It's time once again for our Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, even non-military/naval stuff, so long as it isn't Culture War.
I've been talking with the PAO at NSWC Carderock, and they pointed me to this interesting video tour of some of their facilities, which I thought some of you might enjoy:
2018 overhauls are my reviews of the Boston Navy Yard and Battleship Cove, The Battleship of the Future?, Underwater Protection Part 2, Understanding Hull Symbols and Lushunkou and Weihaiwei. 2019 overhauls are Falklands Part 17, my pictures of Iowa's medical spaces, A Brief Overview of the United States Fleet, Riverine Warfare - North America, the David Taylor Model Basin and the last part on the Spanish-American War. 2020 overhauls are Powder Part 4, Merchant Ships - Tugs and offshore support and Falklands Part 22.
Comments
The BBC is making a crime drama set aboard a Vanguard-class SSBN.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-58334990
With the recent withdrawal/draw-down in Afghanistan, we have seen, in unfortunate abundance, those who earn decent coin by pontificating on one news program or the next about "what it all means."
Naturally part of their droning incantations involves that China now sees the U.S. as so weak as Taiwan is as good as lost. Equally naturally, there seems to be not much thinking as to the how or why of it, but hey, when one is a talking head on a good gig why let deep through stand in the way...
It does make me wonder though. Other than some good reporting from The Economist on the complexity of the Taiwan question, I am not as well read on this specific issue as I would like to be. Can Bean's readership recommend a good grounding on this topic? One that addresses, just as a start, how many post WW2 successful amphibious assaults there have been--Inchon perhaps and when the British brought forces ashore in the Falklands but are there many others? I called an old friend (retired now so admittedly out of the game) who was an Army and JS planner and he opined that he would not think the Chinese would try to go in with anything less than two corps comprising airborne, and all the usual modern force makeup. That is a decent number of gents/gals to get to the fight.
From there one needs to instruct me in how you set up an attack against 25 million people, 15K sq. miles, a certain portion of the island being mountainous, etc.
If the U.S. does not provide assistance, what about Australia? Japan? Singapore? The Japanese obviously would be taking an extremely dim view of such proceedings.
What I am getting at is the pundits (all of whom I heard had no real experience in large-scale planning, force mobilization and projection, etc.) seem to be all too facile in calling this a done deal. In fact, their naivete would be embarrassing if they were not so hubristic in their ignorance.
I know that Admiral Stavridis recently published a book about war in 2034 but I am not looking for a novel (I was disapointed in Singer's effort of a couple of years ago) but rather some good think pieces about how this question has been growing and changing over the past decades.
Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.
@Neal
I don't think this is going to instantly make China go "yes, we'll invade Taiwan". It calls US resolve into question, certainly, but in terms of strategic calculus, invading Taiwan is a big, big step, and China needs to be very certain about the US sitting it out to go ahead and do it. If anything, I'd expect the Biden Administration to take a harder line against China in the next few months or years to try to rebuild some credibility, and I think China is actually smart enough to figure that out.
And yes, the invasion would be a major operation. I'd say that the amphibious force they're building is marginal at best for the job, as well as not being optimized for it. But there has been a near-total absence of big, opposed amphibious assaults since 1945, so the odds are not really in China's favor. Assuming, of course, the Taiwanese can manage to fight back, which isn't a given with the problems I've heard of them having.
If the US doesn't fight, I doubt anyone else will. If we fight, they will too. None of them like China, but without us, even combined they don't really have the firepower necessary.
@Neal,
The big advantages of the PRC in the event of war are:
*Short supply lines *Pre-concentration of forces *Lack of strategic depth of the RoC *Choice of when to attack
You are right that there is a great deal of rugged terain on the island. However, almost everything of military value (big cities, ports, factories, &c, &c) is in a narrow coastal strip on the China facing side of the island.
So, the basic goal of the PRC will be to land a knock-out blow before the RoC can fully mobilize and US reinforcements can arrive. Ideally done when the US is busy with a crisis on the other side of the world.
RE: Diplomacy
I think if the US chooses not to fight, noone else will, and there is a great deal of doubt who will show up even if they do.
RE: Japan
I have have heard a lot of contradictory things, and I would love to hear what the guys here think. I have heard their military is in a sorry state, or that it is great, or other things. I know RoC-Japanese relations are traditionally terrible (on account of the war) but have been improving (but where are they now?).
Long-time reader, I've accumulated a bunch of questions to bean and other local naval experts, guess I just shoot them all at once.
