Evolution of Naval Weapon Doctrines

Factual Questions
1

So, it recently occured to me while reading an Honor Harrington book that there seems to be a repeated trend in Naval armament doctrine to go from more numerous smaller guns to fewer larger guns. Some examples:

Beginning of the 19th Century, the US Navy introduces it’s Heavy Frigates. These frigates, designed to carry an armament of 48 24 pounder cannon, they were both larger and faster than European ships with similar numbers of guns, and were able to both outsail and outgun their British opponents, especially in the first year of the War of 1812.

In the early 20th century, the British introduced the HMS Dreadnought, which revolutionized naval armament by having a ship which featured no secondary batteries and instead mounted several larger guns, simplifying gunnery and allowing greateroverall firepower to be concentrated on a single target. Ships of this style were called “Dreadnoughts” for some time after this. Interestingly enough, they almost ended up being called “Michigans”. The USS Michigan, being built along a similar line of thought to the HMS Dreadnought, had been started earlier, but was built at a more leisurely pace.

During WWII, some of the later battleships (Such as the Iowa Class Battleships) not only featured fewer larger guns (9 16 inch guns in 3 turrets on the USS Iowa vs. 10 12 inch guns in 5 turrets on the older USS Texas) but also featured less armor coverage, leaving less important areas exposed and concentrating extra armor on areas like the engines and the magazines.

OK, now on to the actual question: What are some examples of similar design evolutions since WWII? What were some earlier examples that I missed? Why does this idea seem to come up time and time again, instead of just being capitalized on the whole time?

2

There aren’t. Nowadays, often the only guns on a ship are secondary batteries, in a way. The primary weapon will be a missile platform, or the airplanes that cary missiles. That’s becasue the mission has changed radically. We don’t expect to fight other ships much, and expect to fight them when we do at ranges beyond that of any gun. So I can’t give you want you want: we’re going with more weapons that have greater versatility.

It was generally capitalized on the whole time. But you make the mistake of thinking it’s easy to build big guns. It took steady improvements in naval arms technology and shipbuilding, which occurred all throughout the 19th century, to keep making newer ships. The British did not see a need to rebuild their entire fleet to deal with America, and they had a point: despite a few excellent ships, we just didn’t have the Navy in the short run to deal with them all. Rebuilding their entire fleet would have been extremely expensive. It took vast sums to build a fleet and still does.

3

Actually the trend is towards smaller ships these days. Sort of reversing your hypothesis. The Iowa class was the end of the road for BIG gun naval platforms. The US did have plans for a larger class ( Montana Class ) battleship but they were never built. At some 60,000 tons compared to the Iowa’s 45,000 tons they were beasts. Still, the Japanese Yamato and Musashi were even bigger than the Montana class and they were built (and sunk).

Thing is people eventually figured out that several small, relatively inexpensive planes could sink a massively expensive battleship. With the advent of missiles things got even worse for the really big ships. They were prime targets often representing the pride of their country. Consider the effort that went into the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck. The British threw the better part of their Atlantic fleet at that one ship. Let me say it again though…battleships are monstrously expensive ships. The resources to build just one can take the better part of many countries steel output for a long time. Given all of this (plus the very large number of lives on board) a battleship almost becomes a victim of its own might as a country must deploy them very carefully so as not to lose them rather than being able to be more aggressive (such as they were with submarines in WWII).

So, the trend has been towards smaller ships. Missile cruisers and frigates and destroyers. You can build severl cruisers for the price of one battleship and find you have more flexibility with deployment and with today’s missiles and over the horizon shooting find they are overall more effective. If you lose one, bad as that is, it is nowhere near the loss of one battleship again allowing more flexibility in deployment.

The only ship that continues to get larger is the aircraft carrier (at least US carriers). In the carriers case size is an improvement (can carry more planes, weapons and fuel so can deploy longer and cause more havoc) but consider that when you build a carrier you pretty much have to build a whole battlegroup to form around it and protect it. Again because of their massive value they are super-protected ships. Very few navies in the world can field a super-carrier (can any these days?) much less several as the US does.

