A good example of adaptability was a M4 tank (known as the "Sherman") which his numerous different powerplants. US military wasn't sure, which powerplants would be better and which would be available in required numbers, when they designed M4 - after all, US tank industry was basically re-creating itself after many years of only small-scale production! - and thus they wanted to be sure that at least SOME model works. So they designed M4 in such way, that it could easily be fitted with different poweplants on generally similar models. And it worked pefectly)
The Sherman also incorporated high reliability and superior ergonomics. A tank being sent across the Atlantic or Pacific can't be sent back to factory for rebuild. It must run as long as possible in the worst conditions, and be easily repaired when it finally does break. It must be easy for the crew to fight and live in. How much more so a ship needs these attributes!
German tanks were of middling success but were never produced in the numbers needed. Contrary to popular belief, they were not produced the way American tanks were. If someone in the factory had a way apply a better mousetrap to the vehicle it would just be adopted starting with the next tank coming off the line. Often the necessary parts to repair said vehicle might not make it to the front for months. It was more like clockmaker's shop, where no two tanks were exactly alike. They might (or might not) work better on the battlefield, but they were a nightmare for the logisticians who had to keep them in the fight.
Another aspect of both the M3 Stuart Tank and M4 Sherman tank was the ability to modify a basic design for another useful product and, at the same time, not greatly expand the logistical tail (e.g. spare parts, fuel, etc.). The M3 was also used for assault howitzers, mortar carriers, an SP anti-aircraft tank, artillery tractors for towing heavy guns, a recovery vehicle, and a number of different engineering vehicles. Not all were adopted but you get the idea. And the M4 had even more uses from tank destroyers to SP howitzers, recovery vehicles, engineer vehicles and even a heavy, better protected armored personnel carrier.
CDR Sal, great job breaking down our problem to component parts and identifying the "what" needs to be done to alleviate, and potentially solve it. This quote from your post is key: "...can this weapon be built, repaired, and replenished faster than it will be destroyed? If the answer is no, no amount of acquisition reform, contracting flexibility, or urgency memos will save it." This is the challenge faced by the administration / DoW in general and Hegseth in particular. The system is based upon JCIDS (yes, it's still being followed, despite reports of its demise), the acquisition bible, and GS / contractor types wedded to it. Toss in the revolving door flag officer retirements to prime boards and congressional satisfaction with the money flow into their campaign coffers and jobs in their districts and change is...meeting multi-faceted resistance. Industry is looking at capacity buildup, not capacity re-direct like WWII, and even the 80s cold war. All of this takes time...years if not decades. We have a steep hill to climb, potentially little time to do it, and an adversary who is watching closely and weighing his options and their timing very carefully. "What" is critical to this problem, and you defined it. "How" is...problematic...without some "creative destruction" to the current system, IMO.
The one thing that I didn't see discussed in your excellent article is something that drives contemporary warfighting doctrine, and to a greater and greater degree with every war.
The human element.
You (unconsciously, I assume) tiptoed past the issue in discussing the logic of the Sherman tank.
You wrote--or quoted with implicit approval, I'm not quite sure, but it's not relevant--this: "The Sherman tank wasn’t designed to win one-on-one duels against the most advanced enemy armor. It was designed to be built quickly in enormous quantities and to be easily repaired in the field. *The result was a tank that could be produced and replaced faster than adversaries could destroy it.*" [my emphasis]
That's a sound philosophy...unless, of course, you happen to be *in* one of those tanks when a PaK-88 pokes a giant hole through it.
I'm old enough to remember the ululations over the 68k we lost in Vietnam. Even then, that was pretty much a day in the park by WW2 standards. Indeed the comparison was often made that we lost more to highway fatalities every year than we lost in our twelve-year Excellent Southeast Asian Adventure.
And that sensibility only gets worse every year. In 1983 (IIRC), we lost 241 Marines when a suicide bomber blew himself up during our effort to bring a ceasefire in the Lebanese Civil War. As a result, we pulled out and never returned. I daresay our opponents were watching.
And since then, pretty much all our wars have been small-footprint, low-casualty ones (the ensuing "nation-building"...not so much).
Even our erstwhile adversaries have evidently succumbed to this sensibility. Every time I read about the "massive casualties" both sides have supposedly incurred in the Ukrainian War, I shake my head and think, to the Russians of seventy years ago, those would have been a day in the life.
Indeed the whole manpower aspect of the Ukrainian War seems almost hallucinatory. I haven't looked up the figures lately, but I'll venture to guess the Russians brought maybe one-tenth of the forces they had in 1941 when the Germans invaded and sliced through them like soft butter.
So while I understand your argument and to some degree endorse it, it does have the whiff of Franklin Spinney and the 1970s push toward smaller and cheaper--but necessarily less survivable--weapon systems.
Again...I make no accusations nor am I trying to play gotcha games. But I would welcome a discussion of the tradeoffs between--say--more *Ticos* and *Burkes* versus more FFGs in terms of survivability.
The only comfort I take in a war against China is that they are likely to be more casualty averse than we are. All their vessels are manned by, their planes are flown by, Little Princes. Momma San will not be happy with their loss. And it is never, ever, a good idea to piss off Momma San.
You are missing the point. Filial piety. The family is number one and anyone risking its future is a problem. As much as that is a pressure everywhere, ours pails in comparison.
Erm, I should point out, that when M4 "Sherman" was designed and developed, the "most advanced" enemy tank it could meet was Pz.IV with short-barreled 75-mm gun. Against which even admittedly less capable (but still good) M3 "Lee" was working perfectly fine. So when M4 was developed, it was superior to all Axis armor in service - and when it was deployed, it was still superior to all mass-produced Axis armor. Only "Tiger" and "Panther" heavy tanks were a problem for Sherman's, and they weren't exactly mass-produced ones.
A bigger mistake from the American point was, that they decided against producing and deploying heavy tanks in 1942-1943; that costs them dearly later, because as assault weapon for storming heavily-defended positions M4 "Sherman" wasn't exactly suitable.
I believe you're misreading my comment. I said nothing about tank-on-tank: I referenced the German PaK-88, originally FlaK-88 which was designed as an anti-air weapon (FlaK--"Flugzeug-Abwehr-Kanone") and repurposed as early as 1941 to an anti-tank weapon (PaK--"Panzer-Abwehr-Kanone") against the Russian KV-1.
If the Americans weren't aware of that I can only assume their friends the Sovs didn't bother mentioning it.
Famous story: a German officer is being interrogated after being captured during the breakout from the Normandy beachhead. He explains that the Americans kept sending tanks against his position--a PaK-88 battery--and that every time an American tank popped up out of defile, they'd kill it.
The American interrogation officer then asks, so...why are you here in captivity? To which the German shrugs and responds, we ran out of shells before you ran out of tanks.
I was referring to the point of "The Sherman tank wasn’t designed to win one-on-one duels against the most advanced enemy armor". Actually, it was (albeit in American doctrine of WW2, there were a special tank destroyers to dealt with enemy armor).
The FlaK-88 was perfectly known to Americans, since it was used by Germans even before the war, and already noted to be used as anti-tank weapon in Poland and France. It just wasn't considered to be too great problem, because FlaK-88 were not exactly the best battlefield weapon; they were heavy, took a long time to deploy, and could be easily targeted by excellent American artillery.
The PaK-88 - to be exact, PaK-43 - appeared in service only mid-war, and wasn't exactly viewed as great sucsess either. While it was good in defense of static positions (as you described), it was hard to move (especially considering that German half-tracked gun tractors were crappy) and, again, vulnerable.
That's fine, but your response appeared in my activity feed as "Dilandu replied to your post," so you may simply have hit the wrong "Reply" button.
Anyhow, vulnerable or no, the 88 could put pretty much any tank it hit into the ground, as attested in the aforementioned interrogation story.
If the Germans had been able to manufacture more of them--and perhaps more to the point, the nickel-plated shells they used--we might have had serious problems, excellent artillery or no.
But that's pretty much the story of German WW2 weapons manufacturing: overengineered, finicky, not built for reliability, maintainability, or producibility.
M-4 Mediums were infantry support in their primary role.
The anti Tank duels was supposed to be and was by the M-36, 10 , 18 and the half track GMC.
The US could have used a heavy tank and did field the M-4 Jumbo I believe the reasoning was shipping, for every heavy two or more M-4 Med. could be shipped, But don't quote me on that.
"You wrote--or quoted with implicit approval, I'm not quite sure, but it's not relevant--this: "The Sherman tank wasn’t designed to win one-on-one duels against the most advanced enemy armor. It was designed to be built quickly in enormous quantities and to be easily repaired in the field. *The result was a tank that could be produced and replaced faster than adversaries could destroy it.*" [my emphasis]
That's a sound philosophy...unless, of course, you happen to be *in* one of those tanks when a PaK-88 pokes a giant hole through it."
