It's time as usual for our biweekly open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it's not culture war.
I have a book recommendation for you this time. On Yankee Station is an account of the naval air war in Vietnam, and it's a splendid mix of personal anecdote, clear historical analysis and tactical primer. It's probably going to be my first recommendation for an indictment of the conduct of the war, particularly as it's relatively short and very well-written.
2018 overhauls are Pungdo, So You Want to Build a Modern Navy - Aviation Part 1, Jackie Fisher, Battlecruisers Part 2, Did Iowa Move Sideways During a Broadside? and Auxiliaries Part 2. 2019 overhauls are Soviet Battleships Part 1, Alexander's review of the Newark Air Museum, Battleship Aviation Part 4, Lord Nelson's review of Soya, The Scuttling of the High Seas Fleet and The Blockade of Santiago. And 2020 overhauls are Merchant Ships - Specialized Tankers and Cargo Ships, Naval Rations Part 1 and Tom Clancy.
Comments
Have we ever had a big DDG(X) discussion? This year, the navy requested to retire half of the ticos and stood up a DDG(X) office to build the first ship in 2028.
The current plan (https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11679) is for a hull evolved from zumwalt, IEP powerplant, and combat system similar to the flight III burkes. Size is going to be in between Burke and Zumwalt. This strikes me as boring, but also relatively low risk and so probably the right move. If I had my druthers, there wouldn’t be anything going on this ship that isn’t already working elsewhere, and fortunately, the navy seems to know they can’t afford to fuck this one up. A burke in a new hull with plenty of SWAPC, 96-120 VLS cells (I’d want at least half to be mk 57) and IEP seems like just what the doctor ordered. A nice, low ambition plan for a ship that we can lay down 3 a year of for a couple decades, though doubtless the navy will find a way to screw it up.
Any of you have radically different ideas? Bean, I’m sure you don’t love the idea of a zumwalt evolved hull, but let’s face it, the zumwalt’s problems aren’t the hull.
The Zumwalt's big problem may not be the hull, but it's a pretty specialized hull for a task that DDG(X) isn't going to do. Just stick it in a conventional hull. Maybe a Burke derivative, maybe a new design.
So I'm reading a lot these days about how production and delivery of all sorts of goods are hampered by supply chain problems caused by COVID. In some cases this is because the pandemic shifted consumer demand, and in others its because all sorts of transportation and retail operations been hampered by new rules. Cars, for example, are in short supply right now. Ditto, bicycles.
Any idea about when these kinks will be worked out and things return to some (possibly new) normal?
How about a 'Flight IV' Burke with IEP, a stealthier superstructure (integrated mast etc.) and other more minor upgrades? The basic Burke hull is pretty old, so I imagine that there are issues beyond the size that make it less than ideal, but if you were redesigning it, rather than refitting/rebuilding an existing ship, there would be opportunities to correct those. Obviously there would be less space available for growth than on a Zumwalt derived hull, and the VLS wouldn't be any larger, but I might still consider it as an (even) less ambitious alternative, as the existing Burkes are still good escorts.
The only real problem with the hull of the Burkes as I understand is the short length causing reduced fuel efficiency but stretching it would fix that while also allowing for more stuff to be fitted.
Would an extra illuminator make any sense with active homing missiles?
@alexander
IEP means for very different internal arrangements than a traditional power plant. My understanding is that adapting the burke design would mean either a re-arrangement so significant that it amounts to a new design or wasting a lot of space. And that's pure hull form considerations. You also need a totally new electrical system which is going to end up drawing heavily on the zumwalt experience. I think the amount of risk there is going to be roughly equivalent, and all else being equal I'd rather have a larger hull than a smaller one.
Makes sense - if it's basically a clean sheet design anyway then you might as well have room for growth. What are the trade offs between (1) a stealthy tumblehome hull, (2) a more conventional and stable design, or (3) just scaling up to 15,000 tons and adapting the Zumwalt hull? The Zumwalt hull is set up for IEP, and you could replace the AGS with a conventional 5" and some Mk41. If the basic hull of the Zumwalt is bad, however, (beyond the AGS, radar etc.) then I can't see why you'd pick a smaller tumblehome hull either, so presumably choose either option 2 or 3, depending on your view on Zumwalt's seaworthiness.
Iowa hull.
You know you want to say it.
The Wikipedia article on the Zumwalt class contains this piece of snide commentary:
Why do you people always want spoilers for upcoming posts?
