It is time for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.
Book continues to come along. Draft is currently at 48,000 words revised, and I'm finishing up the chapter on Dreadnought.
On a related note, muddywaters, I'd appreciate it if you'd drop me an email at battleshipbean at gmail.
2018 overhauls are Amphibious Warfare Parts two, three and four, Why Military Acquisition is So Hard, Classes and Dreadnought. 2019 overhauls are Rangekeeping Part 1, Commercial Aviation Part 7, Falklands Part 11, STWTBABB Construction Part 1, Pictures - Iowa Boiler Room and German Guided Bombs Part 2. 2020 overhauls are Battleship Torpedoes Part 3, Aerial Cruise Missiles, Southern Commerce Raiding Part 1 and The Proximity Fuze Part 1. 2021 overhauls are the entirety of the Modern Propulsion Series.
Comments
I have a question about the military promotion funnel.
As officers advance through it, are all officers that are still in the service still at least in principle on their way to the top job, or have some of them been put on paths that end lower? And if they're not all on the top-job track, where is the decision made to shunt them aside? I wouldn't be (too) surprised if all second lieutenant were still on the golden path, say, but by the time they make major, only some of them are still in the running. But how does it actually work?
@Johan Larson
I think in Israel there's a "main promotion funnel" that contains commanders, XO and operations officers of combat units, special force units, or training units, that goes up to chief of staff.
And there's also professional promotion funnels - e.g. engineering officers, logistics officers, HR officers, intelligence officers, etc. These chains only go up to Brigadier General and sometimes not even that (but there's less demand for that, since anyone you'll want to keep can probably triple their pay if not more by going civilian), and you generally don't swap chains since they represent specialized fields of knowledge.
However, the top of the professional funnels (some Brigadier Generals and almost all Major Generals) can contain officers from the main promotion funnel (i.e. ex-combat-unit-commanders), tho unless its a prestigious role (i.e. head of intelligence) that means the officer probably won't be promoted much further.
The Black and Baltic seas are too far apart for this to be viable in Ukraine's case but would Nordstream be considered a legitimate target in the event of a war? Obviously the Germans would be a bit miffed.
Was reading some of the "after WW2". Curious if you guys know why the navy wanted to reactivate the Oriskany at the same time as the battleships. Did they actually have some use for an old Essex?
Also
Is this really a thing?
*"some of the "after WW2" blog"
I'm not entirely sure what the logic behind the Oriskany reactivation would have been. I suspect it might have been similar to the battleship, in that it was a carrier, and thus a capital ship, but I'm not sure. In any case, it seems to have lost out, probably rightly so.
Yes. The W80s used on the TLAM-Ns used special plutonium which had been in the breeder reactor for less time than the normal Pu. This made it more expensive (lower process yield) but also meant that less of the fissile Pu-239 got converted into much more radioactive Pu-240.
As a follow-up, note that this is not true of the W80s for the ALCM and ACM (and presumably LRSO when that enters service). Those had normal plutonium because they weren't going to be stored in torpedo rooms which the crews used for extra bunks.
Will you be commenting on the war in Ukraine?
Are there any theoretical questions that watching this war develop will answer?
I'm not sure how to handle the war in Ukraine, beyond to say that Russia is the aggressor and does not have any legitimate reason to invade, and that we should back Ukraine, although probably not with troops. (This should be obvious, but isn't to a depressingly large percentage of the population.) It's not in my particular field of expertise, and we just don't have enough information at this point to actually say much beyond that Russia is going all-out on this.
What about Russian ships and naval weapon systems, will they be tested in this fight at all, or is it so one sided as not to reveal anything interesting?
@FXBDM
I am pretty sure that The Ukraine doesn't have a navy.
My understanding of the US strategy, admittedly via bar-room rumor, is to send a bunch of reservists to edge of the combat zone and hope one of them gets lucky and catches a mortar.
Ukraine does have a navy, but it's just some minor cold-war surplus stuff: a Krivak-III frigate, a Grisha-III ASW corvette, and half a dozen assorted patrol craft. Some amphibious vessels, but I expect they're useful just for coastal logistics, not for actually invading anyplace.
I don't see any mention of significant mine warfare or shore-based missile capacity, which are the things that might actually be useful to them. So, this isn't going to be a naval war.
re: USS Oriskany, the Navy was looking hard for any way to reach Reagan's stated goal of a 600-ship navy. And the neat thing about aircraft carriers is that their air wings become obsolete, but air wings are relatively - relatively! - cheap and easy to replace. The carrier itself can keep going until it physically falls to pieces, as long as it can operate a useful number of non-obsolete aircraft. So it seemed like it was worth a look.
