That is all for FbF today - but I leave you with something to ponder.
As we discuss what is or is not littoral warfare - check out this picture. All the stealth in the world won't help you here --- and a lack of damage control will kill Sailors wholesale. That is why the selling of LCS is almost a crime.
45 comments:
BB-64, the Big Badger Boat, once had to venture into shallow water to silence a North Korean 6" shore battery, and recieved a mailbox sized hole in her deck for her troubles, ( she obliterated the battery ). If WISCONSIN can get hurt in a littoral gunfight, what will happen to an LCS?
Piggybacking on this, and Guest's post, maybe next week you could do the Allen Sumner class of DD's which did NGFS in WW2, Korea (where some took damage), Vietnam, and some were even upgraded with new ASW stuff and even ASW drones. (sounds kinda familiar).
This at 1k tons less then LCS, 10 knots slower, better range, a lot more crew, and a seemingly a lot more firepower.
LCS is "transformational" so it just won't happen to her ;) .
Back in 1950, though, we still had LOTS of ships and LOTS of WWII experience.
<span>None of those "good solid warships" possessed the network elegance of the LCS!
</span>
AK-47 is not elegant from engineering point of view - and it killed more people than nay single weapon in last century... Neither elegant weapons were, in no particular order
Sherman
T-34
B-17
Il-2
Type VII
Gato
and many more, you name it.
Elegance can happen to a weapon - look at P-51 or Spitfire in flight, but it is exception rather than a rule.
Gato was an "elegant" weapon, probably the best sub of WWII except possibly the German experimental stuff (Type XX et al). Id' say that the B17 and Sherman (maybe not the Sherman) and the type VII all qualify too. What they all were, though, were well-engineered, robust and straighforward, thus well-designed for their task and especially easy to build.
Just remember:
If you have the enemy's range, they also have yours.
Incoming fire always has the right of way.
B-17's aren't elegant?
Ewok40k please report to the USNA Weed post as your expertise on getting high might be useful.
During the Easter Offensive of April-July '72, USS PROVIDENCE, USS OKLAHOMA CITY (both CLGs), and USS NEWPORT NEWS (a CA) all provided NGFS within a mile of the beach at the DMZ when they weren't running strikes up north. All received counter-battery fire, the results of with were insignificant.
The T-34/85 was the embodiment of weaponry elegance. Wide tracks giving it a kilopascal per unit area footprint identical to the infantryman's boot, a rugged and reliable power plant. A highly effective 85mm HV main gun, and sloping armor that defeated all comers other than the 8.8cm L/43 at fighting ranges, until the development of the very long-barreled 7.5cm PaK 40 L/48. Cheap and easy to produce, the tank was so effective that it was seen in the Balkans in the mid-1990s. The Germans had no equivalent for the T-34, especially with the up-gunned 34/85 model, until widespread fielding of the Pzkw V and VI in mid 1943.
And without the aid of anything like GPS....
All those weapons were evolutionary, with good amount of redundancy in systems and solid construction not skimping on materials, and proven design features save the T-34 with its radical (then) sloped armor, and B-17 was as elegant as elephant - and great for it's job, though war reality corrected prewar strategy with the need for escorts. For elegant tank design look at Panther - and it did indeed do fine when overcame it's infancy problems - though probably more of simpler Pz IVs would be better bet for the Panzerwaffe.
unless you happen to have stand-off weapons and enemy not... though in littorals it's rare occurrence
<span>Engaging shore batteries.... love it! Now that is what I call a GUNNERY OFFICER!!</span>
Mind you, the 85mm version appeared late in 1943 as response to the Tigers and Panthers - and Panthers scored 5-1 kill ratio vs them. It was fine tank, but not superweapon as Russians like to sell it. Just ask Israeli Super Sherman crews :) It had initially no radio, and poor optics compared to German tanks. But Russians quite well evolved it, and I think Germans could do similar with Pz IV, upgunning it to 75mm/L70 to make mass-producable killer antitank platform.
<span>Sure doesn't look like the littorals of the '50s and '60s were the kind of place that you'd want a less than Level I Survivability ship to linger.</span>
Can someone please explain to me how the modern Littorals have become "the least severe environment anticipated", and why its ok to send ships built to an engineering standard that struggles to cope with even that to linger there?
Or even a decent coastline to cut your fixes off of. :)
n you would have loved my first deployment.
Yeah...
But those examples are are all OLD!!!
The LCS will be so much smarter.
And its <span>FAST!!!!!</span>
But I doubt any of you Old Farts will ever grasp that.
8-)
<span>There's always going to be a place for the low-end combatant. Previously, this was the role fulfilled by the ocean escorts, such as Knoxes and Perry's. Their lack of all around capability was offset by the fact that they would generally only have one threat axis at a time, primarily a submarine threat. In the post Cold War environment, Figs have done a lot of the economy of force operations that DE's did in WWII, going those places where either the threat was secondary, or there just weren't enough hi end platforms to cover.
The LCS originated under a arguably sound concept, that a very small combatant could be built cheap enough that the loss of one would not be financially much worse than the loss of a high end fighter. The public doesn't get up in arms when someone dumps an F-18. The concept was that you could "flood the zone" with a bunch of these cheap small ships, and if you lost one, but managed to save most of the crew, no big deal.
Well, that's fine and dandy at 400tons like Ceberowski first proposed. But despite the Navy spending 5 years telling us that the LCS wasn't a Fig replacement, at 3000t and a proposed built of 55 hulls, it obviously is. And there's a huge public opinion difference between losing a patrol boat with a number for a name, and losing a warship commissioned and named.</span>
<span><span><span>The public doesn't get up in arms when someone dumps an F-18.</span></span>
But there are plenty in the USN who know that there are only enough to afford only minimal losses these days...</span>
Ewok,
Absolutely, all points are true. But, to Lenin's assertion that "quantity has a quality all its own", when the T-34/76 and later the T-34/85 was being produced at ratios of 8 or 9 to one Panther or Tiger, there didn't need to be a qualitative equivalent. It was a tank that none but the Mk V and VI could handle until the L/70 showed up in the Mk IV.