The short version is that the Zumwalt was designed to be stealthy for two reasons. First, it was supposed to keep costs down by allowing a ship that didn't have Aegis to operate independently. If it's stealthy, then any incoming threat should be manageable by the onboard weapons. Second, it was the 90s/early 2000s, and stealth was the big buzzword. If the program started today, it would be a hypersonic destroyer.
So, with that in mind, there's really no reason to use the Zumwalt hull. Even granting that it isn't immediately unstable, stealth has a lot of penalties at sea, more than in the air. So why not just build a clean-sheet conventional hull with Zumwalt engineering and Burke Flight III combat systems?
What is the problem with the Zumwalt hull? I can imagine that sloping things in, rather than out, makes systems engineering more difficult and creates some other limits, but within those constraints I don't see the issue?
Obviously you need to take some of the official stuff with a grain of salt (heaping teaspoon?) because they're not going to say "it sucks" but these articles suggest that it's not inherently flawed, and indeed is in some ways better than the existing classes. https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2021/03/08/the-stealth-destroyer-zumwalt-sails-through-rough-seas-testing/ https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/39669/debate-over-navys-zumwalt-destroyers-seakeeping-abilities-doused-after-high-seas-tests Admittedly "not inherently flawed" is a rather low bar, but still.
@redRover
I can't find the reference right now, but I believe that bean wrote about tumblehome hulls in one of his articles on stability. As I recall, tumblehome hulls are distinctly worse at recovering from rolls, which can be a pretty major problem in high seas.
Flooding is extra-nasty in a tumblehome hull as well, due to the volume of each level decreasing as you go up. And flooding really doesn't need to be more dangerous - especially on a ship that's also going to feature reduced manning (and thus fewer hands available for damage control).
Per the linked discussion (which primarily concerned French pre-Dreads): https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/519sjp/howdidthetumblehomedesignofsteel_warships/
... tumblehome hulls feel better in rough seas, up to a point. But once things start to go bad, everything suddenly falls off a cliff and the boat is upside-down before you know it.
I've spotted 'Children of a Dead Earth' at a 90% discount on Steam, and could see it appealing to to some of the commenters here, particularly those who enjoyed the Aurora posts. I'm probably going to get it myself at that price (£1.54).
I picked that up when it came out, and it's OK. Unfortunately, it came a bit too late for that stage of my life, but worth it at that price.
I read On Yankee Station a while ago, I'll see if I can dig up my thoughts on it.
@Blackshoe,
That sounds interesting. I haven't opened my copy in several years, but it's still on my shelf. I look forward to seeing your take.
And here's all I wrote. I thought I had more going here, but anyway:
I remember being very favorably impressed by Nichols & Tillman's description of air operations over North Vietnam; the conclusions and recommendations section, less so. For example, even at the time (I was in high school when the book came out) I was very skeptical of the idea that what the USN really needed was masses of daylight-only point-defense interceptors with AIM-9s and guns, however inexpensive. (Many years later I'd learn about the phenomenon of old officers demanding that the armed forces buy new equipment just like the kit they'd served with as young officers, and it appears to me that Nichols succumbed to that tendency here.) The idea of a separate, non-command track career option for aviators, OTOH, feels like a good one, for the reasons described in the book - but I have no idea how feasible it would be to implement.
Random thing I discovered today: the strange and sad fate of a former USN battleship-turned-museum-ship, USS OREGON
The Atlantic has a harsh take on the recently deceased former Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld:
Who else is in the running for the title of worst Secretary of Defence (or War) in American history? I'll start by tossing into the ring John Armstrong Jr., who held the post during the War of 1812.
Are those hooded boiler suit outfits unique to the Royal Navy? It's a very different look.
I actually ran across the article on Rumsfeld, and said "he's wrong" with the very first sentence. Robert McNamara is the worst SecDef in history. This isn't even a question, just a brute fact. I suppose you could fail to understand this if your background is purely on the political side, but even a cursory look at the wider picture shows just how many things McNamara screwed up in bizarre and baffling ways.
echo, do you mean Anti-Flash gear? The USN uses it too, though I admit I do see it more often in images of RN sailors. Maybe someone better-informed can say if there are different criteria for its employment in the two navies?
@johan
It takes a lot of chutzpah to call donald Rumsfield the worst secdef in history while talking about the Vietnam War. The idea that iraq war was a bigger catastrophe than vietnam is simply...ignorant of basic math. It also ignores the (very well documented) history of the bush administration, which makes it very clear that Rumsfeld was not a big supporter of the iraq war, and certainly not its chief advocate. The bush administration is incredibly well documented, and there's a pretty broad consensus about what happened. It's embarrassing that no one seems to bother reading that history before deciding to pontificate about it.