I will say, as I and others have said before, the loss of the battleship may make oveall sense but despite all of the wisdom from naval planners above the battleship I think still could fill a role today. They are stupendously tough ships to sink…even in this era of missiles. The Japanese battleship Musashi (super battleship) took something like 19 torpedo hits and 17 bomb hits and did not sink till 4 hours after the last shot struck her. Bismark took some similar beating and ultimately was scuttled (although at that point it was doomed anyway). Most smaller ships (frigates/destroyers) of today would be lucky to survive two torpedo or bomb hits alone. Just one hit might get lucky and sink them and could certainly put them out of action for awhile.

4

One example that comes to mind is the evolution of aircraft weaponry through WWII and afterwards. It was common for WWII aircraft to carry several machine guns (the P-51 had 6 0.50 caliber machine guns), and later aircraft carried fewer, larger guns (most modern combat aircraft carry a single gun in the 20-30mm range).

I’m not sure whether this is a useful pattern: it’s not as though the people who built pre-dreadnought battleships weren’t aware of the sailing frigate examples, or that pre-WWII aircraft designers were unaware of the pre-dreadnought vs. dreadnought battleship examples.

5

In the case of warships, the limitations of the guns available dictated the criteria of ship design. Not only would the weight and recoil of a few huge guns have been very difficult for the framework of a wooden ship to bear, but you had to calculate what balance of guns would give a ship the greatest effective firepower, given that accuracy and rate of fire was poor before rifled breechloading cannon were perfected.

In the case of the US heavy frigates, they used an ingenious solution to a problem that had plagued warship builders for centuries: “hogging”. In simple terms, the buoyancy of a ship tends to focus at it’s midpoint, leading to the bow and stern sagging while amidships bulges upward. Warships were particularly vulnerable to this because of the weight of their guns. Previously, the only solution was to build a ship almost as broad as it was long. So you ended up with a “Man O’ War” that had lots of heavy guns but sailed about as well as a keg. A frigate was sleeker and faster but payed for this with fewer and smaller (and therefore shorter range) guns. The American solution was to build a series of inverted arches that bore the weight of the ship’s guns down to the keel spread out evenly. So the heavy frigates could carry guns almost comparable to a man o" war while retaining the speed of a frigate.

Turrent guns became practical only after breechloading cannon became available, and steam power cleared the deck of most rigging. The size and firepower of “ironclads” grew but required a decades-long series of design innovations. Early attempts to place monster guns on ships ended up nearly sinking themselves. The WW2 era battleships represented nearly a century of shipbuilding evolution. But then the “bigger guns more armor” competition was sidetracked by the advent of effective air and submarine threats to surface ships, which meant that huge battleships were now too vulnerable to justify investing so much in one ship. Some worry that aircraft carriers may now be in a similar postion given the advances in anti-ship missiles.

6

Off hand I would say that an extra deck was added to aircraft carriers , so that launch and recovery could take place at the same time.

Helicopters went from the mash bubble chopper , to air mobile operations and now vertical insertion, so some more life is still left in the humble helicopter as far as design and tactics are concerned.

Field artillery has gone pretty much self-propelled.

Declan

7

Actualy, no. Even Britain and France’s best carriers have little more firepower than a heavy Marine transport/carrier in that regard.

8

IIRC, England is planning to build a number of Supercarriers of their own, though they’d be smaller than the Nimitz carriers we have now.

9

I wouldn’t exactly call those 2 new carriers the UK is building super-carriers - after all, they are about half the displacement of the US super carriers.

Still, they are a big step up from those 22,000 ton VTOL carriers they have now, which aren’t that good even compared to the 11 Tarawa and Wasp class amphip carriers the US has right now, which have 35-40 helo’s + Harriers, as well as a battalion of Marines.

10

The general situation in weapons development, naval or otherwise, since Day One has been the quest for increasing lethality.

At some points in history, the technology is stagnant and increasing lethality is achieved with increasing numbers. Then an engineering breakthrough occurs and a smaller number of more lethal weapons, or weapons platforms, are deployed. The smaller number is usually driven by cost, as new weapons tend to be more expensive than their predecessors, whether we’re talking about the first iron swords or the first combat laser beams.

Soon the opposition has something similar. Absent another breakthrouth, the only way to increase lethality is to add quantity.

And so the cycle continues.