First, book recommendations. Can you suggest something similar to "Thunder Below!" or even "Two Years Before the Mast", but set on a WWI or WWII surface warship. Ideally given a choice I'd prefer an account of someone from the middle of the ranks rather than the captain, especially on a large ship, and a gun-armed ship rather than a carrier.
Secondly, probably a stupid question, but I'll ask anyway. Why modern carriers are only 100k tons? Judging by cruise and cargo ships, the modern technology allows to build 200k ton ships routinely, bean always says "steal is cheap and air is free", and the carrier seems to be easiest to benefit from extra space - it's main weapon being very easy to scale out. I'm guessing it's some combination of costs of what you put into that space, shipyards and docks not being able to accommodate much larger ships, and plus maybe something about hydrodynamics where you need to either do most of your size increase by increasing the length (and end up with a ridiculously long half a kilometer vessel) or significantly redesign your powerplant and propulsion which is very expensive? If that's the case, should we expect to see 200k+ tons carriers if the arms race ever picks up again in earnest?
Thirdly, specifically to bean, curious what do you think of your colleague/rival in the business of teaching the world about Iowas over at the "Battleship New Jersey" youtube channel?
What do you call a US Submariner who's submerged in all five great lakes: A member of the Grand Order of Muskies. When was it last done: 1955
https://twitter.com/NavalInstitute/status/1432155797052657666?refsrc=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1432155797052657666%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.snafu-solomon.com%2F2021%2F08%2Fgrand-order-of-muskies.html
If you mean "Why doesn't the USN have even bigger carriers with more planes and more people" it's because we don't want that. We need to keep a certain number of ships so that we have a ship in each area.
If you mean "Why not build a bigger carrier but have on it the same number of planes, people, and equipment. That would allow more room to work on the airplanes without crowding, and more deck space for easier landing"
(1) Steel may be cheap but nuclear power plants are not. Pushing around a 200,000 ton ship at over 30 knots would be expensive. (2) One could imagine a much larger ship, with plenty of room to store and work on the aircraft without crowding. But the US Navy is actually unable to build a large ship with empty space and a big deck without filling it up with even more equipment. And that costs money. (The Constellation program might become an exception)
Don't the new carriers push up against Panamax in length? Making them fatter would also make them slower.
Neal:
It would be absolute strategic disaster for Japan so they'd have a motive but with the US staying out they'd only be likely to help if they think Taiwan and the mainland forces are pretty evenly matched (enough that their involvement would be enough to tip it).
Would the mainland even try if they didn't perceive overwhelming superiority? Maybe if it's to distract from domestic problems.
ike:
From what I can tell their military is pretty powerful but relatively weak for their economy and Japanese defense procurement tends to be a bit of a mess.
ike:
Japan's colonialism in Taiwan was pretty benign so there isn't any hatred between the two countries and they've long been on pretty good terms.
Miles G:
With Midway the USN discovered that 100 planes is about the limit of what a carrier can handle so there isn't any point building a carrier that can carry much more than that (but given that the Midways later in their life had less planes and couldn't operate Tomcats maybe there's an argument for capacity a bit above 100 but not using it until decades later).
Miles G:
Only if the planes operated off them get a lot bigger.
ike:
They still have about 30 m before they reach new Panamax but already exceed old Panamax.
@Miles G I rather liked the books by Rev. Montague Thomas Hainsselin (In the Northern Mists etc) and With the Battle Cruisers by Filson Young.
@Neal Wouldn't China prefer to blockade Taiwan rather than invade? Seems easier and politically less risky. Might even frame it as a matter of international law.
Maybe a public health issue, so they could get a mandate from the WHO. Or something environmental, which would allow targeting eg the semiconductor industry.
@Anonymous
I would have thought the exiles who run everything in the RoC would still hold a grudge, though I guess they would be getting very old by now.
@AlexT
I feel like a blockade wouldn't play to the PRC's strengths. It would give the coalition plenty of time to organize / mobilize and risk their navy getting picked off one by one enforcing the blockade. If you are just turning merchantmen away (rather than sink on sight) you risk the classic combo, slow-to-comply + whistle-up-an-airstrike.
@Miles
Unfortunately, I'm not the right person to answer the question about books, as that's not a genre I'm very interested in. USNI usually has several that should meet your criteria in their catalog, so I might take a look there.
