Fullbore Friday

...if you don't love the main gun, you're not a navalist...or worth squat...but I know some Army guys who do...

For decades, the one thing that will trigger me faster than anything else are those who unendingly want to tell you that the multipurpose gun is an anachronism. It is an argument older than I am and is why in the 1950s and 1960s you had all missile warships. They think they are forward-thinking, but they are generally ignorant, retrograde, or trying to sell you something.

Regardless of what real-world combat experience shows, from the Vietnam War, to the Falkland Island War, to Desert Storm, to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, to the operations off Libya in 2011, in the Red Sea the last year, and countless other smaller operations, when combat operations start, you never have enough caliber gun, or enough guns.

Those who only have a 57mm feel helpless. Those with 76mm or 100mm feel useful, but wish they had 127mm/5” gun. Those with 127mm/5” gun wish they could throw a little more, a little further.

You also realize you do not have enough guns. If you have one, you wish you had two…and as many of smaller calibers as you can bolt on the deck and get power to. As we’ve covered before, the stories of the Royal Navy in the Falklands lining the rails with small arms shooing at Mirage and A-4s because they simply needed more firepower.

You get the drill.

What is so triggering, is the same arguments heard from decades that are proven wrong over and over and over are dragged out of the garage and waved around like some unassailable fact from well credentialed “experts.”

Well, stuff it.

Here’s another real world vignette from 2007 that I have heard second hand, got a brief mention in open source at the time …but alas…until now hardly any detail.

I mean…why don’t we have a Battle of Bargal movie…or at least recruiting spot? Have you ever heard about it? Did you even know that a USN DDG cleared out a valley of terrorists with their 5-inch/62 Mk 45 Mod 4 main gun? (NB: still love the acknowledged capability gap because we call the largest naval gun we have as a “lightweight gun”.)

The Long War is full of these little vignettes, but few know them, mostly because the US Navy does a poor job telling its story, even to itself.

Take about 8 minutes of your time and watch from the 15-23 minute mark of this clip from the Shawn Ryan Show with guest Chris VanSant from over a year ago and see a real world representation of exactly what I am talking about, in this case involving USS Chaffee (DDG 90).

I’d like you to listen to the video, but here’s the meaty part starting at 20:00:

We have good visibility that we've got any more threat coming up the ridge line above or below but we're still getting hammered from down below and I'm like I don't like I don't know what our move is from here. Like the three of us were like we don't have a lot of options here and Brady goes how about some Naval gunfire and so you know we kind of the three of us kind of looked at each other and we're like all right yeah we can do this.

Like let's just have they're all in one spot let's hammer this draw. We had already talked to him pre-planned targets um so the boat was ready and aware and they were jacked up. Like they didn't even know we were there but they were jacked pump we called them in the blind. It was a really funny like 20-minute conversation before we had gotten into that position and and you could hear him in the background, like yeah like they knew they were getting ready to get some and so Rad is on the horn with the boat I have a handheld satellite radio because I'm like we can't do this unless I call troops and contact over the SATCOM. Like they got to know we've been engaged that we didn't just shoot naval gunfire into a country we're not supposed to be into and so yeah.

So Brady's talking to the boat calling a naval gunfire I'm calling in troops in contact over SATCOM I said that we had wounded but I didn't say who because I was worried that if it was just Somali we weren't going to get the same reaction which I don't know if that was the right call or the wrong call but it was the call that I made at the time. And so we ended up grabbing up as many of the Somalis as we could and we started pulling back off the ridge right about that time rounds come overhead, I think Brady shot had him shoot like 24 rounds or something off the deck guns into the valley and walked them up and down as we pulled back off the ridge so we get back down to our patrol base…

When you need air support, it is hours away. When you need artillery, it isn’t there. When you have a US Navy warship in international waters and you’re within range … you can have two dozen 5” rounds sweep a valley of your enemy to cover your retreat. The enemy won’t know where it is coming from and won’t be able to reach it.

A multipurpose main gun is just that…multipurpose. It can support special forces ashore in a pickle. It can shoot down attack drones or enemy ships. It sliced, dices, it juliennes.

I’ll just end this with a final note: Flight II of the Constellation Class Frigate needs to have a 5” gun, not the 57mm gun it has now. The Italians and French have 5” guns on their version, we should be there too.

If there were a 57mm and not a 5” gun off the shore of Somalia that day…good chance Chris would not be here to tell this story.

That was 18 years ago, and almost no one outside the surface community know this story, and very few of them. Why? This was so much more than, as described in the brief NBC story linked above:

The destroyer USS Chafee fired her deck guns at two or three suspected "high-value terrorist targets" in the Puntland area along the northern coast of Somalia on Saturday, U.S. officials told NBC News. The three suspects are accused of taking part in the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

If you want to watch the full discussion with Chris VanSant, it’s below. This story starts at about the 1:44 story, but back up 5-10 minutes to get the full context.

Fullbore, even if you don’t get a movie.