Posted on 01/25/2017 6:15:48 PM PST by MtnClimber
In truth the idea has some merit in an age of Drones and remote controlled warplanes—and new super accurate rail guns. The Japanese attempts were built in desperation to fill the need for carriers—they had lost the edge in warplanes and trained pilots—they old battleships were not top of the line at that stage of the war—to top it off they were poorly used—at Leyte Gulf Battle. They are not proof positive the idea sucks lemons.
The hybrid ships did almost do in the US Navy during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. They were escorting the decoy aircraft carriers and the scout planes mistook them as pure battleships.
As a precaution Admiral Halsey sent the American battleships to escort the fleet carriers. The result was leaving the transport and supply ships open to attack by the Japanese surface fleet. Only heroic action by the escort carriers and destroyers saved the day.
“WWII battleships have so much armor that modern missiles have no effect...”
It’s actually the other way around.
Warhead design has advanced so greatly since 1940 that plate armor (tempered steel, with face hardening) is no longer any protection. The most basic shaped charge handily defeats thicknesses of armor far greater than is feasible to hang on a warship, or a vehicle.
Different projectile-defeating concepts are demanded. Some of these new armoring systems can be installed on vehicles, but the large size of warships renders their use at sea infeasible; issues of buoyancy and stability further limit utility, which is the case with conventional plate armor also.
Perfect for the F-35”B”.
Chinese concept?
Perhaps Flash Bainite would do? It’s an induction heated / water quenching process applied to common low alloy steel to modify the Austenite / Marstenite grain structure.
This was interesting; but, would like to see it take a 50 hit without the freedom of movement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJdz8iVUtiw
“Anything that comes out of the present Pentagon procurement process needs to be looked at cross-eyed by the American public. It has been a threat to national security and the economic welfare of the American citizens since before WWII. ... The list goes on of the wasted funds and botched procurements of DoD acquisitions.”
If the American public believes what AndyJackson wrote, they deserve to be defeated and forgotten by history.
The military-industrial complex is the only thing standing between the nation and disaster. It’s been true far longer than the magical days of the Second World War that critics of today’s military seem so infatuated with. Without it, we might just as well go back to throwing rocks.
The nation can pay for higher tech weapon systems, or pay in blood. But the public, apparently, doesn’t like doing either one: The public has already let it be known that it shrinks from producing enough manpower, enough warm bodies, to fight any adversaries one-on-one, footsoldier to footsoldier. And the public is too squeamish to send “our boys” to fight in any “foreign wars” (which, to the average citizen, apparently means “don’t deploy any farther away than the next county”).
Recipes for defeat in the modern age. National interests go rather a ways beyond the shoreline, and involve matters somewhat more complex than good working-class jobs.
North American’s P-51 is the stuff of legend. But that’s pretty much it ... it was fast and maneuverable, but carried a warload so light as to be marginal. It functioned tolerably against Euro adversaries designed a decade earlier, but was very tricky to fly (more losses to landing accidents than in combat) and the powerplant and cooling system had to be babied most fussily.
The only reason its reputation over Europe in the 1940s looms, was because it could be modified to fly as far as the bombers could, affording them escort all the way to their targets. And its extended range was just barely possible; with the extra fuel tanks installed, the aircraft became unstable, even more dangerous to fly than before: not a machine to be handed to amateurs idly. The cooling system rendered it particularly vulnerable to ground fire. The longer ranges confronting the Allies the Pacific Theater rendered the P-51 a non-player just like that. Large numbers of pilots considered several aircraft to be better, including the P-40, designed more than half a decade earlier.
The F-111 and the F-16 cannot be compared because they were designed to accomplish different missions (they both received the “F” designation more to assuage the egoes of pilots, than any other reason). It’s true the F-16 can pull more G than any previous single-seat aircraft, but that has no meaning, once the physical ability of a pilot to withstand G forces is exceeded ... and though no fighter pilot will admit it, they do have a personal G limit inside the F-16’s maximum potential. Who cares what the aircraft can do, after the pilot has passed out?
AndyJackson writes like he’s been hanging out with Pierre Sprey too often: he needs to give up the notion that the design, development, and procurement of the F-16 was somehow more pure, somehow less burdened with political baggage, than other systems. It is a false notion.
One of Col John Boyd’s last surviving “acolytes,” Sprey was a DoD civilian, an aero engineer who wangled a spot on the project specification-writing team for the Lightweight Fighter project, which ultimately led to the F-16. Now aging and frail, he can still be seen now and then on documentaries about military aircraft systems, airing on American Heroes Channel, History Channel, or Smithsonian Channel.
Sprey - now styling himself “the designer of the F-16” - still grouses that USAF insisted on hanging too much “unnecessary” gear on his pet airplane, making it “too heavy”. He’s convinced (as are most fighter pilots) that the high-G, wild-maneuvering, visual-range air battle is still the essence of air warfare, and that individual pilots, acting alone, dominate.
He is severely in error.
Those concepts went out before 1920: memoirs of Air Service AEF flight instructors who trained eager-beaver fighter pilot wannabes in the First World War make repeated mention of the dire necessity of beating the lone-warrior, knight-of-the-air, I-can-do-anything attitudes out of the thick heads of new recruits; only after this was done could any progress be made, toward shaping them up into worthwhile aviators.
The truth is, the F-16 is the least effective, most dangerous, least reliable manned aircraft the US military now flies. Even grossly “overweight” as Pierre Sprey insists it is, it hasn’t enough range to go any useful distance, and cannot lift enough munitions to do much of anything. It is capable of high speed, but going that fast causes it run out of gas in about five minutes.
