They’ve also had 40+ years of working on countering sea-skimming missiles as well, or at least Western navies have. Radars and radar signal processing has dramatically improved since the Falklands, and modern ships stand a reasonable chance of picking up missiles and being able to shoot them down before it comes down to the Phalanx guns.
From what I’ve read, modern AESA/PESA radars (different phased array approaches) can pick up sea-skimming missiles at roughly 20-30 km, which could be as little as 20-40 seconds out from the ship. This is however far enough out and long enough to fire missiles like Aster-30 or SM-6 Standard missiles at it.
If it gets past those missiles, then the CIWS guns get to work at an effective range of about 1500 yards, firing 20mm tungsten discarding sabot rounds at a rate of 75 per second.
That’s one ship’s response. Most Western navies have integrated air defense systems like AEGIS, which let ships share information and produce a coordinated response.
Side note… It does amuse me a little that all the Soviet propaganda and bullshit about their weapon capability back through the 1990s seems to have backfired a bit, in that Western countries believed it and built systems and procedures to counter those inflated capabilities, and for the past 30 years, we’ve seen Western weapons systems consistently curb-stomp Soviet stuff and post-Soviet upgrades as a result.
That is a dubious claim, especially at the beginning of the war, when the performance of the IJN was absolutely the equal of the USN. Midway went badly, but the Japanese did quite well in a lot of other engagements. The IJN was a more progressive, forward-thinking organization than the Japanese army, that’s for sure. You kinda have to be.
At some point during the war, the USN took the lead as having the best sailors at Damage Control. That was very important. As far as I can recall, the US took the lead from the Royal Navy and not the Imperial Navy.
Hell, even at Midway, they came close to saving the Yorktown and if the Yorktown didn’t take the final torpedo hits probably would have made it back to Pearl for repairs.
IMO, of the 5 carriers lost at Midway, only Yorktown might have been saved by better damage control. She wasn’t, so that’s not a glowing example of superior damage control.
I thought the Akagi took only one direct hit and there was an absolute failure at containing the fires. That sounds pretty bad. What am I missing? It isn’t like I have access to detailed DC reports for any of the ships. I just know the Yorktown nearly survived thanks to DC efforts.
The Yorktown’s crew had already demonstrated excellent DC efforts after the Battle of the Coral Sea.
The IJN carriers were hit in their hangars while the hangars were full of gassed and armed aircraft. The resulting fires were beyond the 1942 abilities of any nation’s DC to control. Even in 1945, American DC was barely sufficient to save Franklin from such a fire. Fires like that would be a challenge for modern firefighting.
Yorktown’s damage on the 4th may have been survivable. Abandoned, she stayed afloat for almost a day before a DC team reboarded. A day had been lost due to the mistaken assessment that her sinking was imminent. By the 6th, they were draining engineering spaces in hopes of restoring some propulsion. I-168’s torpedoes then doomed her. We don’t know what could have been achieved with another day to effect repairs.
Specific to the Akagi, what is now regarded as the single hit struck a weak spot (the midships elevator), penetrated to the upper hangar deck and exploded on top of a number of B5N bombers that were either armed with torpedoes or in the process of arming*. The blast also blew flaming debris into the lower hangar deck, and probably destroyed the tanks for the CO2 system that might have stemmed the fire in the lower hangar deck long enough to put it out. Additionally, one of the main IJN tactics for fighting fires — isolating the affected area using rolling fireproof screens — was rendered inoperative since the screens in that area were destroyed by the initial explosion.
As it turned out, all four IJN carriers at Midway had what turned out to be fatal flaws when it came to survivability. Akagi and Kaga were older retrofits (from a battlecruiser and battleship respectively), and like many such hybrids they suffered from the compromises necessary to shoehorn carrier functions into a non-carrier structure; Soryu and Hiryu, while newer and purpose-built, sacrificed protection for speed and aircraft capacity.
