In fairness, your questions were patently ridiculous. But I agree, I posed a stupid question because there’s no military in the world that would spend billions on a weapons system with a going-in operational availability rate of less than 10%. It’s a patently silly question, but it is even more outlandish that anyone would say, “Sure, that sounds like a good idea!”
And your criticism is fallacious. Operational warfare is of course about adaptation, requirements for weapons system is basically the complete opposite of adaptation. In a requirements sense, anyone competent would look at the other factors of DOTMLPF before seeking a materiel solution (especially in my silly question, in which there are extreme costs for extremely limited utility).
You proposed an ill-conceived February hypothetical. You can’t use that and then complain that your poor choice of an example drove a response that was equally silly.
I’m not sure you understand the term “operational availability,” or it doesn’t mean what you think it means. You asked if I’d buy a weapons system that was only would only be used 8% of the time and I responded to that. Now you want to change that discussion to one that asks if I’d support a weapons system that is only functional “less than 10%” of the time. These are two separate and distinct discussions. From my limited experience with the BBs and my understanding of their maintenance, their readiness when deployed was high - higher than the norm for surface combatants. So in answer to your question, all other things equal, I would buy a weapons system that I needed only 8% of the time. I still wouldn’t buy one that was operational available less than 10% of the time.
There are many weapons systems that are very specialized, and can only be used in very specific cases. Most of them are. From that perspective - the one you appear to be attempting to use - I don’t think that it’s a convincing argument against the BBs. We see more and more weapons systems that are trying to be all things to all people (see JSF and LCS) and they’re failures. Big ticket failures. (although in fairness to JSF, the verdict still isn’t completely in on that.)
The BBs have a place in the war fighting plans of DoN. The Marine Corps has been complained about the lack of support from Navy in amphibs and NGFS for the last decade. The question is it financially viable. In that case, the answer is a resounding “no.”
No, I didn’t say that the ship would only be used 8% of the time. I said it COULD only be used 8% of the time. The rest of the year it doesn’t work. That was the scenario. But it’s absurd to accuse me of changing the question after you gave a patently absurd response to an absurd question. Maybe you didn’t understand the question when I wrote it?
One of the points that has been brought up but not thoroughly addressed is the survivability of a battleship.
Considering the “modernized Iowa” scenario: is 12-18" of steel really much use against modern weapons? Off the top of my head, that kind of armor was pretty good protection against armor piercing shells and ordinary high explosive bombs. So yeah, it’d also protect against most contemporary anti-ship missiles.
But my WAG is that it’d be relatively trivial to come up with armor-piercing, shaped-charge warheads for anti-ship missiles. After all, contemporary main battle tanks have composite armor that is supposed to be comparable to steel armor 1-2 feet thick; and yet are still vulnerable to the relatively small shaped charges of anti-tank missiles.
I suspect a 500+ kg armor-piercing shaped charge would be able to blow a hole in anything capable of floating.
I brought that up earlier, and many here didn’t concur, but I think they’re wrong.
In a nutshell, BBs were meant to be as survivable as possible against other BBs. But over the last 70 years, surface combatants have become less and less hardened. They have become faster, they have more countermeasures, better sonar and radar. But they don’t have more firepower. And ships today aren’t armed to destroy a BB, they are armed to destroy other thin hulled ships. They don’t have more destructive firepower. Hell and FFG, a thin hulled USN throwaway ship survived two hits by an Exocet.
I think BBs survivability is seriously underrated here.
An Exocet has a pretty small warhead though, only 165 kg of high explosive. Heavier anti-ship missiles have 450-1000 kg warheads. Would an Iowa-class battleship survive a hit from one of those?
After a quick run through Wiki, I see that it took many hits from <500 kg bombs and torpedoes to sink the Japanese battleships. But that’s with ordinary high explosives.
