You’ll have mini-battleships suited for littoral fighting. They will revert to the speed-armor-firepower formula as applied to BB’s before. I’m surprised naval designers are sticking to the speed-firepower-stealth for littoral combat units.
A Navy SSGN submarine can carry 154 missiles with a great degree of stealth. Current surface combatants (both the Burke class and Zumwalt class) can each carry several dozen missiles. Since our most capable naval adversary, China, has something like a couple hundred surface combatants that we would be concerned about, how many missiles do you think one ship needs?
Well, they also weren’t that useful.
He said “since” meaning “after” the war. Obviously they had more practice during the war itself.
Well that depends on what you want them to be useful for.
For the Marines and Army within 20 miles of shore they were damn useful.
If I designed an impressive weapon that could only be used during the month of February, would you buy it?
You scaled the time frame wrong. One month a year or 8.3% of the time is plenty of deployment, considering most weapons wait years before tasting actual combat. One acquires weapons based on probable frequency and severity of need.
I think you’re explaining your thoughts poorly, because I can’t make heads or tails of what you wrote.
Are you saying that you would buy a weapon that was useless in 11 months out of the year?
Well, we do have militarized snowmobiles, so, yeah (kinda.)
(Not a serious rebuttal, just a quip.)
It’s pointless answering a question like that directly. There have been a lot of weapons designed for just one use and that’s it. Not all weapons are manufactured at constant volume and standard features. Specialized one-time weapons exist (at least in mind) and are waiting to be built or assembled at a moment’s call.
Give me five contemporaneous examples.
Well, there’s the Sphere of Annihilation, the Battle Analyzer, and the Exponential Field, for starters.
Nuclear:
Tsar Bomba - 54 megatons (tested only)
Castle Bravo - 15 megatons (tested only)
Non-nuclear:
GBU-28 (bunker buster) - two used at Desert Storm
GBU-43 (MOAB) - tested only, 15 units produced
FOAB (Russian counterpart of MOAB - no data
Back in the day, I once managed to get an *Iowa *class BB into a Soviet task force while playing the original “Harpoon” game. Managed to sink like 8 ships with guns before the battleship itself sank. It was on fire and heavily damaged (probably sinking) before coming into gun range, but once it opened up, it was insane by the game’s standards. None of that “on fire” or other damaged and possibly sinking business- just outright destruction.
Not that it proves anything, but it’s something I definitely remember being interesting. And in terms of actual gameplaying, it wasn’t terribly effective, as it basically took me losing the game just to contrive the situation where I could get the BB to grips with the enemy ships at gun range.
In ideal worlds with optimal information and fairly equal sides this might be true. But the real world isn’t the same as the game world…I recently saw a video of the Iranian Navy attacking a mockup of a carrier with a bunch of smaller frigates and even smaller ships at relatively close range (20 miles or less). I’ve seen similar things about North Korea and some other countries. I think there is still a place in the Navy for having a gun on a ship, and considering the strides made on both range and, more important, guided munitions technology, I think this will remain the case. In addition, there are more missions for the Navy than simply combating other countries navies in blue water engagements that are at rough parity with the US.
None of this is to say that a pure gun armed ship or battleship is a good idea. I still don’t think we need ships with batteries of the things on them. But a ship with a single large long range gun firing guided munitions? There is still a role for that in the US Navy. Probably why the Navy still has 5" guns on ships and is developing things like the rail gun or other long range guided munitions. When you feel the need to send the very best, certainly use a missile. But maybe you don’t want to sink or otherwise pound something at the cost of several million dollars a shot sometimes, and you want to save those for targets that warrant them.
Do you know if there is a modern version of your board game? It would be interesting if they have updated it with the new rail guns or if they still feel like even 100-150 nautical miles is too short a range for such a weapon to be viable.
If I didn’t have a weapon that worked in February, and I thought I’d have to fight in February, damn straight I’d buy it.
If I designed an impressive weapon that could only used by infantry that could only kill other infantry within 500 yards would you buy it?
If I designed an impressive weapon that could only be used underwater and launch nuclear missiles would you buy it?
What does it do, make blacks history?
By “ballistic”, do you mean missiles that fly so high they can’t use control surfaces to steer in midphase? What’s are the advantages of ballistic missiles as opposed to the other kinds of missiles?
What advantages aside from not putting all your eggs in the same basket?
How much/what kind of specialization do you foresee happening in such a network?
How do you know if you’re going to have a fight in February when you’re making a decision to buy a weapon that will only be operational years after you ask for it? Wouldn’t the enemy simply adapt to the limitations of that weapon?
Considering the ground forces are the only way we know to seize and hold territory, yes.
Considering that it is the most effective deterrent for nuclear war, yes.
Not a chance. They are too old, and slow. And too big of a target. Battleships are now history.
Smaller ships ( cheaper to build ) can do just as much damage with missiles, and the similar guns. And they are much more mobile, and harder to detect.
The Navy actually has some radical stuff. Laser guns that can set a small craft on fire, radar evading shapes for boats, and magnetic rail guns that fire at super sonic speeds. At the speed that gun travels, the damage with the shell is enough no explosive is needed.
With this strategy, you’d never buy a weapons system. The entire art of warfare is based on adaptation. You create, he adapts, you adapt. Repeat. Is this really a new concept to you? How do you think mankind evolved from throwing rocks?
Seriously, that just isn’t a great question.
You buy a weapons system to fill a gap in your capabilities or to exploit a gap in your enemies. Then you prioritize based on funding, industrial capability, tradeoffs due to those factors, the likelihood of use and a litany of other factors.
I’ve stated that I don’t think we should bring them back. They are very, very expensive, largely due to fuel, manpower, training and maintenance costs. When they were built, fuel and manpower were free. Not the case now.
But . . . they have survivability on their side, and if (a big if) you felt you’d have to make an opposed large scale landing or fight a significant amount of time on the littoral, the BB would have to be considered. I don’t think it would ever be brought back, but under the correct circumstances above, you could make the case.