Finally, while (as has been noted) even at this stage of the war the entire crew of a US ship was trained and drilled to some extent in damage control, in the IJN DC was the province of engineering specialists. Especially on the Kaga and Soryu these specialists were decimated in the initial attacks, rendering attempts to contain the damage ineffective at best.
* In addition, the B5Ns had initially been armed with 800kg bombs in anticipation of a strike on Midway. Since these bombs could not be struck below to the magazines while torpedoes were being brought up, they were on the hangar deck as well.
I can’t think of anything that could be considered a fatal flaw for any of the Japanese carriers. Maybe that Kaga was too slow? They succumbed to hangar fires just like several American carriers.
Nor did their designers favor offensive characteristics over defensive ones, vs the designers of US carriers. Consider the 2 ships which are most comparable, Hiryu and Yorktown. The US ship could sail farther, carried more planes and more avgas; all offensive advantages. The IJN ship, though 10% smaller, had defensive advantages: more armor, 50% more heavy AA, nearly double the light AA, and higher speed*.
*I consider high speed to be primarily a defensive asset for a carrier. Full power was typically called for when under attack, as it made the ship harder to hit. Soryu and Hiryu were so fast they could outrun torpedoes.
The big thing is to keep it afloat because that’s where you live. Next, get it back to fighting trim or, failing that, allow it to make it back to port for repairs.
I have an engineering background, so I’m not completely ignorant of the physics involved. But I never really had a sense for how strong or delicate large ships actually are. Sometimes they seem like they can take an unsustainable amount of damage before sinking, if they even sink at all (like the Stark, Forrester, or Bismark). Other times, even ‘unsinkable’ ships seem like they go down very quickly or explode into bits if they get hit the wrong way (like the Titanic or the Hood).
Coming back to this and trying to restore the conversation about damage control and how it relates to the culture of the navies.
Drachinifel’s assessment of damage control capabilities (an hour-long video, but is interesting if you are interested in the subject) is that the USN started WWII with somewhat of a lead over IJN, but because of the USN’s culture in general, its approach to DC efforts and other material factors it rapidly became much, much better over the next few years of the war. While Japan did make improvements, they weren’t as great as the USN and the IJN soon found itself losing anyway and becoming irrelevant by the end of the war.
Looking at the factors which helped the US and hindered Japan, it’s likely that the Russians may have similar navy cultures to Japan, which would be to their detriment.
The IJN was much more hierarchal, with much stricter disciple for not performing duties as expected. Drachinifel sees this as as a negative, as it tends to inhibit spontaneous actions even without direct orders. As example would be a person assigned to a AA gun who may tend to remain at station even after the danger has passed, rather than go and join the firefighting efforts.
OTOH, the idea that all hands are part of DC was paramount in the USN, and people were allowed more independence. The well-known improvement by a Yorktown crewmember to drain the AV gas lines and replace with CO2, an inert gas, came directly from the disaster of Lexington at Coral Sea. That crewmember wasn’t part of the DC team, and it wasn’t his job to design it, but he had an idea which helped initially save Yorktown at Midway. as well as many other carriers.
Poorly trained, strictly disciplined constricts, such as what Russia seems to use, would probably be more similar to the IJN than the USN.
The USN designed the carriers with redundancy and reliability in the DC systems. For example, the Japan had two fire mains on carriers, one for starboard and one for port, but they were made of cast iron which tended to break where the USN designs were made so that damage in one area wouldn’t knock down the entire side. Various valves could be shut and damaged pipes would be bypassed to allow water to keep flowing.
Also, the systems were carefully documented in manuals, which allowed more people to effectively use them.
In contrast, the IJN had DC specialists and while everyone would pitch in during an emergency, they weren’t as well trained.
Because the IJN DC teams were specialists, when they were killed or injured by a bomb then the response wasn’t as effective. This can be seen in Midway on Kaga which lost the DC team in the attack, and had a high number of casualties among the crew members because the fires spread rapidly, where Akagi team wasn’t hit and had fewer casualties because the fires didn’t spread as quickly.
