Yeah, but it’s not really due to the gun either, anymore. Rather the big number of hard points under that wing and belly.
The 30mm X 173, even the HEI, just isn’t as lethal as you’d like for troops in the open, whereas a SDB or Griffon, or those new guided 2.75 inch rockets, are. And the MBTs it was designed to kill, coming through Fulda, are armored enough that it’s not likely to get more than even a mobility kill. Assuming it doesn’t get swatted by the peer opponent’s CIWS, SAM system like the RAM, or now, some sort of energy weapon. Not that the dirt farmers we’ve been fighting for the last 20 years have any of those.
Great for the time though, and a 1 second gun burst was both cheaper and more effective than a dumb 500 lb. bomb that was likely going to miss anyways.
Going back to the OP, I doubt that the engagement envelope size, accuracy, or cost of those 16 inch rifles, is why the USN turned them all into museum ships or razor blades. It’s the cost to man and fuel the things. What was the ship’s complement on an Iowa anyway? 2,700 Sailors? To deliver, at the most, 1200 bombs each with a bursting charge akin to a Mk. 82 bomb? That’s 15 B-2 sorties. Probably the same number of B-52 sorties these days. Which isn’t small, mind, but doesn’t take nearly 3,000 personnel to accomplish either. Not counting the support ships and escorts.
This happens a lot in all sorts of circumstances. There are examples of Sherman tanks with holes poked in them but otherwise fine.
It was not fine for the crew inside (I recall reading somewhere how the tank would be salvaged but some poor Joe had to hose the human remains out of the tank).
Same as using armor piercing bullets. If you know your enemy has body armor then you want those. If they don’t have body armor then you are better off using non-armor piercing bullets.
Ships were the same. You didn’t want the shell to explode on contact because that means most of the explosion would be on the outside of the ship. So the fuses had to be set to detonate a little after initial contact. If there was a lot of armor the shell blows up inside the ship causing massive damage. If no armor then it goes right through.
That said, I can’t imagine even a non-exploding battleship shell poking a hole in a frigate not being a bad thing. Those were pretty big shells.
Example hole in 26 inches of armor plate from the IJN Shinano (sister ship to Yamato) from an inert 16 inch AP shell. A lot more details than you probably want to know about the armor and the test, here.
I imagine there was a lot of spall, and probably hull cracking, from the impact of those shells. Still better than being around when the bursting charge went off.
Aside, I wonder how a modern, hardened precision guided munition, like a BLU-116 or heck, a MOP, would do in a similar test? I know they go through gobs of reinforced concrete and earth like nothing, but what about Class B armor plating?
A USS Iowa Mark 8 “Super-heavy” shell weighed in at 2,700 pounds compared to the BLU-116’s 1,927 pounds. Also, Mark-8 had a much smaller warhead (41 pounds compared to the BLU-116 240 pound explosive) suggesting more of the shell is dedicated to its strength for armor penetration. Add in the BLU-116 is gravity dropped whereas the Mark 8 has the kinetic oomph from its guns.
All-in-all I would guess the Mark-8 shell had substantially better armor penetration characteristics than a BLU-116.
You’re both on the right track. But a bunch of that was a limitation of 1940s fuze & warhead technology.
Nowadays things are different. We have fuzing that can deal with armor and also the absence of armor, adapting to whatever it hits as it is hitting it. In addition of course to making specialized warheads for big armor, small armor, and no-armor situations.
The ‘Missouri’ was taken out of mothballs for Operation Desert Storm in 1991. The use case for it was to soften up Iraqi positions prior to the invasion. Missouri was also upgraded in the 80’s with modern (for the time) fire control, Tomahawk missiles, etc.
I think the use-case still exists: offshore bombardment of non-peer hostile nations in war. But all the Iowa class ships have been converted into museums now, and I doubt if they can be made battle ready any more. Missouri had to be towed out of port by tugs when it was used as a movie set in ‘Under Siege’ (or maybe it was the Cher Video).
Anyway, we have plenty of other alternatives now that didn’t exist then.
