High end canon shells are more complex than that. It’s a large bomb with fuses designed so it doesn’t just detonate in the canon barrel and kill everyone. It has to survive the acceleration. The powder has to burn at the correct rate and not blow up the ship. This isn’t as difficult as making a missile, but it’s not trivial.
Yeah as I understand it Oskar Schindler had particular trouble making shells that would blow up.
Iowa class BB draft was around 29 ft, which would allow it to get fairly near most coastlines.
It may be counterintuitive but munition costs are not that big a deal.
In the US military, the labor-related costs of one military personnel are about 100K$/year. A battleship may have about 3000 personnel, a destroyer about 300.
3000-300=2700 personnel saving
2700X100 000$/year= 270M$/year.
270M$ buys you more than 200 cruise missile or antiship missiles which is more than any warship will fire in a war, never mind per average year.
Or take guided bombs vs dumb bombs. A guided bomb might cost 25 000$ and a dumb bomb a few hundred dollars. But you no longer tens of aircraft to destroy a target with their additional related fuel, maintenance and labor costs.
In addition, warfare is so lethal today that you need to bring your best from the very beginning; Whoever gets the worst of early engagements may be so attrited and disrupted that they get into a steep downward spiral. It’s less like a fistfight where you can trade blows for a while and more like an axe fight.
Has anyone done the approximate math on the cost increases of missiles/torpedoes vs aircraft/ships? Are sophisticated munitions increasing in price at a faster rate than sophisticated platforms?
Yeah, this is conclusive. A Harpoon missile is 1.2 million, and a cruise missile is about 1.4 million. If it saves you 270 million a year in crew costs - which sounds accurate, one documentary on the post-refer Iowa class was it was costing a million dollars a day - it’s overwhelmingly worth it.
Even a major war would be preceded by years or decades of peacetime, during which all those extra expenses are costing you money. When you finally do have a major war, if the war is so hot that you need to fire off hundreds of cruise missiles per platform on average, well, a war that destructive you want launch platforms that can fire from 200+ miles away.
The whole thing sounds like a political decision to even maintain the Iowa class postwar at all.
As for sophisticated munitions costs - what I can point out is that if WW2’s production histories are any guide, sophistication was no bar to mass deployment. Many of the weapons the both sides used in WW2 were extremely costly in time and materials to make, and yet they were deployed in vast numbers. Apparently, like you say, it’s best to bring your A game, and to send in B-17s and B-29s with Norden bombsights and full crews, nothing less.
The 1.4 million sticker price on a cruise missile is not a hard number, it must have all kinds of overhead baked into the cost that Raytheon has to charge since only small numbers are built every year. If the United States had another total war similar to ww2, those costs would plummet or be irrelevant as probably existing factories would start producing cruise missiles, similar to how automobile plants were making tanks.
An interesting datum to keep in mind: When discussing modern warfare, WWII comparisons are often brought up*. WWII is as distant from us as the US Civil War was to WWII when it started. Yet WWII commanders would have been unwise to think in terms of mid 19th-century warfare. If there’s any one war that should set the analysis frame, it’s the Six Day war.
The same war where a 1700 ton, 186 complement ship that relied on guns was sunk by 2 67ton, 17 complement missile boats which fired 4 80km-range missiles with 75% accuracy
*I’m not suggesting your reference to WWII munitions is a problem, it just reminded me of a trend when discussing warfare
If ‘high end’ is in the context of now, meaning guided shells, they are definitely harder to develop and produce at reasonable cost than guided weapons that only have to survive being accelerated (much more gently) by a rocket booster or catapult (launching a plane carrying them). That’s amply illustrated by the cost and development problems of recent USN guided shell efforts.
But debate now about activating ex-battleship (museums) is a ridiculous one as has been amply shown by threads on almost every message board on the internet. And the corresponding themes of often semi-magical weapons for future ‘battleships’ is likewise removed from reality.
OTOH back to the 1940’s there were not missiles at least in the same sense or to same degree*. However in fact the sort of industrial base to produce all elements of a BB was at least as difficult and exclusive as the one to produce airplanes. The efforts to produce electronics oriented weapons in WWII were something new, but again a different not necessarily ‘harder’ thing than producing heavy ships.
As another post mentioned, the Iowa’s in particular were specially able to escort carrier forces because of their ~32kt designed speed, though only 4 of them v many more carriers by 1944 and the slower ‘new’ US BB’s (6 North Carolina and South Dakota class ships) of ~27kts were also used for that. The 'old BB’s of pre Washington Treaty (~20 kts at best by then) were not used in that role as a rule. But one ship couldn’t do multiple things at the same time, the old ships did a lot of the shore bombardment. Each Iowa fired relatively few shell in shore bombardment in WWII compared to each ship’s expenditure in Korea, and in case of USS NJ in Vietnam. NJ fired fewer than 800 main gun rounds in combat in WWII (some of which were against Japanese ships rather than shore targets) v over 12,000 combined in Korea and Vietnam not counting Lebanon.
Also just because we look in hindsight and see no important surface actions by battleships related to carrier battles does mean they weren’t expected. The Japanese tried to force night surface engagements as adjunct to some of the 1942 carrier battles, the USN tried to send the BB’s on similar missions in the 1944 battles, but it didn’t happen; a few other BB v BB engagements unrelated to carrier ops did. Anyway BB’s were recognized as obsolete in their original ship v ship role mainly after the USN destroyed the IJN and there was no other large opposing fleet in prospect (the Soviet one not being a serious threat till decades later and even then not mainly via surface ships).
Carriers could project power far inland in that scenario of naval supremacy, BB’s to a very limited range (and effect). Prior to the mainly socio-political (and weird, IMO) phenomenon of BB worship in the US from ca. the 1980’s**, this was not controversial. USN analysis of Korean ops recognized BB’s as a specialized niche tool, not any kind of central element of naval power even by then.
*there aren’t many modern weapons which don’t have some sort of precursor at least in advanced development by the end of WWII, eg. there were guided anti-ship weapons used during WWII, and some like the Bat glide bomb even had guidance systems similar in concept to modern AhSM’s, which the German guided antiship bombs didn’t.
**though had roots in the often ridiculous exaggeration of the importance and advantages of USS NJ’s operations in Vietnam.
Agree with your whole post.
Ref the snip it’s simply a matter of fanboy tacticool. No more and no less. Fomented by various factions within the MI complex back then and by the politico-military-media complex today.