This argument has a serious flaw -- the "deathtrap Sherman" was a meme, not reality. By the numbers, the Sherman had the best crew-survival rates of any armored vehicle in the entire war, bar none.
Unlike the T-34, "cheap and plentiful" does not *have* to mean low-survivability. One of the things that made the Sherman the best tank at keeping its crews alive was that high-scale, distributed production made it possible to *iterate* in a way that looks almost like todays software CD/CI process -- every Sherman coming off the line had "bugfixes" over the ones that came off the same line a month before. The switch to wet stowage being one easy example. The improvements in the hatches being another.
And each upgraded Sherman could still maintain enough parts commonality with the older models that it wasn't instantly lethal to the supply and maintenance chain keeping them in the fight. Of course, part of *that* was that the production scale didn't apply just to the *tanks*, but also to the entire supply chain(s) of subsystems and components behind them. And at the time, the US also had the logistical lift capacity to get that insane variety of spare parts to where they were needed most.
I appreciate it, but my days of going down this sort of rabbit-hole are well behind me.
In any event the discussion about the Sherman was intended to reflect an issue entirely unrelated to its actual performance--the more so that we can only talk about its overall survivability *post hoc*.
As I said originally, if you were on the other side of the 88 poking holes in your tank, whatever the guys back home thought wasn't topmost on your mind.
Which was in support of my point that talking about combat effectiveness in terms of cost-effectiveness is a categorical error.
We are not Russia: we value human life too much to recklessly put it at risk in wartime.
In that sense the Germans had it right: they just went nuts with the "next big thing" *while they were actually fighting a war*.
Cost/effectiveness is a sliding scale, not a binary choice. And influenced strongly by externalities, like availability. Right now, the new Legend-based frigate is a sub-optimal design for a potential fight with the PLAN, but right now it's about the best we can actually *build* in anything like a timely manner, in numbers sufficient to matter. And, hopefully, re-learn enough about shipbuilding in the process to make it to the next step on the tech tree (to abuse a video game analogy). Building those small fry will, if done right, start growing back the shipbuilding industrial and skill base. Hopefully.
The trick is to find a workable *balance* -- you *have* to have numbers, but you *also* have to have quality. The Sherman may have been outclassed 1v1 against the "big cats", but not by such a margin that US forces had to resort to "Sherman wave attacks" to make up the difference. They *did* often need a numbers advantage, but they *had* that thanks to better manufacturability and maintainability.
Vs the PRC, the US is up against it -- they simply have us completely out-classed in mass manufacturing of nearly everything, and they are near-peer, potentially full peer, in weapon system quality. We *cannot* build enough wunderwaffen (in numbers or of sufficient "wunderfulness") to close that gap. We either find some way to partially close the *quantity* gap, or we just fold up our tents and go home.
We may not be Russia, but we certainly put a *lot* of servicemen into Shermans, Kaiser Coffins, and dinky DEs of multiple classes during WWII. No one demanded that we delay hostilities until we had unsinkable ships, and tanks that could bounce any German gun with impunity.
Perhaps the national culture will not support that kind of risk anymore, in which case the next century really will be the PRC's.
I'm afraid I disagree with you: The Germans had it completely wrong. They *were* the protagonists of Clarke's "Superiority", and it helped cost them the war.
Sigh. Do you even read what I write? This isn't about affordability: it's about the American preference for capital-intensive warfighting, with the explicit goal of preserving the lives of American warfighters.
All of which drove the Sherman's design compromises. In Europe, the Whermacht had the advantage of being less constrained on tank weight, although they still ended up building tanks that were limited to a small % of their bridge network. Their biggest flaw was their terrible maintainability, followed closely by the low production rates.
(...any similarity to modern American weapons platform production is just a figment of your imagination. Really. Would I lie to you?)
I mean, a tank that partially comes apart and has one part tow the other part in order to get over narrow bridges, then reassembles like a Transformer (ignore the crew of Puny Flesh Creatures crawling all over it with wrenches) for combat....
So, another old lesson that car makers learned in the 1920's and many times since then is that good enough is a better way to field a weapon than routinely redesigning for the purpose of adding an incremental improvement and only manufacturing a few. I think we actually need both - cheap, easily produced, and rapidly distributed as well as some whiz-bang to distract the enemy. Having design superiority is nothing if you only have a few shots before you're out.
As one who spent half a lifetime in manufacturing businesses I couldn't agree more.
Perfect is the enemy of good enough.
That said, American consumerism seems to require a certain level of flashiness, the whistles and bells, that don't really add to function. In reality, most of that builds in failure points. Which is fine when your model is turn over the product base every 5 years.
Unfortunately, that same level of consumer expectation seems to be in our weapons procurement process. We don't need sexy weapons. We need brutally effective ones. If a club works, then use that, don't design a multifunction tool or make it out of exotic materials rather than just some old tree branch.
Don't get me started on the rant about touchscreens in cars. Simple, effective controls are what's needed. I don't need to browse down through three levels of menu to adjust the A/C!
Wouldn't be so bad if the touchscreen wasn't below the top line of the dashboard so you didn't have to take your eyes completely off the road to do stuff.
I've got cool stuff that I'd probably use...if I could easily do so while driving.
I was pretty deep in the LRLAP round (the too expensive, too hard to produce round from the failed Zumwalt/AGS project) throughout its development. Maybe 5 years before cancellation, I was waving my arms, pointing out that we were heading for a design that could only be built by a team of engineers at low rates. The fact that I didn't make a dent in business as usual was deeply frustrating and convinced me NSFS wasn't a serious program. At some point, we were all resigned that it was dead meat...but we really wanted to see some rounds go down range from an actual ship, not single shots from test guns. Never even got that satisfaction...
Back in 2009, I was working on a US-DOE nuclear construction project with an engineer who had previously been employed in the Navy's 5-inch ERGM program before it was cancelled in March 2008.
Unit costs for a 15,000 round buy had ballooned from $45,000 per 5-inch ERGM round to more than $190,000 per round and were still rising.
This man told me that as early as 2002, it was clear to almost everyone directly involved in that program that the 5-inch ERGM round would never reach production, because its unit costs were rising so rapidly due to the many performance issues which were yet to be solved.
The 5-inch ERGM program should have been cancelled in 2002. But it wasn't. Cancellation had to wait another five years.
At any rate, it became abundantly clear in 2009 that the 155mm LRLAP program was headed in the same direction as 5-inch ERGM, for the same reasons, and was certainly headed for cancellation.
Norman Polmar said at the time -- remember this is 2009 -- that 155mm AGS should also be cancelled and be replaced on the DDG-1000 Class by a centerline MK-41 VLS. His sage advice was ignored. 155mm LRLAP was cancelled in 2016, also five years after it should have been.
I followed the ERGM saga and work a couple of the follow on 5” programs. Turns out it’s really hard to build a (cost effective) round that acts as a bullet in the barrel and a guided missile thereafter.
I had this notion back in 2001 that three 5-inch guided rounds could be loaded into a sabot 'carrier body' round and be fired from a sixteen-inch naval rifle.
At some distance from the gun -- possibly at apogee, possibly later -- the three 5-inch rounds would be released from the saboted carrier body and then make their way down to the intended target or targets.
An experienced gun-fired ordnance engineer took a look at this notion and had this assessment .....
With ten or twelve years of development effort, and some millions of dollars, the carrier body concept could be made to work.
But if it did work technically, then what happens next?
Build a modern BBGN(X) carrying one or more latter-day technology 16-inch gun systems? (This is the year 2001 when this conversation took place.)
I’d like this 10 times if allowed. At some point, I saw a concept for a 8-10” sabot projectile for the 16” gun. Unboosted but satellite guided and packed with a ridiculous number of tantalum(?) flechettes. Never saw anything beyond a sketch but…that would have been kinda cool. Any excuse to keep the 16 in the fight.
The major problems with any latter-day large-bore gun system are these:
-- If we are talking about a very large bore gun system like 14 or 16 inch systems, the support infrastructure for the Iowa Class and its 16-inch guns has been completely scrapped, including all the liners and all the spare barrels. It is not possible at this point to use the Iowa Class even for ammunition testing.
-- The market for 5-inch/127mm ammunition types is much larger than any market for a pure non-saboted 8-inch, 12-inch, or 16-inch guided ammunition type could possibly be.
-- An 8-inch/10-inch saboted single-projectile guided round for a 12-inch, or a 14-inch, or a 16-inch rifle will take ten to twelve years to develop and test. Fielding such a projectile would require concurrent development and testing of a new class of large-bore gun.
