I’m not going to make assertions about 100NM range, but if you’ll note this:
<bolding mine>
You’ll note that the use of ERFB+BB technology better than doubles the range over a gun firing standard shells. Assuming a range of 43,000 yards for a typical 16"/50 gun (depending on shell, it can be longer, or shorter), and assuming that 16" ERFB+BB is somewhat less efficient, say, only exactly doubling the range, we get a typical range of 86,000 yards, or roughly 49 miles. That well exceeds the Marines request for gunfire support to 35NM inland.
[sup]*[/sup](ERFB+BB == Extended Range Full Bore Base Bleed)
Well, yes, it’s not 100nm, but then I never thought 100nm for a gun to particularly useful. 40 miles is getting pretty extreme, and without guided munitions of some sort, atmospheric conditions en route, plus target motion (if any) are going to significantly reduce the 16"/50’s remarkable accuracy. Much beyond 50 miles, you’d need terminal guidance to get useful (to the Marines, that is) accuracy. However, the Marines only want 35 miles, and that’s entirely do-able.
I agree. If you read the link I left above on the Paris Gun you’ll see that the gun was considered a failure. Low payload and cost of operation were part of it (it could only fire 65 shots before having the barrel replaced). However, it was also wildly inaacurate and is described as only being able to hit a city-sized target. As such it was pretty much relegated to a terror weapon since it really filled no useful military role.
The Iraqi ‘supergun’ (or Babylon Gun), if built, would have had ranges on the 1000NM range and could shoot payloads into orbit (with a little rocket help). How the hell you would aim that thing is beyond me so I again don’t see the point except for use as a terror weapon.
…there seems to have been less problems with barrel wear than I recalled. This varied from nation to nation (with accounts of the Italian 381mm guns indicating that they could not fire half their magazines without suffering serious wear and tear to their guns), but American battleships seem to have been able to keep up sustained fire for the duration of an operation – but the frequency of yard times, always in the aftermath of amphibious operations, indicated that they received replacement barrels at least between operations.
Actually, it’s was a “pocket battleship”, which is more or less short for “we can’t afford a real battleship”
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I’m not sure where you got this idea - that a battleship would need it’s own carrier air group. I thought it was fairly obvious that I was advocating battleships being PART of some currently existing air groups (as they were before they were decommisioned)
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When was the last time a US naval force faced such a threat? I know it’s a concern, but theres nothing forcing you to rush the battleship in, unprotected, on the first day of the conflict or something. Enemy air assets are typically nuetralized on the first day of a US military operation.
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Historically, land artillery isn’t a threat to naval ships. They don’t have armor piercing shells, and they’re not designed to be pinpoint accurate.
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Firstly, I said it to allay your squeemish fears. If I were in charge, I wouldn’t go exactly charging head first into the situation with a BB, but I wouldn’t wait for the ‘all clear, nothing is moving’ signal either.
And… besides, we had a 3 month campaign in kosovo, despite their air force being neutralized on day 1. If we’d already won 90% of the war, why did we bomb them for 3 more months? That’s a good example of a situation in which a BB would be quite useful.
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Unless the enemy has managed to station thousands of troops to repel an amphibious landing and those troops have somehow avoided all air attacks then maybe the BB is useful.
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I’m going to guess you don’t have much of a military history background. Artillery IS power on the battlefield. Even without the marines needing to fight through ‘hordes’ of defenders, without artillery, a few well placed ones can make the operation unacceptably slow.
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Air supremacy != owning a chunk of the land.
Do you KNOW what the costs are? They don’t cost all that much more than a modern day destroyer or two. I’ve only said this 10 times on this thread, but they’re REALLY NOT huge-budget ships.
What we’re doing INSTEAD of recomming the iowas is building brand new DD-214s. These are something like $540 a million a pop to build, and have substantial operating costs.
Recomming an iowa would cost next to nothing, and the operating costs would be relatively higher, true.
However, we’re going to have to build at least 4-5 DD214s to even try to equal the usefulness of the iowa’s they’re replacing, and boom, there’s 2.5 billion in construction costs - and since there are 4-5 of them, higher operating costs.
