The whole point of shore bombardment is to soften up a target for a beach landing. Thing is, “we don’t need no stinkin’ beaches!” Our troops (even our tanks and big guns) don’t have to travel by boat anymore.
The very much still use boats. It is one thing to move a rapid response for by air. It is another to try and move a whole division and its equipment.
That’s what ports are for; not beaches. You don’t capture a port by blowing it to smithereens.
You need to capture the port first. Good luck flying everyone in you need for that.
And the Allies whipped up temporary ports really fast after D-Day so they could land lots and lots of troops who then went and captured proper ports (see: battle of Cherbourg). They built those landing ports off the beaches they just captured.
Why not? The most useful ports are airports. Remind me again which beach we used to invade Afghanistan.
Land locked country of guerrilla fighters with almost no ability to oppose an air attack…certainly not against the US.
After the Soviet withdrawal and the departure of foreign advisors, the Air Force declined in terms of operational capability. With the collapse of the Najibullah Government in 1992, the Air Force splintered, breaking up amongst the different mujahideen factions in the ongoing civil war. By the end of the 1990s, the military of the Taliban maintained five supersonic MIG-21MFs and 10 Sukhoi-22 fighter-bombers.[25] They also held six Mil Mi-8 helicopters, five Mi-35s, five L-39Cs, six An-12s, 25 An-26s, a dozen An-24/32s, an IL-18, and a Yakovlev.[26] The Afghan Northern Alliance/United Front operated a small number of helicopters and transports and a few other aircraft for which it depended on assistance from neighboring Tajikistan. With the breakdown of logistical systems, the cannibalization of surviving airframes was widespread. The US/Coalition operations in the fall of 2001 destroyed most of the remaining Afghan aircraft. It was 2005 before a US-led, international effort began to rebuild the Afghan Air Force; since 2007, the pace has increased significantly under the auspices of the Combined Air Power Transition Force. SOURCE
Also, presumably some other countries allowed the US to overfly their airspace with our military planes. IIRC Pakistan let us do that (the other option is Iran and I can not see them agreeing to that).
What would it cost to operate a battleship for a year (personnel costs included)? About once in how many years can it be expected to be used in a role that can’t be done by other platforms?
If we multiply the yearly cost of operation by the number of years then divide that by the number of targets it would destroy, how much does destroying each target cost?
I’m not familiar enough with naval and military matters to give firm numbers but if we do that calculation, battleships likely won’t look so cheap.
I can’t believe we’re still arguing about the value of a weapons system that no military has seen fit to build since the attack on Pearl Harbor.
I was unaware that anyone was advocating using battleships now. I thought that calculation was made years ago. They served a purpose at one time but got relegated to the dustbin of history.
Then why do we have an ENTIRE branch of service essentially dedicated to doing just that?
I think amphibious landings are probably not too likely to take the classic WWII form in most future wars, mostly because the nature of wars is a bit different than what it was as recently as Korea. But to say that it’s in the same league as cavalry charges is a bit premature. It’s entirely likely that we might need to force a landing somewhere in the future- maybe in the Spratlys, or Fiery Cross Reef or somewhere else in the South China Sea. And it’ll be the USMC that does it, using the equipment and techniques they developed during WWII for the most part, albeit modified with helicopters/V-22s, and better air support.
I’m definitely in the camp that battleships’ day has long since come and gone. If we did need something for shore bombardment above and beyond what your average destroyer’s 5" gun can do, something like an arsenal ship or monitor would be the way to go, as they’d have the same on-target firepower, but without all the extraneous stuff associated with being a battleship.
I should have been more precise. “D-Day style invasions” is ambiguous. I didn’t mean amphibious landings but amphibious landings as they were done in WWII, with battleships, as pertains to this discussion.
Amphibious assaults can/will still happen but not like they did in WWII. If someone films today’s equivalent of Saving Private Ryan, the big opening scene will be quite different.
IIRC, the Marines would primarily use vertical envelopment. If you think that resembles D-Day, we’ll have to disagree.
Right, I’m not completely opposed to even a gunship that takes the same form factor as a battleship for speed, maneuverability, and seaworthiness, but the armor is a complete waste.
Then why are people in this thread defending their ability to take a missile, if they don’t think they’d be useful for anything other than a punching bag?
I’ve always found it interesting that no actual marines were involved in D-Day. Biggest amphibious landing of the war by an order of magnitude,and they didn’t think to bring in the experts? It’s almost as if anyone could do it.
It’s probably in one of the GAO cites listed at the following wiki. From that wiki article, in 1999, just to bring one back into service would cost half a billion USD. Plus another 100 million or so to remake the gunpowder. Probably optimistic projected costs, 1999 dollars, and not operational costs, AFAIK, and still over a half billion per unit.
The US Army did bigger amphibious landings (D-Day, Salerno) and more of them (the multiple landings in the New Guinea campaign), than the US Marine Corps. I want to say they commanded more vessels as well than the Navy or Marines, albeit most of them were quite small.
Not naysaying any of the comments just upthread of me there’s another factor to the small snippet I quote here …
IMO the USMC still exists largely as a result of DOD bureaucratic inertia, not out of an enduring currently validated forward-looking need for amphibious landings.
In fact the current Commandant of USMC is in the midst of a thoroughgoing re-engineering of the Marines based on a mission set that greatly de-emphasizes amphibious warfare. Which de-emphasis is massively controversial within USMC and its proponents to say the least. I offer no opinion on the wisdom of this effort; I merely point out it’s going on right now.
When maritime troops got started as a military specialty in the Age of Sail, their mission was boarding enemy ships and repelling enemy boarders in turn. Period. That mission was de-emphasized then all-but discarded starting in the early Age of Steam. Fast forward to today and yes, ship’s defense against boarders is still a mission. But it’s far from the number 1 raison d’etre Mission.
Perhaps amphibious warfare is in the throes of a similar discarding. Much as the various arguments made above about aircraft carriers’ increasing obsolescence, the days of amphibious assault may not be 100% passed, but are probably 90% passed, especially against near-peer competitors. Whether that’s e.g. US vs. China or e.g. Pakistan vs. Sri Lanka.
Part of the reason all militaries discover at the outset of hostilities that they’re equipped for the wrong war is simply inertia. Hardware lasts a long time, corporate memory lasts longer, and the received wisdom of doctrine is seldom overturned except following a bitter lesson from the enemy. Plus/minus a few revolutionary thinkers like Billy Mitchell, Elmo Zumwalt, and perhaps the current CMC David Berger.
It’ll be interesting to see how that re-think settles out.
The Navy is currently evaluating how to use the fleet when, to survive, it has to be about 1000 nmi from the beach it is attacking (that’s the current best guess as to the size of the zone in which survival is unlikely against, cruise missiles, hypersonics, ballistic missiles, and subs in a peer conflict). Carriers and other big ships aren’t going away, but the battleship is being drastically re-thought. A distributed fleet with a lot of unmanned vessels is looking more and more likely as a way to deal with precision weapons.
And big guns for bombardment are looking less and less important, as the ability to get close enough to even reach the shore makes discussion of the fearsome effects of such bombardments moot.
How many naval battle have their been since the end of WWII?