You mentioned swarming, LWs and AI helos – what’s the fourth one?
I though about using a numbered list to be more explicit but blew that off. Oops.
There are two unrelated projects both based on swarming. Once is air to surface missiles and is at the pre-prototype hardware stage. The other is air to air and is at the software exploration stage.
The cooperative self-forging nature of swarming in general is one important item of AI development. Maneuvering to track and hit a relatively slow-moving target is old news; missiles have been doing that for decades.
Teaching an individual AI how to dogfight (and figuring out the all-aspect sensors to “see” all the players in the furball) is a significantly different problem. Which has applicability to LW individually and also, once coupled to the separate swarming capability, will enable swarming counter-air.
So that’s two distinct efforts but with a bunch of eventual overlap in deployment. Sorry to have been less than clear.
Also unrelated to everything else I mentioned in my prior post, here are two more AI things well in the works.
Multiple nations are working on autonomous air to air refueling and have various prototypes actually flying. This enables a) unmanned tankers; b) unmanned receivers; and c) relieving human crew(s) at either end of the hose from the current risky and fatiguing job of manually controlled refueling. Even if both aircraft are manned the intent is to let HAL on both vehicles perform the rendezvous & hookup while the crews watch for screwups.
Unrelated to that effort …
USN is pretty deep into deploying autonomous carrier landings. Both as an enabler for UAVs launching & recovering from the CVNs, but also to relieve the human pilot of the need to hand-fly the landing or go swimming.
A remarkable amount of the Navy’s flying hours & wear and tear on aircraft and ships are simply devoted to keeping the pilots proficient enough to safely land on the boat. If that same $ and effort could be redeployed to more combat-oriented training and tasking the air assets would be that much more combat effective, cheap to own, or both.
Thought that might be the case, but it wasn’t particularly clear. Thanks.
No they weren’t. Iowa-class battleships were very fast as battleships went, but most modern battleships could make 25-30 knots.
LSLGuy, thank you for giving a much fuller answer, with cites, in line with what I was trying to get across.
Absolutely. But it’s also a mistake to assume that since the US has carriers and conventional airplanes, that the military is somehow unaware of this or not developing countermeasures to it.
My earlier point to the drone comments was more that a UAV wouldn’t offer a whole lot to attacking a carrier than a piloted aircraft would, except for the lack of dead pilots if it is shot down. It has some advantages and disadvantages, but isn’t something a carrier can’t deal with. In a lot of ways, using a UAV to fire missiles at a carrier seems absurd vs. using a purpose built anti-ship cruise missile.
But that’s a garden-variety MQ-9 Reaper style UAV. The swarming ones mentioned upthread are the wave of the future, I suspect.
Agree completely that a Predator / Reaper / etc., represents no material threat to a CVN or the rest of it’s screening force. And really adds no capability beyond what other conventional attack platforms can already do better. They’re not even fast enough to be credible decoys as part of a larger anti-carrier strike package.
Which is why using the term “drone” or even “UAV” without qualification is so counterproductive.
It’s about like saying “An airplane is no threat to an aircraft carrier”, and one person in thinking about a Cessna trying to kamikaze through the flight deck and the other is thinking a long range bomber armed with a bevy of supersonic sea-skimming anti-ship missiles. Both are aircraft but are very different threats.
Exactly. Speed was tremendously valuable even when they didn’t have to keep up with carriers. Even the pre-WWI dreadnoughts went about 20 knots more or less, which wasn’t slouchy for a 30,000 ton ship, considering they were powered by guys heaving coal into the burners (which made steam for turbines for the most part).
Now if you’re talking about old ships like the USS New York or USS Arkansas during WWII, then yeah, they were relatively slow. But they were also 30-ish years old, and pretty outdated by that point.
I’ve changed my opinion to the reverse of that over the past week.
Previously, I played Devil’s Advocate even given the uselessness of the BBs in most situations, and thought that if I were the navy planner I only build fast battleships, and previous slower battleships might as well be scrapped.
But that was assuming they were only 2 to 2 1/2 times as expensive as destroyers. I don’t know how expensive they are in resources but looking at Wikipedia they have at least 5 times as many personnel. If you round down to 4 times as expensive, as a planner, I would say hell no to trading 4 destroyers for 1 battleship in any case except shore bombardment. And those only need to keep up with the invasion fleet, not with the carrier fleet.
