The Japanese 18" was indeed barely better than the 16"/50 that the IOWAs carried. If we restrict ourselves to very basic data, the 18" guns fired to 46kyds and had a 3200lbs projectile, while the 16"/50 fired to 42kyds and had a 2700lbs projectile. The 16" had a slightly higher velocity on impact and firing, helping with the less heavy shell’s penetration power, and generally, the U.S. shells were slightly better; altogether, then, there was not much to choose between the Japanese 18" and the U.S. 16", especially is secondary characteristics (turret train speed, rate of fire) were concerned, and with the addition of U.S. fire control, the U.S. gun certainly became a superior weapons system.
An incidentally, 18" was certainly not the upper size for gun technology in the 1940s. The Japanese were already planning a 20" gun, and there seems little reason to assume larger guns could not have been fitted to ever larger ships.
But not at maximum rate of fire.
Exactly how accurate? What is CEP of 16 inch guns?
That’s irrelevant. Whatever intelligence you’d have, it wouldn’t be different for battleship gunners.
Then you use GPS guided or dumb bombs. And even better choose for invasion day with good forecast.
Again, so what? It doesn’t mean that guided weapons aren’t more accurate and thus more effective. It just mean that not always they are needed. Most often modern weapons have nice accuracy without precision munition.
There is, and I already pointed it two or three pages ago. Cost.
Development of new family of ammo is complex and convoluted process. You need to make projects, testbeds, machine shops, train personnel, integrate it with fire control system, which would probably need serious upgrade or overhaul on their own… I takes money. It takes time. And all this for, like, nine barrels on single ship. Which you probably wouldn’t use anyway, because amphibious landings aren’t most probable scenarios of future.
Sure. And this is why we have bombs and artillery shells filled with antipersonnel submunitions.
That’s the point - we can achieve the same or similar effect using other available weapon systems. We don’t need friggin battleship with 16 inches to do it. Maybe battleship could do it a little better. But in 99.9% percent of possible scenarios it would be just less useful and more expensive than other alternatives.
Oh, I found answer myself. According to this, we can estimate CEP of something like 150 yards for 25.000 yards distance and 250 yards for 36.000.
For comparison guided munition achieve usually 30 yards or so, regardless of distance.
Look…naval artillery may not be as precise as a precision guided missile but they are damn accurate nonetheless. I am kinda curious when that demonstration you linked to happened as well. There are several aspects to accurate naval gun fire including knowing where you are with a high degree of precision. In this day of GPS and modern computers and gun stabilization weapon systems and spotter drones and radar and laser range finders these ships can place ordinance with astounding accuracy. I already showed you the one in 1950’s where they managed five shots and five direct hits. Here is a more modern example – Five Inch Friday (bolding mine):
Notice “swift and lethal response” above.
Airplanes and missiles fired from afar just do not have the time-on-target that artillery can provide. These ships can loiter in an area indefinitely if not opposed and shell when called for. Planes cannot loiter long and carry minimal payloads before having to go back to refuel and rearm. And of course planes need maintenance too and a lot of it to stay operational. In an extended battle having reliable fire support when you need it is a huge help.
If anyone is interested in what life was like for a sailor aboard one of those battlewagons in the months that led to Pearl Harbor, I would recommend Battleship Sailor by Theodore C Mason, a radioman for fourteen months on the battleship California. It was published in 1982 by the United States naval Institute, Annapolis, Maryland. His description of the raid on Pearl Harbor is stuning, and the entire book is a fascinating read.
But ANZAC is a frigate, not a battleship. This incident is more like my post several pages before telling how useful the 5" guns on destroyers were on D-Day. It sells me more on building up a fleet of cheap frigates and destroyers than it tells me we should keep some antique battleships afloat Just In Case.
You’re joking, right? You don’t perform an area bombardment with precession guided weapons; the whole point is that the enemie’s positions haven’t been pinpointed precisely, just the general area. So you shell or bomb the hell out of the place the same way it’s been done since long, long before guided munitions.
- GPS is guided, but doesn’t help if you’re not sure of exactly where to make the bomb hit.
- dropping dumb bombs or unguided shells is what you do in this case, and also when you are not certain of the position of all of the enemy, i.e. all the time.
I’m not just talking about the day of launching an amphibious invasion for guided weapons having problems in inclement weather; I mean how the world works all the time. Battles don’t get picked to only happen on days of perfect sunshine, and everyone doesn’t stop fighting and sing Kumbaya because of rain or fog or overcast. For that matter, I don’t trust my local five day forecast to be accurate - and I’m not risking lives based on it.
