It's time for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't culture war.
Book update: 56,000 words and counting. Mostly working on the dreadnoughts in the ~1910 period.
Also, it's about time for another virtual meetup. Next one will be Saturday, March 12th, at 1 PM Central (GMT-6).
A lot of you probably know about the HNSA booklets of general plans (quite detailed construction drawings of warships), but I have just found another source. The US National Archives have a bunch, too, including a lot of ships which aren't in the HNSA collection. Unfortunately, their indexing is rather messy, and not everything which shows up in their system is digitized. Best bet is to just search "booklet of general plans" plus an identifier for the type of ship you're looking for. Note also that if you do go through an index link, it applies whatever you have in the search bar on the previous page. Sadly, Iowa appears to be among the ships which hasn't been digitized yet, but I live in hope.
2018 overhauls are Propulsion Parts one, two, three and four, Strike Warfare and Late Night Forward Pumproom Test. 2019 overhauls are my reviews of museums in Singapore, Commercial Aviation Part 8, A Brief History of the Cruiser, Pictures - Iowa Engine Room and Spanish-American War Part 2. 2020 overhauls are Proximity Fuze Part 2, The Range of a Carrier Wing - An Experiment, Pictures - Iowa Enlisted Mess and Merchant Ships Introduction and Passenger Vessels. 2021 overhauls are The Designation Follies, Naval Airships Part 3, NWAS Soviet SLBMs Part 1 and NWAS Polaris Part 1.
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They recovered the F-35C that crashed a few weeks ago. Twelve thousand feet down. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/44560/navys-crashed-f-35c-recovered-from-the-bottom-of-the-south-china-sea
Also, some senior enlisted and an Ensign to face punishment for their part in releasing PLAT footage. https://news.usni.org/2022/02/17/four-chiefs-facing-charges-over-release-video-of-f-35c-crash-on-uss-carl-vinson
Gee, you don't say that it was a stupid idea to be the one to put that footage out there...
So the Iowa class were pretty wet forward thanks to the unusual hull shape, right?
I was looking at those two single(?) 20mm mounts in that bowl overhanging the bow, and wondered how much time they would have spent under breaking waves.
A lot. Everything forward of Turret 1 was quite vulnerable to damage from heavy seas. There's a reason those guns went away quickly.
Sabaton has finally fulfilled my desire for more naval songs, with an ode to the dreadnought!
So, it seems whatever happens in Ukraine, there will be a spike in military spending in Europe, and probably in Canada too. Any signs yet of how much spending will increase and what the money will be spent on?
@Johan Larson
To quote Zhou Enlai, "It's too soon to tell." It could be spent wisely, foolishly, or they may change their minds in six months.
In many of the NATO armies there is over a generation of rot and neglect. (Think of the experiences in Bosnia & Afganistan.) That is not going to get fixed easily or cheaply, if at all.
It's nice to see things like Germany finally making a decision on the Tornado replacement (even if it is possibly the silliest decision they could have made). The more interesting thing AFAIC is the proposed structural changes, like the drive to enshrine "minimum 2% of GDP for Defense" in the German constitution. If they can get that through before the excitement wears off, that has the potential to produce lasting change.
Because I do suspect that the people who are just now getting religion about their defense budgets will, once the conflict is over, decide that this was so expensive for Russia that neither they nor anyone else will ever try anything again. And they'll feel safe in cutting their budgets right back down as soon as the present emergency ends.
@Johan Larson: Sorry, why Canada? We already have a nice buffer state between us and Russia ;)
@Johan Larson: Sorry, why Canada? We already have a nice buffer state between us and Russia ;)
We really should use a better metric that %GDP for defence spending. This one is too prone to abuse and shenanigans. If you were emperor of NATO, how would you measure military contributions to the Alliance?
@Fxbdm: it's a good starting metric, though; it allows you to quickly separate who is and who isn't serious about defense.
%GDP defense expenditure is sometimes referred to as "defense burden," a term which gets right to the point: what proportional load is your economy bearing to support military activities?