With modern armor-piercing warheads, I suspect even a missile like the Hellfire (with a mere 9 kg HEAT warhead) could at least penetrate battleship armor. There are existing ~500 kg bunker-busting warheads on cruise missiles, which used multiple stage shaped charges to penetrate some meters of reinforced concrete. What would those do to a battleship?
My WAG is that battleship-piercing warheads could be quickly developed and placed on anti-ship missiles. Much quicker than anyone could build or refit a battleship.
OTOH, even if the armor isn’t invulnerable, it could assist survivability. The heavy anti-ship missiles, which could cripple any unarmored ship, might not do as much damage using an armor-piercing warhead. Rather than blowing the entire structure of the ship apart, they’d poke holes in a few individual compartments.
What is the state-of-the-art today of supersonic (?) torpedoes? Is there any validity to the notion of causing an explosion under a ship, so the cavity/vacuum breaks its keel?
Also, the BB’s big guns aren’t highly armored; a relatively little explosion can take away part of its firepower. (Yeah, I know, same is true of tanks, and relatively few tanks get put out of combat by hits on their guns.)
Older generation Soviet/Russian AShM’s generally did have shaped charge warheads*. The newer ones seem to more often have semi-AP/HE warheads.
The warheads in either case would not necessarily be optimized for the thick armor of a battleship, why would they be for such a rare target of such little threat relatively speaking? But the idea that BB’s could absorb hits by big AShM’s, especially multiple hits, and continue their missions is nonsensical. That much is obvious and not really dependent on in-the-weeds details about particular AShM’s.
*for example for the air launched Kh-22 ‘Burya’, the shaped charge warhead was claimed to burn through the compartments of a simulated (presumably a/c carrier) target to a depth of 12m. http://vs.milrf.ru/armament/marine/krm_x22.htm
Because it’s really cheap and easy to make new warhead for an AShM. If the US were to deploy some sort of battleships, Russia and China would quickly and cheaply make some to have the capability of sinking the battleships. Putting a better armor penetration warhead and tweaking the targetting system a bit isn’t going to take a lot of time, research, or expertise, certainly it’s going to be way less than the multi-year process to build a new large ship from scratch. And in addition to making them for their own use, they’d gladly sell them to any countries they already sell anti-ship weapons to, increasing the chance of someone successfully using one to give the USN a significant setback and make the US look weak to the world.
The idea that no one would respond to a massive, expensive, prestigious project like the USN building battleships doesn’t make a lot of sense.
A HEAT warhead is a way for a slow moving missile like an anti tank missile or RPG to penetrate armor without being fast. The new big AShMs are already very fast at the terminal stage so HEAT isn’t really necessary. The problem with the “carrier killing” AshMs like the Kh-22 is that they are huge, ten times the size of an Exocet and the size of small jet fighters. The only things that can launch them are land based launchers, fairly large (destroyer size) surface ships, subs or large bombers. There are really only 3 countries in the world that have bombers of that size, the US, Russia and China which recently started producing new Tu-16s specifically to carry huge AShMs - everything on the new Tu-16s not necessary for this mission, like the bomb bay, have been eliminated.
The problem then is that you still need to carry your huge AShM to within range, and the fighters on the carrier are still going to get to your bomber/destroyer before you can get in range. So a carrier still has the upper hand, but a battleship without a carrier’s air cover would be a sitting duck.
Earlier generation Soviet AShM’s with shaped charge warheads were often quite fast, Kh-22 was an example, Mach 2.4. Also a semi-AP warhead is not like an AP or sabot projectile of an anti-tank gun. It isn’t just limited in penetration capability by speed but by the strength of the warhead, just like a ‘common’ or HE shell won’t necessarily penetrate a tank no matter how fast you propel it: at a certain point it breaks up before penetrating. So the speed analogy with anti-tank projectiles doesn’t correctly translate to large AShM designs’ warhead choices.
But as I said, just pointing out that a number of AShM’s do have shaped charge warheads, so yes it’s no problem to develop and deploy them.