This budget argument doesn’t hold water considering that the navy recognizes the role of the battleship needs replacing, and the replacement costs a whole lot - and doesn’t do half the job.
It wouldn’t take anywhere near 50 planes…The ship wouldn’t
be able to destroy ten missiles if they’re fired at once…
That is, if you’re only dealing with the carrier…
Anyway, you don’t need to destroy a carrier to put it out
of action… That would be the primary goal of most countries
I always guessed at what amount of damage a carrier could
take and still launch planes… We were always told that the
island could be completely blown off and the carrier
basically wouldn’t miss a beat…
Nope…it was a real honest-to-goodness battleship unless you consider a ship practically identical to the DKM Bismark to be a “pocket battleship”. IIRC the Bismark and the Scharnhorst were considered near twins (both were built in the same year).
This site lists the Scharnhorst as the Bismark’s slight better in armor and speed. Bismark beat out Scharnhorst in raw firepower but Scharnhorst was still all battleship and no slouch third only to the Iowa class and Yamato class battleships (fourth in the list linked since they place Bismark ahead of Scharnhorst but only just).
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As to the dilly-dallying about when a BB should be used you still ignore an important point. Being close to shore is MUCH more dangerous than being far from it.
An aircraft carrier can stay 500 miles off shore and launch strikes on targets 1,000 miles away. Just finding the carrier is likely to be difficult much less launching an attack against it.
A Battleship sitting 15 miles off of (say) New York could be attacked by planes launched out of Chicago. With in-air refueling you can do even better than that…say an attack from Los Angeles. Everyone already knows exactly where the BB is. If you had manged to wipe out the air capabilities of the entire US then I’d say you are well on your way to winning the war. The carrier on the other hand need only take out airbases maybe a few hundred miles from the coast to effectively shield itself from land based air attacks (those planse need to be able to fly out to sea AND return).
Combat air patrol over the battleship is nice but even committing several carriers to its defense they would be hard pressed to fend off attacks from multiple land based aircraft coming in from different directions which would be a mission relatively easy to mount. In addition planes defending the BB might be vulnerable to land based AA missiles (remember the planes will have to try to engage enemy planes over land before they can close to firing range with the BB…even with the long range Phoenix AA missile).
The carrier simply can’t afford to be close to shore. An enemy would fall over itself trying to sink a carrier if they could (6,000 or so men, 80 or so aircraft and a multi-billion dollar investment not easily replaced plus a huge psychological shock). Maintaining an effective CAP over the BB in these circumstances would be difficult. Add to that TWO task forces (one protecting the carrier a few hundred miles away and one protecting the BB)of screening ships (AEGIS Cruisers, Destroyers, etc.) and your costs have skyrocketed.
Finally, while the carrier is doing CAP for the BB and itself it can’t effectively mount other operations. If nothing else you will have to replace strike aircraft with air superiority fighters so you have enough to protect both the BB and the carrier in two different locations and enough so you can rotate planes in and out so pilots can rest.
All-in-all effectively operating AND protecting a battleship in this age is too expensive for what you get back. Remember, it is not just the cost of sailing around the battleship but all of the support you need to give it as well.
The English were losing shipping from airstrikes launched hundreds of miles away on the mainland during the Falklands nastyness. But the English were parked right next to a hostile, artillery-equipped land force, and the Argie forces on the islands sank nothing. If the UK had possesed a BB or CC, the fighting on the islands would have been over more quickly. In fact, the UK was so concerned about Naval Gunfire, that they sank the General Belgranno (former WWII heavy cruiser) outside their self-declared warzone, on the off chance it might get close enough to use it’s guns.
You’ve assumed that proximity = threat. That’s not entirely, or even particularly, true anymore. Any modern and well equipped military can mount an overwhelming multi-axis attack from thousands of miles away. This means that it doesn’t matter if you’re 5 miles from shore, or 500 miles from shore. Sure, proximity will permit a higher sortie rate, but frankly, if the first wave doesn’t do the trick, the second likely won’t, either.
