It's time for our biweekly open thread. Talk about anything you want, including things completely unrelated to the blog's subject matter, so long as it's not culture war.
And another reminder (flogging a dead horse, I know) about the meetup I have scheduled for the Salem on Sunday.
I'd also like to highlight a question Johan Larson asked on a recent SSC open thread, about how you would move the Iowa from LA to Denver. The resulting thread was very interesting.
Comments
Since a footnote to the New Maginot Line review recommended the WWII alternate history A Blunted Sickle, I've caught up on the whole thing.
I'd be curious to hear people's general thoughts on it, but I also have two specific questions:
1) If we change the scenario so that the Germans try to complete the sickle cut after all, despite having a longer way to go, rather than taking Paris, would it have worked? (IIRC the author said this was a reasonable alternative, but that it probably wouldn't work)
2) Is it really plausible to butterfly away the fall of the Netherlands based on the fate of one bridge?
Given the state of the German military, how high ranking an Americans officer would be needed to conquer them? Like, would a USMC one star be able to beat Germany? I realize this is very speculative, but I'd be interested how prove go about it.
IIRC, trying to complete the sickle cut would have had them attacking the main mass of British and French armies, wouldn't it? (It's been a while since I read it.)
It wasn't just the fate of one bridge. The Dutch were expecting the French to come to their aid under the Dyle plan, so they stood down the forces watching a whole string of bridges, over which said aid would have flowed. In ABS, they knew they were on their own, and instead had those bridges on a hair-trigger to blow. I believe Pdf27 said he was originally going to keep their fate the same as @ before some of his readers talked him into looking deeper.
On a completely unrelated note, my copy of Norman Friedman's new book, British Battleships of the Victorian Era, showed up Saturday. So far, it looks good, but I'm rather surprised by how many of the footnotes are to books I've read.
I'm not sure this is a meaningful question. Is the officer having to do this single-handed? Because in that case, only the highest-ranking officer (the SecDef) is capable of doing so.
Contrary to popular belief, officers don't automatically get better at warfare with promotion. Obviously, I'd expect a typical general to be better at strategy than a typical lieutenant, but I don't know that we can say "yes, a 3* could do it, but not a 2*". It depends heavily on the specific officer, and the forces available to him.
@Bean
My question assumes the officer acts with only the combat forces under his command, plus whatever normal tail support it is provided with, so I suppose it's really more a question about what size unit (s) you would need.
From glancing at Wikipedia, a colonel commands an MEU, while a two star commands a brigade, etc.
Put another way, what's the least manpower intensive way to either conquer Germany or defeat their military? No nukes, as that's cheating. I assume the Marines would be the best bet, as they have the most balanced forces, but maybe an Army major with some tanks would be a better bet?
Also implicit is the question of how you go about it, which I suppose it's sort of two questions. One assumes a neutral field of battle, in terms of how effective the German military actually is (which I'm mostly interested in), and the other more speculative one is more about noon nuclear ways to conquer Germany, including a decapitation attack or something like that. I'm mostly interested in the first question, but the second one is probably more fun to think about.
Couple of things I've been thinking about:
1) How much different was the South Dakota armor scheme from the North Carolinas? I know it was redesigned, but did the SoDaks end up meaningfully better protected?
2) The US planned to arm the North Carolinas with 14in guns in 4-gun turrets, until the treaty situation allowed them to use 16in guns instead, and development was halted on the 14in gun. How effective might the 14in guns have been against contemporary battleships, supposing that a 14in superheavy shell was developed?
It was very different. Unfortunately, I don't know of any public-domain armor diagrams (if any reader is decent with a graphics program, I'd be happy to provide non-public domain samples to work from), but any decent reference book (I'd see if your local library system has Friedman's or Dulin & Garzke's works on US battleships) will have them. North Carolina had an external, vertical belt, while South Dakota had a sloped belt that was internal to the hull. The slope made it a lot more effective weight-for-weight, but also reduced stability after damage and was tricky to repair. It also continued down as one of the bulkheads in the TDS, protecting against underwater shell hits. North Carolina just had patches over the magazines to stop hits there. Iowa's protective scheme was essentially identical to South Dakota's.
At a first guess, it would have had the penetration of a 16" conventional shell, much as the 16" superheavy was equivalent to an 18". Which is quite effective against anything short of Yamato, and not bad against her, either.
I'm so glad my "Your Mission ..." scenarios are popular. Here's one I've been saving up.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to design a transportation system that can get you anywhere in the world in six hours. The system has to be able to pick up a person from anywhere in the continental United States and deliver them safely to any spot on the planet within six hours of being summoned. You are not responsible for their safety after disembarkation.
@Johan Larson
The pick up seems like the hardest part, if it has to be "anywhere" in CONUS. The circumference of the Earth is 21,600nm, so 11knm in range would get you anywhere on Earth, neglecting winds. This also means we need a design speed of about 2k kts, so wind is probably negligible : )
Accordingly, there seem to be two major options that I can think of:
Of the two, I think #1 is the lower risk option, as you could do it with about 30 V-22s and a few ICBMs. (Or you could have multiple launch sites to reduce the V-22 time). #2 is definitely cooler though, so there's that.
In looking further, the quoted range for a Minuteman III is only about 8000 nm, and a Trident 7500. However, since we're only launching a single person, this seems like it can be overcome by reducing throw weight/payload. If that isn't the case, then we just need a bigger rocket, which is eminently solvable using COTS hardware.
Also, in case I wasn't clear, for option #1 pickup would be either via landing the helicopter, or using a winch to pick the person up. I'm sure there are a few locales where winch pickup isn't possible, but I think it's sufficiently close that it counts for "everywhere in CONUS", or at least they could walk there by the time the V-22 arrives.