No manned aircraft can out-dodge modern missiles, not even when the pilot does happen to see one coming. And the chances of eyeballing an attacking missile are greatly reduced, for any pilot all alone as he must be, in a single-seat machine.
The F-35 was built to accomplish its various mission in entirely different ways, against which the WWI-vintage concepts that gave rise to the F-16 can make no headway.
None of my critique means that I am an apologist for DoD’s procurement process (I had to deal with it, day in and day out, for more than half of my active duty career). It is less than efficient, but AndyJackson is blaming the wrong people.
The procurement system was put in place on explicit orders from Congress: they have passed all the laws governing it, because they wanted more control over how much DoD spent, and how, and where. And don’t forget who elected Congress: the American public.
It’s easy to argue that Congress did not create the acquisition/procurement bureaucracy for the purest reasons, merely to improve efficiency and effectiveness.
But arguing that way would be to ignore the ultimate truth: development of modern weapon systems is carried out at the very outermost margin of technological advances, right up there next to basic scientific research along the cutting edge. Great uncertainties exist, and always will. It’s unrealistic, to believe that success can be smoothly foreseen or easily attained, that schedules can be defined far in advance and can be made to stick regardless, that costs can be forecast and won’t ever change. Waste and botch can be reduced, but not eliminated.
Note we’re not even starting to account for political give-and-take, or meddling, high or low.
Americans have come to believe that they can have national defense, at no cost, now or sooner, with complete superiority and efficiency, without anyone getting killed. These are false choices.
The real choices:
- pay now, or pay later
- pay in money, or pay in blood
Well, the 70s were almost 50 years ago and I don’t think that what’s left of the Russian navy would last 48 hours
The only chance would be stand off cruise missiles and perhaps a submarine or two that wouldn’t be equipped with large holes after the fist day
The day of the battleship is gone. The torpedo and missiles have relegated it to the history books along with the 74 gun ship of the line and the trireme. Though there are few thing more impressive in naval warfare then a 9 gun salvo from the MK-VIIs of an Iowa class battleship, it is as practical as a broadside of 32 pounders. An Aegis class cruiser or destroyer is the ultimate surface combatant today. Anything within a 300 mile range is a potential target.
Herman was at the Longbeach Naval Ship yard. She was used to handle the 160 ton weights required to weight test the 80 ton booms and rigging on LKA 116 while in the yard in 73. According to Wiki, the crane was sold to the Panama Canal commission after the LBNSY was closed and is still in use in the canal zone.
>>upgrade the generators (this is especially important in modern weapons systems as the Brits just found out to their dismay)
There is a witty Lucas, Prince of Darkness quip lurking here somewhere, but I’m not the one to come up with it as I’m here reading to fall back to sleep.
+1. The F-16 can go anywhere on earth with two missiles and a tanker in tow.
I can see launching aircraft from that platform... but recovery would be a little dicey.
The F-35s’ exhaust would melt the deck, their radars would not turn on (their internal software is heavily glitched with no plans to fix), their guns would not fire, their range is extremely limited (are refueling queens, useless with out constant refueling), and they would be shot down by Russian BVR missises long before they could drop either of their two 500 lb bombs assuming they somehow managed to be fielded close enough ... just for starters - POS.
And when the tanker is shot down - one of the very first targets against a peer - that is the end for the POS, aka the F-35.
There are numerous flaws with your argument. One is that an awful lot of the acquisition dollars does not buy technology, but bureaucracy and support contractors for bureaucracy [surrogate bureaucracts] - all those high rise buildings housing contractors that have grown up around the D.C. beltway - those aren't scientists and engineers. They are there to support the acquisition bureaucracy. Why?
It's like robbing banks. You do it because that is where the money is. Pentagon buries evidence of $125 billion in bureaucratic waste to which Frank Kendall replied the whole thing was so wrong that he needed another 1000 people reporting directly to him. And that is just the tip of the ice-berg.
One of the things you missed in your history is that the group you are complaining about (Boyd's acolytes - since you decided to take a whack at them) also did the A-10 development and approached it the same way - what does the pilot assigned close air support mission need to achieve his mission and get home. And the same acquisition process hates that plane and want to cancel it along with the CAS mission if they could and keep the dollars.
The present acquisition process is living breathing proof of Arrow's theorem on public choice, and the way every bureaucratic disaster gets fixed is to patch it with more people who have voting rights on the final "choice" which leads to disasters like the litoral combat ship. You don't design any complex integrated system that has to be optimized for a particular mission by voting, but by rigorous disciplined systems engineering.
The best and most revolutionary systems come not from the acquistion process but from DARPA. The Virginia class submarine did, as did the entire stealth concept. There is a reason. DARPA is not allowed to have an entrenched bureaucracy. Every program officer has to move on every so many years.
We could go on and on. And again, the F-35 example is used now in official DoD acquisition courses as a case study in how not to do procurements - it's so bad it's even a joke in the procurement bureaucracy.
There hasn't been any demand for it for the last 70 years so it's understandable.
I have said this before. Cheap solution
take a 300,000T tanker put double the BB armor around the superstructure, fill the cargo tanks with water and load it up with VLS: AAW,ASM,LACM, all sorts of ECM. flight deck for helos and VSTOL.
For some context to Rickover’s statement, remember that he was trying to redirect resources away from aircraft carriers towards submarines. Rickover was first and foremost a nuclear sub guy.
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