Count me in the camp that calls the days of contested amphibious assaults nearly over. Missiles are simply too accurate, too long range, and too cheap to expect thousands of Marines not to be blown to bits while their lightly armored, slow swimming vehicles churn through the ocean for an hour or more in hopes of making it to shore.
Uncontested amphibious landings can certainly happen in the future. But laying down cannon barrages for hours or days before sending the Marines in? It just isn’t going to happen.
There is no point to battleships. One might as well advocate for high speed biplanes. “But imagine how much lift a jet biplane could generate!!!” Answer: who cares?
As a positive for battleships, there was a 20-yr period beginning in the 80’s when it was the pteferred ship by the americans when coming within 20 miles of a hostile shore.
I’m not sure why you’re talking about money. This is the American military we’re talking about. They’re not going to switch to drones because they’re cheaper. They’re going to switch to drones (eventually - the technology isn’t there right now) because a drone could pull g-forces that would turn a human pilot into raspberry jelly. At some point, we’re going to have either an autonomous or remote-piloted drone that’s going to be able to literally fly rings around any contemporaneous piloted craft. And if you can launch that drone off the back off a cruiser, it makes more sense to build twenty cruisers each carrying five drones, than a single aircraft carrier with a hundred.
Unless you are going to posit we’ll be fighting ourselves money is certainly a barrier to the kinds of capabilities you were getting at. Yeah, I think we will have drones one day that have capabilities close or even superior to those of manned air craft today (where ‘one day’ equates to a decade or two down the pike wrt development AND production/deployment), but they will cost nearly as much as the current generation of fighters which is going to put them out of the price range of most countries…which means we won’t be looking at drones making our current carriers obsolete for quite a while yet (which was the theme of the discussion were were, um, discussing ;)).
As to your point about building cruisers to fly and fight the drones of the future, it makes more sense to re-purpose vessels we already have, especially if they haven’t been shown to be obsolete than to build new cruises solely to fly drones off of. I’m not sure about distributed verse concentrated capabilities…this would be a similar argument to why we built a few very capable (and very expensive) super carriers as opposed to a bunch more smaller and less capable pocket carriers. The US tried both and hit on the bigger carriers, but other countries went the smaller pocket carrier route so I guess it’s a debate. Perhaps in the future with ever dwindling defense budgets we will go that route, but you’ll need a new generation of admirals to think in those terms and give up their carriers (just like you needed a new generation of admirals to finally give up the battleships as THE prestige command position).
At any rate I think, getting back to the subject of the OP, that there could be a place for a modern battleship in the fleet, though I concede we are unlikely to ever build one. Like I said, this is more due to budgets and attitudes than to the realities of how useful such a ship would be. I think they could be VERY useful, basically larger and more capable Ticonderoga. I think they are being dismissed in this and other threads because people have it in their heads the image of the Iowa (though even THOSE were useful not to long ago, and were retired more because they were so costly to maintain than because they were useless) and they aren’t really thinking about what a modern ship would or could be or how it could be employed. No point in beating this dead horse anymore from my perspective, since it’s hard to check it’s teeth when you are changing dead mounts in mid-stream to ensure it’s a good gift.
VTOL I would assume is what Miller was thinking of, sort of like the F-35 Navy variant. Either that or they would have magic anti-grav and be pony powered with neural links using blackhole tech that allows for full real time anywhere in the solar system. It’s probably one of those.
I think there’s some confusion here over the word “obsolete.” I regard something as obsolete when there’s another option that is significantly superior at its function in nearly every way. You seem to be using it to mean, “No longer able to fulfill its intended function.” (Which, admittedly, is probably the more correct usage.) I agree that we’ll continue to use aircraft carriers and manned aircraft for the foreseeable future, because for the foreseeable future, there’s no one who’s really a serious threat to our conventional military strength. If option A is better than option B, but everyone else only has option C, then we’re not likely to upgrade to option A. “Obsolete” may not be the best term to describe option B, but that’s the scenario I’m getting at.
In a military context where what matters most is relative effectiveness (one faction relative to another), your use is more useful.
Otherwise, we would have to conclude that swords are not obsolete in wars since they’ll chop up a man just as they did 500 years ago*. Or that towed anti-tank guns aren’t obsolete even with the widespread use of ATGMs and RPGs. Or that battleships aren’t obsolete.
*But hey, sword are really great in melee, much better than bayonets or rifles. We should issue swords to soldiers in the field; better have it and not need it than need it and not have it. Melee doesn’t happen often but when it does, we want the very best for it, just like shore bombardment. We could make titanium swords and maybe we could research nanocarbon and laser swords.
Doesn’t have to be all cruise missiles; they could be SM-2/SM-3s, Harpoons, etc. in the VLS cells or any other variety of missile. In the antiterrorism/counterinsurgency era, there might be little use for many missiles, but against a major conventional foe like Russia or China, an arsenal ship could quickly enable a U.S. saturation attack on an enemy fleet or boost up the number of SM-2s/SM-3s against a saturation attack on a CVBG, but then again, Russian or Chinese arsenal ships might just as easily negate that advantage.