-- If we managed to develop a new large-bore gun system and new large-bore ammunition types to feed those new gun systems, we will need a new or significantly-revised platform to carry that system.
-- IMHO, the Trump administration's BBG(X) proposal is merely a trial balloon tossed out for reaction and comment. That notional platform will not become a truly serious proposal, if ever, unless and until some large number of constructive inputs are received and analyzed.
If it was up to me, I would take a look at where the market for 5-inch/127mm ammunition types is going.
If that market will be producing a practical 5-inch/127mm guided round for use in legacy gun systems, I would then give some thought to developing a larger long-barrel gun capable of sending those 5-inch guided rounds out to longer distances than are possible today using the 5"/62 system.
The Burke Class wouldn't be capable of carrying such a gun. But a new-build DDG(X) in the 18,000 to 20,000 ton range might do the trick.
I tend to think the "battleship" name is being used for at least two reasons: 1. as a serious description of capability relative to a CG, and 2. To distract and/or annoy all the right people.
If we can make a big enough platform, we could probably get more than 100 VLS cells on it, and also, be able to refill those cells from embarked containers inside the ship (perhaps 4 cells per container or something like that, perhaps enabling magazines in excess of 200, 250 missiles and even allowing for some reconfiguration of active load.
Also, a large enough ship should justify nuclear power, alleviating a lot of concerns on the electrical front.
A lot of people jumped right to "new Iowa class" but others think of it as a "premier battle platform" that would include a number of effective weapons and also incorporate survivability.
In a previous life I was responsible for manufacturing an electronic medical device for use in the field, that had to meet drop and water ingress standards. Mech designer delivered a beautiful, heavily contoured/curved, polycarbonate shell (front and back) with built in over-molding to provide the seal.
The shells were app. 8.5 x 11 x1.5 inches.
Specified tolerances in all dimensions were .005, and in many cases the water seal simply wouldn't flow properly if the substrate was off by much more than that.
"Well, they just need to be careful!"
Rejection was initially > 90%, never got better than 35%.
Exactly. We have been designing, building, fielding and supporting Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Rolls Royces. We won the last Pacific war with Fords & Chevrolets. "Scalable" is the buzzword bingo term for being mass producible. If you can't mass produce it, and all of its parts, it may be pretty but it won't fight worth a damn.
Against a peer threat scale is one thing but so is technological overmatch. Stealth aircraft and the ability to fight at night are two things that put the US head and shoulders above other militaries. You all are over-rotating on scale, which leads to things like making a frigate fast that can't do a damn thing in a shooting war.
The way I've described our manufacturing situation between the US and China is to compare it to Germany vs the Soviets in WW2. Germany tended to focus on quality which looked good on paper but wasn't sustainable or scalable with strained logistics. The Soviets had okay equipment but made up for it in numbers. They suffered tremendously but won the war. Of course there are plenty of factors I glossed over but you get the idea.
As you said, equipment with overmatch is awesome....if you can actually produce and repair it.
Sometimes I can’t help but wonder, do our adversaries enjoy reading things openly available about US military deficiencies? Do the ChiComs openly and publicly self-flagellate themselves?
Or, is our self-flagellation actually disinformation, designed to lull them into over confidence? Sadly, we know this isn’t the case.
I pose all this because I also can’t help but wonder, maybe we should STFU about our military weaknesses; save it for secure, private, need-to-know audiences.
Understood, but we are a republic not a people's republic and nothing can be done without the support of the people.
"Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions". - A. Lincoln
Secrecy may be worse than open discussion. Those of us in the maritime world knew for years how dire the situation was with commercial shipping. Look how long it took for anyone in Washington, DC to notice and look how much needs to be done. The FMC has no chair. MARAD just got an administrator in December. Need I go on?
I still think we should shut it publicly about our military weaknesses. But, on the other hand, our leak-like-a-sieve Congress would blab it all, anyway. So, this is discussion is probably moot.
If you hunt enough, some of their academic circles supporting their military have publicly available lectures on line. I've seen where they just regurgitate data we make public tht is obviously wrong like the Frigate 85% lie.
I am for avoiding group think and for crowdsourcing more than we do. They ought to float wargames out there and let us tear it apart. If you need vetted and given a membership card, fine, but don't shrink the brain trust.
I think this may be a good time to read up on Rome's "Crisis of the Third Century" when Rome was overwhelmed and rescued by a series of strong emperors.
Except structurally we are moving from Republic to Principate. Where we fake it by keeping the institutions that made us great in the first place. I'm all for skipping that and avoiding the Dominate.
For starters, in a conflict against China - using your WW2 comparison - you do not have the Wehrmacht and the Red Army killing millions of each other, while having Germany's industrial base ground to dust under American and British aerial bombardment. Plus supplying the Soviet forces with intelligence and materiel. I cannot believe that American war planners do not take that into account.
For a war with China, WW2 simply isn't the template. Nor is WW1, the Great Northern War, Korea, or The Thirty Years War.
I'll go as far as saying that the USA has never faced an enemy such as China, anywhere, at any time.
The closest historical parallel that spontaneously comes to mind is the Crusades; not for any religious/spiritual reason (control of traderoutes & ports were far more important even back then) but because of the logistics involved and the difference in how war is viewed through the respective cultural lenses of the participants.
Come to think of it, perhaps there is a spiritual component - the (for some time yet) Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture that is the foundation of the USA is not the same as the Confucian-Communist Sinoic civilisation.
Also - who actually wants a war, or the fear of one?
Your last paragraph … well written, my question, now what?
Your preceding paragraphs are good historical content.
Yesterday, President Vladimir Putin said to TASS, let the United States and Greenland work out the issues.
Today’s News reported, agreement has been reached, United States will identify “Pockets” of Land in Greenland. President Trump was asked, “Will the United States own Greenland?” President Trump did not answer that question. Female Reporter asked, “For how long will this agreement be?” President Trumps reply, “For Infinity”.
CDR Salamander please focus on that the average “Taxpayer”, me, says to our Local members of Congress and our County Executives, Examples written on Tuesday, by JAG Corps, Joint Base Andrews were, Sarah Elfreth - Congresswoman, 410 - 832 - 8890 or 202 - 225 - 4016; and County Executive Steuart Pittman, 410 - 222 - 1821.
Here in Deale, Maryland 30751, kindly advise me and my Shipmates … The “Who, What, Where and When”, to focus our work upon.
Please help us follow the “Money Trail”, the successful delivery of the ships, boats, weapon systems we need “Now” to protect and defend our United States men, women.
My son arrived yesterday back into the United States, Praise God!
He will be flying missions from that State for the next week. Then he returns to his home USAF Base on the East Coast.
Only twenty-seven years old! Abroad for eight (8) days on USAF Missions.
I owe my son and his Crew Buddies, the best Naval Protection we have now and “Tomorrow”. If you agree, please acknowledge with a “Like” and or “Heart”.
Thank you for reading my comment. God bless America! Nurse Jane
"…can this weapon be built, repaired, and replenished faster than it will be destroyed? If the answer is no, no amount of acquisition reform, contracting flexibility, or urgency memos will save it."
If that is true, then we shouldn't bother having a surface fleet.
And how does BB(X) fit within this concept ? It doesn't. Its what the German's did to loose the war: exquisite crap that satisfies the ego, but not the cold calculus of overwhelming the opponent.
Different people in the DOD, same habits only worse, no matter what the talk is in the SecDef office. To this day its the same idiotic thinking out of the top of the Navy: adaptability is making no decisions and just piling all the wanted capabilities on fewer and fewer bigger and bigger multimission ships.
The Germans lost the war partially because they couldn't appreciate how exquisite, the bespoke Studebaker 6x6 was over their simple technology horse drawn carts. After all, a horse isn't dependent upon bespoke material, limited supply base.
The BB(X)? Too soon to get excited over a few artists renderings. Besides? What defines a BB? Hasn't the definition changed from a ship of the line up to and including an arsenal ship?
And because Germans made an utter mess of their car & truck production before the war, literally producing almost a hundred of different models in small batches. As a result, their logistic was constantly a mess, and even some attempts in unification of car & truck supply, undertaken just before the war, were only partially sucsessfull.
I mentioned in another comment, but to me "battleship" evokes "premier ship of the line" and implies various, and a lot, of the best offensive weaponry available, along with durability and survivability. it doesn't mean 16" guns, or rail guns, particularly, but rather a tier one platform for making war at sea.
"Battleship" invokes a robust mental image to the general public, and therefore their Congress members. At best, "arsenal ship" evokes blanks stares and at worst images in the minds of coastal/think tank elites of of what may be below decks of bitter clinging fishermen off the 'Bama shores.