IIRC being shelled by an Iowa class battleship was unnerving in a way nothing else was.
The battleship would use an unmanned drone for spotting and damage assessment. The Iraqis figured out pretty quickly that when a drone like that showed up, battleship shells were soon to follow. There is video out there somewhere of Iraqis surrendering to the drone. They knew what was about to follow and wanted none of it.
That is not something you saw from planes with missiles or tanks and whatnot.
This was my dad’s take on the power projected by a battleship on an enemy position. They had forward spotters back in WWII that radioed back firing data to the ship just over the horizon, he even served as a spotter at Okinawa and saw first hand the effects. After days of consent pounding by 16" shells the enemy was dazed and could not coordinate a defense of the beach effectively. At Okinawa the beach was abandoned and the allies landed unopposed.
Yes. The use case is there but narrow and fulfilled by other systems. D-Day style invasions are in the same historical rubric as bayonet charges. Having a huge ship to do short-range bombardment of the coastal area of much weaker opponents is not likely to be a good use of resources. People often bring up the cost of missiles but I’d expect the cost of high-end munitions to be a fraction of the cost of labor, operations and maintenance cost over any given decade.
Ordnance does add up, but guided ordnance is nowhere near as expensive as it once was. And guided munitions can often effect the same solution as a fraction of the firepower of unguided. If there is a role for battleships in the future, it will be as a combination of speed and armor and the space to hold large amounts of equipment, not huge gun barrages. In this case, equipment could include guided missiles, drones, or other weaponry. It does not seem likely that this would needed now, but it’s not impossible in the future.
It sure does add up and guided munitions are nothing like “cheap.”
A Tomahawk cruise missile costs around $1.87 million (2017) each. It is the only cruise missile that can be fired from something other than a plane that the US has. If you have to use a planes add in the cost of those plus pilots and crews and forward air bases and support.
By comparison, a 16" shell from an Iowa class battleship costs around $15,000 each (it is hard to find good numbers on that but seems reasonable).
During the Korean War the USS Missouri fired 6,576 16" rounds. If you shot that many Tomahawk missiles it would cost you over $12.6 billion. Battleship shells would cost you around $100 million. Big difference.
If you use shorter range, cheaper missiles then you need a plane to fly very close to the target. An F-35 costs around $120 million each. An Iowa class battleship would cost around $1.6 billion in today’s money. So, you can have around 14 planes for the price of one battleship.
It can get all weird with costs of maintenance and crew but the planes are not cheap with expensive pilots, ground crews, air bases or aircraft carriers and so on.
The main advantage the missiles have is they can hit almost anywhere and the battleship can only hit about 20-25 miles inland (and they are quite accurate these days). That said, a huge amount of the world’s population and cities are within that range. A battleship parked in Jamaica Bay in New York City could pound all of New York City.
Now do JDAM. Same accuracy as TLAM, but a good deal cheaper. 25k per guidance kit, plus the cost of the bomb. Versus 750k for the Tactical Tomahawk. Though the Tactical Tomahawk allows ships and conceivably land units to join in the fun.
It does get pricier these days, with JASSM and the -ER variant going for 1.2 to 1.4 million, and LRASM going near 4 million. But those don’t compete with a battleship; they’re for near peer-opponents where a lot of standoff, and no manned pilots near the enemy weapons engagement zone, are desired.
Anyway, JDAM is still on par, unit to unit, with the cost of a 16 inch HE shell, plus it can be dropped from any a/c that can lift it. And even a squadron’s worth of personnel, POL, and other costs—even including tankers, jammers if needed, escorts, are nothing compared to feeding, paying, escorting, fueling, etc…the battleship needed to fire those shells.
It’s cheaper to let the zoomies kill things rather than the big gun sailors. Which is why they were retired, cool stories about enemies surrendering to the targeting UAV aside.
Not sure how your math makes those on par, cost-wise, with a 16" shell at $15k. Certainly cheaper than a Tomahawk but still twice as expensive, at least, as a 16" shell. Also, they almost certainly don’t have the same ability to wreck hard targets as a 16" shell which we saw upthread is a beast at just that sort of task (there are different shells, one is an armor penetrator).