I started watching one of their videos a while ago, and stopped because the error counter was creeping up. Not Sabaton Bismarck History levels, but the ship's historian should be able to do better.
Less than you would think. Remember, the word tonnage is a trap, and best I can tell, even the largest cruise ships have a displacement tonnage of about 100,000 tons. Cargo ships do get significantly heavier fully loaded, but that's mostly draft rather than length and width.
The actual answer is a combination of the limits of yards and docks and concerns about too many eggs in one basket. It's not Panamax. Every carrier since Midway has been too big to fit through the canal, even after the expansion. Yes, a modern CVN is technically within New Panamax at the waterline, but AIUI the deck overhang is too big to let it go through. But the current ships are pushing the limits of the construction facilities and maintenance drydocks, and upgrading that stuff tends to be expensive. They're having trouble getting money to maintain what they have, so big upgrades are out.
The other issue is that carrier size is a rather controversial issue, and there's a reasonably strong camp that the current ships are too big and should be made smaller. I think they're wrong (there are economies of scale in carrier wings that mean a ship half the size will be less than half as effective for more than half the cost) but they're powerful enough to scupper this plan. To say nothing of the fact that a carrier which isn't there is useless, so you need enough to actually have one there. A carrier twice the size wouldn't be twice as expensive, but it might be 50% more expensive, which means that we're now down to 2 deployed instead of 3. And as Anonymous points out, once you get past 90-100 planes, you start to run into issues operating them all. Particularly for where we are now, the current ships are pretty close to optimum.
@bean Thank you for the explanations, and I like the Sabaton reference. When I've first heard that song my thought was something like "Hmm, you might've wanted to discuss some details with bean before writing this guys".
@Alex T Thanks for the recommendations, I'll check those out.
Good comments on Taiwan. Point well taken @Bean that it would seem unlikely that China would try to take a bite unless they had some confidence that the U.S. was going to sit out the fight.
@Anonymous The Economist article had also mentioned that the Japanese occupation of Formosa was surprisingly/relatively benign. Gee...you would have thought they would have learned that the soft touch yielded greater results than a bloodlust campaign.
On another note, there had been discussion some months past on this forum about a good read regarding the Japanese capitulation in WW2.
Suggestions were given to read Richard Frank's Downfall. I am revisiting this fine piece of research and most definitely second the recommendation. Although 20 to 25 years old, it has held up nearly perfectly. I can see why many commentators view this as one of the standard works on the last months of the war with Nippon. Well worth the time for those who are interested.
@Neal
Keep in mind that when Japan took it from China, Formosa was a colonial back-water with an negligible literate elite. Lessons learned there are likely not transferable to Korea.
Also, does anyone else find it somewhat less than honest to refer to the 50 years as a Japanese province as an 'occupation'?
Yeah, Formosa was taken in a rather different context than most Japanese possessions, and held for a lot longer. As for learning lessons, that was something Japan basically didn't do. There was wide variance in the quality of their officers, and the ones who got it right were as likely as not to get shunted into backwaters. (I think of the planners of the Southeast Asia campaign here.)
ike:
Taiwanese natives have been the ones setting the culture and running politics for decades.
bean:
I think they might also be too high to fit under the bridge over the canal.
This is somewhat tangential to the main topic of Naval Gazing, but the Institute of International and Strategic Studies has a neat paper on cruise missiles in the Middle East. It covers the cruise missile capabilities of the major Middle Eastern powers, including Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.
In other shipping news, there are two autonomous cargo ships that are set to sail in the coming year. One is a conventionally powered container ship in Japan, which will be making a trip between Tokyo and Ise, in order to test the feasibility of sailing an autonomous containership in the heavy maritime traffic of Japan's inland seas. Japan's population of merchant mariners is aging even more rapidly than the Japanese population as a whole, and investing in fully automated cargo vessels is seen as a way to improve productivity and safety without requiring additional sailors.
The other is an electric vessel that will serve as a coastal freighter in Norway. While batteries aren't (yet) energy dense enough to make transoceanic journeys feasible on electric power, it seems like they're sufficient for coastal and other short range traffic.
https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2021/09/south-korea-test-fires-ballistic-missile-from-new-kss-iii-submarine/
South Korea has developed a domestic SLBM.
Given the lack of either a nuclear launch platform or nuclear warhead, it seems like it gives only marginal improvements on a cruise missile in terms of actually blowing things up. However, it seems like it still has important implications for the Korean balance of power, especially as adding a warhead seems like it would be well within South Korea's technical capabilities.