Further, you’re assuming that a force capable of overwhelming a BB wouldn’t do the same to a carrier. Again, not true. Additionally, you’re assuming that the BB would be sent into a situation where air superiourity hadn’t been achieved. That’s completely counter to doctrine. There is nothing in the world more likely to destroy an amphib assault than a lack of air superiority. Any half-way intelligent attacker would completely ignore the BB, and go after the gators (amphibious fleet), which are far more valuable targets. The gators carry the only force really threatening to any enemy: Marines. Sure, aircraft and gunfire can blow things up and wreck cities, but only Marines grunts can take those cities away. We still send the horribly vulnerable, thin-skinned, and (mostly) defenseless gators into harms way, so why wouldn’t we send a BB? Hell, what makes you think that we’d even be dumb enough to chose a well defended site to attack in the first place? The whole point of an MAU/ARG is to be able to hit where the enemy ain’t. Amphibs try and go for over-the-horizon attacks these days, when possible, but with the BB’s range, Right now, the ship can be 10 miles off shore, and be blasting things 15 or so miles inland. Add on ERFB+BB, and you can be 14 miles out to sea, and still be blasting things 35 miles inland!
As for shore-based SAMs, well, they’re a threat to the aircraft supporting the beachhead already, and would be no more dangerous to the amphib group CAP whether or not a BB is in the group.
We’ve already disposed of the threat from shore-based artillery: The BB is far more dangerous to them then they are to it. The BB can engage from beyond the capablilty of any shore-based artillery. No one has coastal defense artillery anymore, and so would have to depend on SP or towed guns, which just don’t have the reach.
Last note: Didja ever notice that Amphib groups generally don’t have a carrier? Sure, they’ve got LPHs and LHAs, but those only carry Harriers in the way of fixed-wing assests. That’s because they either go where the enemy air assets are few, or they borrow a carrier group at need. If the gators don’t need a carrier battle group now, why would putting a BB in the group create a need?
That’s just flat wrong.
They do it all the time. The only time a carrier couldn’t provide a CAP for itself would be if it were damaged beyond the capabilty of launching aircraft, or had just launched an Alpha Strike. You don’t seriously think that the carrier is just sitting out there without a CAP of it’s own while it’s aircraft are bombing things inland and providing CAP for the gators, do you? Why would adding a BB change that?
I beg to disagree on a Carrier’s armor. It is not solid armor with a belt, like a BB, but rather thinner armor that is in compartments, honeycombed so to speak, to have the air in the compartment absorb the impact and let the out layers of armor be rupurted while keeping the inner layers intact.
Bismarck and Tirpitz were identical ships. Scharnhost and Geisanau were pocket battleships and identical to each other IIRC. You wouldn’t want to run up against any of them as they were mean, tough and had something to prove. I’d put my money on an Iowa against any other battleship, including Yamato or Bismarck, but it would be really ugly.
Our navy, with the cost of new capital ships being several billion dollars, has opted to go with carriers protected by smaller ships because the strategic plan absolutely requires carriers to project air superiority. There is no substitute for air superiority. The navy wants 15 nuke powered ACs so that they can field half of them at any one time so that they can project the air group of one of them anywhere in the world on a few hours notice and count on dominance in that time frame. Congress won’t give them quite that much money as carrier groups are wildly expensive.
As impressive as BBs are, for the conservative $1 billion needed to make a new one or the $300 million a year to operate one of the Iowas, you can purchase about 500 to 1500 cruise missiles and put them in any of the carrier group ships. My own idea is to put them in a cargo container/launcher, roll it out on the carrier deck and send them off like bottle rockets.
As undramatic as the arsenal ship (a designer fireworks barge) is, the concept is sound. Except that you don’t need the arsenal ship. Current ships can be modified to carry more missiles, old Ohio class subs can be converted and my container/launcher idea is really fab too, for just the cost of the munitions.