Also, your JDAM is being carried by a $100 million dollar plane and it can only carry a few. Once it unloads it and its friends leave. A battleship can sit there and shell you all day long and put massively more fire into an area over a given time-frame compared to planes.
Now add in airfields and maintenance to support those planes and not seeing how you are a lot better off. Yes, ships cost money to operate too but planes have a much higher maintenance cost (an F-35 requires 50 maintenance hours per flight-hour…not how ships compare but I’d be willing to bet is a a loooot less).
Planes have more versatility and can hit inland targets but if you want to flatten a coastal city or base floating artillery will beat them every time.
I’ve gone through this already upthread. The Iowa could hold, ballpark, 1200 main gun rounds. If they’re AP, the bursting charge is much smaller, and it had better hit the target exactly to kill it. If they’re HE, they’re roughly equivalent to a Mk. 82 500 lb bomb. The shell is bigger, but the bursting charge is roughly the same.
Accuracy is around an order of magnitude worse than JDAM. (See, the article I linked upthread on the guns and their shells. From it:
For example, during test shoots off Crete in 1987, fifteen shells were fired from 34,000 yards (31,900 m), five from the right gun of each turret. The pattern size was 220 yards (200 m), 0.64% of the total range. 14 out of the 15 landed within 250 yards (230 m) of the center of the pattern and 8 were within 150 yards (140 m). Shell-to-shell dispersion was 123ards (112 m), 0.36% of total range.)
If we make the big assumption that CEP is 0.36% of total range, then even at kissing distance of 5,000 yards, CEP is around 16 yards or so. JDAM’s observed accuracy is 7m or so. If it absolutely must be closer, use a LGB, at ~ 2-4 times the cost.
1200, 500 lb JDAM can be carried by 15 B-2 sorties. Make it 20, as that was likely a stunt. Or use the B-1 or B-52—if we’re parking a battleship offshore, we’re not really worried about whether the enemy can shoot back, or whether the enemy knows we’re there. Or 80 or so F-18 sorties.
Run the costs on that projection of force versus the cost to operate an Iowa BB and its de rigueur escort of at least one Burke, and probably more. And with that, I’m done with this subtopic.
Just like it’s possible that the bad surface combat records of the battleships was due to luck since there weren’t that many of them, it’s possible that their supposed effect on morale and fortifications could be an artifact of the Japanese doctrine of not contesting the beaches. If the Germans had been the ones on the Pacific island, they might have built and defended more fortifications closer to the beach. Of course it’s possible that even this would have been futile in the face of battleship bombardment, but the battleship’s record in Normandy isn’t that impressive. They were, however, good at harassing enemy movements due to their long range guns.
They did contest the beaches though, Ludovic. Iwo Jima, Tarawa (Betio), Peleliu: Okinawa is notable for being one of the only islands that the Japanese didn’t give immediate dogged resistance to the first guys to hit the beach. Other cases it happened, Kwajalein comes to mind, the defenders were surprised, greatly outnumbered, and lacked the camouflaged fortifications and interlocking fields of fire from belt-feds on up that characterized the examples I mentioned above. Or the Army or Marines just landed where the bad guys weren’t, like many of the New Guinea landings or Leyte. Easier to do on a bigger island, I guess.
Okinawa, because of the terrain, and that it was the home of the artillery school, was defended differently.
In the Med, the Royal Navy harassed movement through naval gunfire in the manner you described for Normandy. Most of the roads were near the sea, the Royal Navy enjoyed naval supremacy, and deserts lack overhead concealment. Rommel had a bad time when his forces got in eyesight of an observer, and naval gunfire was at hand.
…reported costs for the standard Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) missile, used by both the Marines and Army, range from about $100,000 to $200,000 a shot. The larger Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), fired from the same HIMARS and MLRS launchers, costs roughly $750,000 to $820,000. In contrast, McConnell told me, “your bottom-basement going rate on a Harpoon missile or a Naval Strike Missile is somewhere around $1.5 million.” SOURCE