I really don't understand the point of a non-nuclear submarine launched ballistic missile. Like you've pointed out, there isn't anything a conventionally-armed ballistic missile could do, that a cruise missile could do more efficiently and with greater precision.
Is the point of this exercise for South Korea to demonstrate to North Korea and China that, if it were to develop a nuclear weapon, said nuclear weapon would have a pre-built delivery system? Although South Korea is a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), they also have a history of playing fast and loose with NPT restrictions. It wouldn't surprise me if the South Koreans have an everything-but-the-warhead nuclear weapons program. That way, if they felt it necessary to establish a nuclear deterrent, they could withdraw from the NPT, manufacture a few warheads, and have sea-borne deterrence patrols in a year or two at most.
@quanticle
It seems like they fall into the same category of Japan and a few other countries of "technically can make a bomb very easily, but don't want to because of NPT and diplomatic concerns". But they're also that much geographically closer to China/North Korea, and thus want to put a bit more emphasis on how close they are to having a bomb.
Or at least that's my guess.
Pedantry: ".. couldn't do more efficiently .."
Isn't the best range, for a given payload, achieved via ballistic trajectory? Also, simpler to build and trickier to intercept.
Wild speculation on Korea: The whole S. Korea being part of the NPT is predicated on S. Korea thinking that it doesn't need nukes because instead it has US protection.
And the USA offers said protection (to all sorts of places, from Korea and Japan to Germany and Poland) on the basis of "You don't get nukes, we'll use ours to protect you."
So, maybe Korea thought it would be worth while to remind the USA to hold up its side of the bargain? "You keep all those nukes ready to protect us, and show the fortitude required to use them in extremis, or we'll have to go it alone, which you don't want."
The ROK doesn't need SSBs to change the balance against the Norks; they have plenty of firepower. This is not being messaged buk-ward, to use a Hangul phrase. Probably intended to send a message to Japan.
The ROKs always seem to have a tendency to build capability to prove they can build it, even it's not necessarily needed or terribly useful. And I'd agree that they are probably not too far from having a few warheads, if that's what they really wanted.
Wouldn't they be aimed at the PRC in their role as the north kingdom's patron?
@AlexT
Ballistic and cruise missiles face very different problems, but in general, cruise missiles are thought of as easier to build. Jet engines are a lot more efficient than rockets, enough to offset any theoretical disadvantages, and guidance is fairly straightforward with modern electronics.
@Doctorpat
I'd say that's spot-on. Also worth pointing out that it's somewhat easier to build nuclear weapons than it is to build ballistic missiles (seriously, take a look at the history of both programs in the US) and so they're getting the hard part out of the way first.
@ike
I'm not sure how much China is protecting North Korea these days, what with the Norks having nuclear weapons of their own. Deterrence against China is more likely to be about making sure the PRC doesn't preemptively attack South Korea if it decides to go after the ROC.
@ike: what bean said. I have a pretty fair amount of experience with the ROKs, and from everything I've ever read "we need to be able to provide some deterrent against the PRC" didn't seem to be something they think too much about. Given their lengthy experience dealing with the Chinese in one form or another, I think they mostly try and avoid antagonizing them too much. I frankly they have as much leverage over the Norks as the PRC does at this point, anyway.
BTBT
In something completely different, here's a submariner nitpicking his way through Hunt For Red October
@Blackshoe
Thanks for posting that link. A quite drole play by play I must say. As one of the very few earth dwellers who thought those Clancey movies excreble, I very much appreciated his commentary--although he apparently did like the book and the movie so it was all in fun.
I am wondering if in my remaining years there will ever again be the perfect, or even half-perfect, war/military movie. Not documentary, of which there have been a good number, but an actual believable movie.
That sounds counterintuitive, doesn't it? A jet engine, with all the highly engineered moving parts, in an airframe with all the lifting and control surfaces, compared to a pointy tube filled with grains of fuel. Since guidance is essentially solved, accuracy won't be a factor. What am I missing?
Basically, airplanes are better-known and easier to design than rockets, and a cruise missile is an airplane. Airplanes are also more efficient, so you can generally get more range out of a cruise missile than you can from an equivalent ballistic missile. (This may or may not hold true for intercontinental ranges.) And there's a major perception issue around ballistic missiles.