Using it for comparison purposes is fraught, and it should not be thought of as an indicator of final military capacity. The latter requires far more sophisticated analysis, and even then is still subject to the political and strategic ends the nation seeks through the means of its military means.
Re "are they taking it seriously" it seems like the fairest measure would be something like "combat capable / deployment ready company equivalents per million people" with a conversion table for Air Force / Navy units and an adjustment for unbalanced forces (I.e. you can't have lots of infantry companies without a proportionate number of artillery units or whatever.)
@redRover
A population-based force requirement penalizes countries with lower per-capita GDP, assuming it stipulates everyone provide units with roughly the same level of training and equipment.
The big advantage of %GDP is that it's the number that the people who you're trying to write the rules to protect against actually care about. Not many politicians are inherently averse to having military forces, they just don't want to pay for them. So any capability-based metric invites gaming to try to figure out how something that satisfies the letter of the law can be provided as cheaply as possible. Not to say that %GDP can't be gamed to some extent (the UK includes soldier's pensions, for instance, which don't contribute to readiness), but it does provide a lot of protection from the sort of problems that popped up in, say, Imperial Germany, where there was an explicit strength target (the Navy Laws) and a serious financial squeeze. The alternative is to try to nail down what "capable" means precisely enough, but that's going to be ludicrously difficult, and the likely result is that the "combat ready" unit actually has no reserve ammo and no radios.
If initial reports are confirmed then Ukrainians successfully attacker Russian ship using unguided Grad missiles, from shore.
@DG
Given how much of the budget is people, directly or indirectly, I think that’s okay. You want something that’s PPP neutral.
@bean
Good point re “% of GDP is the actual metric that matters.”
However, I think that’s not measuring capabilities leaves it open to generously funded make work programs, where they can’t actually deploy meaningfully. (I.e. 1% spent wisely is better than 2.5% spent in Canada…)
Well done to the Ukrainians, if true.
@redRover
I'm not saying you shouldn't measure capabilities, too. %GDP certainly isn't perfect, particularly by itself, but I do think it's an important part of the toolbox, and makes other measures much easier.
Philistine:
The big problem I see with that is what happens when 2% of GDP for Defense is just a big waste of money because the dictatorships in Russia and China collapsed (which we all hope happens) and now there's no one to fight.
Given how much of the budget is people, directly or indirectly, I think that’s okay. You want something that’s PPP neutral.
Most of the actual or prospective NATO members with low GDP-per-capita don't manufacture much of their own military equipment, much less the big-ticket items, so they're buying it with exchange-dollars, not PPP dollars.
In the most navalgazing of current events issues, are there any changes predicted to the Jones act? Or possibly just another round of temporary exemptions for places like Hawaii?
Didn't this happen 30 years ago? History will never end so long as humans remain human, even if it takes another vacation.
@Echo
While the Jones Act is a terrible law, Biden seems to be enough of a fan that I doubt it goes away. Maybe waivers, because apparently a lot of the Russian oil goes to Hawaii and the West Coast, and while we can replace it from domestic sources, we don't have the tankers to do so.
Looks like someone isn't going to get invited to the fancy DC cocktail parties. : )
I don't think I was likely to get invited there anyway, and I wouldn't want to go to a party with the sort of people who think history was actually going to end.
Has the US moved any of its warships in response because of the war in Ukraine?
Sort of. The only ones I know of were four destroyers sent from the East Coast a month ago, and as of right now, only the Truman CVSG is in European waters, but I suspect that there may be more soon.
Yet, there IS an CVN cruising in the eastern Mediterranean.
Charles De Gaulle moved out of Cyprus on March 3rd to conduct recon missions over Rumania.
bean:
For Russia yes, but it didn't last, for China not even close.
But if both those countries should become democracies and manage to stay that way…
But if both those countries should become democracies and manage to stay that way…
What was Scotty's wonderful turn of phrase in one of the Star Trek films? Oh yes: "And if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a wagon."
Even if both nations somehow managed to form stable representative governments, they'd still have much the same geo-strategic interests, though some of the negative influences of autocracy and totalitarian ideology would no longer be warping their decision-making processes.
Then again, some democracies have historically been quite aggressive.