Now for my attempted hijacking: the hell with all these oil fired ships with limited range: why aren’t most of them nuke powered? Better speed, unlimited range, higher cost, lower maintenance.
I’ll grant the Scharnhorst and Gneisau (pocket) battleship status, but that site is playing games when it places the Scharnhorst up there with the Bismarck. They get most of their points by comparing tonnage of shells fired. However, an 11 inch gun simply does not have the power of a 15 inch gun and firing it faster does not make it more likely to puncture stronger armor.
The problem with that has already been discussed, but to recap: There are things you just can’t do with cruise missiles, and that especially includes close support of ground troops. For that you need aircraft or artillery. Preferably both.
Yes, it is sound, but it lacks the flexibilty and close-in precision that the Marines need, and is nowhere near the panacea that it’s proponents are claiming. Cramming more missiles into existing ships would either make them into half-baked arsenal ships, or would make them into something useless, by inhibiting them from carrying out the other missions that they’re intended to handle. A warship is a highly optimized vessel, with no spare room on board. If you stick in something new, something else has to be riped out, and retrofitting weapons systems into a ship never designed for them is always inefficient and costly.
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Now for my attempted hijacking: the hell with all these oil fired ships with limited range: why aren’t most of them nuke powered? Better speed, unlimited range, higher cost, lower maintenance.
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Because:
It’s tough to make a nuc operator. The necessary minimum standards are extremely high, the washout rate is unbelivably high, and the retention rate is abysmal.
The refuelling costs and other non-mission cost of nuc reactors is far higher than people realize.
Gas turbines can provide just as much speed, at much lower costs, with far easier manning, in less space and weight. Only on the CVNs and SSN/SSBNs do reactors really make sense.
Our navy is very good at getting fuel to the oil-burners, so range is not the huge bugaboo it might be thought to be. It’s not a non-issue, but it’s one we know how to handle.
Nuc reactors are unbelievably maintenance hungry. Ask any nuc (I’m one), SSN stands for: Saturdays, Sundays, and Nights.
Nice discussion going on. Sorry I didn’t get into it earlier and if I repeat or miss someone else’s points, I am sorry.
I don’t think the BB’s are dead. The question is: Does a mission still exist for them? I think so. Unlike a carrier that has to loiter far from your shores, I can sail a BB right up to where you can see it and there is not much you can do about it. Those idiots who attacked the USS Cole wouldn’t even have dented the steel on the side of the Iowa.
No other country has a ship that could match the battleship and at least one commentator wondered if they had anything in their fleet that could touch the Iowa class:
Well I apologize for repeating somewhat, but sometimes a running start at a thought is better than just a fragment.
But I do disagree on the effectiveness of missiles. Just because they now require a lot of programming doesn’t mean that it cannot be simplified, for example, when the fellow on the beachead asks for some support 50 meters SW of his GPS position, modern computers should be able to place a missile there in a few seconds with a very high accuracy. This is entirely doable, and potentially far closer in to his actual position than current artillery (I know someone will correct me if I am wrong.)
I (or someone else) brings up an advantage of the battleship, and several people create an extreme situation in which this advantage is nullified, to somehow prove that there is no advantage.
Let’s look at this historically…
In the last 50 years or so, what sort of wars have we gotten ourselves into?
Well, there was korea. We used battleships there to great effect.
Vietnam - the vietnamese were so intimidated by the Iowas offshore that they cut off negotiations until they were removed.
Panama and Grenada - to be honest, I don’t know if there was any battleship action here, but we’re talking about coast bound or island nations with no significant naval threat - a perfect territory for a battleship.
Gulf - we used battleships to great effect with virtually no danger.
Kosovo - we certainly could’ve used some battleships in that one in our campaign. Again, no real danger present.
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So we can dream up these situations with a determined, well equipped enemy - but what are we talking about in the real term?
Our real military operations have presented no real threat/potential threat to our battleships. And when they’ve been used, they’ve made their presence known greatly.
So where is this mystical situation you refer to when 50 aircraft magically teleport overhead a battleship? Has there been a military operation we’ve run in the last 50 years in which battleships have proved all that vulnerable?