Robert S. McNamara was a prime example of a well-educated, highly intelligent person who ruined everything he touched. The worst kind of intellectual, he employed his education and intelligence not to expand his (or anyone else's) understanding but merely to reinforce his prejudices - part of which was mastering the art of generating "objective statistical analyses" which coincidentally (by virtue of very carefully selected terms and scope) just happened to confirm his existing biases. His tenure as SecDef was a catastrophe whose disastrous effects still persist more than 50 years later. For all Rumsfeld's faults, the idea that he was in McNamara's league is just wild.
Still, I'm not entirely surprised that the editors at The Atlantic think Rumsfeld was worse than McNamara. To the extent that they even know McNamara's record apart from Vietnam, they likely believe he was a prescient sage and a hero.
Related question, more relevant to this blog: in the years between 1900 and 2000, who was the best SecNav? Who was the worst?
I'd nominate Francis Matthews as worst for his complete failure to defend the Navy during the late 40s. For best, my first instinct is John Lehman, although there are several other candidates who I don't have the knowledge to evaluate as I'd need to. Forrestal and Knox spring to mind. I would rule out Josephus Daniels, the other prominent name that might show up on the list.
I have the McNamara autobiography upstairs. It is hard not to like him as a person, but as Bean says "everything he touches..."
@quanticle
Secretary Long established the general board, which would be the top advisory institution in the navy for almost 50 years and, on the whole, did a remarkably good job of steering the navy through a period of rapid technological change and enormous expansion. Long created it, and must deserve some credit for that.
Another aviation-related YouTube channel has taken a look at the 1980 film The Final Countdown, and another batch of half-educated commenters have come out of the woodwork to assert that the Nimitz would certainly have been doomed had the storm not reappeared and returned her to 1980. Because air-to-air missiles would "never" be able to lock on to the low-tech IJN aircraft, which would also be nigh-impossible to shoot down with guns due to being "far more maneuverable" than modern jets; modern bombs would be completely ineffective against Nagumo's "heavily-armored fleet"; and even if the weapons were effective Nimitz wouldn't have enough of anything aboard to make a dent in Nagumo's "hundreds of aircraft and dozens of ships"; and last but not least, no amount of technological progress in the intervening 40 years would matter a tinker's dam in the outcome of such a confrontation.
And of course what's really galling is the thought that 25 or 30 years ago I was making similarly absurd claims, with equal self-assurance, based on equally inadequate information. Nothing burns like perspective.
Philistine is making me want to go find this video and start commenting back. A most dangerous impulse.
FWIW, IMHO, I do think there are some fun discussions about dropping modern equipment (spoiler: a DDG-51 with a tail in the Atlantic makes the U-boat threat disappear very quick), bit "Nimitzes would get owned by IJN carriers" is uh not it, to say the least.
We've discussed sort-of-that before.
@Blackshoe,
It is a rabbit hole made of flypaper and tar pits, to be sure... But on the other hand, Someone Is Wrong On The Internet!
One F14 doing a full afterburner flyover of Pearl 3 hours before the Japanese got there could have tipped the balance all by itself.
Sure, there are any number of different ways the Nimitz personnel could have handled the situation, some probably better than what they came up with in the film. Almost all the comments - and certainly the ones that have been driving me up the wall with their assertions that technological progress made military technology less capable in 1980 than in 1941 - have been focused on the scenario the film set up, though.
India has announced that it's started work on an indigenous carrier aircraft. The Twin Engine Deck-Based Fighter (TEDBF) is an offshoot of the existing HAL Tejas, using the same engines, with a design that bears a striking resemblance to the Dassault Rafale.
Whether this program will go any better than the original Tejas program, which was beset with delays and technical issues, remains to be seen.
What's wrong with actual Rafales? Doesn't India already operate them? If they are prepared to pay, they could probably get Dassault to help them build a few domestically.
Apparently actual Rafales are too large to fit comfortably aboard the elevators of the INS Vikrant.
Source
India does operate actual Rafales, but exclusively as land-based aircraft.