I doubt that VTOL drones will approach the firepower of a carrier’s complement of Super Hornets and Lightning IIs. If based on smaller warships, those drones would be smaller and pack less weaponry, and you’d have fewer of them than fighters on a carrier.
Depends which kind of drone. With limited resources, I don’t think a warship could throw away drones every time. A few sorties and it would run itself out of drones. Any drone packing serious firepower might cost millions of dollars. Whereas reusable drones could perform hundreds of sorties.
It’s not so much that the Marines will be churning through the ocean for hours in slow swimming vehicles; it’s that they’ll be hitting the beach at over 100mph. The USMC was pioneering the concept of vertical envelopment using helicopters in 1948 and the component coming from the sea won’t be in slow moving LCVPs making 8kts on a good day unloaded from thier parent ships a mile or two off the beach, an LCAC carrying a full load of 60 tons will still do over 40kts and deliver it 200nm from its parent ship. In the event we ever do see contested amphibious assaults against prepared fortifications in the future there’s nothing a battleship’s guns can do that a plane dropping a laser guided fuel-air explosive can’t do better.
Nice analogy. This actually neatly explains the reasoning. Sure, battleships are really great at blowing stuff up at close range. Shame it’ll be over one way or another before it comes to those ranges. And it’s not an efficient use of money for the Navy to haul around a battleship for that “one time” it actually comes in useful any more than it is useful for infantrymen to carry swords instead of carrying more water or more radio batteries or ammo.
I think I’ve heard of these expendable armed drones. Aren’t they called… cruise missiles?
Given nets and a landing area the size of a helicopter pad, you could land drones without significant damage. No idea what drone size that stops being practical.
If youwant one that does anything worthwhile, yes, they have to be retrieved. The camera on a Predator costs more than a million dollars. Even if it cost one tenth the price, even disregarding the cost of the airplane, it is unaffordable to spend $100k on hardware that’s thrown away every mission. Besides which, let’s say a ship launches five drones and none come back. The ship then has to go back to port to get more drones. That’s a huge waste of resources.
The idea of drones literally being disposable - as opposed to it not being as big a deal if they crash since there’s no pilot - doesn’t make much economic sense at all.
Not really, the advanced drones are meant to fly many missions. It is preferred they land but with VTOL added in and/or no mushable human inside they will require a lot less deck to land. Thus Carriers will be phased out though not for at least 20-30 years is my guess. Drones like the Northrop Grumman X-47B still requires large flat decks but many other designs are in the works.
The next Big ‘E’ CVN-80 will not even be in operation until 2025. These CVNs are all expected to have a 50 year operational life. The Enterprise (CVN-65) successfully completed her 50 year mission and is currently being scrapped and she was the first of the CVNs. So the Gerald Ford class may possibly be pressed into longer duty. (CVN-80 the next Enterprise, will be the 3rd of the class).
Ok, so, today, what option is more effective in doing the job we are asking the carriers to do? I can’t think of any. There MIGHT be one down the road in a decade or two…or, there might not be. It’s hard to project military tech and trends into the future, just as it’s hard to project other tech into the future. Even if there were another option (for the US) it wouldn’t make carriers ‘obsolete’ except in the most obscure torturing of the term, since until and unless the potential enemies the carrier MIGHT be called upon to fight would have to have this more advanced capability as well, otherwise we are back to presuming we’d be fighting ourselves.
[QUOTE=MichaelEmouse]
In a military context where what matters most is relative effectiveness (one faction relative to another), your use is more useful.
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Funny…I’d say the reality is just the opposite. If all we are going to be engaging is guys with fire hardened spears then bronze swords and armor are good enough. If they get copper swords, well, bronze is still going to be good enough. Once they start developing bronze and have the potential to put it in the field, well, THEN you might want to ramp up that iron sword and armor production project you’ve had on the back burner and get it ready to go. In military matters, context and relative effectiveness means you produce a weapon or weapons system for the mission, or for the expected mission, not simply toss something out that will still be able to do the mission every time you get a better option. If we did that all we’d have today are a handful of F-22s and maybe some F-35s (to give one example) because it’s far superior to everything else WE have (thus superior to everything everyone else has as well). Would suck, though, if we needed a squadron of fighters deployed to, oh, say Eastern Europe and one needed somewhere else though. And would suck when the mission really only needed some F-16s since we got rid of those, them being ‘obsolete’ and all. Of course, I suppose we could buy enough of them to ensure that since we are getting rid of all the other USAF air superiority and attack fighters and just build a bunch of F-22s and F-35s (until we develop something better then we can toss those out)…you guys would all be on board with that, right? Would mean instead of the continual cutting of the defense budget we’d need instead to expand it, but that’s cool…right? :dubious:
A modern battleship wouldn’t be analogous to either a sword (which is totally ridiculous) or towed anti-tank field guns (which is a better analogy…to the 70 year old version of the battleship most folks in this thread are fixated on).