11

No. The USA is the only country with super-carriers. France and Brazil use regular carriers (half the number of planes, roughly), Russia a reguar carrier but with VTOL planes IIRC, all other countries (UK, Italy, Spain and India) mini-carriers with again roughly half the number of planes of a regular carrier (and VTOL, not regular planes, IIRC) .

For instance, the american T. Roosevelt brings more than 80 aircrafts, the french Charles de Gaulle around 40, the british Invincible 20-25. The UK intends to have build regular-sized carriers around 2010-2015, though.

12

Hijack : I had assumed that all modern armies only used SP guns, by now. but watching a footage about Irak, I noticed british troops with guns (looking more or less like WWII howitzers, to give you an idea) towed by trucks.

So, are non-self propelled guns still in use?

13

Actually, I was reading the other day that the US navy is looking to create a new class of ships to provide gun fire for ground support. The guns would either be rail guns (seems unlikely to me) or rocket propelled ballistic rounds that would be smart guided into the target. I forget now what the frame they were talking about now (I think it was a destroyer frame…but could have been a frigate). Appearently there is an identified need to provide shore batteries that aren’t missiles (I guess missiles are pretty expensive for ground support)…and the gun rounds would be pretty inexpensive.

-XT

14

Yes. Towed artillery is still very much in use. It has the advantage of being much more portable than a SP gun like the Paladin. A 105mm towed gun can be towed by a truck or Hummvee or it can be flown into remote areas by helicopoter.

15

Lumpy is right that steam and breechloading made turreted guns a more feasible solution to getting fewer heavy guns and still being able to cover a reasonable arc of fire (for broadside batteries, you need a lot more guns to cover an arc of fire, and you have half that gunweight unavailable for targets on the wrong side of your ship. Turreted guns generally can fire to either side, there being early exceptions).

Part of what’s vexing us about this question is that concentration into a few heavy guns is only an apparent trend if one ignores certain periods. Actually it was more cyclical.

For example, the American Civil War Monitor class of ironclads appeared right at the dawn of ironclad warfare and yet represents the extreme oif concentrated big gun turrets: The Monitor herself had two eleven-inch guns, standard heavy naval armament for the era, in a single turret, and no other armament. Shortly thereafter followed the Canonicus class, with one 11-inch and one monster 15-inch gun. In this case it was the inability of Northern foundries to turn out large numbers of the 15-inch guns that dictated only one to a ship, not so much considerations of weight or recoil. Soon the North was launching monitor types with two turrets sporting four eleven-inch guns or two fifteen-inchers.

Military fashions are (usually) driven by perceived threat. Wooden ships could be torn apart quickly (and were, in practice) by large numbers of explosive-shot-firing guns. When another ironclad was the enemy, heavy short-ranged guns for battering armor became more important than a large number of lighter guns.

But soon the torpedo, carried by fast torpedo-boats, became the greater threat to a battleship. Designers responded by employing a large number of a new quick-firing type of gun; torpedo-boats were frail, but fast, so a high volume of smaller shells was preferable.

Experience in battle soon showed that these large batteries of quick-firing guns were a vulnerability – heavy guns from other battleships could penetrate the thin armor over these light batteries and find ammunition and propellant to explode. The job of repelling torpedo-boat attack was foisted off onto smaller (expendable) ships called torpedo-boat destroyers, which have evolved into modern destroyers. Battleships reverted briefly to all-big-gun armament like the Dreadnought, but designers soon allowed smaller batteries to creep back onto their big ships.

Eventually the threat of aircraft attack caused the proliferation of small batteries of antiaircraft guns, because once again the nature of the perceived threat had changed.

Regards,

Sailboat

16

Lumpy is right that steam and breechloading made turreted guns a more feasible solution to getting fewer heavy guns and still being able to cover a reasonable arc of fire (for broadside batteries, you need a lot more guns to cover an arc of fire, and you have half that gunweight unavailable for targets on the wrong side of your ship. Turreted guns generally can fire to either side, there being early exceptions).

Part of what’s vexing us about this question is that concentration into a few heavy guns is only an apparent trend if one ignores certain periods. Actually it was more cyclical.