DPWhite, missles are very accurate, but they are not the most effective way of doing business. When that call for fire goes out, how long do you want to wait for rounds to start falling on the target and how much money do you want to spend to dig an infantry platoon out of its bunkers?
During the Gulf War, we ran out of targets for the Tomahawks, it just wasn’t cost effective to use them against tanks and infantry in the field. That is were the main guns of the BB’s came into play.
Aircraft do not have the loiter capability to sustain 24hr coverage over a battlefield. Cruise missles are awfully expensive to fire (a half million or so each?) and their flight times can be from 5 - 10 minutes depending on how far off the beach their launcher is hiding.
A BB, on the other hand, can hang around the beach and put steel on target within 2 and a half minutes of the call for fire. The standard rounds were all bought back inthe 40’s and 50’s so they are cost cheap by today’s dollars to use. New rounds using cluster bomb technology have been drawn up that would turn the guns into huge shotguns without the wear problems the Japanese had. This would give the ships a potential theater ABM capability as well as long range anti-air / missle defense. As important, the BB carries a huge psychological impact. IIRC, the Koreans wanted them removed from their shores before they would consider peace talks. Not bad for an obsolete weapons platform.
Another site with ways to add 21st Cent tech to the BB and make them a better deal than spending billions on lesser craft: http://g2mil.com/battleships.htm.
Towards the end is a doable concept for using ramjet assisted rounds (capable of Mach 5+) that would turn the BB into a 500 mile theater defense weapon against surface, air, and ABM threats.
Further on the “missiles” issue: Sure, you could go with local designation of a missle, but that supposes that we’ve actually got someone who can actually lay an eye on the target, and keep it there. A missile will only accidentally hit targets that it can’t see, or that can’t be designated. Artillery can “search” behind obstructions, can hit invisble targets, and doesn’t require that the grunt know their own precise locatation. If the FO doesn’t know where he is, he can call a round deliberately long, and then “talk” the fire onto the target. You can’t do that with missiles. Further, missiles require programming before launch, and if the target moves, the friendly troops move, or the friendlies have their position even slightly wrong (and that happens all the time, despite GPS and good maps!), then you’ve got a “friendly fire” incident.
So, you can reserve the expensive and rather slow-response missiles for high value / high importance targets, send the aircraft after the same, and use the inexpensive artillery for everything else - Or - You can spend 100’s of thousands of dollars worth of missiles on blowing up machinegun nests and rifle squads, when a single shell would have done the trick. Which makes more sense?
True, and it’s even worse. I can make an ATLANTA class light cruiser rank ABOVE the QUEEN ELIZABETH:
16 [number of guns] x 15 [rounds per minute per gun] x (5 [size of gun] + 28 [caliber of gun])= 10320. Compare that to QE’s 10.080, if you will. So what’s that tell us? Put the ATLANTA up against the YAMATO with a better chance to win than if we used QE? Not to mention that there is no reason to rate BISMARCK at a faster rate of fire than IOWA (26s per round vs. 30s per round).
True that SCHARNHORST was a real battleship, albeit a poor one (52,000 tons full load for laughable characteristics vis-a-vis 40,000 ton full load American battleships NORTH CAROLINA and SOUTH DAKOTA…shows how poor German ship design was after a twenty-year battleship design hiatus.). But she was not built the same year as BISMARCK (a year earlier), nor was she a sister/twin of that ship – both the hull form and the interior layout differed, as did protection schemes and, of course, armament.
With in-air refuelling you can hit Kabul from North Dakota. With in-air refuelling you can hit aircraft carriers in the middle of the Atlantic from Chicago. So what? You are not waging a war, usually, without expecting resistance, and so you deal with it. If the situation is such that a battleship cannot be deployed without undue risk, it won’t be. But bear several things in mind, if you will. In the scenario I and others have argued, there would be an amphibious landing around too, necessitating strong air cover. This landing would also have dealt with any anti-air emplacements in range (and for the most part, the battleship itself would have done that).
