Political scientists Brian Crisher and Mark Souva address that question, and others. US absolute naval strength declined during the 1990s, while relative naval strength rose slightly. Both declined slightly from 2000-2010. Relative naval strength was at a record in 2011, if I read Kevin Drum’s chart properly. See my previous post for linky goodness, which contain caveats.
Brian Crisher and Mark Souva: The figure also shows that in the second half of the twentieth century, the US enjoyed preeminence in naval power that the British could only dream about in the nineteenth century.
First, let’s leave nukes out of it. I concede that using the power of nukes to offset the power of a battleship is weird math. Let’s focus on the conventional explosive payloads.
Second, you took that 1 to 1000 comparison while skipping the stated assumption in the example you quote, that ships work in groups like task forces and fleets. Yes, if you spread them out in singletons, then having 100 platforms go in 100 different directions is better than having only 80 platforms, even if each platform is individually more capable.
I said you can’t just count hulls, you have to look at overall capabilities. 100 ships is 100 ships is 100 ships means my 80 ships are inferior to your 100 ships, even if my 80 ships are WWII battleships and your 100 ships are patrol boats.
This is a valid criticism of my statements. There are a number of regions where the ships patrol individually rather than in large groups. There is some benefit to having more numbers of ships over more individually capable ships for this role. However, those situations are not the bulk of active operations, and also, that benefit is offset by the communications improvements modern ships have that allow use of airplanes and satellites to increase their detection patrol coverage, and their weapons capabilities that extend their effective range. If the old ship (1917) is stuck with line of sight surveillance and can only fire on targets within a 4 mile radius, but the new ship (2012) can talk to satellites and aircraft and thus surveil and target in a 40 mile radius, then that new ship is way more capable.
The newest generation ships use more automation, requiring smaller crews to operate.
I’m not saying differently. I’m saying that if you have a successful plan in place that sufficiently accounts for refit, repair, and crew rotations, and you then reduce the number of ships in an intelligent manner such that fleet sizes go down but fleet capabilities remain constant or go up, you do not have to dramatically increase your refit/repair rates. It’s accounted for by the same math, and I even allowed for keeping the same number of ships out of active rotation, for a slightly higher overall tally count than direct scale substitution.
This is a fair concern. Note that Obama has more ships than Bush did. Note that we just launched a new ship last month, the USS Fort Worth, commissioned on Sep 22, 2012.
Note also that that is not directly a number of hulls problem, but a staffing problem. Although I gather from the way Navy logistics works, those are fairly coupled.
Fair enough. I hope you all will remember that I said I gave the cureent administration the benefit of the doubt about what it needs to meet the missions they expect to have to cover.
This is a better question that the absurdly silly comparison which Romney made, but it’s still apples to oranges.
My econ professor (back in the Reagan days) had previously taught at North Dakota and related that among his students were air force pilots. In a lesson on the economic worth of particular jobs vs. their pay, he asked one such pilot what the guy did. The F-14 pilot responded that his job was to keep nuclear armed Soviet bombers out of US airspace. So the professor asked him to quantify his answer, how many bombers did he keep out that day. I love the pilot’s response as reported by the professor – “All of them.”
It’s a different world now and different missions.
The US Navy at it’s most powerful is right now. To consider otherwise is crazy talk. Its more capable, more far-reaching, more technologically advanced and more mobile than ever before. Plus nukes.
We can deploy more (and more advanced) planes than ever before, more subs that are actually quiet and more capable than before (with nukes!), more advanced attack and defense weaponry than ever before (Aegis systems are outdated) and can put forth numbers in a rapid deployment than ever before if necessary.
This doesn’t even take into account our ability to deploy more and better trained Marines in a shorter amount of time, or the ability to project the likes of SEAL teams in rapid response units faster than ever before.
Ya’ll be crazy. Hulls, schmulls. The only scenario where we need MORE ships is in a direct naval confrontation, and that ain’t happening unless China gets uppity.
I know it’s a three year old post, but I think you misremembered the story. There have never been F-14s in the Air Force and certainly not in North Dakota. Also, their role was to intercept threats to US fleets, not to the US mainland. He was probably an F-15 pilot.
This. The 1945 US Navy battle line would never even get within visible range of the modern US Navy battle group before it was sunk.
Also keep in mind that modern US Navy battlegroups include fast attack submarines as escorts. So even if the 1945 battle line did manage to get within gun range of a modern battle group, it would have difficulty keeping its guns on target once the battleships started getting hit (and sunk) by multiple MK-48 ADCAP torpedoes.
While the old battleships might shrug off cruise missile hits with their armor, they would not survive multiple hits from torpedoes that are designed to explode beneath their keels and break their backs. Modern torpedoes are self-guided and rarely miss…and if they do miss, they circle back and re-attack. :eek:
I’ll let robby & the bubbleheads (band name!) sink the 1945 US Navy battleships with torpedoes after the 2012 US Navy battlegroup has blinded them. The battleships turn on their fire control radar or anti-aircraft radar or navigation radar or radios? Seconds later an anti-radiation missile just took out the antennas (and a good bit of the superstructure). Those mighty guns of the battleships aren’t any good unless they know where the target is. With laser guidance, any missile or bomb could take out the superstructure where the eyes and ears are.
Then I’d let the destroyers and cruisers have target practice with their guns (they have launched torpedoes also) on the 1945 ships and then if anything is still floating, turn them over to robby and his subs to finish them off - unless the attached Marines want to do a boarding raid.
Leave this part off. Modern surface ship guns, and especially torpedoes, have ranges of just a few miles, point blank range for the big guns on cruisers and battleships – radar or not.
On review, I didn’t mean the subs. Let them out ahead, and if they have enough torpedoes, you don’t need a surface fleet.
Little known factoid – the US submarine force constituted about 2% of the Navy, but sank more than half of the Japanese ships sunk during the war. And that was with shitty defective torpedoes for the first 3 years.
In terms of firepower, a modern frigate has more than a WWII battleship. take today’s RN-small as it is, it has vastly more power than the entire fleet of WWII. There simply is no comparison.
You should also consider that any modern surface combatant will have helicopters that can drop the same lightweight torpedoes that you mention, so the range of the weapons is greatly more than where the ship happens to be located.
“But wouldn’t a WWII battleship just shoot down the helicopter?” I don’t see how that is possible. The radar on an old surface combatant would be useless, whether by jamming by modern airborne or surface electronic warfare systems. They would probably not see the helicopter coming. And in any case, shooting down a helicopter from 7+ miles away would just be an incredibly improbable thing to happen.
The real modern difference in single-ship-vs-single-ship is the range of modern weapons and sensors. Carriers did for battleships in WWII because 1940s aircraft outranged the 1920’s biggest big guns. The same is even more true today. Claims of competitive capabilities against 70+ years of heavily-funded progress are laughable.
You’ll not be surprised to learn that xkcd: The Past has an entry on point.
To further illustrate the point, there’s a Great Debates thread about the Battle of Leyte Gulf in which the U.S. Navy plain couldn’t find a whole damn Japanese battle group, and was sent on a wild goose chase that very nearly had significant consequences for the battle. If that happened 70 years ago, what assurance does the legacy navy have of ever seeing its modern opponent today? Especially considering that the old navy’s radar would be useless.