Having owned, showed, trained, raised, farmed and got tired of them, I can assure you horses are not simultaneously simple and reliable technology and they are reliant on bespoke material and a limited supply base, it just happens to be an agricultural one not an industrial one. If you don't think so, feed a barn full of horses crappy fodder that cattle or goats would happily eat every day, watch them all colic and see how far your wagons get. Or just watch them colic because the weather changed too quick or go down because they stepped on walnut sawdust or ate a few maple or cherry leaves. Then when they are all down, there are no replacement parts or even cannibalizing parts, you just shoot them all and attempt to move another 50 tons of horses from the farm to the front. They do have the advantage they can feed the chow line if needed.
Germany was severely limited in the resources it could put into new technology and systems leading into WW2 for multiple reasons, and so it put those resources into what technology it (or Hitler's ego) thought was most impactful and relied on the established for the mundane. Hence why it was still using a bolt action rifle and stick grenades for its infantry and horses for its logistics while using a single very modern ground breaking machine gun for light through fixed emplacement applications. They didn't prefer horses because horses were inherently simpler, it was what was established, was an agricultural product and therefor could be produced without competing with weapons for industrial capacity and what they ended up stuck with due to their ambitions and hubris outstripping the speed their industrial capacity could scale or even be rationally organized.
"Too soon to get excited over a few artists renderings."
The artist renderings and this ship concept are drawing attention away from solving the Navy's growing strategic weakness, capacity, and reinforcing the Navy's decades long bad habit: gold plated ships. It could not be a more harmful. distraction.
I suspect with all the problems of which you speak it was still easier to find fodder than diesel the further they got away from the tracks.
Maybe this new CBG(N) will help slow the growing strategic impotence of the USN. The rendering? Please, if that draws attention away from the requirements then the artistic license is the least of our national security concerns.
Essentially as IS-2 fit into Soviet tank armies. Sometimes you just need a BIGGER tool to do the job. T-34-85 was excellent tank - but it was still a medium tank, and there were functions that it can't perform efficiently (it still could do it, but with higher risks and losses). So Soviet military developed a next generation heavy tank to complement the medium ones. IS-2 was heavier and costlier than T-34-85, could not be produced in comparable numbers - but it got armor that could stop German 88, and main cannon that could blast through "Tiger" frontal armor (and was excellent in demolishing the bunkers, blowing up fortifications and destroying entrenched infantry). And the T-34-85 & IS-2 combo worked perfectly for the final two years of war.
(at the last year of war USSR actually got IS-3 - which could drive any German tank commander to shot himself, rather than facing the beast - but the first series have production problems, so IS-3 wasn't deployed till later)
As I said, sometimes you just need a bigger tool to do the job.
This is a ridiculous analogy. The Soviets already had vast amounts of serviceable tanks. The US Navy doesn't have vast amounts of anything that floats. It only "fits" in the fleet structure the way a heavy tank fit in the Soviet Army if you entirely ignore quantities.
If I need 50 hammers for 45 people to hammer nails and 5 to hammer rocks, buying 25 sledge hammers and 25 claw hammers is not productive. In an analogy closer to the Navy's and this ships design philosophy; assuming I will drive nails with only sledge hammers because I might have to occasionally smash rocks would be idiotic. Proportions matter and preparing for war is not an exercise in picking the right tool for a limited use.
Al L, in my humble opinion, the Trump administration's BBG(X) proposal is merely a trial balloon tossed out for reaction and comment. At least for now.
This is how Trump does things. As it concerns the BBG(X), his people know that the 'battleship mystique' is a thing among long-time navalists, and so it's a useful means of focusing interest and attention on this trial balloon.
The BBG(X) notional platform will not become a truly serious proposal, if ever, unless and until some large number of constructive inputs are received and analyzed. With the consequence that the actual proposal might well become a larger DDG(X) or CG(X) when all the commentary and inputs have been collected and assessed.
I have been saying for more than two decades on this forum and on others that a number of factors have driven the USN to load more and more combat capability into a smaller number of larger, more complex, more expensive warships.
We have seen something different happen with the Constellation Class cancellation.
It's my opinion that in choosing the Legend Class as the basis for the new frigate, a firm decision has been made to splash more but less complex warships into the water quickly -- as opposed to waiting for a larger, more complex, more expensive warship like the Constellation Class to be delivered some day, somehow, at some uncertain date in the future.
"the actual proposal might well become a larger DDG(X) or CG(X) when all the commentary and inputs have been collected and assessed."
In other words a white elephant built by a committee. This is what the Navy and DOD does now. Its a recipe to end up with nothing unless hard decisions are made. The Navy has not successfully made such decisions in 3 decades. All evidence is its a proposal that satisfies 2 egos: the Navy officer corps collective-big-ships-yield-big-careers ego and the President's. One cannot make an argument it is intended to do anything else as it only encourages bad habits the Navy has had for decades that need to be ended not fed.
The Burke is what it is and has lasted this long because of hard choices resulting in constraints on the design and development rather than it being an open ended uncapped free for all for the ambitious. It has lasted this long because it acknowledged 2 eternal design rules which are utterly lost on the Navy: sometimes less is more and the hardest thing to do is knowing when to stop. Even the hangarless Flight 1s are today strategically relevant 3.5 decades later. Every other overly ambitious surface combatant the Navy has attempted since is a dead end. Those decisions are not made by committees full of people advocating for their bailiwick to get more work, they are made by individuals and/or small groups put in leadership and authorized to stop the BS from piling too high. This concept makes that impossible as it is already piled too high.
Every time something that can be distributed is instead piled on one speculative future ship design the need for more ships in the fleet is undercut. Put everything the Navy does on one giant hull and the rational for less money will be "you already have a ship that does that" One need only look around at how much attention pictures of big impressive ships get in the media verses pictures of big impressive formations to understand the inherent bias toward ships vs fleet structure.
This ship concept does nothing but attempt to jamb a giant square peg in a moderate sized future hole in our fleet structure and as such will do nothing but do more damage to what is most at risk - capacity. Capacity is the ground we are losing to China and the diverse threats across the oceans not capability. From Gaza to the Red Sea to Iran to now Venezuela the lesson is we are highly capable but lack sustainability. We now have just 1(ONE!) operable CVN in the theater where they matter the most, WESTPAC, and its in port in maintence.
If China wanted to take Taiwan tomorrow that CVN would be toast in hours, the CBG now in the Indian ocean would have to fight its way back across the straights, the ones in the US wouldn't be there for at least 2 weeks maybe months and the remaining ships in WestPac except the SSNs, SSBNs (if any) amount to a speed bump. CVNs in WestPac are about strategically worthless unless at least one is at sea in that theater at all times.
The cost of each of these BB(X) would likely buy 2-3 SSNs which could carry a total of 80-120 missiles right up to Chinas doorstep unobserved and so endanger the entire Chinese Fleet. 2 (JUST 2) Virginia Block 6 loaded with MSTs can endanger any ship leaving Chinas coast. Blowing ten to tens of billions of dollars per unit on a surface combatant makes no sense in that context. It is money, effort, political capital and attention that should be spent on hammering home just how thin our fleet is, and how quickly it needs mitigation not waving shiny far off objects in front of the public.
A good example of adaptability was a M4 tank (known as the "Sherman") which his numerous different powerplants. US military wasn't sure, which powerplants would be better and which would be available in required numbers, when they designed M4 - after all, US tank industry was basically re-creating itself after many years of only small-scale production! - and thus they wanted to be sure that at least SOME model works. So they designed M4 in such way, that it could easily be fitted with different poweplants on generally similar models. And it worked pefectly)
The Sherman also incorporated high reliability and superior ergonomics. A tank being sent across the Atlantic or Pacific can't be sent back to factory for rebuild. It must run as long as possible in the worst conditions, and be easily repaired when it finally does break. It must be easy for the crew to fight and live in. How much more so a ship needs these attributes!
I was thinking about the mindset of building Tigers as opposed to Sherman's myself.
We need to remember that a lot of ours and theirs hardware will be destroyed in the initial days of the war if not hours, it has to be replaceable.
German tanks were of middling success but were never produced in the numbers needed. Contrary to popular belief, they were not produced the way American tanks were. If someone in the factory had a way apply a better mousetrap to the vehicle it would just be adopted starting with the next tank coming off the line. Often the necessary parts to repair said vehicle might not make it to the front for months. It was more like clockmaker's shop, where no two tanks were exactly alike. They might (or might not) work better on the battlefield, but they were a nightmare for the logisticians who had to keep them in the fight.