@RedRover, my plan for the pickup was to have multiple launch bases, each with a V-22 for the initial pick-up and one of whatever system takes the passenger across the world. With the V-22 having a top speed of some 500 km/h, if we gave the initial pickup team two hours for the out and return, that would mean covering the country in circles 1000 km in diameter. I haven't done the math, but it might mean 15 or 20 of them. And it would give us a comfortable four hours for the remainder of the journey.
We should be able to trade off bases vs V-22s. If we station some V-22s away from their bases, they can reach out further. The optimal configuration would depend on the expense of the V-22s versus whatever second-leg system we decide on.
@JL
Right, and that gives 11k nm/4 hours, or 2750kts. That's about 50% faster than an SR-71, which I think means we would be limited to a missile, or perhaps some sort of hypersonic missile type thing. The X-51A almost hits that, at 5Mm/hr or 2700kts, but the longest duration flight at hypersonic speeds was 210 seconds, rather than four hours.
From a tech standpoint, missiles of some sort seem like the obvious answer. However, I wonder if the acceleration profile of an ICBM or ICBM-similar machine would be survivable for the passenger, both on launch and reentry. Reentry is probably easier, as we can have retro-rockets or something before the parachute opens in order to minimize time in deceleration.
I suppose we could find something between an X-51 and an ICBM, but given my knowledge of the extant tech, I'm not sure what that would be. However, our long range option (SR-71++/Concorde XL, X-51, Minuteman) determines our V-22 time, so I think we have to work backwards from that. Or we can ditch the V-22 first mile option for a Fulton chair.
Of course, the real money no object answer is a hypersonic VTOL with in flight refueling and a hover capability.
@JL
My kingdom for an edit button!
Re non V-22 alternatives, the Fulton chair seems like the most obvious alternative, but I think there are other possible alternatives. For instance, you could go Space X style, have a rocket that launches, lands within 1km of the traveler, and then the second/third stage of the rocket relaunch with the traveler.
I’m not seeing any options better than the V-22/ICBM combo. Everything else strikes me as really impractical, no matter how cool B-70 airlines sound. Maybe you substitute a TAV-8 for the V-22, and station tanekrs around to increase speed.
The first 28 Americans into orbit rode converted ICBMs. (It wasn’t a unique 28, but I don’t really feel like counting repeats in late Gemini. It was 28 seats. You get my point.) I don’t know of any reason why Minuteman or even MX would be so much worse.
Retrockets? When we have all this lovely air to slow us down? This is merely a matter of changing the ballistic coefficient of the entry vehicle, to get the profile you want. To avoid squishing the passenger, you’re going to need to be a lot draggier than an ICBM warhead, but there are things you can do to increase deceleration and still get the passenger down fast. I did a fair bit of looking into this, and the best thing is probably to be able to modulate your ballistic coefficient to hold the deceleration in a high survivable range, so you start braking early, take drag off as the air thickens, then put it back on as you slow down again.
Say you're able to go back in time to make some changes in the design of a battleship, what class do you modify and how?
For the purposes of the following I'll state some ground rules: 1. You can only redesign one class of battleship.
Whoever is giving you use of the time machine will also convince the relevant government you're from the future and that government will listen to you and believe whatever you say.
Any new technologies must be able to be manufactured with the industrial equipment available at the time (e.g. no microprocessors in the fire control systems).
As for me, I'll take the King George V class from WWII, reduce the armament from 10 14" guns to 9 14" guns (in three triple turrets) or even 8 guns (with the B turret a twin) to improve turret reliability and use the mass saved to increase fuel capacity, the bow would also be reshaped to more along the lines of Vanguard.
To deal with the reduced firepower compared to threat ships Fin-stabilized Discarding Sabot ammunition would be used, this would require the guns be made smoothbore or a mechanism included to despin the projectile, at least one of which should be possible for interwar technology.
bean:
I think it's more a case of higher ranking officers commanding larger units, in which case the question really becomes, do you need a Brigade, Division, Corps or even larger?
RedRover:
Marines tend to be lighter than most Army units which does make them easier to deploy but also reduces their firepower somewhat.
Johan Larson:
How much is it allowed to cost?
In terms of performance you'll have to get almost to orbit which is going to mean either staging or extreme mass ratios unless you can get scramjets to live up to their hype.
If you're using expendable stages know that you're not allowed to drop them on people which will seriously limit your launch sites and which directions you can launch in.
RedRover
Solid rockets are known for providing a rough ride but acceleration can be set by the grain shape to whatever profile you want.
How much is it allowed to cost?
Sky's the limit in this case. Obviously, less is better than more, though.
We need to do some thinking about what happens at the end of the journey for the passenger. Remember, they're allowed to pick any destination at all. It could be a nice open field in Kazakhstan, but it could also be an address in downtown Tokyo. We need something better than a splashdown capsule.
That’s an interesting question, and one I’m not sure I have an answer to. There are lots of alternatives, but I’m aware of how they flowed out of the design drivers in place, so I start running into reasons not to make the change.
Keep in mind that the ships were originally intended to be armed with 12 14″, and B turret was reduced to a twin when they decided to raise the armored deck up a deck level, and needed weight compensation. 3x3 isn’t a bad solution, and I might go with convincing them to do that instead. Going for 8 guns in two triples and a twin is not such a good idea. One of the main bottlenecks was turret/mount design and construction. Hence Vanguard. This just makes things worse.
And yes, you’re right on the bow reshaping. Firing dead ahead at 0 elevation was a stupid requirement, and should never have been mandated.
I’d also replace the 5.25″ with 4.5″ guns as on the rebuilds, and look into redesigning the TDS, which was pretty bad. Fix the electrical system, and convince them to go with a heavy Bofors fit for their light AA right out of the gate.
Wait. Does this scenario allow us to convince the British to cheat on the Treaty? Because a little bit of cheating would help them a lot.
You can fire sabots from a rifled gun. The US did it on the Iowas (for range, not penetration) and it’s been done in tanks, too. But I’m not sure it’s within the tech of the time, and I’m very not sure this is a good idea. Tanks are sort of like armored bubbles. Get through the outer shell and they pop. Battleships are not. Getting through the armor is only part of the work, and a sabot round isn’t going to be particularly good at killing what’s inside. I’d suggest handing over the tech the US was using to make superheavy shells would be a better option. I just wish I had a better idea of what that was.