Then again, there might not be an amphibious landing; but something that those who argue against the battleship are constantly simply ignoring is that there might also not be an effective enemy threat! Take examples cited by Senor Beef: Grenada – what threat was there? Panama – what threat? The Falklands? Even, Iraq? Lebanon? Vietnam? Korea? Somalia? The fact remains that in all these occassions, battleships operated or could have operated to great effect and greatly in support of operations ashore without any undue risk. And anyone who argues that battleships should not be exposed to DUE risk might just as well scrap the entire Navy, since it will all be useless.
The argument was less than a missile couldn’t hit a battleship, the idea is that it wouldn’t do much damage. Some might: HARM and other anti-radiation missiles could do fierce top-side damage, and of course any missile that hits the unprotected upper structures of the IOWAs will do damage. However, it is likely that the majority of missiles available to those nations which are likely opponents will not be able to do that. Those nations don’t usually have third-generation missiles like Harpoon, but rely on Silkworms, Exocets and other more primitive missiles. These generally aim at the largest radar echo: and without much doubt, the straight hull, whereunder the armor lies, gives the strongest echo. Then, there is two Phalanx systems per side, decoys, and escorts; all in all, entirely the same defensive systems (except Sea Sparrow) that a carrier possess, plus options not available to a carrier (I’d envisage the use of the guns to put up cordons of sea water before the missiles to confuse them, throw them off course, and various other things. The opponents of the battleship on this board have failed so far to point on one inherent weakness of the battleship that a carrier does not have; and to point out why that weakness renders the battleship useless in the niche for which I among others consider it most valuable.
[A quick note: I specifically mentioned third-generation missiles, because some, and I think Harpoon is among them, will aim at points off the largest return echo in order to create more damage to a greater part of the target; in theory, a first-generation missile would always hit the same spot, where the largest return echo is registered. Later missiles somewhat adapt the pattern, making top-sides hits were no armor exists more likely.]
Korea – Missile technology was practically non-existant. Planes would still pretty much need to fly over a BB and drop a bomb on it or try to torpedo it. A dangerous situation at best for the plane and a danger in which the BB and its escorts are well able to meet.
Vietnam – Missile technology was in its infancy. AFAIK nothing like ship killing missiles really existed yet…especially fire-and-forget missiles that could be launched from extreme range. You’re still relegated to flying over the BB to try to blow it up.
Panama and Grenada – I don’t know if battleships were there or not. However, in the absence of any credible threat (the country’s simply didn’t possess them) the issue is kinda moot. Any ship sitting off their shores could feel safe to do whatever it pleased.
Gulf – Yes BB’s were used but mostly as Tomahawk launch platforms and then to shell the Iraqi army as a diversion to the real attack inland. While I’m sure this was useful I’d wager the war would have progressed almost exactly the same with the same end results. The BB’s were in no way a deciding factor. Compare them to carriers and consider which was more valuable to the overall effort.
Kosovo – I’m not really up on that conflict but if battleships are so great and realtively cheap for what you get why didn’t we use them?
Picking on small, relatively backward countries is one thing. In those cases I imagine our military could get on just fine with or without battleships at their disposal.
The ‘mystical’ situation I am particularly thinking of is a belligerent China. Sailing a battleship into the Taiwan Strait in a shooting war would almost certainly see it sunk. Carriers sitting behind Taiwan would be of far more use. I’d bet money the Chinese (unlike the Vietnamese) would be far more concerned about a carrier task force than a battleship task force. If you included a battleship among the carrier task force I still doubt they’d care too much. An AEGIS cruiser would probably be of more concern and value as a target to them. For the BB to do anything differently from any ship that could launch Tomahawks it’d have to get within easy striking range of the mainland. While we might ostensibly control the skies in a war against China I don’t think we’d ever own the skies as we did in Iraq and do now in Afghanistan. China is also more than a ‘mystical’ enemy as they have already rattled their sabre repeatedly against Taiwan and make claims to territory 1,000 miles from their shores. They seem to have every intent of being the next military world power to rival the US.