So I’d keep the old battleships. But I wouldn’t produce new ones in the buildup to WW2 no matter what the speed.
I have always admired WW2 era US PT boats and wondered if we had built more earlier on could they have taken on Japanese capital ships?
No chance in open ocean. In an island chain, calm(er) waters, they might qualify as a pain-in-the-ass with the torpedoes. Screening destroyers and escorts would make an attack a suicide mission for most of the swarm.
Plenty of actual combat in Libya. Russian air defense systems really came up short.
Well yeah… “destroyer” is short for torpedo boat destroyer. So wrecking PT boats was literally what destroyers were intended to do.
It was thought of before, Jeune École, mainly by the French (as the name implies) and Japanese who knew they would not be able to match any kind of building program where the Royal Navy gets serious.
Jackie Fisher, in turn, countered with the battle cruiser.
But we have examples of smaller ships being sunk (or nearly so and severely disabled) with only a single missile hit (e.g. USS Stark or the HMS Sheffield).
I’d wager an Iowa class battleship could easily absorb five Exocet missiles where just one will sink or at the very least render useless “modern” warships.
That debate is about armor, not about ship size. Roughly speaking, the 80K ton Iowa was a 40K ton vessel with 40K tons of armor wrapped around it.
We could build Stark/Sheffield sized vessels with a similar armor ratio. Or we could build thin-skinned big ships with multiple 16" cannon.
Battleships, from the dreadnought era forwards (and arguably for much of the preceding age of sail), were about the idea that warfare was a slug-fest where the ability to absorb punishment was more important than the ability to dish it out. Given the shitty accuracy of unguided gunnery that makes sense.
The attitude today is the opposite. It’s essentially that a strong offense applied quickly reduces / negates the need for a strong defense.
You’re probably right that an Iowa could absorb 5 Exocets. What it could not absorb is more than 1 missile that was designed as an Iowa-killer. Missiles aren’t designed in a vacuum; they’re designed against a known target set.
Mission-killing a battleship by destroying its radars & comms is easy; that stuff can’t be armored. After that it’s just a spot on the ocean that is harmless outside WAG 10 miles range, but pretty darn lethal inside that range. So don’t go there right now and send a submarine to finish it off at your leisure.
Warfare is ALWAYS a team sport. it’s fun to talk about individual weapons in isolation. But that’s as meaningless as talking about a second baseman without his team.
I think five Exocet hits are likely to cause an operational loss until repairs can be made.
One Exocet weighs in at almost the same as a 15" shell and will strike the battleship with huge kinetic energy give its airspeed. It will get through armour, five of those will cause serious damage.
Also worth noting the Exocet would be launched from beyond the range of the guns of any battleship.
Also worth noting that cruise missiles can be programmed to strike a target that moves as slowly as a battleship and can carry nuclear weapons
About 1700 pounds at launch. Much of that is fuel, which will be burned, accelerating to cruise speed. Further, it’s subsonic at best. Finally, it’s much less densely constructed than a AP shell. I expect the result to be similar to the kamakaze ‘dent’ on USS Missouri. Lots of flaming propellant thrown everywhere though, and the 350 pound ish warhead will break things topside.
It is amazing how thick the armor is on those old battleships. Even USS Texas looked like a bank vault when you entered the citadel area.
The best way to sink a WWII battleship is still with WWII technology. 1,000 lbs of high explosive below the waterline just like at Pearl Harbor.
Right - kamikaze were basically early cruise missiles in a sense- some even had warheads or carried bombs.
At any rate, quite a few battleships were damaged by kamikaze, but from what I can tell, most of the damage was due to unarmored areas being hit and/or fires started from the fuel remaining in the kamikaze.
This would apply just as much to a modern-day battleship with cruise missiles; a 300 lb HE warhead isn’t going to do much to the armor unless it’s a shaped charge of some kind. The Iowa class battleships had 12" thick belt armor going from the deck to the bottom of the hull and angled at 19 degrees, giving an equivalent of 17.3" of armor. The turrets and barbettes were also armored with 17.3" of armor. And there was an armored deck 6" thick as well.
Cruise missiles would be unlikely to sink an Iowa class battleship, but they could do a lot of damage, especially to unarmored spaces.