Make the first stage reusable and fly it back. In the early shuttle studies, when they had a reusable winged booster, there was serious talk of launching out of Kansas.
I get that now. I didn’t read it right the first time around.
I’m going to go with a corps-level (plus aviation) as the minimum. No matter how bad the people fighting you are, taking over a country takes lots of people. And Germany, unlike Iraq, is not a brutal dictatorship, which means I expect the individual soldiers would fight pretty hard.
RE the challenge, you could also do a C-5/Fulton chair combined with an Air Launched Ballistic Missile, for minimum transit time. They apparently got an initial launch off, but never finished development.
Next question: SSKs are often portrayed as carrier killers if they have enough time to get ahead of them, or can wait at pinch points in constrained waters. However, it seems like carriers, at least modern US CVNs (and maybe even the QEs or the CDG?) are so large that you would need multiple hits to actually sink them. I'm sure a lot of the research is classified, and there is a large random component to how much damage a given torpedo/missile does,* but how likely is a sub to actually sink a carrier, versus mission kill it, versus "this is a hole we can patch in 48-72 hours and then watch out"?
*That is to say one hit can going to cause a lot more secondary problems in terms of fire and so on than another that hits a more open space, plus you have things like damage control proficiency/luck, etc.
@Anonymous:
A large tag in the control room/operations room of either Halsey's ship or Jellicoe's HMS Iron Duke that says something to the effect of "Use the radio!" Alternatively, make the powder handling systems more effective so there is less incentive to circumvent them.
I think we put too much emphasis on the top line specs (size of weaponry/armor plan), because that's a lot more interesting/fun, when the details and how you use it can make a lot more difference. Powder handling hoists are not nearly as sexy as gun plans, but could have made more of a difference in terms of how Jutland played out.
@RedRover
I actually have a book on US mobile ICBMs, but I haven't gotten around to reading it. But that's a very good solution. Well done.
A single torpedo hit is almost certainly a mission kill. IIRC, you're looking at 3-4 to sink a US CVN, but a single one is still going to put the ship out of action for a long time. Which is nearly as bad from a military perspective, even if it's not as bad in public view terms. But they're going to shoot as many torpedoes as they have.
Neither would do much good. The problem at Jutland wasn't Iron Duke, it was everyone else. As for Halsey, close defense of the invasion force was 7th Fleet's job, not his, and the decision to go after the carriers was entirely understandable given what they knew at the time.
I was thinking about trying to fix the battlecruisers, but I couldn't think of a good way to do it. I'm trying not to make recommendations I don't know how to put into practice, and there's still some bits of British turret practice in that era that I don't understand. Also note that Lion was able to supply powder faster than the guns would fire without breaking the interlocks. Equipment was very much not the problem. Although Hood might be a good candidate to fix. Give her an all-or-nothing armor scheme, and she'd have been a lot better suited for WWII.
@bean
Quite, but I was thinking more in terms of using it to encourage everyone else to give reports, rather than stand around. Asking for position and intel reports shouldn't be necessary, but it seems like it was?
Maybe the problem was that the design was theoretically capable, but in practice wasn't used properly, and would have benefited from better human factors design?
I suspect we're approaching this challenge somewhat differently. I view "make better hoists" as underspecified. I don't know enough to say more than that, nor do I know where to look to find out. (This isn't to doubt the possibility of better hoists, just that I don't know what they would look like.) Whereas if I need to give some specifics on improvements to the KGV's electrical system, I can get something useful from several books I have on my shelf. And "Yes, the need for light AAA guns is way higher than you think. Yes, more than that, too, and you really should use the Bofors instead of the pom-pom." is plenty for a designer to work from. Likewise, I don't think trying to manipulate the crews is really within scope.
For human delivery, modern solid fueled ballistic missiles are too thrusty - the peak sustained acceleration on the upper stage is high enough to be at least extremely unpleasant for a human occupant (particularly if they are in anything other than perfect health) and you want your cargo to be conscious when they arrive.
You can probably do it with a solid rocket, and might indeed want to, since they are storable and much easier to air launch. But it would probably need to be a clean sheet design.
Best bet might be a Falcon 9 with a redesigned second stage that can be launched on a suborbital trajectory and land propulsively at a minimally prepared site. Or go James Bond and have the second stage be mostly a heat shield that deploys a single man glider or helicopter. Toughest part is that you'd need to maintain a fairly large number of launch sites, and launch pads that can support the care and feeding of a large liquid rocket are surprisingly expensive to build and maintain.
@bean - regarding Halsey at Leyte, I think the decision to strike North was defensible, but Halsey erred in making an ambiguous report/order about TF34. Also, he (and/or his subordinates)were too ready to believe initial reports of crippling damage to Kurita's force and failed to act on information that Kurita had turned back around (which arrived soon enough to do something about it, whether that was forming TF34 or something else).
@bean I'd been having much the same thoughts about the KGVs lately. They definitely feel like by far the lowest-hanging fruit of the WW2 generation. Most of the others could have used a solid DP secondary fit and better light AA, but it's harder to see what those countries really could have done with the resources they had available to them, and really radical redesigns get a lot tougher in that regard.
Seems like most of the WW2 classes could be improved by reworking the secondaries/AA and fixing deficiencies in TDS.
@JL
I'm not so sure. The military is currently deploying GPS guided parachute systems (JPADS), so even in Tokyo you could just aim for one of the avenues and try to land there with a parachute, though you'd need a ram air one rather than the traditional circular chutes. As gdub says, you could also go for a small glider/helicopter type thing that deploys in mid-air. I also think this is where liquid retrorockets might be easier than a parachute, because the thrust vectoring allows for more precision, and if you happen to fry a car or two on landing that's a small fraction of a percent of the mission cost.