For example, the American Civil War Monitor class of ironclads appeared right at the dawn of ironclad warfare and yet represents the extreme oif concentrated big gun turrets: The Monitor herself had two eleven-inch guns, standard heavy naval armament for the era, in a single turret, and no other armament. Shortly thereafter followed the Canonicus class, with one 11-inch and one monster 15-inch gun. In this case it was the inability of Northern foundries to turn out large numbers of the 15-inch guns that dictated only one to a ship, not so much considerations of weight or recoil. Soon the North was launching monitor types with two turrets sporting four eleven-inch guns or two fifteen-inchers.

Military fashions are (usually) driven by perceived threat. Wooden ships could be torn apart quickly (and were, in practice) by large numbers of explosive-shot-firing guns. When another ironclad was the enemy, heavy short-ranged guns for battering armor became more important than a large number of lighter guns.

But soon the torpedo, carried by fast torpedo-boats, became the greater threat to a battleship. Designers responded by employing a large number of a new quick-firing type of gun; torpedo-boats were frail, but fast, so a high volume of smaller shells was preferable.

Experience in battle soon showed that these large batteries of quick-firing guns were a vulnerability – heavy guns from other battleships could penetrate the thin armor over these light batteries and find ammunition and propellant to explode. The job of repelling torpedo-boat attack was foisted off onto smaller (expendable) ships called torpedo-boat destroyers, which have evolved into modern destroyers. Battleships reverted briefly to all-big-gun armament like the Dreadnought, but designers soon allowed smaller batteries to creep back onto their big ships.

Eventually the threat of aircraft attack caused the proliferation of small batteries of antiaircraft guns, because once again the nature of the perceived threat had changed.

Regards,

Sailboat

17

Right, that makes sense now, especially after LSLGuy mentioned the bit about how you get more lethality by adding more guns until something substantially more powerful comes along, and then you repeat the process. Not sure how I failed to think of that.

Yeah, I remember looking at some graphics showing the layout of various battleships during various stages of their careers. Due to extensive refits as time went on, a battleship would end up having everything except the placement of it’s main batteries changed (up to and including the shape of the hull itself).

Something that amused me was that the early USS Lexington (CV2) and the USS Princeton apparantly fielded 8 inch guns designed to allow the carriers to defend themselves against attack by destroyers or cruisers (which, in practice, never happened). The guns were later removed, though both ships, IIRC, were sank soon after due to aerial and submarine attacks during the Pacific campaign. Later in the war, we get the Essex class carriers, much larger than their predecessors, and featuring batteries of 5 inch guns for defense against aircraft. The USS Hornet, berthed at Alameda Point on the old Alameda Air Force Base in California still has it’s twin-5 turrets, which it could apparantly aim remotely using a radar-assisted fire control system. All you needed at the guns were the crews to keep reloading them while they aimed and fired.

Basically, they took off the big guns because they realized they weren’t needed, then as carrier battle doctrine got fleshed out and evolved during WWII, they began to add big guns back in because they needed the raw knock-down power to take down enemy aircraft quickly. Another change in naval doctrine around the same time was how the gunners aimed their guns. Apparantly they started training them to just fire all around a particular area, rather than trying to shoot down any specific plane, and due to the raw mass of fire the AA batteries could throw up by about midway through WWII, they actually show down more planes this way.

18

I beleive you are thinking of Lexington and Saratoga (CV3). Both ships were originally laid down as battle cruisers, and converted to aircraft carriers to meet the limitations of the Washington Naval Treaty. Thye both retained their original design secondary batteries as defensive weapons, as the practice of sailing aircraft carriers surrounded by a defensive task force was not yet standard. Saratoga’s 8" guns were removed in 1942 while she was being repaired after a torpedo hit, but Lexington still had hers when she was sunk as a result of Japanese air attack during the Battle of the Coral Sea. Saratoga survived the war and was used as an atomic bomb target at Bikini.

19

Ahh, right, now I remember, Princeton was a light carrier or something like that. IIRC, she had a tendency to list a few degrees to one side.

20

Yes, all of the Independence class light carriers (which were adapted from cruiser hulls during construction) listed a few degrees to starboard due to the weight of the island structure, funnels, etc. They never found a way to counter the list while retaining seaworthiness.