Readying about modern naval warfare, I’ve noticed that modern ships seem to be extremely vulnerable to damage. Before the advent of missiles, it seems like warships would often keep fighting even after getting hit several times.
During the 6 Day War, the 1700 ton destroyer Eilat was hit by two missiles, after which the crew gave up on fighting and went into rescue mode.
During the Falklands War, HMS Sheffield got hit by one missile with a warhead that was about 30 000 times lighter than HMS Sheffield (165 kg vs 4820 tons), after which the crew went into rescue mode. The British Navy gave up on keeping use of it and just salvaged what it could from it.
So I’m wondering, what’s the smallest amount of damage it would require to take a blue sea warship (frigate and above) out of the fight for a day? A week? A month? How about damage to aircraft like fighters, early airborne warning, drones? How much of a scratch is too shameful to come out and play?
The Japanese Type 91 (Revision 2) torpedoes used at Pearl Harbor had a 204 kg warhead and were capable of sinking the HMS Prince of Wales (37,000 tons) and the USS Oklahoma (27,500 tons) among others.
Remember, it’s not the size of the hit, it’s the placement. I’ve seen full-grown men knocked out of action after their adorable toddler accidentally hit them in the groin.
One of the essential differences in military ship design you’re overlooking is a change from a focus on passive defences, that is, “let’s chuck a shedload of armour on this ship”, to active defences, radar, missiles, CIWS, etc. It’s no coincidence that change followed the shift in the main threat being from other ships hurling big chunks of metal, to aircraft and later anti-ship missiles. Also I’m not sure when it happened, but the change in torpedo warheads from direct contact on the hull to proximity warheads played a part as well.
With the exception of the carrier flight deck, modern military ships generally carry no appreciable armour plating. (Not that destroyers anyway of any era ever really did), they are more susceptible to damage from weapons that make it through their active defences.
Concur with Kunilou that the ratio between warhead weight and ship weight is a meaningless measure.
AIUI, modern warships are a lot more thin-skinned than their old predecessors, and also modern antiship weaponry is a lot deadlier and packs more punch (not necessarily explosive, but also in how it damages the ship - for instance, some torpedoes are now designed specifically to detonate at a certain point under the ship, instead of impacting it, so as to snap its spine as it falls through the an artificially-generated vacuum with blast effect.)
Also, modern warships are much more digital, which makes them more sensitive. Anything involving computers and radio/radar stuff is far more delicate than just brute iron hardware.
Have modern weapons become better at specific placement when they hit? Were the missiles that hit the Eilat and HMS Sheffield aiming for something specific? That’s doubtful in 1982 and unlikely from Soviet tech in 1967.
The main changing factor seems to be that modern warships, as Projammer puts it, have a lot of groin. So, does that mean that even a 64kg warhead like the RIM-174’s could have a good probability of taking a destroyer, cruiser or carrier out of the fight long enough that the high intensity part of the war is over by the time it’s repaired?
Yes, torpedoes have always been especially effective since they hit below the waterline. The comparison I meant to do was between missiles and non-missiles.
The USS Cole was struck by a suicide bombing on Oct 12, 2000. It sailed under its own power on Apr 19, 2002 but wasn’t back in full service for another year.
The guided-missile destroyer USS Cole was heavily damaged by al-Qaeda suicide bombers in 2000, while being refueled in Yemen. The attackers used an estimated 400 to 700 pounds of C4, and the attack blew a 40 foot by 60 foot hole in the Cole’s hull, and killed 39 sailors.
It took three days of damage control to stabilize the ship, and it was brought back to the U.S. to be repaired. It made it back to the U.S. at the end of 2000, and it appears that repairs took a total of 14 months.
Probably depends on what is meant by “out of the fight” as well- are we talking damaged severely enough to warrant going back to port for repairs, or are we talking more of a temporary type situation?
I don’t know if modern ships are really that much relatively wimpier than older ones; look at the fighting off Okinawa; kamikaze are roughly analogous to modern anti-ship missiles, and getting hit by one of those took just about any ship out of the fight back then. Even at that, they didn’t always sink, just like they don’t today (USS Stark took hits by two Exocets and didn’t sink, for example).
It seems after reading a lot of the WWII and Falklands accounts and the USS Forrestal, USS Stark, USS Samuel B. Roberts and USS Cole accounts, that fires are one of the biggest threats, not necessarily the immediate damage caused by missiles, shells, torpedoes or mines. Power loss is a big issue as well- with power, fires can be fought, and water can be pumped out.
I haven’t stayed up on modern warfare that much … Do other combat forces have short range tactical EMP weapons yet.
From the air or from the sea that could ruin your whole day and take a year or more to replace all of the electronics an EMP weapon could do havoc on a USN ship of any size.
The USS Fitzgerald is currently under repair after it’s collision. It’s expected to be out for a total of 2 years. The Cole was out for a similar time frame.
One of the deals with sending ships to the shipyard regardless of damage is they are going to perform all the upgrades while it’s out of service rather than repairing them, letting them finish off their schedule, then bringing them in again for the upgrades. So getting your ship damaged does mean you get the new toys earlier!
I guess it depends on what the rush is, what they are willing to forgo, and what was damaged.
For example during world war II Bath Iron works was putting out destroyers on a 17 day schedule.
The Zumwalts took about 5 years each to build. They were slow builds because they were the first of their kind, only ended up making 3 of them. Only the first one has been commissioned. The navy has the other two but are futzing around with them rather than putting them into service.
You could argue that the Sheffield had a particular and unfortunate vulnerability, and the loss of the ship pretty much instantly changed the design of any future ships. The aluminium superstructure was the reason the ship was a total write off. It burnt and melted, trapped crew and took out pretty much everything of value. Nobody had realised that a single missile strike could set off such a devastating fire.
There is no useful passive defense against a modern missile. Your only chance is to divert it, or kill it before it kills you. Hitting something coming at you at hypersonic velocities is pretty much impossible. Most anti-ship missiles are not that fast right now, but your chance of disabling one as it comes in is still not great. Hence the emphasis on EW to try to convince the thing to go somewhere else.
This serious need for high tech defenses is part of why a damaged ship takes a long time to get back on the water. As noted above, the chance to perform a tech refit is worth taking, and these take a long time. A modern warship can have a life of decades. But the weapons and defense systems may go through three or four generations in that time. If you consider progress in computer systems in the time since the majority of ships have been in commission you can see that many would have been built with systems that had almost stone age capability compared to now. And those refits will involve much more than just changing the equipment in racks over. They will involve stripping out miles of cables, structural changes to take the new systems - and running new cabling, installation of complex systems that the ship was not originally deigned to take, and testing, qualification, more testing, training and more testing.
Even if you don’t perform a refit, the damage to the systems can be much worse than just bent steel. You may find yourself having to strip out massive amounts of infrastructure, fix the damage and refit new cabling and infrastructure. All in a ship that was originality fitted with much of this infrastructure when it was not complete, and access to internals was vastly easier.
Ships of WW2 and the like simply didn’t have these systems. They were just big boats filled with sailors and ammunition and an armament of huge guns that were kept fed that ammunition by the sailors.
You could reasonably compare the time to fix a warship to the time to fix a large airplane. It is always harder than when you built it. Lots harder.