Of course, if you went with a hypersonic VTOL, then the passenger can just get winched down.
@gbdub
Strong vote for Bond. Small capsule with a paraglider wing. Simple, and should let you drop basically anywhere. Propulsive landing with something that has already done a near-orbital atmospheric entry really scares me.
My position on Halsey may be a bit contrarian, I'll admit. But I do think he was much less wrong than normally believed. I do wish he'd detached TF 34, but I think his reasoning for not doing so was sound.
I think it might be best to send a pilot along with the passenger, to handle the landing. And the final stage should be a helicopter, not a glider. Gliders are too unforgiving; if you misjudge the approach in a glider, you can't go around and try again.
So, the UK has announced a new stealth fighter aircraft project (the 'Tempest') and I just want to know...why?
They just got their first F-35s, like, the day before yesterday. I realize modern aircraft have a (regrettably) long development cycle, but the U.S. 6th generation efforts to replace the (older) F-22 don't seem to have gotten to the same level of official hype (official mockups, name, grandstanding announcements etc. etc.)
Is it just a PR stunt? Are they trying to get out ahead of European future fighter efforts? Or what?
@Suvorov
Adding to your points, by opting for "Tempest" they will have two different 5+/6 gen fighters in the fleet which will massively increase costs. I mean, what could be easier, replace the aging Tornado with F-35A, enjoy cost savings from the maintenance, pilot training, logistics and various other angles but nooo.
IMHO, it's UK's air industry desperately grabbing for the orders, preferably military so they could drag on and overspend to their heart's content. Airbus is withdrawing from UK, without domestic support it's doomed. As the various other EU-based industries and enterprises will continue to relocate to the continent, the crisis will deepen and budgets will be cut. Thus, it needs to get the contract now, before everyone understands UK can't afford what it signed up for.
That's my conspiracy theory, anyways.
Johan Larson: > We need to do some thinking about what happens at the end of the journey for the passenger. Remember, they're allowed to pick any destination at all. It could be a nice open field in Kazakhstan, but it could also be an address in downtown Tokyo. We need something better than a splashdown capsule.
Or not, the MOOSE could do if you want to go really minimal, out James Bond everyone else in the thread.
bean:
3×3 would be my preference but having B as a twin would work, we do know that it was the quad turrets they had trouble with, B turret tended to work fine.
bean:
Not a bad idea that.
bean:
Yes, but unless you have a despin mechanism it'll hurt range.
bean:
That sounds like it could even things out.
RedRover:
Maybe an enlarged Pegasus?
gbdub:
The thrust profile can be changed at manufacture to decrease as the mass reduces.
bean:
It usually works on Soyuz after an orbital re-entry.
Johan Larson:
That doubles the payload requirement.
I think you're missing the point. Yes, downgauging the turrets might solve the reliability problems (although the British were perfectly capable of screwing up a triple, as on Nelson), but if you're doing that, you can certainly shrink the barbette diameter on the other two to fit a triple in B as well and keep the ship under the treaty limit. Making B a twin gets you the worst of all possible worlds. Less firepower, and more mounts to design, and for what benefit? I'd also suspect that part of the reason the quad mount had issues was the need to split the design section to deal with the twin. That delayed the ships several months, and I doubt they were taking their time. If you go with one design, it lets them do their job properly.
Given that the longest-range gunfire hit on a moving ship was well inside the existing range of the gun, and that a sabot is going to gain range anyway, I'm not sure this is an important factor.
That's not even remotely the same thing. Soyuz uses small solids (notoriously reliable) to reduce the size of the parachute they need to set down on land. Falcon does the entire landing with just thrust and natural aerodynamics. A lot of my concern on the matter comes from the fact that I don't see how a Falcon second stage is going to survive atmospheric entry. Hardening it is heavy, and you're still putting all your eggs in an unreliable basket. This is what a paraglider is for, maybe with a tiny engine to give go-around capability.
@Inky
I don't think "HM's Gov't are grasping at straws in the face of Brexit, to the detriment of any kind of long-term strategy" counts as a conspiracy theory any more.
@anonymous - “The thrust profile can be changed at manufacture to decrease as the mass reduces.”
Yes, but that completely changes the performance of the motor. Changing a grain geometry on a solid rocket, especially one you plan to stick people on top of, is basically a clean sheet design. It would certainly work, but if the idea was “we can just use an existing ICBM design and it will be cheap”, it won’t. You’ll need a specially designed rocket.
@bean - beat me to it on Soyuz. The solids there are basically airbags with style.
Falcon 9 is a big rocket, with a design capability to put an orbital capsule and associated service module suitable for 6 people into at least LEO. Scale the payload down to 1 person on a suborbital trajectory, and you might save enough weight to make all of S2 recoverable.
Regarding Halsey, not sure you can be too contrarian if you’re siding with Adm. King ;)
Ultimately though, Halsey made a defensible decision, but it was the wrong one, and not only in hindsight. His aggressiveness was known and to be expected, especially given the criticism Spruance got for not being more aggressive at Philippine Sea, but at the end of the day, he walked right into a Japanese trap and only brilliant ballsy seamanship by Taffy 3 and somewhat inexplicable timidity by Kurita kept it from being a total disaster.
I just don’t think you can write off a complete failure to account for a fleet containing the freaking Yamato that you’ve already spotted and engaged multiple times, particularly when you’ve got significant numerical superiority and can afford to split your forces.
Some of the blame falls on the subordinates of course. Partially I’m just miffed because I think Spruance is badly underrated while Halsey got a taste (just a taste) of that “too big to fail / the people need a hero” treatment that MacArthur got. Moreso with the typhoons.
Anyway I’d think you’d be all over Halsey if, for nothing else, blowing the best chance of the war for a gunnery duel between a Yamato and an Iowa.
@gbdub
We have unlimited money, and I really don't like trying to do propulsive landings on a primitive pad. This is why we have paragliders.