Another aspect of both the M3 Stuart Tank and M4 Sherman tank was the ability to modify a basic design for another useful product and, at the same time, not greatly expand the logistical tail (e.g. spare parts, fuel, etc.). The M3 was also used for assault howitzers, mortar carriers, an SP anti-aircraft tank, artillery tractors for towing heavy guns, a recovery vehicle, and a number of different engineering vehicles. Not all were adopted but you get the idea. And the M4 had even more uses from tank destroyers to SP howitzers, recovery vehicles, engineer vehicles and even a heavy, better protected armored personnel carrier.
CDR Sal, great job breaking down our problem to component parts and identifying the "what" needs to be done to alleviate, and potentially solve it. This quote from your post is key: "...can this weapon be built, repaired, and replenished faster than it will be destroyed? If the answer is no, no amount of acquisition reform, contracting flexibility, or urgency memos will save it." This is the challenge faced by the administration / DoW in general and Hegseth in particular. The system is based upon JCIDS (yes, it's still being followed, despite reports of its demise), the acquisition bible, and GS / contractor types wedded to it. Toss in the revolving door flag officer retirements to prime boards and congressional satisfaction with the money flow into their campaign coffers and jobs in their districts and change is...meeting multi-faceted resistance. Industry is looking at capacity buildup, not capacity re-direct like WWII, and even the 80s cold war. All of this takes time...years if not decades. We have a steep hill to climb, potentially little time to do it, and an adversary who is watching closely and weighing his options and their timing very carefully. "What" is critical to this problem, and you defined it. "How" is...problematic...without some "creative destruction" to the current system, IMO.
The one thing that I didn't see discussed in your excellent article is something that drives contemporary warfighting doctrine, and to a greater and greater degree with every war.
The human element.
You (unconsciously, I assume) tiptoed past the issue in discussing the logic of the Sherman tank.
You wrote--or quoted with implicit approval, I'm not quite sure, but it's not relevant--this: "The Sherman tank wasn’t designed to win one-on-one duels against the most advanced enemy armor. It was designed to be built quickly in enormous quantities and to be easily repaired in the field. *The result was a tank that could be produced and replaced faster than adversaries could destroy it.*" [my emphasis]
That's a sound philosophy...unless, of course, you happen to be *in* one of those tanks when a PaK-88 pokes a giant hole through it.
I'm old enough to remember the ululations over the 68k we lost in Vietnam. Even then, that was pretty much a day in the park by WW2 standards. Indeed the comparison was often made that we lost more to highway fatalities every year than we lost in our twelve-year Excellent Southeast Asian Adventure.
And that sensibility only gets worse every year. In 1983 (IIRC), we lost 241 Marines when a suicide bomber blew himself up during our effort to bring a ceasefire in the Lebanese Civil War. As a result, we pulled out and never returned. I daresay our opponents were watching.
And since then, pretty much all our wars have been small-footprint, low-casualty ones (the ensuing "nation-building"...not so much).
Even our erstwhile adversaries have evidently succumbed to this sensibility. Every time I read about the "massive casualties" both sides have supposedly incurred in the Ukrainian War, I shake my head and think, to the Russians of seventy years ago, those would have been a day in the life.
Indeed the whole manpower aspect of the Ukrainian War seems almost hallucinatory. I haven't looked up the figures lately, but I'll venture to guess the Russians brought maybe one-tenth of the forces they had in 1941 when the Germans invaded and sliced through them like soft butter.
So while I understand your argument and to some degree endorse it, it does have the whiff of Franklin Spinney and the 1970s push toward smaller and cheaper--but necessarily less survivable--weapon systems.
Again...I make no accusations nor am I trying to play gotcha games. But I would welcome a discussion of the tradeoffs between--say--more *Ticos* and *Burkes* versus more FFGs in terms of survivability.
The only comfort I take in a war against China is that they are likely to be more casualty averse than we are. All their vessels are manned by, their planes are flown by, Little Princes. Momma San will not be happy with their loss. And it is never, ever, a good idea to piss off Momma San.
Somehow, I don't think President Xi is too concerned about the upcoming midterm elections in China.
Even dictators get ejected from office. It's just not as gentle as when it happens in a free country...
Sure. It's the peasants in the streets with murderous intent that gives you pause.
You are missing the point. Filial piety. The family is number one and anyone risking its future is a problem. As much as that is a pressure everywhere, ours pails in comparison.
Erm, I should point out, that when M4 "Sherman" was designed and developed, the "most advanced" enemy tank it could meet was Pz.IV with short-barreled 75-mm gun. Against which even admittedly less capable (but still good) M3 "Lee" was working perfectly fine. So when M4 was developed, it was superior to all Axis armor in service - and when it was deployed, it was still superior to all mass-produced Axis armor. Only "Tiger" and "Panther" heavy tanks were a problem for Sherman's, and they weren't exactly mass-produced ones.
A bigger mistake from the American point was, that they decided against producing and deploying heavy tanks in 1942-1943; that costs them dearly later, because as assault weapon for storming heavily-defended positions M4 "Sherman" wasn't exactly suitable.
I believe you're misreading my comment. I said nothing about tank-on-tank: I referenced the German PaK-88, originally FlaK-88 which was designed as an anti-air weapon (FlaK--"Flugzeug-Abwehr-Kanone") and repurposed as early as 1941 to an anti-tank weapon (PaK--"Panzer-Abwehr-Kanone") against the Russian KV-1.
If the Americans weren't aware of that I can only assume their friends the Sovs didn't bother mentioning it.
Famous story: a German officer is being interrogated after being captured during the breakout from the Normandy beachhead. He explains that the Americans kept sending tanks against his position--a PaK-88 battery--and that every time an American tank popped up out of defile, they'd kill it.
The American interrogation officer then asks, so...why are you here in captivity? To which the German shrugs and responds, we ran out of shells before you ran out of tanks.
I was referring to the point of "The Sherman tank wasn’t designed to win one-on-one duels against the most advanced enemy armor". Actually, it was (albeit in American doctrine of WW2, there were a special tank destroyers to dealt with enemy armor).
The FlaK-88 was perfectly known to Americans, since it was used by Germans even before the war, and already noted to be used as anti-tank weapon in Poland and France. It just wasn't considered to be too great problem, because FlaK-88 were not exactly the best battlefield weapon; they were heavy, took a long time to deploy, and could be easily targeted by excellent American artillery.
The PaK-88 - to be exact, PaK-43 - appeared in service only mid-war, and wasn't exactly viewed as great sucsess either. While it was good in defense of static positions (as you described), it was hard to move (especially considering that German half-tracked gun tractors were crappy) and, again, vulnerable.
That's fine, but your response appeared in my activity feed as "Dilandu replied to your post," so you may simply have hit the wrong "Reply" button.
Anyhow, vulnerable or no, the 88 could put pretty much any tank it hit into the ground, as attested in the aforementioned interrogation story.
If the Germans had been able to manufacture more of them--and perhaps more to the point, the nickel-plated shells they used--we might have had serious problems, excellent artillery or no.
But that's pretty much the story of German WW2 weapons manufacturing: overengineered, finicky, not built for reliability, maintainability, or producibility.
Lucky for us.
The FlaK- 88 was also a tall target though somewhat slim.
M-4 Mediums were infantry support in their primary role.
The anti Tank duels was supposed to be and was by the M-36, 10 , 18 and the half track GMC.
The US could have used a heavy tank and did field the M-4 Jumbo I believe the reasoning was shipping, for every heavy two or more M-4 Med. could be shipped, But don't quote me on that.
"You wrote--or quoted with implicit approval, I'm not quite sure, but it's not relevant--this: "The Sherman tank wasn’t designed to win one-on-one duels against the most advanced enemy armor. It was designed to be built quickly in enormous quantities and to be easily repaired in the field. *The result was a tank that could be produced and replaced faster than adversaries could destroy it.*" [my emphasis]
That's a sound philosophy...unless, of course, you happen to be *in* one of those tanks when a PaK-88 pokes a giant hole through it."
This argument has a serious flaw -- the "deathtrap Sherman" was a meme, not reality. By the numbers, the Sherman had the best crew-survival rates of any armored vehicle in the entire war, bar none.
Unlike the T-34, "cheap and plentiful" does not *have* to mean low-survivability. One of the things that made the Sherman the best tank at keeping its crews alive was that high-scale, distributed production made it possible to *iterate* in a way that looks almost like todays software CD/CI process -- every Sherman coming off the line had "bugfixes" over the ones that came off the same line a month before. The switch to wet stowage being one easy example. The improvements in the hatches being another.
And each upgraded Sherman could still maintain enough parts commonality with the older models that it wasn't instantly lethal to the supply and maintenance chain keeping them in the fight. Of course, part of *that* was that the production scale didn't apply just to the *tanks*, but also to the entire supply chain(s) of subsystems and components behind them. And at the time, the US also had the logistical lift capacity to get that insane variety of spare parts to where they were needed most.