Unfortunately by the early 1980s, Oriskany wasn't doing well on any of those fronts. She was in poor material condition even before she was put into reserve, and her air group, if reactivated, would have been limited to A-7s (maybe supplemented by Marine A-4s and AV-8s... both of which would have been strict downgrades from the A-7) - no A-6s, and certainly no F-14s, drastically reducing her usefulness to the Fleet. Thus it was quickly realized that reactivating her was a Bad Idea.
The Ukrainian Navy is small and just not that big of a deal in this fight, any more than navies were in, say, the Franco-Prussian War. And Russia doesn't seem to have bothered with amphibious operations, given that they have enough fronts to flank Ukrainian defenses without it. We might get some interesting information on Russian air warfare capabilities when this is all over, but nothing much on the naval side unless this war gets much bigger than anyone wants.
I'm not so sure that we won't see a Russian ship fire on one from an EU navy by way of showing some force and trying to convince the EU forces that they don't want any of this.
I think that would mostly just serve to rile things up, but I'm not sure I'd put it past Russia at this point to think that EU forces would "wimp out" and slink away if they took any real damage. OTOH, I think it might take more than 16 P-1000 Vulkans to knock out a Horizon or the equivalent, and a big salvo like that is unquestionably an escalation.
If Putin is at all smart, he's going to make sure that his navy is under strict orders not to fire at any NATO warship. You don't just let 16 P-1000s loose by accident, and if it wasn't an accident, it's a literal act of war and whoever it was would be 100% unambiguously justified in activating Article 5. Maybe he could avert it by swearing that it was the unauthorized actions of the ship's captain and that he's very sorry, but I can't see NATO settling for just an apology. I don't think that a war with NATO is one Putin can win, or even survive. But he also seems to be out of touch enough with reality that I can't totally rule the possibility out.
That sounds like a job for mines. "We are terribly sorry about your frigate, but we did warn you that the Straits of Azov were mined."
And I expect everyone to be very careful around areas that are declared to be mined. If they start mining first and declaring later, that's less unambiguous an act of war than P-1000s, but I would argue that the Praying Mantis precedent should apply.
Thanks guys, that makes sense about the Oriskany. And why ships like the Kitty Hawk were kept in service so long.
And I can't wait to hear in the Brief Overview of The Russian Navy why on earth they put P-1000s on a carrier.
Ok, another Russian question, if you don't mind. Russia spends "only" 62 billions a year on defense, which is less than the UK, and in the same ballpark as France and Germany. Yet, when you compare the Russian army composition to even the UK, it dwarfs them. (I guess it's hard to find the right numbers. but for example this: https://armedforces.eu/compare/countryUnitedKingdomvsRussia, says the Russian army has ten times the manpower, 4 times the tanks, 60 times the artillery pieces, 5 times the fighter aircraft etc.)
What's with that? Is it because the expenses are calculated in US$ and the Ruble is devalued, but for internal defense programs and paying recruits, it matters less? Is that all leftover soviet equipment? Are they just spending a lot less on people and a lot more on equipment? Is it that the UK went for quality over quantity because of different attitudes towards personnel losses?
The out-of-touchness is exactly what I'm worried about. Pardon the slightly culture-warry phrasing here, but I worry that Putin has drunk enough of his own bongwater to think that he's a "hard man making hard decisions" and the EU leaders are a bunch of "feckless liberal pantywaists", and figure that they might talk tough, but they'll run scared as soon as their forces have to do any bleeding.
I think Germany actually might, but I'm much less sure that Italy or France would back down because they lost a frigate to a blowhard that doesn't have another sucker-punch like that up their sleeve. If they just had to expend 48 Aster 30s defending against a would-be attempt to sink a frigate, that'll probably just get their blood up.
@FXBDM
When comparing defense spending between nations that acquire the great majority of their defense articles domestically, you should always use Parity Purchasing Power rather than Nominal figures. All costs are ultimately labor costs, and in a nation where median wages are lower everything is far less expensive. PPP also takes into account inflation, etc.
Note that if you do this and look at the defense spending of nations like Russia and especially China, you may become nervous.
USNI has an article from yesterday about the Russian Navy's participation in the assault on Ukraine. Short version is that they appear to have contributed Kalibers (Tomahawk equivalent) to the strikes, but nothing more so far. There's a substantial amphibious force in the Black Sea, but it looks like they're trying to do to Ukraine what we did to Saddam in 1991.
According to USNI, troops from one of the two amphibious groups have gone ashore near Mariupol. That's well to the east, south of Donetsk. Depending on what the situation there is, they may be trying to deflate a pocket of resistance to their advance towards Kharkiv.
@echo: to be legally not-a-carrier and hence allowed through the Turkish straits. Though this is not immediately relevant as she is probably not in any state to participate in the current war.