I'm not 100% sure of my position on Leyte Gulf. I'm planning on doing a series on the battle later in the year, but until I get the time to do digging for that, I don't have the information necessary to be sure what I think.
Do I wish he'd done that? Absolutely. It would have tremendously increased the reputation of the battleship during the war, and probably seen Yamato sunk by gunfire. But I can understand why he didn't, too.
Does anyone have good sources on how the land war in Europe would have played out during the Cold War? I realize a lot of it is speculative, like whether nukes get used or not, and also time dependent as the balance of forces in 1960 was not the same as 1980, etc. Nonetheless, does anyone have good order of magnitude war gaming results or things like that, which are grounded more in reality than in fiction?
Does anyone know offhand what the thinking was behind Russia's AK-130 gun mount? It's a high-ROF, autoloading twin 130mm with fixed ammo, from a time when guns were becoming distinctly passe. I wonder what itch they were scratching with that design? It's not a bad idea as such, but I'm really curious what they had in mind.
Offhand? They wanted to make an autoloading gun bigger than capitalist Bofors 120mm.
I just recently got a book on Soviet warships that comes highly recommend. Unfortunately, it's at home, and I'm in Boston. Remind me next week.
bean:
The Nelsons seemed to work, though maybe that's just because they had more time to fix the bugs before they had to use them for real.
Which brings up the question of why not use the same turrets as the Nelsons or a modification of them on the Lion class?
bean:
Somehow I doubt that was the problem and suspect the quad would've been crap even if they'd used 3 quad turrets.
bean:
The twin was an adaptation of an old design and the delay may well have given more time to work on the quad.
bean:
Upper stages also get more benefit from being light so the performance loss of re-usability is going to be even higher than a naïve calculation of just seeing how much heat shield it'd need would indicate.
Gbdub:
Had Taffy 3 not won how much would it have changed things?
RedRover:
You'd need to account for a lot of Soviet forces not being very useful. It recently came up around here that the Soviet airborne troops would've been almost useless with a complete lack of transport capacity to deploy them and being too lightly equipped to handle real infantry. I've also heard people say that a significant proportion of those conscripted into Warsaw Pact forces didn't get much if any combat training and were instead used as laborers or just endured hazing making those troops much less useful in a war.
I'll admit that playing Wargame: Red Dragon has skewed my perception of the VDV, but didn't the Russians plan on putting a bunch of special forces behind the lines to harass rear echelon units (transports, artillery, communications, etc.)? I recall that NATO personal defense weapons were developed specifically to give those guys a means to shoot back.
I don't recall the VDV specifically being earmarked for that role, but it makes a lot of sense.
Regarding how the war in Europe would have turned out, obligatory Red Storm Rising recommendation. I believe Red Storm Rising was actually based on lots of wargames, RedRover, but it doesn't go into detail about the wargames in the novel itself.
@anon and @Suvorov
I'm looking for something like the estimates that came out about Operation Downfall/Olympic, rather than the play by play that Red Storm provides. Surely the DoD gamed this out at least once or twice a year, though maybe it's not public domain?
@Anonymous
The Nelsons were famously bad, and it took at least 10 years to make them even remotely satisfactory. Even then, they were not well-liked.
Because they had many issues, and because there were improvements in technology in the decade and a half since the turrets for the Nelson were designed.
bean:
Source? I know they had lots of issues with not having enough designers to go around during the rearmament program, and I'm not sure why gun mountings should be an exception, particularly when they're trying to minimize delays while designing a new mount.
Again, I need sources on this. I don't have access to my books right now, and the Boston Public Library wasn't brilliant (Friedman's British Battleships 1905-1946 didn't have the information I was looking for) but I don't remember anything about it being an adaptation of an old design. There's nothing inherently impossible about a quad. The French built them quite successfully.
It would have been bad for the invasion fleet, but probably not catastrophic. The Japanese only had so much ammo, and with airplanes and destroyers attacking, not to mention the ships that had just won at Suriago, I suspect they'd just run out of firepower before too long. (That said, Oldendorf's battleships were pretty low on AP ammo.)
Suvorov:
Small specops teams is about all they could place behind NATO lines and NATO would probably be doing the same thing to them (if not at first, they will if the idea turns out to work) but large scale paratroop drops which is what VDV were planning wouldn't have worked, VVS didn't have the airlift capacity for it and paratroops are too light to go up against real infantry.
RedRover:
If they showed that certain features of Soviet Doctrine were basically making things easier for NATO would they want the Soviet's to know that?
bean:
But by the time the Lions were going to be built they got the worst of the problems sorted.
It seems some of the problems came from excessive mass savings, not having the treaty hanging over the Lion class would allow that to be fixed.
bean:
The people who served on them seemed to think they were OK and that the dislike came from people making assumptions about the unusual configuration.
bean:
https://www.chuckhawks.com/treaty_battleships.htm
bean:
True, though the guns in each half of the turret were very close together, had limited relative movement and shells fired at the same time would cause a wake effect leading to dispersal (sadly the source Wikipedia seems to use is in French).
bean:
I guess the real question is, how much would it have delayed the invasion?
Yes. Which means they knew what not to do next.
Again, why not use a new design?
Everything I'm referring to is specifically on the turrets, not the arrangement. And all sources agree that they weren't a particularly good design.
I'm going to have to check a couple books. This kind of stuff is easy to get wrong, and I have serious doubts about that claim, given what I know about turret design.
All true. It was almost two twins welded together. But my impression of that essay is that he's too positive on the Nelsons and too negative on the KGVs.
Troops had been ashore for a week by the time of the naval battle.
@anon
No, clearly not. However, to inform policy discussions you would think they would release at least a top level result/estimate, even if they don't reveal the methodology behind it. Or somebody in the private sector/think tank world would have come up with the same thing.