Thanks for the info, I had not known that! :-)
The best Tank-Youtuber does multiple "myth busting" videos on the Sherman -- perhaps the best deep-dive on the subject I've ever seen:
https://www.reddit.com/r/WorldofTanks/comments/38t4sa/myths_of_american_armor_talk_by_the_writer_of_the/
https://youtu.be/3zubVHz5RzA?si=c-W8HsKJTnq8jSeb
https://www.youtube.com/live/leWp4GNWqpI?si=yOQzREqLQ2WTIipF
I appreciate it, but my days of going down this sort of rabbit-hole are well behind me.
In any event the discussion about the Sherman was intended to reflect an issue entirely unrelated to its actual performance--the more so that we can only talk about its overall survivability *post hoc*.
As I said originally, if you were on the other side of the 88 poking holes in your tank, whatever the guys back home thought wasn't topmost on your mind.
Which was in support of my point that talking about combat effectiveness in terms of cost-effectiveness is a categorical error.
We are not Russia: we value human life too much to recklessly put it at risk in wartime.
In that sense the Germans had it right: they just went nuts with the "next big thing" *while they were actually fighting a war*.
...Arthur Clarke, call your office.
Cost/effectiveness is a sliding scale, not a binary choice. And influenced strongly by externalities, like availability. Right now, the new Legend-based frigate is a sub-optimal design for a potential fight with the PLAN, but right now it's about the best we can actually *build* in anything like a timely manner, in numbers sufficient to matter. And, hopefully, re-learn enough about shipbuilding in the process to make it to the next step on the tech tree (to abuse a video game analogy). Building those small fry will, if done right, start growing back the shipbuilding industrial and skill base. Hopefully.
The trick is to find a workable *balance* -- you *have* to have numbers, but you *also* have to have quality. The Sherman may have been outclassed 1v1 against the "big cats", but not by such a margin that US forces had to resort to "Sherman wave attacks" to make up the difference. They *did* often need a numbers advantage, but they *had* that thanks to better manufacturability and maintainability.
Vs the PRC, the US is up against it -- they simply have us completely out-classed in mass manufacturing of nearly everything, and they are near-peer, potentially full peer, in weapon system quality. We *cannot* build enough wunderwaffen (in numbers or of sufficient "wunderfulness") to close that gap. We either find some way to partially close the *quantity* gap, or we just fold up our tents and go home.
We may not be Russia, but we certainly put a *lot* of servicemen into Shermans, Kaiser Coffins, and dinky DEs of multiple classes during WWII. No one demanded that we delay hostilities until we had unsinkable ships, and tanks that could bounce any German gun with impunity.
Perhaps the national culture will not support that kind of risk anymore, in which case the next century really will be the PRC's.
I'm afraid I disagree with you: The Germans had it completely wrong. They *were* the protagonists of Clarke's "Superiority", and it helped cost them the war.
Sigh. Do you even read what I write? This isn't about affordability: it's about the American preference for capital-intensive warfighting, with the explicit goal of preserving the lives of American warfighters.
I'm done here. You win <eyeroll>
The decision was also made to keep the tank transportable. A nice tank isn't worth all that much if you can't hoist on and off of your ships.
Or haul it by rail inside the European rail system in land that was overrun by US forces.
All of which drove the Sherman's design compromises. In Europe, the Whermacht had the advantage of being less constrained on tank weight, although they still ended up building tanks that were limited to a small % of their bridge network. Their biggest flaw was their terrible maintainability, followed closely by the low production rates.
(...any similarity to modern American weapons platform production is just a figment of your imagination. Really. Would I lie to you?)
And those transport constraints also lead to the... oddly genius? Design of the American T-28, the "Doom Turtle": https://youtu.be/DPqqmCE1M1U?si=XeICrQmOR0HmMnUz
I mean, a tank that partially comes apart and has one part tow the other part in order to get over narrow bridges, then reassembles like a Transformer (ignore the crew of Puny Flesh Creatures crawling all over it with wrenches) for combat....
(...any similarity to modern American weapons platform production is just a figment of your imagination. Really. Would I lie to you?)
No I trust your facts LOL
The Doom Turtle was an exercise in fantasy and fear possibly stupidity (big Grin)
So, another old lesson that car makers learned in the 1920's and many times since then is that good enough is a better way to field a weapon than routinely redesigning for the purpose of adding an incremental improvement and only manufacturing a few. I think we actually need both - cheap, easily produced, and rapidly distributed as well as some whiz-bang to distract the enemy. Having design superiority is nothing if you only have a few shots before you're out.
As one who spent half a lifetime in manufacturing businesses I couldn't agree more.
Perfect is the enemy of good enough.
That said, American consumerism seems to require a certain level of flashiness, the whistles and bells, that don't really add to function. In reality, most of that builds in failure points. Which is fine when your model is turn over the product base every 5 years.
Unfortunately, that same level of consumer expectation seems to be in our weapons procurement process. We don't need sexy weapons. We need brutally effective ones. If a club works, then use that, don't design a multifunction tool or make it out of exotic materials rather than just some old tree branch.
Don't get me started on the rant about touchscreens in cars. Simple, effective controls are what's needed. I don't need to browse down through three levels of menu to adjust the A/C!
I'm with you on that.
Wouldn't be so bad if the touchscreen wasn't below the top line of the dashboard so you didn't have to take your eyes completely off the road to do stuff.
I've got cool stuff that I'd probably use...if I could easily do so while driving.
I was pretty deep in the LRLAP round (the too expensive, too hard to produce round from the failed Zumwalt/AGS project) throughout its development. Maybe 5 years before cancellation, I was waving my arms, pointing out that we were heading for a design that could only be built by a team of engineers at low rates. The fact that I didn't make a dent in business as usual was deeply frustrating and convinced me NSFS wasn't a serious program. At some point, we were all resigned that it was dead meat...but we really wanted to see some rounds go down range from an actual ship, not single shots from test guns. Never even got that satisfaction...
Back in 2009, I was working on a US-DOE nuclear construction project with an engineer who had previously been employed in the Navy's 5-inch ERGM program before it was cancelled in March 2008.
Unit costs for a 15,000 round buy had ballooned from $45,000 per 5-inch ERGM round to more than $190,000 per round and were still rising.
This man told me that as early as 2002, it was clear to almost everyone directly involved in that program that the 5-inch ERGM round would never reach production, because its unit costs were rising so rapidly due to the many performance issues which were yet to be solved.
The 5-inch ERGM program should have been cancelled in 2002. But it wasn't. Cancellation had to wait another five years.
At any rate, it became abundantly clear in 2009 that the 155mm LRLAP program was headed in the same direction as 5-inch ERGM, for the same reasons, and was certainly headed for cancellation.
Norman Polmar said at the time -- remember this is 2009 -- that 155mm AGS should also be cancelled and be replaced on the DDG-1000 Class by a centerline MK-41 VLS. His sage advice was ignored. 155mm LRLAP was cancelled in 2016, also five years after it should have been.
I followed the ERGM saga and work a couple of the follow on 5” programs. Turns out it’s really hard to build a (cost effective) round that acts as a bullet in the barrel and a guided missile thereafter.
I had this notion back in 2001 that three 5-inch guided rounds could be loaded into a sabot 'carrier body' round and be fired from a sixteen-inch naval rifle.
At some distance from the gun -- possibly at apogee, possibly later -- the three 5-inch rounds would be released from the saboted carrier body and then make their way down to the intended target or targets.
An experienced gun-fired ordnance engineer took a look at this notion and had this assessment .....
With ten or twelve years of development effort, and some millions of dollars, the carrier body concept could be made to work.
But if it did work technically, then what happens next?
Build a modern BBGN(X) carrying one or more latter-day technology 16-inch gun systems? (This is the year 2001 when this conversation took place.)
I’d like this 10 times if allowed. At some point, I saw a concept for a 8-10” sabot projectile for the 16” gun. Unboosted but satellite guided and packed with a ridiculous number of tantalum(?) flechettes. Never saw anything beyond a sketch but…that would have been kinda cool. Any excuse to keep the 16 in the fight.
The major problems with any latter-day large-bore gun system are these:
-- If we are talking about a very large bore gun system like 14 or 16 inch systems, the support infrastructure for the Iowa Class and its 16-inch guns has been completely scrapped, including all the liners and all the spare barrels. It is not possible at this point to use the Iowa Class even for ammunition testing.
-- The market for 5-inch/127mm ammunition types is much larger than any market for a pure non-saboted 8-inch, 12-inch, or 16-inch guided ammunition type could possibly be.