I'm not sure that's a fair characterization of ballistic missiles. Sure, you can build a ballistic missile that is a pointy tube filled with grains of fuel, but it won't be a very accurate system. In practice, you need the same control surfaces for both ballistic and cruise missiles, only for ballistic missiles they need to be controlled much more precisely because errors accumulate a lot more quickly at Mach 7 than they do at subsonic speeds.
Nukes reduce your need for accuracy (and who still puts fins on ballistic missiles?).
Though the faster ballistic trajectory means less INS drift.
Nukes may reduce the need for accuracy, but not enough to make ballistic missiles trivial. It's a tradeoff, and one with different answers depending on the era. In the 50s and 60s, ballistic was the clear winner. By the late 70s, the balance had swung back towards cruise, where it seems to have stayed.
As for fins, those are the easy guidance system. Anything else is harder to do.
Don't forget that places like South Korea already have existing aircraft industries. They have Engineers with decades of experience, they have the tooling, they have the appropriate wind tunnels and modelling software, they have the component supply chain... they have all that ready to build what is fundamentally a small, pilotless, single journey, jet aircraft.
A ballistic missile is starting from scratch.
A ballistic missile is also ballistic, meaning your guidance system has to put the missile on a course precise enough to hit a target thousands of kilometers away with no further updates. A cruise missile INS may drift, but to the extent that it gives you any useful position knowledge you can use that to steer towards your aimpoint. A ballistic missile INS might be the word of God giving you your position to the nanometer, but you can't steer after the first five minutes so what does it matter?
And managing the last little bit of steering as you shut down the engines, in particular, is very tricky business.
Oh so that's why global gravity field models are so important. Don't want a nearby mountain pulling your ICBM off course.
Don't ICBMs, even non-MIRV, have a handful of cold-gas thrusters, to correct their trajectory after engine cutoff? I'd be surprised if current short-range ballistics don't do the same. No longer quite a tube filled with fuel grains, granted, but still sounds cheaper/simpler than a jet engine.
Accuracy appears solvable with current tech, even for conventional payloads. And, on second thought, if GPS stops being reliable, a missile that goes above the atmosphere and can see the stars seems better in this regard.
I imagine it can get chaotic during the last few seconds, right?
I can't comment on current US ballistic missile design practice, but the pre-MIRV systems (e.g. Titan II, Minuteman I/II) had nothing after main engine shutdown. MIRVed systems traditionally have a "bus" with bipropellant rocket engines to deploy each warhead precisely on its individual trajectory, but that still leaves most warheads completely uncontrolled through most of their flight path.
There are now some missiles that were designed for MIRV use and are now single-warhead, which would still presumably have that "bus" available for the one warhead through most of its trajectory. But, A: that's not how they were designed to work and B: you still want to separate from the bus fairly early because the bus is an unstealthy ABM magnet and C: that sort of bus is a fairly complex space vehicle that's not going to be substantially cheaper or easier than a small jet engine.
There are also some tactical(ish) ballistic missiles that use aerodynamic guidance in the terminal phase; that's also not an easy thing to do.
And yes, especially with solid motors, getting precise control of the shutdown is tricky. That's probably part of the reason the Russians stuck with not only complex liquid propellant ICBMs and (oh dear Lord no) SLBMs for so long, but liquid propellant with separate vernier engines. Less efficient than vectoring the thrust of the main engine, but it means you can shut down the main engine a bit early and use just the more precise verniers to get the trajectory just right.
As someone who's had to try and reverse-engineer the Isayev 4D10 propulsion system from an old Russian SLBM, "cheap" and "simple" are two things it isn't.
Btw bean, if you have the time there's an aurora4x tournament running on the discord. All techs up to 150kRP, 100k build points.
Looks like the Aussies have opted to get SSN technology from the UK and America, much to the annoyance of France.
For complicated reasons, that discussion has been taking place in OT80, although it will hopefully move to OT87 tomorrow when I write up my thoughts on it.
In looking something else up, I was shocked to find out that Hyman G Rickover b.1900, d.1986, served in the USN from 1918 to 1982, all of it on active duty, and a lot of it wearing admiral's stars (1952-1982)!
I knew he was a fixture and an institution, but I had no idea he had that long a tenure...
@Ian Argent: off the top of my head, three other guys with comparable career lengths and impacts:
-Jackie Fisher (~58 years) -Sergey Gorshkov (also ~58 years, longer if you count his "retired" job) -Liu Huaqing (huh, also ~58 years, at least per Wikipedia, which I have no clue if that's right).
All are pretty alike in terms of impact to their navies, as well.