Huh. I'd heard that the ship's dimensions were a major constraint for Vikramaditya's air wing, but assumed it was just that they couldn't get enough Rafales or F-18s aboard to be useful and still have room to move around the flight and hangar decks due to limitations inherent in that ship's origins as Admiral Gorshkov. I also assumed that they'd fix that on Vikrant, since that was a clean-sheet design and they could specify it pretty much any way they wanted. Alternatively, that's the excuse the IN is giving to justify building their own carrier aircraft, which is something they wanted to do anyway.
@Alexander,
AIUI, the hangup to India building Rafales domestically is that the IAF wants Dassault to guarantee the build quality of Indian-built Rafales, while Dassault wants India to understand that is impossible and insane. So the planned Rafale buy keeps going up and down, with more or fewer being built in France, while they continue to bang on the details.
To my understanding, Indian military aircraft procurement is possibly the worst in the world. The HAL Tejas is a fairly mundane lightweight fighter, but the program that produced it started in the early 80s, a decade before the JSF, and they entered service at about the same time (2015). Oh, and the total built so far is 37. So I'm not surprised they got their carrier/aircraft integration that wrong.
Not being able to fit Rafales on your carrier is a good reason not to buy them, though does raise questions about how well thought through the carrier design is. I can understand being concerned about the quality of Indian built aircraft, but that is going to apply just as much if not more to a domestic design. At least if they pick Rafales some aircraft would be purely French. This is the sort of thing (which happens to some extent in the UK too) that makes me feel like some defence procurement is primarily a scheme to transfer wealth from taxpayers to contractors, with the provision of equipment as a byproduct.
This is true to some extent almost everywhere, although there's wide variation in how much effect it has and it's hard to disentangle from strategic concerns. The US has economies of scale so that it doesn't usually hit us too badly, but the same is not true of much of the rest of the world. And then there's BAE, which has on occasion figured out how to skip the whole "provision of equipment" bit.
To add to Philistine's summary, Dassault's falling out with the Indian government was over India's demand that Dassault be on the hook financially for any failures of a subcontractor. Which seems reasonable until you realize that the subcontractor in question was...HAL.
Which is itself an...Indian government agency.
So yeah, don't think Dassault is looking to deal with the Indian government again for a long time.
And the Tejas isn't even the worst example of Indian defense acquisition excellence! Check out their attempts to get 155mm artillery, for example.
So, my sister and I like to send each other postcards. One of her postcard books is of WW1 art.
This week, I got this lovely painting of the hideous HMS Lord Clive, by Oscar Parkes, a fantastically talented guy who was variously a surgeon, artist, and editor of Jane's Fighting Ships.
@Phillistine
That reminds me of an old but entertaining short story Hawk Among the Sparrows, where a plane from a future war is thrown back to WWI and the pilot finds that his weaponry, designed for anti-ballistic missile defense, is incapable of targeting German triplanes.
Sure, but he'll have to refuel. Was there even a place to land a jet fighter in '14?
@echo: in case you are still wondering, I think the hooded boiler suits you refer to are flash gear (more specifically, anti-flash gear). Introduced after Jutland. In USN service, there are two varieties, the white and tannish-kind, with the white being perceived as "better". Also, the RN stuff (with the mesh around the mouth) is also perceived as "better", although I don't think that's really been tested very much, just a matter of perception.
The Wikipedia article on Robert Clive led me, in turn, to the article on the source of Clive's sole 18" gun, the HMS Furious. And wow, I thought I'd seen some really special designs for World War 1 ships, but Furious is something else. A 20,000 ton "light" cruiser, with a flying-off deck fore and a single 18" gun aft. It should have been named the Fischer, because only Jackie Fischer could have looked at that design and thought it was a good idea. It was probably one of the few ships that probably benefited by being converted to an aircraft carrier.
@quanticle: covered here.
@AlexT: if you're looking for time travel fiction that takes the lack of support infrastructure issue seriously, try the 1632 series.
Re Oscar Parkes, don't forget the author of the first of the great battleship reference books. My copy is within arm's reach of where I sit now (along with all the other great battleship reference books) and while it's dated in some ways, it's still really useful.
Suggestion for a post: the Battle (not the War!) of the Falklands.
I've thought about doing the East Asia Squadron at some point, but it will probably wait until after Norway is done, and that's going to be a while.
@AlexT
Conveniently for the narrative, his jet was a VTOL. The question of refueling was actually a big part of the story: he managed to fuel his plane off of kerosene, however at the time kerosene was just a fuel for lamps and stoves, and couldn't be easily procured in the quantities he needed.
Being able to run on almost anything that burns does have advantages.