That being said, I think the broad strokes of such war games would be pretty much the same on both sides of the table. Between spying and publicly available knowledge, both sides have a reasonable estimate of how many tanks and planes and so on are available to both sides, what the geography is like, likely routes of attack, and so on. To be sure, there is a lot to be done about assumptions in relative effectiveness, mobilization rates, and also if either side had any secret weapons up their sleeves*, but I don't think large scale estimates actually engender all that much secret knowledge.**
*Stealth bombers, that kind of thing.
**Again, going back to Olympic, the Japanese and the Americans ended up having similar estimates of casualty rates, where the logical place to attack was, and so on. It turned out post-war that the Japanese actually had more resources available than US intelligence estimated at the time, particularly in the way of kamikaze, but the broad stroke analysis of where to invade, how to fight, and rough estimates for deaths per 100k man days in theater was obvious to both sides.
Cold War modelling would have more uncertainty, because they didn't have the recent precedent to model off of the way that WWII strategists did, but I don't think that really changes the big picture. Also, somewhat in mitigation, I would assume they had better intel on each other.
bean:
Because the new design wouldn't be ready soon enough, better is the enemy of good enough and the Nelsons by the time of WWII had turrets that mostly worked.
bean:
So it would've delayed landing of reinforcements and the Japanese ships would've been able to do some shore bombardment but then not much later the US would come back in force, doesn't sound like the delay would be all that long.
RedRover:
A lot of the private sector think tanks were basically just ways for the government to get a second opinion and with enough insulation to allow things that the military might not want said to be said, I can believe them delivering classified reports.
RedRover:
The geography seriously constrained where the allies could land making strategy very predictable, if there are more options for the attacker then results would have much more variance.
RedRover:
It might if a technique one side thinks will work really well turns out to be a bust and I am arguing that large scale paratroop drops are such a technique.
That was never in the cards. First, by that point the bottleneck was construction, not design. They may even have done most of the design of the triples, but couldn't build them. Thus, we got Vanguard. Second, technology improves, and by the time the Lions came around, the Nelsons were 15 years old. And third, "mostly worked" isn't what I want to put into my new ships.
A lot of them do deliver classified reports. Most nuclear targeting was done by private think-tanks, and that stuff is absolutely classified.
First comment from Battleship Cove: Wow. I'd talked with the ship before coming, and met up with one of their people, who showed us a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff. Even without that, it would have been very solid. With that, it was easily one of my best naval days ever. Thanks to Bill Hood and the rest of the crew of the Massachusetts. The full review will be up eventually, but I have a lot of pictures to sort through.
bean:
But wasn't Vanguard started from scratch after they decided they couldn't get the new turret design ready in time?
Does it really take longer to be build a turret than a ship?
bean:
In an ideal world no, but mostly worked and ready now might well be better than will hopefully fully work but you'll have to wait a few years.
@Anonymous:
No and yes. Vanguard was started because they urgently found themselves in need of more battleships after the situation changed from just facing the Japanese to facing the Japanese, Germans, and Italians. I believe the initial plans were to build her alongside the Lions, but that was shelved when they decided that it wasn't worth building the Lions. Note that two were laid down, which isn't a step you normally take with armament up in the air.
Also note that a revision of Nelson's turrets for Lion would have included making the shell hoists longer, because for some reason, the British had set the guns in the Nelsons up to fire a light, high-velocity shell, and that didn't actually work in practice.
Paratroop units have a long history of being used more as "grenadier" type forces on the grounds that anyone who volunteers to jump out of a plane has more of the warrior spirit than someone who doesn't. Paratroop commanders also continue to insist that airborne training exercises instill both discipline and flexibility regardless of their utility in an actual war (they also spend a lot of time theorizing about situations where they would be useful).
The Russian/Soviet insistence on special light equipment for their airborne forces suggests they might have gone a little further than the logic above suggests is absolutely necessary. However, it really wouldn't be that difficult to hand a VDV battalion some BTRs and extra ammo and have them fight as a motor rifle outfit -- maybe even with extra effectiveness if the paratroop advocates are right.
Also, actual parachute deployments are sort of a high-risk, high-reward type of operation. The possible benefits of a masterstroke "vertical envelopment" might be judged so great as to justify a substantial investment. And with paratroops, even if you never end up doing it, you've still trained a bunch of infantry who can fight as regulars with minimal refitting.
One other thing -- the major substitute for parachute infantry capability is helicopter infantry. The USSR doesn't seem to have bet nearly as heavily on helicopters as the US did or does, especially back in the 1960s. The quantity and special equipping of the VDV might still be far cheaper than the building a bunch of helicopters.
Wading in with no prior knowledge here, but it seems like paratroops are pretty useful for quickly stomping a militarily weaker enemy. Is it possible the Soviets mainly developed the VDV for that capability, and then thought about their use in a full-scale hot war as a secondary consideration?
bean:
Yet the war ended before they finished it.
sfoil:
There doesn't seem to be much (possibly not any) evidence that the jumping out of a plane part has anything to do with it, besides, lots of civilians with no warrior spirit whatsoever do jump out of perfectly good aircraft.
See https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/combat-studies-institute/csi-books/WhenFailureThrives.pdf which cassander referenced in another thread. On the topic of paratroops if you haven't read it you're arguing from ignorance and chances are the argument you have for why paratroops should exist have been answered there.
sfoil:
So does pretty much anything else they could do to simulate a form of combat, only the other things might actually teach the troops something useful.
sfoil:
Even if they were more effective the paratroop advocates are still wrong, those troops would likely be just as effective if they were regular infantry, if paratroopers are more effective it's because paratroop units get better quality troops and are more likely to be able to keep their officers for longer, the stupidity of jumping out of perfectly good aircraft has nothing to do with it.