-- An 8-inch/10-inch saboted single-projectile guided round for a 12-inch, or a 14-inch, or a 16-inch rifle will take ten to twelve years to develop and test. Fielding such a projectile would require concurrent development and testing of a new class of large-bore gun.
-- If we managed to develop a new large-bore gun system and new large-bore ammunition types to feed those new gun systems, we will need a new or significantly-revised platform to carry that system.
-- IMHO, the Trump administration's BBG(X) proposal is merely a trial balloon tossed out for reaction and comment. That notional platform will not become a truly serious proposal, if ever, unless and until some large number of constructive inputs are received and analyzed.
If it was up to me, I would take a look at where the market for 5-inch/127mm ammunition types is going.
If that market will be producing a practical 5-inch/127mm guided round for use in legacy gun systems, I would then give some thought to developing a larger long-barrel gun capable of sending those 5-inch guided rounds out to longer distances than are possible today using the 5"/62 system.
The Burke Class wouldn't be capable of carrying such a gun. But a new-build DDG(X) in the 18,000 to 20,000 ton range might do the trick.
I tend to think the "battleship" name is being used for at least two reasons: 1. as a serious description of capability relative to a CG, and 2. To distract and/or annoy all the right people.
If we can make a big enough platform, we could probably get more than 100 VLS cells on it, and also, be able to refill those cells from embarked containers inside the ship (perhaps 4 cells per container or something like that, perhaps enabling magazines in excess of 200, 250 missiles and even allowing for some reconfiguration of active load.
Also, a large enough ship should justify nuclear power, alleviating a lot of concerns on the electrical front.
A lot of people jumped right to "new Iowa class" but others think of it as a "premier battle platform" that would include a number of effective weapons and also incorporate survivability.
Can it be done? Probably. By us? Maybe. Now? ?
In a previous life I was responsible for manufacturing an electronic medical device for use in the field, that had to meet drop and water ingress standards. Mech designer delivered a beautiful, heavily contoured/curved, polycarbonate shell (front and back) with built in over-molding to provide the seal.
The shells were app. 8.5 x 11 x1.5 inches.
Specified tolerances in all dimensions were .005, and in many cases the water seal simply wouldn't flow properly if the substrate was off by much more than that.
"Well, they just need to be careful!"
Rejection was initially > 90%, never got better than 35%.
People ask me why I drink.
Exactly. We have been designing, building, fielding and supporting Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Rolls Royces. We won the last Pacific war with Fords & Chevrolets. "Scalable" is the buzzword bingo term for being mass producible. If you can't mass produce it, and all of its parts, it may be pretty but it won't fight worth a damn.
Against a peer threat scale is one thing but so is technological overmatch. Stealth aircraft and the ability to fight at night are two things that put the US head and shoulders above other militaries. You all are over-rotating on scale, which leads to things like making a frigate fast that can't do a damn thing in a shooting war.
The way I've described our manufacturing situation between the US and China is to compare it to Germany vs the Soviets in WW2. Germany tended to focus on quality which looked good on paper but wasn't sustainable or scalable with strained logistics. The Soviets had okay equipment but made up for it in numbers. They suffered tremendously but won the war. Of course there are plenty of factors I glossed over but you get the idea.
As you said, equipment with overmatch is awesome....if you can actually produce and repair it.
Quantity does have a vertain quality in and of itself.
They also suffered by far the most casualties. Birth rate is a very important factor in future warfare right now.
Well, we need to bring back production of " intermediate goods" for parts production; something the "experts" tell us is "dumb".
Sometimes I can’t help but wonder, do our adversaries enjoy reading things openly available about US military deficiencies? Do the ChiComs openly and publicly self-flagellate themselves?
Or, is our self-flagellation actually disinformation, designed to lull them into over confidence? Sadly, we know this isn’t the case.
I pose all this because I also can’t help but wonder, maybe we should STFU about our military weaknesses; save it for secure, private, need-to-know audiences.
That thought has crossed my mind as well.
Understood, but we are a republic not a people's republic and nothing can be done without the support of the people.
"Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions". - A. Lincoln
Good point. I’m just posing the scenario.
Secrecy may be worse than open discussion. Those of us in the maritime world knew for years how dire the situation was with commercial shipping. Look how long it took for anyone in Washington, DC to notice and look how much needs to be done. The FMC has no chair. MARAD just got an administrator in December. Need I go on?
You can go on all you want. Suit yourself.
I still think we should shut it publicly about our military weaknesses. But, on the other hand, our leak-like-a-sieve Congress would blab it all, anyway. So, this is discussion is probably moot.
There is nothing we're discussing that the PRC doesn't already know.
If you hunt enough, some of their academic circles supporting their military have publicly available lectures on line. I've seen where they just regurgitate data we make public tht is obviously wrong like the Frigate 85% lie.
I don’t doubt this at all.
How exactly would you shut down the discussions? I am curious to find out.
You tell me.
It’s also been said, “Loose lips sink ships.”
That was propaganda to hide the damage done by not immediately implementing the convoy system.
I am for avoiding group think and for crowdsourcing more than we do. They ought to float wargames out there and let us tear it apart. If you need vetted and given a membership card, fine, but don't shrink the brain trust.
I think we only discuss information in the public sphere already; all likely enemies are already aware of the weaknesses we discuss here.
Concur
I think this may be a good time to read up on Rome's "Crisis of the Third Century" when Rome was overwhelmed and rescued by a series of strong emperors.
Except structurally we are moving from Republic to Principate. Where we fake it by keeping the institutions that made us great in the first place. I'm all for skipping that and avoiding the Dominate.
Also to include the relative concurrent rise of the Eastern Roman Empire and how it managed to last another 1,000 years after the fall of the West.
Taking a punt-gun approach in my thought-process:
For starters, in a conflict against China - using your WW2 comparison - you do not have the Wehrmacht and the Red Army killing millions of each other, while having Germany's industrial base ground to dust under American and British aerial bombardment. Plus supplying the Soviet forces with intelligence and materiel. I cannot believe that American war planners do not take that into account.
For a war with China, WW2 simply isn't the template. Nor is WW1, the Great Northern War, Korea, or The Thirty Years War.
I'll go as far as saying that the USA has never faced an enemy such as China, anywhere, at any time.
The closest historical parallel that spontaneously comes to mind is the Crusades; not for any religious/spiritual reason (control of traderoutes & ports were far more important even back then) but because of the logistics involved and the difference in how war is viewed through the respective cultural lenses of the participants.
Come to think of it, perhaps there is a spiritual component - the (for some time yet) Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture that is the foundation of the USA is not the same as the Confucian-Communist Sinoic civilisation.
Also - who actually wants a war, or the fear of one?
Good Morning CDR Salamander,
Your last paragraph … well written, my question, now what?
Your preceding paragraphs are good historical content.
Yesterday, President Vladimir Putin said to TASS, let the United States and Greenland work out the issues.
Today’s News reported, agreement has been reached, United States will identify “Pockets” of Land in Greenland. President Trump was asked, “Will the United States own Greenland?” President Trump did not answer that question. Female Reporter asked, “For how long will this agreement be?” President Trumps reply, “For Infinity”.
CDR Salamander please focus on that the average “Taxpayer”, me, says to our Local members of Congress and our County Executives, Examples written on Tuesday, by JAG Corps, Joint Base Andrews were, Sarah Elfreth - Congresswoman, 410 - 832 - 8890 or 202 - 225 - 4016; and County Executive Steuart Pittman, 410 - 222 - 1821.
Here in Deale, Maryland 30751, kindly advise me and my Shipmates … The “Who, What, Where and When”, to focus our work upon.
Please help us follow the “Money Trail”, the successful delivery of the ships, boats, weapon systems we need “Now” to protect and defend our United States men, women.
My son arrived yesterday back into the United States, Praise God!
He will be flying missions from that State for the next week. Then he returns to his home USAF Base on the East Coast.
Only twenty-seven years old! Abroad for eight (8) days on USAF Missions.
I owe my son and his Crew Buddies, the best Naval Protection we have now and “Tomorrow”. If you agree, please acknowledge with a “Like” and or “Heart”.
Thank you for reading my comment. God bless America! Nurse Jane
"…can this weapon be built, repaired, and replenished faster than it will be destroyed? If the answer is no, no amount of acquisition reform, contracting flexibility, or urgency memos will save it."
If that is true, then we shouldn't bother having a surface fleet.
What can we kill with an 11 meter RHIB?
Well, if you do it right, maybe a cruiser.
You need some bolt on stuff, but you could get it there.
And how does BB(X) fit within this concept ? It doesn't. Its what the German's did to loose the war: exquisite crap that satisfies the ego, but not the cold calculus of overwhelming the opponent.