@Fxbdm
Technically, there are two, at least if we include the Aegean as part of the Eastern Med. Truman is also flying planes over Romania.
How many serviceable BMD rounds does the Navy have?
A quick Google indicates that they probably have around 350 SM-3s in stock. I would guess that maybe 150 or so are on deployed ships, although they're going to be scattered all around the world. We should definitely buy more, and I am becoming increasingly baffled that nobody is pushing more missile defense as a result of what is going on in Ukraine.
I'm sure BMD will receive attention in due course. Getting the sanctions regime right, and providing defense materiel to Ukraine is understandably the higher priority right now for policymakers.
It's not so much that I was expecting immediate policy action as that it doesn't seem to have even entered the conversation. We have the technology. We've spent the last 20 years developing it. And nobody cares when we are given a perfect demonstration of why we should deploy it much more widely. And if the Russians don't like it, they can try to outbuild us. They'll go bankrupt, just like they did last time.
Didn't the US just send Patriots to Poland?
I think that SM-3 has better ABM performance than Patriot, which is able to protect a smaller area against less capable missiles. I expect @JohnSchilling would be able to give a better explanation of their different strengths, though secrecy may be an issue. If the Army gets Standard and Tomahawk for use against surface targets, presumably they could end up using SM-3 for BMD as well?
We have sent Patriots to Poland. I was talking more about buying extra missile defenses, particularly for the US homeland. Plop Aegis ashore sites at major cities, and expand GMD to cover Russia.
@Alexander
SM-3 is better than Patriot at ABM. The problem is that Tomahawk doesn't require a nice radar, and neither does SM-6 the way the Army is planning to use it. You can't do ABM without one. You could rely on another sensor, but we have land-based ABM systems, most notably THAAD, which seem like they already do what we want in the field.
I don't know much about THAAD. How does it compare against SM-3? Is there any reason to prefer fixed sites compared to mobile vehicles? Unless you need very large missiles like Ground Based Interceptors. Or a very large radar.
Best I can tell, THAAD is a bit lower-powered than SM-3 Block I, probably because it has to be lighter for transport reasons and the radar is worse than SPY-1 because it's on a truck instead of a ship. It's significantly worse than the SM-3 Block II. The other big advantage of a fixed site is that it's hard to move, which probably makes it politically harder to shut down if the politicians get complacent.
Would a fixed site require any particular defences against, e.g. cruise missiles, that vehicles would be inherently resistant to?
Are you going to be posting a link for the meetup?
Vehicles are only resistant if you move them frequently, which is rather difficult if you're trying to defend, say, Washington DC. Beyond that, slap a few SM-2s and ESSMs into the VLS at the Aegis Ashore site, and you're good.
I've been using the same one for a year now, and didn't think to put the link here. Sorry I didn't see this earlier.
I always thought the genius of ship-based missile defense was allies knowing you can ~~just sail away~~ Reprioritize Your Deployments if they don't keep you happy, whereas setting on their land leaves you committed to maintaining the base.
Is SM-3 expected to be capable against actual ICBMs in some future block? I thought it was currently limited to slower short and medium range missiles.
SM-3 is demonstrably capable against spacecraft in low orbit if you take time to set up the shot. So, it can do exoatmospheric ICBM defense. That's not a design requirement, and it would almost certainly require software and CONOPS changes to be able to do it real-time in war.
And it doesn't have the kinematic performance of the GBI, so you can't cover a continent with 1-3 sites.
In general, SM-3 Blk I is rated as being effective against lesser ballistic missiles, while Blk II has some capability against ICBMs. Burnt Frost was impressive, but the window to shoot was incredibly narrow.
Yes, but I think we can count on the alliance between the US and places like NYC and LA enduring in the long term.
The Ever Forward, a container ship owned by the same shipping company that operates the infamous Ever Given, has run aground in Chesapeake Bay. Fortunately, unlike the Ever Given, Ever Forward ran aground outside the main shipping channel and isn't expected to block traffic.
That company's going to need a new name and paint scheme, because every minor incident they have will be meme-bait from now on.