Which is exactly my point. No military has ever had the luxury of knowing exactly where the enemy is located all the time. You don’t shoot off guided munitions until you are sure where a target is. Old fashioned ‘dumb’ bombardments are done all the time. B-52s still drop 30 tons of freefall bombs on map grids.
You’re seriously overestimating the cost and time. I’m also not just talking about the Iowas, the USN was dicking around with the idea of using an 8" gun rather than the 5" that are standard on modern vessels due to the superior range and accuracy when conducting shore bombardments. The navy also spent a ton of money developing a 5" guided projectile carrying submunitions that was finally canned in 2004.
Which is, again largely what I’ve been saying. The battleships day has come and passed, but the claim that I was arguing against as being patently wrong is:
Dropping precisely on target with precession munitions to demolish every point of resistance is not how the world works. Also, dropping cluster munitions on a meaningfully dug in enemy is a great way to waste ammunition.
The point of my post was to show how accurate and useful naval artillery can be.
In this case the frigates (seems there were more than just the Anzac) were sufficient to the task. Sometimes though I am betting a battleship would be preferred (greater range, more and bigger boom). Sort of in the same way that sometimes a mortar is sufficient and other times you want an MLRS at your back.
It’s not how it used to work, it’s how it would work now. If America had to make a D-day style assault these days every inch of the target beach(s) would be mapped with drones, thermal vision, millimetric radar etc and targets assigned as appropriate. Not a marine would step ashore until every one of those were flattened.
And no of course it’s probably not a good idea to use cluster bombs on a well dug-in enemy which is why i said earlier .
Delete as appropriate for the situation.
Forget the battleships. We need the Des Moines class cruisers again. Nine 8"/55RF Mark 16 cannon. These were semiautomatic, with each barrel capable of firing 20 rounds per minute, for a grand total of 180 eight inch shells being fired every minute…
As was shown in Desert Storm, while aircraft are crucial, they simply cannot do the job themselves. And that despite going on for a bit over a month. To be sure it was devastating and critical to success yet at the end there was still plenty of the Iraqi army to engage in ground action.
As noted above if a battleship (or other artillery) is in range of ground troops they are much more effective than a plane. They can respond more quickly and lay down a much greater weight of fire. Planes are good for precision work and have their place but sometimes you need something else and that something is artillery.
Also consider the costs. A single F/A-18 Hornet cost about $55 million each. I cannot find operational costs but I am willing to bet it runs into the tens of thousands of dollars per flight hour. A naval aviator costs something north of $1 million to train. A single JDAM (guided bomb) costs around $30,000 each (lots more than an artillery shell).
So say a modern carrier carries 20 Hornets. So there goes over $1 billion for the planes alone. Add the crew and operating costs (not to mention the carrier) and I think a battleship looks like a better deal all the time.
For comparison the cost to reactivate and modernize a battleship is put at the price of a guided missile frigate (cite). A modern Oliver Hazard Perry class frigate goes for about $64 million (cite).
I want to be clear I understand how vastly more flexible a carrier is that justifies the cost. I also get it that there just may not be that many roles in the modern world that would call for a battlewagon. Just saying if there was a job for it I think it could be a very cost effective platform.
No doubt whatsoever. But the valid question is, it is reasonable to expect that in the near future, we’re going to need LOTS of naval artillery within 25 miles of a target? One never knows for sure, but the odds seem pretty low.
Ok, but you need 1,800 people to run a battleship, and what, about 150 to run a cruiser or destroyer. Forget acquisition cost, the cost of OPERATING a battleship is VERY high.
And there’s no way in hell we can build a $64 million frigate. We’re building – er, trying to build – a frigate-like ship in the form of the Littoral Combat Ship. The cost of those ships, at the moment, is nearly 10 times higher than the figure you cited.
But if we’re going to need ships for naval artillery, I think it is worth spending the $3 or $4 billion it is going to cost to build a next generation cruiser/destroyer that could provide longer-range fires, plus missile defense capability. And we wouldn’t have to expand the size of the Navy (or retire other ships) to get the sailors to man those combatants.
I’m sorry, but you are living in a fantasy world. I do not doubt the power and the march of technology, but the belief that it is going to provide 100% accurate intelligence and allow guided munitions to hit and destroy everything prior to landing is wildly out of touch with reality. If this is the way things work now, then Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom should have had the army and marines not seeing a defensive position all the way to Baghdad, and the Serbian army in Kosovo should have been entirely obliterated when NATO bombed them. In all of these cases there was months of lead-time in which to garner intelligence from drones, thermal vision, millimetric wave radar, satellites, etc etc. In Desert Storm aircraft were even given more than a month of bombing before the ground forces attacked. Even against such a poor opponent as Iraq, ground forces had to fight through prepared positions that hadn’t been flattened with technology.