Different people in the DOD, same habits only worse, no matter what the talk is in the SecDef office. To this day its the same idiotic thinking out of the top of the Navy: adaptability is making no decisions and just piling all the wanted capabilities on fewer and fewer bigger and bigger multimission ships.
The Germans lost the war partially because they couldn't appreciate how exquisite, the bespoke Studebaker 6x6 was over their simple technology horse drawn carts. After all, a horse isn't dependent upon bespoke material, limited supply base.
The BB(X)? Too soon to get excited over a few artists renderings. Besides? What defines a BB? Hasn't the definition changed from a ship of the line up to and including an arsenal ship?
And because Germans made an utter mess of their car & truck production before the war, literally producing almost a hundred of different models in small batches. As a result, their logistic was constantly a mess, and even some attempts in unification of car & truck supply, undertaken just before the war, were only partially sucsessfull.
I mentioned in another comment, but to me "battleship" evokes "premier ship of the line" and implies various, and a lot, of the best offensive weaponry available, along with durability and survivability. it doesn't mean 16" guns, or rail guns, particularly, but rather a tier one platform for making war at sea.
"Battleship" invokes a robust mental image to the general public, and therefore their Congress members. At best, "arsenal ship" evokes blanks stares and at worst images in the minds of coastal/think tank elites of of what may be below decks of bitter clinging fishermen off the 'Bama shores.
Having owned, showed, trained, raised, farmed and got tired of them, I can assure you horses are not simultaneously simple and reliable technology and they are reliant on bespoke material and a limited supply base, it just happens to be an agricultural one not an industrial one. If you don't think so, feed a barn full of horses crappy fodder that cattle or goats would happily eat every day, watch them all colic and see how far your wagons get. Or just watch them colic because the weather changed too quick or go down because they stepped on walnut sawdust or ate a few maple or cherry leaves. Then when they are all down, there are no replacement parts or even cannibalizing parts, you just shoot them all and attempt to move another 50 tons of horses from the farm to the front. They do have the advantage they can feed the chow line if needed.
Germany was severely limited in the resources it could put into new technology and systems leading into WW2 for multiple reasons, and so it put those resources into what technology it (or Hitler's ego) thought was most impactful and relied on the established for the mundane. Hence why it was still using a bolt action rifle and stick grenades for its infantry and horses for its logistics while using a single very modern ground breaking machine gun for light through fixed emplacement applications. They didn't prefer horses because horses were inherently simpler, it was what was established, was an agricultural product and therefor could be produced without competing with weapons for industrial capacity and what they ended up stuck with due to their ambitions and hubris outstripping the speed their industrial capacity could scale or even be rationally organized.
"Too soon to get excited over a few artists renderings."
The artist renderings and this ship concept are drawing attention away from solving the Navy's growing strategic weakness, capacity, and reinforcing the Navy's decades long bad habit: gold plated ships. It could not be a more harmful. distraction.
I suspect with all the problems of which you speak it was still easier to find fodder than diesel the further they got away from the tracks.
Maybe this new CBG(N) will help slow the growing strategic impotence of the USN. The rendering? Please, if that draws attention away from the requirements then the artistic license is the least of our national security concerns.
Essentially as IS-2 fit into Soviet tank armies. Sometimes you just need a BIGGER tool to do the job. T-34-85 was excellent tank - but it was still a medium tank, and there were functions that it can't perform efficiently (it still could do it, but with higher risks and losses). So Soviet military developed a next generation heavy tank to complement the medium ones. IS-2 was heavier and costlier than T-34-85, could not be produced in comparable numbers - but it got armor that could stop German 88, and main cannon that could blast through "Tiger" frontal armor (and was excellent in demolishing the bunkers, blowing up fortifications and destroying entrenched infantry). And the T-34-85 & IS-2 combo worked perfectly for the final two years of war.
(at the last year of war USSR actually got IS-3 - which could drive any German tank commander to shot himself, rather than facing the beast - but the first series have production problems, so IS-3 wasn't deployed till later)
As I said, sometimes you just need a bigger tool to do the job.
This is a ridiculous analogy. The Soviets already had vast amounts of serviceable tanks. The US Navy doesn't have vast amounts of anything that floats. It only "fits" in the fleet structure the way a heavy tank fit in the Soviet Army if you entirely ignore quantities.
If I need 50 hammers for 45 people to hammer nails and 5 to hammer rocks, buying 25 sledge hammers and 25 claw hammers is not productive. In an analogy closer to the Navy's and this ships design philosophy; assuming I will drive nails with only sledge hammers because I might have to occasionally smash rocks would be idiotic. Proportions matter and preparing for war is not an exercise in picking the right tool for a limited use.
Al L, in my humble opinion, the Trump administration's BBG(X) proposal is merely a trial balloon tossed out for reaction and comment. At least for now.
This is how Trump does things. As it concerns the BBG(X), his people know that the 'battleship mystique' is a thing among long-time navalists, and so it's a useful means of focusing interest and attention on this trial balloon.
The BBG(X) notional platform will not become a truly serious proposal, if ever, unless and until some large number of constructive inputs are received and analyzed. With the consequence that the actual proposal might well become a larger DDG(X) or CG(X) when all the commentary and inputs have been collected and assessed.
I have been saying for more than two decades on this forum and on others that a number of factors have driven the USN to load more and more combat capability into a smaller number of larger, more complex, more expensive warships.
We have seen something different happen with the Constellation Class cancellation.
It's my opinion that in choosing the Legend Class as the basis for the new frigate, a firm decision has been made to splash more but less complex warships into the water quickly -- as opposed to waiting for a larger, more complex, more expensive warship like the Constellation Class to be delivered some day, somehow, at some uncertain date in the future.
"the actual proposal might well become a larger DDG(X) or CG(X) when all the commentary and inputs have been collected and assessed."
In other words a white elephant built by a committee. This is what the Navy and DOD does now. Its a recipe to end up with nothing unless hard decisions are made. The Navy has not successfully made such decisions in 3 decades. All evidence is its a proposal that satisfies 2 egos: the Navy officer corps collective-big-ships-yield-big-careers ego and the President's. One cannot make an argument it is intended to do anything else as it only encourages bad habits the Navy has had for decades that need to be ended not fed.
The Burke is what it is and has lasted this long because of hard choices resulting in constraints on the design and development rather than it being an open ended uncapped free for all for the ambitious. It has lasted this long because it acknowledged 2 eternal design rules which are utterly lost on the Navy: sometimes less is more and the hardest thing to do is knowing when to stop. Even the hangarless Flight 1s are today strategically relevant 3.5 decades later. Every other overly ambitious surface combatant the Navy has attempted since is a dead end. Those decisions are not made by committees full of people advocating for their bailiwick to get more work, they are made by individuals and/or small groups put in leadership and authorized to stop the BS from piling too high. This concept makes that impossible as it is already piled too high.
Every time something that can be distributed is instead piled on one speculative future ship design the need for more ships in the fleet is undercut. Put everything the Navy does on one giant hull and the rational for less money will be "you already have a ship that does that" One need only look around at how much attention pictures of big impressive ships get in the media verses pictures of big impressive formations to understand the inherent bias toward ships vs fleet structure.
This ship concept does nothing but attempt to jamb a giant square peg in a moderate sized future hole in our fleet structure and as such will do nothing but do more damage to what is most at risk - capacity. Capacity is the ground we are losing to China and the diverse threats across the oceans not capability. From Gaza to the Red Sea to Iran to now Venezuela the lesson is we are highly capable but lack sustainability. We now have just 1(ONE!) operable CVN in the theater where they matter the most, WESTPAC, and its in port in maintence.
If China wanted to take Taiwan tomorrow that CVN would be toast in hours, the CBG now in the Indian ocean would have to fight its way back across the straights, the ones in the US wouldn't be there for at least 2 weeks maybe months and the remaining ships in WestPac except the SSNs, SSBNs (if any) amount to a speed bump. CVNs in WestPac are about strategically worthless unless at least one is at sea in that theater at all times.
The cost of each of these BB(X) would likely buy 2-3 SSNs which could carry a total of 80-120 missiles right up to Chinas doorstep unobserved and so endanger the entire Chinese Fleet. 2 (JUST 2) Virginia Block 6 loaded with MSTs can endanger any ship leaving Chinas coast. Blowing ten to tens of billions of dollars per unit on a surface combatant makes no sense in that context. It is money, effort, political capital and attention that should be spent on hammering home just how thin our fleet is, and how quickly it needs mitigation not waving shiny far off objects in front of the public.
.....the trade school brochure! 🇺🇲🏗️👩🏻🏭🏭👨🏽🔧⚙️🧰
We desperately need a lot of kids going into those trade schools.