Create a new infantry unit, offer anyone who joins extra pay or a large signing bonus, then take the best of those who apply and it'll become an elite unit that is more effective than regular infantry without any special equipment or training.
sfoil:
Actual history shows them to be higher-risk, normal-reward, it's likely that every single large scale paratroop drop would've been better done by normal infantry, even when paratroops did well they tended to take a lot of causalities.
sfoil:
They could be judged so, but that would be a denial of reality.
sfoil:
True, but you've also wasted a whole heap of time teaching them to do something useless, it also costs money to fly those planes they jump out of and the requirements on the aircraft could cost the Air Force extra money when buying transports.
sfoil:
Helicopter infantry actually do what paratroops were meant to be able to do.
sfoil:
Maybe cheaper but with basically no benefit over non-helicopter infantry.
ADifferentAnonymous:
If the enemy doesn't fight back (much) then paratroops can work really well, but so will basically anything, against very weak enemies beyond helicopter range or specops insertion are the only military uses of paratroops and neither justifies having paratroop brigades.
ADifferentAnonymous:
No, the VDV was intended for use against militaries at about their same level.
@Anonymous
Calm down. I don't think sfoil is entirely wrong, although the reason for paratroopers is more subtle.
One of the big issues with setting up any kind of elite infantry unit is that the existing infantry units don't want to give up their best guys. These are men who otherwise turn into NCOs, and the establishment tends to put up a serious fight about losing them. Being able to say "but we're Jumping Out of Airplanes" probably makes it somewhat easier to deal with those objections, and might well make the unit more attractive to potential recruits. Now the obvious thing to do is train the men to jump, but not set up for actually doing combat jumps. I think this is what a lot of countries have done.
The thing with paratroops is that they already exist so whatever fight has already been fought, if you don't have any paratroops you'd be better off having the fight about something that'll actually matter for combat capability, like units specializing in different terrain types (how a lot of real world elite units came about).
bean:
Which is pretty much what the British have done, created a whole heap of paratroopers in job title only and if you already have paratroop regiments probably the best thing you can do with them.
And if you have a convenient terrain type to have them specialize in, that makes a lot of sense. But if I want to create an elite infantry unit and can't say "this is a unit specializing in warfare on the moors" with a straight face, using PARATROOPERS as a way to distinguish them makes a lot of sense. You have a couple weeks of jump school, which also serves as the initiation/bonding ritual, and then maybe a jump day every 6 months. Of course, there is always the threat of someone taking the whole thing seriously...
Unrelated to the paratroops discussion: why don't we see more use of plunging fire in naval warfare? It seems like a straightforward way to circumvent the armor schemes you've described for heavy warships, but the only large-scale naval uses of it I know about are the bomb vessels of the 17th-19th centuries, and those were used mostly for shore bombardment. There was a line of 12-inch coast defense mortars in US service (a few surviving examples still exist on Corregidor), so we're not dealing with technological limitations on the gun itself.
I guess it would be somewhat less accurate at close range, since shells would fly further and be more subject to windage. And fire control would be a bit trickier. Are those insurmountable problems?
Danger space. The danger space of a steeply-falling shell is very small, which means that it's a lot harder to hit something. I'm not sure what the story behind the 12" coast-defense mortar is, as I know very little about coastal defense in general, but I do know that there was at least one time when the British feared the French were going to get into plunging fire. I believe this impacted the armor scheme of the Canopus class pre-dreads.
Maybe I didn't make it clear enough that I was stating the internal rationalizations for maintaining airborne divisions, not approving them. Bean's linked article is right about their minimal utility and the origins of their outsized presence. They're obviously a solution in search of a problem. Unfortunately the French intervention in Mali is going to keep the flame alive for another generation.
That paratroop units are a sort of Schelling point in organizing light infantry is all the reason they really have or need. We don't rationally need multiple amphibious assault divisions organized into their own quasi service either, but history gave them to us and they do real fighting well enough.
I do think there is some value forcing the US in particular to think carefully about how they can actually go "light", which airborne does. Maybe the diehard advocates are right about seizing airheads. That can probably justify a single regiment/brigade. Claiming that randomly dispersing lightly-armed soldiers behind enemy lines is Good Actually is absurd and hopefully no one takes it seriously.
The opportunity cost of training jumpmasters etc would be higher if regular soldiers were actually training at the limits of their schedules and meat was getting cut, but that's rarely the case. In reality other units are running around in snowshoes or maybe just taking the day off on what would be jump day. As for aircraft, both the US and Russia need a lot of airlift anyway, and being able to airdrop commodity supplies is probably useful enough that the planes need to be able to rig up and drop stuff anyway.
At least some of the participants in this operation were sufficiently embarrassed by the reputation it acquired to avoid wearing the insignia for it, at least as an everyday matter.
That makes sense. Explains why the bomb vessels got away with it, too: if you're bombarding something on land it's frequently an area target (probably more true now than it was in the 18th century, but even then a fort would have a bigger footprint than a ship), but ship-to-ship means a point target almost by definition.
It's also relevant that a typical bomb vessel fought from anchor, which meant that they could walk their fire onto the target. The technology to do that from a moving vessel, and particularly at a moving target, didn't exist until 1910 at the earliest, and it wasn't good until the 1930s. I also think that the effects of ship motion (how much the point of impact is displaced as a result of roll) are fairly similar, possibly even favoring high-angle fire.
Let's suppose we are back before the rise of the aircraft carrier and have a very specific goal: to destroy a battleship on the high seas. Is our best bet to build a battleship of our own, or would we get better value for money by using our money to build some other type of ships, such as PT boats or submarines?
Since we're on the high seas, PT boats are definitely out. PT boats themselves are generally pretty ineffective, and doubly so outside of coastal waters. Even larger surface torpedo craft never were that good in the open sea. If the target is unescorted, then destroyers might work, but I'd be uncomfortable about it.
Submarines are probably also a no. They were more of a threat in WWI than aircraft, but the problem there is that you have to wait for the target to stumble across you. Maybe you could pull off a night surface attack, but you're likely to be slower than your quarry, which is never a good place to be. So I'm going to vote for battleships.
bean:
If it looks like combat will take place there then you can. Mountain infantry is considered elite, no reason jungle, desert or urban specialized infantry couldn't be (those genuinely are hard environments to fight in).
sfoil:
Quite true, Marines have developed a reputation for being elite troops pretty much everywhere but at least there actually are good reasons for having them.
sfoil:
Even there airfield defenders are likely to be heavily equipped (since they don't need to move around all that much) while paratroops are inherently light.