Iraq is really a bad adversary to use as an example, but it’s the best for using ‘the way things work now’ with state of the art i.e. US military technology. The Iraqi military has never performed anything better than poorly since its creation. It didn’t perform at all well in the war with Iran from 1980-88 or in its involvement in the 1967 and 1973 wars with Israel. In fact, in 1973 the Iraqi 3rd Armored Division sent to Syria could have thrown a serious wrench into the flank of Israel’s drive towards Damascus, but instead stopped for the afternoon and night in front of Israeli positions that they didn’t know were there. The next morning when they moved forward blissfully unaware of Israeli positions they walked straight into a huge ambush in which they lost over 80 tanks to none lost by Israel, and the division was essentially out of the fight as any offensive threat. Which, of course, sounds remarkably familiar to Iraq’s pitiful showing in conventional combat against the US in 1991 and 2003.
Even against such a shoddy opponent, with months to collect intelligence on their positions, and in 1991 with over a month of lead time to demolish them by air, the US/coalition didn’t step onto Kuwaiti/Iraqi soil with every position of resistance flattened with perfect intelligence locating everything to be hit by precision weapons dropped with pinpoint accuracy.
The cluster munitions bit was aimed at puppygod, apologies if it seemed directed towards what you have written.
Blind faith in technology when it fails to live up to the promise of a panacea is nothing new. The Norden bombsight was supposed to allow precision bombing in WW2, and the Patriot was claimed to have a 90% success rate against Scuds. Neither was close to the truth, but they were reported as being true for home front propaganda purposes long after the military had wised up to reality. I have serious doubts that technology will ever be able to do what you think it can do now militarily, but I have no doubt at all that it can’t do it today.
I’m personally partial to the Brooklyn class, 15 6"/47 naval rifles capable of sustaining 8-10 rounds per minute per barrel - well, until the ammunition ran out. Eh, it’s only 150 6" shells every minute, but they saw active service in WW2 Honestly, it was a floating battalion of heavy artillery on crack back in WW2.
The bigger problem for both air and naval bombardment is that Tribesman X is our friend…we can carefully kill all of Tribe Y and leave Tribesman X intact, using precision weapons. Then when we hit the beach Tribesman X suddenly turns out to be our real enemy after all; and some of Tribe Y were dewy-eyed schoolchildren on their way to the French Ambassador’s birthday party.
Tribesman X might not even have been intending to become our enemy; he could have changed his mind after watching us carpet-bomb Tribe Y.
Clearly identifiable/uniformed opponents who stay away from their own civilians to protect them will simply be destroyed by a modern superpower…and they know it. Asymmetric warfare is the only way to face a modern superpower.
I didn’t address this before, but I think we’re closer to the practical limits on how big and damage-resistant a battleship can be than we are to the upper limits of practical missile development.
I did address this before, or at least posted a link to battleship comparisons that include gun and shell discussions, in post 136.
ralph124c, here’s a specific discussion of the guns in question.
But guns are only part of the system for delivering steel on target; there’s also the question of who had the better fire control.
Read through that whole site (there’s a “back to main page” link at the bottom) if you’re interested in battleship comparisons. 
Good link. I have often wondered.
Well, I think we should gut and replace all the Iowa’s with gas turbins or nuke power and then rehab the whole ship with modern systems. We can’t waste the money we spendt on these ships and could and may need them again. The DDGX progam is dead, as is the gunfire support program, it has to be cheeper and better to gut and redo these navy vets then it is to build an entire new platform to do this mission and put some balls back into this country. We have lost our edge in our place in the world and others are plotting to drive this country into the ground, teddy was right talk softly and carry a big stick, and the iowa’s are a real show of the big stick so why not bring them back and make them modern tools of democracy?
The problem with bringing back the Iowa and or any of her sisters is the crew size of about 1500. I dont doubt that the USN could come up with the crew, but I think that when it comes down to it, the BB has no real defence against a mark 48 class torpedo, which is designed to detonate under the target ship and displace a lot of water, breaking the keel of what ever the target was.
Losing a 150 sailors would be tragic, losing 1500 in one shot is totally off the radar in terms of what the average tax payer would be thinking.
For the record , I think the USN sailors and officers would aquit themselves in the manner of John Paul Jones and Dave Farragut and would realize the risks, but…
Declan