters or guided missiles I think submarines become the most important vessels as soon as SSNs exist. I expect warships would probably be limited to escorts with sonar, anti-submarine mortars/torpedoes, and a gun to deal with other escorts and for bombardment. Battleships would be ineffective against nuclear attack subs, but to costly to bother with for sinking frigates.
Nuclear powered hydrofoils seems like an interesting solution to the "no powered flight" issue, or perhaps some sort of surface piercing catamaran. Fast enough to outrun torpedoes and most other threats, they could use speed/maneuverability to change the dynamic of surface warfare as a kind of psuedo-aircraft.
I could see any one of the half-dozen high-speed watercraft designs ending up popular as a means of going faster than conventional ships, but all of them need to be light, and nuclear power is not what you turn to when you need high energy density. It gives you phenomenal endurance and doesn't need air, but for something like a hydrofoil, you need lightness. For instance, a Los Angeles class sub has about 30,000-35,000 SHP. The best estimate I can find for the reactor is around 1,680 tons. This is in the same broad ballpark as the LM2500 that powers most US surface combatants. The weight for one of those? 5 tons. For that matter, the Pegasus class hydrofoils had a single LM2500 each, and the whole thing weighed only 237 tons. And even then, they were really weight-critical.
Without anti-ship missiles I'm not sure fast hydrofoils would be effective against surface ships with modern guns, but they might be useful as a sort of helicopter substitute for sub-hunting, particularly if they were hard to torpedo. I'm imagining one paired with a frigate with a towed array, dashing out to investigate contacts and torpedo them.
Hydroplaning torpedo that's basically a cruise missile but the 'wings' fly through water?
But once you get your boat or whatever fast enough, you're pretty much a plane that's flagrantly violating the 'stay away from the edge of the sky' rule.
See: how nobody is allowed to do a water speed record because it's so dangerous. Also how Bloodhound is a really difficult project. None of the vertical margin for error that an aircraft has. 1' too low and you're dead.
It appears that Command: Modern Operations (the sequel to CMANO) is out today. Personally, I'm going to hold off on buying it for a month or so (specifically, until the USNI Christmas Sale is over), but I look forward to trying it out.
This is perhaps too culture war adjacent, but what do people make of the current viability/strategic advisability of NATO, given the rather fractious state of our relations with Turkey?
While presenting a united front is a good and useful thing to NATO, I don't know that I would describe Turkey's position in the alliance as having the same strategic implications it did when the alliance was formed, nor is it a sign of the imminent demise of the alliance if Turkey were to leave/be pushed out, especially since it won't be happening under gunpoint of an external threat. Fundamentally the purpose of the alliance is to guarantee the security of Europe*, fundamentally by keeping core western europe (originally UK & France, expanded now to Germany & Italy) prepared to meet an invasion with the eastern border states (now fulfilled by Poland & the central European states) serving as a tripwire & delaying action to buy time for heavy American reinforcements to arrive. The periphery states (Iceland, Turkey, Denmark) served important roles in bottling up soviet naval/air power so that the all important sea lanes remained clear. Of the periphery states, Turkey is the most redundant given that the routes out of the Mediterranean have quite a few additional choke points covered by a lot of land based airpower.
To that end, the Nato structure looks like a) a bunch of trip wire forces spread along the eastern border that make it hard for any of the major players to back out over a localized conflict, b) coordination of the logistic train (e.g. standardized ammunition, freight handling practices, airbase preparation), c) integrated air & naval information systems (and to a lesser extent defenses, these are still largely left to national purview), and d) training for rapid deployment of mobile forces (e.g. the specialties of the American & UK forces). There is some component of e) American nuclear umbrella, but this isn't so much a NATO thing is it is a series of bilateral agreements between individual countries & the US, and everyone is going to eat a missile from one side or the other (or both) in the event of a hot nuclear war regardless (assuming the opponent is Russia, but what scenario is Europe involved in a hot nuclear war where the US/Russian arsenals aren't going after the traditional target list?).
NATO takes a reputation hit from losing a member sure, but it doesn't especially change the calculus for the remaining Eastern European states that want in (and while it does make it harder for Georgia or any other Caucus state that would want to join, in my estimation that ship has sailed and Ukraine is a far more important bellwether than Turkey, but there isn't really a practical way to pull off the traditional NATO tripwire/reinforcement strategy given the local geography vs. the northern European plains). It also doesn't especially change the calculus of any of the existing members, though it would mean that the southern naval flank needs some reinforcing (and the Russian position in Syria meant that Turkey had already been partially bypassed anyways). There will certainly be negative consequences from leakage of technical/operational information in the short term, but it seems unlikely that there will be any earth shattering consequences, as the core function of NATO military cooperation was to make sure everyone's logistics train was on the same page, not sharing whiz-bang technology (hence why the whole export control regime kerfuffle over the F-35 is technically a separate matter)
President Macron's recent comments are probably a more salient concern to the health of the alliance, but it's hardly the first time France has chafed at the arrangement and as long as Germany & the UK aren't biting, it's unlikely anything will come of it
That answers the feasibility part of the question, though not necessarily the advisability question. I am personally fond of current security arrangement for the western world (after all I got to grow up as a Navy brat in a lot of interesting places across Europe as a result), but I don't know if it is the best possible state of the world. I know I wouldn't count Russia out a threat, so that there needs to be some security arrangement but I haven't put in the intellectual work to say why it needs to US forces rather than European that backstop the setup. I think it's largely a mistake to attempt to frame western coalition actions outside of Europe as NATO actions, but that's something of a different question, and also not an opinion I've thought deeply enough about to be certain of.
*Pick your ever changing definition of who chooses to be/is allowed to be Europe
I do these things so you don't have to. Last night I saw the 2019 version of "Midway". Now you don't have to, and if you're the target audience for this blog, you really, really don't want to. It's everything our host feared, and worse. Jack Fletcher doesn't show up in even the extended credits.
I can post a proper review later, if there's interest. But, one question. Bean, there was never a standard US Navy doctrine of having dive bombers deploy smoke screens to cover torpedo bombers as they attacked enemy shipping, right? That's not something I somehow missed and Roland Emmerlich somehow knew?
Looks pretty, though, and stuff blows up real good.
That's not something I've ever heard of. That would be extremely difficult to coordinate, and IIRC doctrine at the time was for more or less independent attacks. Unfortunately, it's been a long time since I read Shattered Sword or the relevant Morison, and I don't have Lundstrum's stuff on that era. Yet.
It would also require aerial smoke bombs or smoke tanks compatible with an SBD (from the depiction, roughly the form factor of a 500-lb GP bomb), and I don't think the Navy ever had such a thing. But I don't have a comprehensive reference for that in my library.
@John Schilling - I for one would be interested in a long-form review of the movie. But...
"...a standard US Navy doctrine of having dive bombers deploy smoke screens to cover torpedo bombers as they attacked enemy shipping..."
... makes it sound even worse than the trailers made it look. So that's probably all the review I really NEED.
Aerial smoke screens were definitely a thing. I would be very surprised if the use described was anything other than a fabrication, though.
Oh, yeah. They were totally a thing, and were even occasionally discussed for screening attackers going after ships, but I don't know of any operational use in that manner, much less use at Midway. Strike coordination was still in its infancy.