Knocking the airfield out with bombers so the enemy can't use it is probably the best thing to be done with enemy airfields.
sfoil:
The VDV certainly took it seriously.
sfoil:
True, though you might not need all your Air Force transports to be like that.
In fact I suspect that the USAF did make the right choice buying all those C17s because of their superior STOL capability but it is possible that they'd be better off with something else.
Johan Larson:
A torpedo armed cruiser if you can't afford a battleship might have merits, though it'd be risky (I'd be tempted not to even bother carrying ammo for the guns to avoid a hit causing a magazine explosion).
There’s a reason I picked moors for my specialized environment instead of any of those, specifically because it isn’t a hard environment to fight in. If you have a specific environment that makes sense to specialize a unit in, by all means do so. But that also has drawbacks. “Why are we sending the urban combat unit to jungle warfare school?” Paratroopers are an appropriate specialization without needing to actually specialize in something.
Define “heavily equipped”. They don’t have any obvious weight limits, but at the same time, there are the limits of cost and manpower that are inherent with any military force. Every man defending an airfield is a man that isn’t doing something else. And he’s more likely to be equipped with a GPMG than a tank, simply for reasons of cost. It’s not implausible that good light infantry with the aid of surprise could outfight the typical defenders of an airfield. Honestly, this seems like a case where the threat of paratroopers might be worth quite a bit. The enemy has to detach a battalion of troops to each and every suitable airfield, instead of sending them to the front. Much like how the Marines tied down the Iraqis during Desert Storm.
Pretty much nobody ever suggested using paratroopers to grab enemy airfields to deny them to the enemy. The whole point is that you’re planning to use them yourself.
@anon
I think this has changed somewhat with improved anti-airfield munitions like the Durandal and certain cluster munitions, but the past experience has been that bombing airfields isn't actually very effective and is comparatively easy to repair. If you can hit the aircraft in their hangars that's more useful, but they're also easier for a competent enemy to harden or disperse.
How often do they actually use the STOL/rough field capabilities in combat? In practice it seems like most places have a decent 767/747 capable airfield within usable range, and this is even more true in Europe/Asia than Afghanistan/Iraq. It's a cool feature, but it seems like the useful part is that they can carry outsize cargo.
bean:
Even if you're not likely to have to fight in it you're probably still better off specializing for it then something that will be used never.
bean:
Not as lightly equipped as paratroopers. Even just having a four wheel drive vehicle is helpful.
bean:
bean:
True, that's what makes defense so annoying.
bean:
Yes, but if they're paratroopers they're going to be spread all over the place (assuming their transports don't get shot down first), that's not conductive to actually fighting a battle and is a good way to give the defenders time to prepare.
bean:
You'd still need them to defend against helicopter borne infantry showing up.
bean:
Eventually, but if you've got the ability to send paratroopers to the airfield (which is likely to require some SEAD which is typically done by tactical fighter-bombers) you probably don't need it.
RedRover:
Dropping landmines is a good way to make repairs take longer, but that also has it's disadvantages, quite serious ones too.
But taking an airfield out of action for a short time is still useful.
RedRover:
There's a limit to how much you can disperse, if the aircraft fly themselves to the dispersed storage site then it needs a runway, using trucks to transport them will only work for some roads and using helicopters will require a lot of heavy life capacity.
Timing the strikes on airbases to occur when there'll be planes outside the hangers and on the tarmac is probably the best thing to do if you can.
RedRover:
Interesting question, though steep approach, rapid climbout (preferably while circling the airfield) and military grade countermeasures could make it harder to hit with MANPADS which these days is what the USAF really has to worry about.
RedRover:
Even those two have airports that can handle a 747.
If the US military needs more airlift than the Air Force can provide they'd call up the Civil Reserve Air Fleet to provide 747 freighters for behind the lines logistics while the C17s transfer from the 747s to the front along with the C130s.
In other words it's a contingency but one that in the right circumstances could be very useful to have.
RedRover:
That's useful, though upgraded C5s could do that job.
@Anonymous
Helpful, yes, but I think it's doing too much work in your mind. I'm certainly not espousing "spirit above all", but the third-rate troops typically found guarding airfields, even when equipped with 4x4s and lots of machine guns, are at a serious disadvantage against good infantry, which most airborne units are.
It's not WWII any more. An airborne attack on an airfield is likely to begin with smart bombs falling on the defender's positions, including the barracks where most of the force is tucked away for the night. Modern navigation means that the paratroopers are going to be scattered all over the drop zone, and not all over northwest France like they were during Overlord. And they'll have radios with which to call for more fire support.
Granted. But helicopters are slower than fixed-wing aircraft and more vulnerable when landing their cargos. I'm not pushing for paperclipistan to have paratroops, but they aren't totally useless.
Why would you be taking an airfield to base fighters at it? The idea is that you clear the runways and make it safe to land C-130s and C-17s with men and equipment aboard.
We upgraded the C-5s, too. The problem is that there weren't enough of them.
bean:
The RAF seems to be trying to make their airfield guards an elite unit that isn't third rate.
bean:
New built C5s with the upgrades pre-installed would fix that problem.
Hence "typically". There are, of course, exceptions. Also, AIUI the RAF regiment is less about guarding airfields themselves and more about setting up airfield defenses and training the personnel on the base to be better at it.
You're making a lot of assumptions about the ability of the production line to be brought back. I suspect that would be much more difficult than you think.
bean:
Would it be any harder than creating an entirely new production line?
Whether it'd be worth it would also depend on how many units you're buying.
That's not something I can answer with available information. Restarting military aircraft production is tricky, although probably easier for a transport than something like the F-22.