As can be seen in the quote above, the US spread the teams out throughout the ship and they were less vulnerable to being killed or injured. Also, they had them lay down during the attack for safety. That would be inconceivable on Japanese ships.
I haven’t read anything about the Russian or Soviet navies, but it seems they have many accidents over the years.
It doesn’t appear that they have the same culture in their navy concerning safety and DC.
Likewise, if a fire breaks out, you want whoever’s closest to immediately take action against it, fighting it, calling in the alarm, or both. Which they can’t do if they’re still busy doing their regular job.
Nitpick: It wasn’t some enlisted crewman nor even a low-ranking officer but rather an engineer officer in charge of the fueling systems.
The Yorktown ’s acting executive officer, Commander Irving D. Wiltsie, later reported one reason the carrier had escaped more extensive damage: Shortly before the dive bombers had attacked, “all gasoline in the topside gasoline lines was pumped back down to the gasoline tanks. . . . [A] CO2 purging system for the topside gasoline lines and a CO2 blanket for the gasoline tank compartments” prevented a serious conflagration. Machinist Oscar W. Myers, the air fuel officer, had developed the carbon-dioxide purging system to expel vapors.14 This lesson had been learned from the loss of the USS Lexington (CV-2) at Coral Sea.
Still, his main job wasn’t DC – he just thought it might be a good idea to get the bad stuff down below when the ordnance started flying around. I doubt his IJN counterpart would have gotten that far out of his lane.
For many years after WW2 the loss of Ark Royal was used as a teaching exercise at the RN’s damage control school (together with a large floodable model). The board of enquiry held that prompt and audacious counterflooding would have saved the ship, also that the theory and practice of damage control needed to be much more widely disseminated among ships’ companies.
The person claims to be a Danish military analyst with a background in their navy.
The believes that operator fatigue could have been a cause, and has a few interesting points. I don’t know enough about modern systems to vet this, but it looks interesting.
First, he notes that the Neptune skims at low altitude an claims that this is below the radar of their S-300 AA system and would be visible for only about two minutes.
He says that Russian device interfaces were dated and difficult to monitor by humans and user fatigue would become a problem. He shows the interface and notes the difficulty.
As they have been at war for weeks and weeks not with no action, it would be hard to maintain constant vigilance.
Note that the US Navy has two destroyers damaged recently with part of the problem as operator error. I can’t imagine that Russian conscripts would do much better.
Back to the video, the analysist thinks it’s more likely that the Ukrainians didn’t use a drone to distract Moskva but rather let them remain unaware unit the missiles popped up and used active search radar at the very end.
Here is another video discussing the sinking.
This has some video from the 2008 engagement between the Nanuchka-class corvette Mirazh and the Georgian Stenka-class cutter Giorgi Toreli and shows the crew performance in a firefight. The crew are shirtless, not wearing protective gear and are just hanging around rather than at battle stations. All very casual.
At one point, a crewmember pounds on the gauges to fix a problem.
Without watching the video, I’ll just say that doesn’t seem like a very controversial claim. Although automated systems are possible, and even exist, I have no idea what the level of automated detection capability is (or rather was) on Moskva, much less how reliable it may have been even when functioning. False positives, for instance, are entirely possible and may be a major barrier to rapid response even where the radar and associated processing systems are working well. False positives are also why, even where automated responses is theoretically possible, there is an extraordinary reluctance to engage such features because you’re just one spurious blip away from firing of live ordinance (of limited quantity) at a wisp of sea spray.
So, yeah, given the need for human oversight and intervention, fatigue will be a factor in any Navy. And that’s even if the necessary systems are operating. Given what we’ve learned about Russia’s overall level of material readiness on land, I would not assume that conditions are necessarily better at sea. And even if they were, they might just have assumed, erroneously as it happens, that they were operating in a permissive environment and so did not need to be in an elevated condition of operational or personnel readiness.