Nor is it a discussion of the general supposed strengths and weaknesses of past Soviet or current Russian or Chinese capability against USN carriers all together, which includes a lot of unknowns and unprovable contentions by fans of either the offense or the defense.
The key point is that it’s nonsense when people claim or imply battleships could shrug off hits from big AShM’s because of their armor, even if the missiles weren’t optimized as anti-BB armor weapons. And fairly big AShM’s are not limited to Russia and China, but have been proliferated to a number of other countries, and battleships would operate (with any effect) relatively near shore, long range a/c aren’t the only launch platforms. As just one example Syria has the Russian ‘Bastion’ coast defense system using P-800 Mach 2.5 AShM’s, with ‘only’ 500kg warheads, but a BB shrug off hits by those? No. You don’t have to penetrate the vitals of an armored ship, the limited areas protected by such armor, to ‘mission kill’ it, as was repeatedly demonstrated in the armored ship era.
And anyway, the point of these anti-armor missiles isn’t to kill the Battleship, it’s to prevent the Battleship from just parking itself on your coast and shelling you with impunity. The mere existence of the threat of these countermeasures means you can’t risk your multi-billion dollar ship unless the mission is so critical it has to be done even if the battleship ends up on the bottom with all hands.
But if WWIII breaks out in 20 years, and we’ve got this modern gold-plated battleship, how many amphibious invasions of Russia or China are we going to be doing? The answer is zero. Zero landings, because your Operation Overlord 2.0 is going to be seriously disrupted by all the nuclear bombs going off, such that preserving the United States as a functioning state is going to take everything we’ve got, and if we had an amphibious expeditionary force we should be sending it home at full speed to assist with disaster recovery. And that beachhead you were going to land the marines on? Why not turn it into a giant radioactive crater instead? Oh, and if you manage to land the marines on that beachhead anyway? It turns into another giant radioactive crater as the enemy nukes your expeditionary force.
In any case where we wish we had a battleship to throw cheap shells instead of expensive missiles at goatherds in caves, the battleship is too expensive. In any case where cost doesn’t matter because it’s WWIII, the battleship just gets nuked.
If that’s the case, than we can stop all discussions on war fighting. Because once the nukes start flying, none of these weapons systems matter.
But on the other hand, there have been nukes for over 70 years now, and they’ve not been used in an operational since, well, ever. (They were used strategically only in my opinion). So I think we have to have all of these debates with the caveat that nukes aren’t going to be used.
Just as an aside: I visited the USS North Carolina today. Amazing ship. Sixteen inch guns are truly awesome-looking engines of destruction. Obviously, the question in today’s world is: could such a ship be kept floating long enough to be useful in a serious war? But wow, what a ship!
This ain’t the russian navy bringing a tug with them, where ever they go. But if the USN heads to the sounds of the guns, then the fleet will bring the rain. You have to see the BB first, no so easy. Everyone has been trying to spot the carriers for a long time, and its not easy, so now as an adversary, you have to let the fleet get into knife fighting range, simply to be able to take a shot at it. The problem with that is, your ships are either sunk already or running for antartica, and now all you are really left with is shore batteries, and as soon as they light up their search radars, there is a stop watch running as to how much time remaining they have.
Maybe you’re kidding, but if not your question is really how could a missile developed in the 1960’s get close to ships armed with defensive weapons that don’t even exist yet in operational form? Depends on your imagination, like any other case of giving future super weapons as an answer to long existing threats. And who knows, maybe 50+ yrs of further development might even have made the latest AShM’s a little harder to shoot down than Kh-22.
Anyway your point goes back to the general theme of surface ship (including carrier) survivability. But that’s a different, harder and more obscure, question than whether WWII type BB’s, either the existing museum pieces or somehow building new ones from keel up, have a role to play commensurate with the huge cost (either of those ways) and huge crew requirement. The answer to that is obviously not.