Re: Admiral Kuznetsov, also keep in mind that those ships were only designed to carry 1-2 squadrons of fixed-wing aircraft. At most 1-2 squadrons. 16 big cruise missiles make a pretty hefty one-time supplement to the air group's anti-surface punch.
What Phillistine says. The missiles are the equivalent of a squadron of strike aircraft, usable only once but displacing much less than a squadron's worth of hangar+magazine+fuel space. And capable of being launched on shorter notice. If you are optimizing for sustained air operations, that's not a winning move. If you expect one decisive airstrike to dominate the outcome, it maybe is.
Also, and I'm not sure how much (or even IF) this was a factor in Soviet thinking, but the USSR was pretty new to the carrier aviation game when they were designing the Admiral Kuznettsov. It seems possible that the missiles were seen as a hedge against the whole "carrier" thing not working (say, in case the Soviet aircraft industry failed to produce a suitably high-performance aircraft to fly off it) - if all else failed, they'd still get a pretty capable missile cruiser out of the deal.
@FXBDM I'm sure that if you restricted it to ships and aircraft that entered service after the breakup of the Soviet Union, France and Britain would fare much better by comparison. Russia does have stocks of a lot of old Soviet kit, some only marginally serviceable, as well as conscripts to equip with it. PPP also explains a lot of the difference, as others have pointed out. But it is also because the Russian military is set up to do a different job than the British or French, neither of whom expect to fight a war against a neighbouring country. Conversely, Russia would be unable to do much to protect tankers in the Persian Gulf, for instance, and wouldn't have much reason to either. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that there is any way of looking at things that would make Germany look good though.
@Johan Larson: speaking only for the US Navy, and really only for the Surface Warfare side of things (I could discuss some of the other line communities): theoretically we dress it as a "anyone could be an admiral one day!". The reality is probably most guys get noticed in their first four years in the service (first Division Officer tours); some might actually get noticed at the Academy (if you were in a senior leadership position there, you almost certainly caught the eye of future admirals and people who would help your career. After your first DivO tour is where you can start getting shore duties (Flag Aide, Naval Postgraduate School) that can really put you on the golden path. But you don’t have to. Additionally, even at the division officer level, you get guys who start getting filtered off because they aren't good enough; those guys mostly leave the service.
Proximity to success is a pretty important factor; I suspect rare is the guy who is on the golden path who does not work for an admiral fairly early on.
Department Head (normally around the 7-8 years of commissioned service-YCS-mark is where you start really narrowing down. Some people don't do well in those jobs; they get fitness reports that reflect this. Under the old system where you could draw a pension after 20 years, assuming they made LCDR, they could just ride it out and retire. Not sure how that will work in the future. After 2 DH tours, guys moved on to another shore tour, which was another opportunity to attract the attention of The Right People, if they do well enough.
This is the point where you start seeing people who start falling off the Golden Path because they just aren't good enough; and they might still make command of a destroyer or small amphib; they are still good, but not good enough.
If you do great in your staff rides and your Commander Command, you can keep moving up on the Path. The Catch is...staying on the Golden Path usually requires taking lots of hard, demanding jobs, and sacrificing a lot of your families. This is where a lot of guys start deciding that the Golden Path isn’t for them; at this point, you know who all your peers are, and you know which of them are going to absolutely make Admiral, and so maybe you can ride out to CAPT and do a ride in that job and then get a nice sunset tour and ride off happy. Even if you aren’t gunning for command slots but still have useful skills (usually related to acquisition fields or specific areas), you get kept around in those jobs where you are supposed to be useful
Now, what happens if you fall off (vice getting off)? You become what is known as Non-Due Course (NDC), and you are the fodder for the detailers (other line officers who manage all the personnel assignments for the Navy, and people who are almost by rule on the Golden Path). They put you in all the awful jobs they have to fill and don’t care how it affects your life/family. Enough of this normally gets guys to drop papers.
Warning: I could bitterly rant about this for days, so one should factor that into my analysis.
Rep. Lance Gooden has introduced legislation authorizing President Biden to issues Letters of Marque to help seize Russian yachts. I am extremely confused as to why anyone would think this was a good idea. Specifically, if we want to seize the yachts, the Navy is more capable and much less likely to produce hilarious baffling legal cases. Not to mention that privateering is illegal under customary international law, even if it's still in the US Constitution.
Actually, repealing that section might go in my "amend the Constitution" draft folder, just so we can stop having this kind of stupidity every few years.
Traditionally, aren't letters of marque only valid if congress declares war?
Apparently not. They were used in the Quasi-war, which was never declared.
I can only imagine your fury at Rep Gooden. "Great, now I have to do a post on the history of letters of marque."
It's not so much fury over that as just annoyance over a stupid policy idea that keeps coming up. Explaining at greater length why it's stupid would be a decent post.
In naval-y news, the largest ship in the Ukrainian Navy was apparently scuttled recently.