The 85mm began to hit the front in early 1943, in HUGE numbers from Kuibishev and other factories, and along with the KVs, made up the preponderance of Soviet main echelon armor at Kursk.
<span><span>But despite the Navy spending 5 years telling us that the LCS wasn't a Fig replacement, at 3000t and a proposed built of 55 hulls, it obviously is.</span></span>
What I was sayin' seven years ago...
Programs of Future Past...This is all so like the early proposal days
of the FFGs. Remember how they were supposed to have a crew of about
70-90 people and be versatile by virtue of their numbers?
Of course reality turned out to be quite different and I have no
doubts it will be for the LCS as well.
Sid, my point, poorly made, was that the "Steetfighter" concept ran into the wall that was the need for a Fig replacement. And lacking the singleminded manager to keep the design in check, to keep it from mushrooming from its simple origins, every guy in a blue suit insisted that his favorite project had to be incorporated.
Zumwalt knew what he wanted, a (relatively) cheap frigate, but one that was robust enough to be useful. He wanted something more akin to the Dealeys than the Claude Joneses. And while he gave ground in some areas and let cost rise (2 helos vs. one, MK-13 vs. BPDMS), he also made sure that "better" didn't become the victor over "good enough."
There was, and stil is, no such discipline over the LCS program. It is all things to all people. Here we are with two hulls in the water, and the baseline still isn't fixed. We don't know what the ships will do, despite 10 years of people supposedly thinking of the doctrine of fighting in the littorals (and doctrine and strategy are what SHOULD drive the design of warships). One of the earliest decisions made was that speed should be emphasised. That decision of course drives the entire rest of the design, to include the need to sacrifice ability to absorb damage (your pet peeve). That makes sense on a 400t patrol boat that's gonna fight Boghammers. It's sheer lunacy in a 3000t frigate, especially one that's a minesweeper, helo carrier, small deck amphib, and inshore ASW platform.
While we can bitch and moan about LM and GD quality control, we can't complain about the design. LM and GD were never given guidance about what was needed beyond making a fast boat that looked really cool.
T-34C with 76mm made up the majority at Kursk.
The T-34/76 was more numerous than the 85 overall at Kursk, but not in the main echelons. They were husbanded similarly to the way the Germans later did with the "Heavy" Panzer battalions.
Dude!!! The thing is NETWORKED!!! And cool/futuristic looking!
MY G-D. The LCS is Obama. You can project anything you want to upon it's blank screen.. :)
It's the perfect ship for the current POTUS. Overthought, overpriced, undermanned, underarmed, and under construction.
I remember watching a documentery on the Panzer Korps, and when the host asked an elderly German, who at one time in his life was a Panzer General, what tank of WWII, if he could choose any of them, would he have eauipped the panzer forces with. I was expecting him to say, " Lots more Panthers ", and was surprised to hear him say that he would have been unstoppable, if he could have had Shermans, armed with the gun from the Panther. The Sherman was mechanically utterly reliable, and the Panther gun would have allowed it to kill, before the threats could get into range of thier own guns.
A Sherman with a gun of a Panther would have been the British Firefly, with a 17-pdr main gun. A lethal cannon even to the Pzkw V and VI.
Someone tell me this - if we can build cruisers back then, and lots of them, then why can't we build a good, solid cruiser now?
This drives me nuts!
We just scrapped the ex-USS Des Moines. It wasn't until just a few years ago that I learned about this CVB class, over 700' long.
Please tell me why we can't replicate something like this?
look at what Israeli have done with upgunned Shermans, as late as 1967!
Because we're having a fleet of super star destroyers aka CVNs to build, support, and escort?
otherwise, cruisers were designed for anti-surface primarily, and that turf was claimed by naval aviation and antiship missiles... nobody is building gun-centric ships anymore. If we ever have to build a dedicated naval gunfire support platform, it would be a monitor - think naval equivalent of A-10.
Original concept was for 400 ton? He would love the Visby class!
Seems that ...as reported over at Tim Colton's place...LCS-1 has grown some "butt wedges".
Kinda cute. But if those sponsons are for damaged stability, what happens when they get holed as well?
Also, have to wonder what the interaction is with the wake, and the impact it may have on the ship's vaunted speed.
Why do I get the feeling that somebody at Gibbs&Cox is hopping mad about how they are looking in all this mess..
A major problem is that our steel industry is gone, or, at least, is a shadow of it's former self. This nation cannot produce 16" homogeneous rolled armor plats anymore. The machinery is dead and gone.
If we wanted to make armored warships again, we'd have to rebuild our steel production capability, although it might be interesting to see what part, if any, a composite armor like that used on the M-1 MBT could serve a ship.
I saw those yesterday...from about 50 feet. Some other interesting things about it as well. Ask Sala for the info.
<span><span>Piggybacking on this, and Guest's post, maybe next week you could do the Allen Sumner class of DD's which did NGFS in WW2, Korea (where some took damage), Vietnam, and some were even upgraded with new ASW stuff and even ASW drones. (sounds kinda familiar). </span>
Good tale here about the Rowan off North Vietnam...
(check out the haircuts-Fuzzy Navy at its height)</span>
LCS-1 stern redesign: I think those bouyancy additions are going to make if really difficult-er (if there is such a word) for RHIB's etc to reenter the well deck after their VBSS etc missions. It's already hard enough in even moderate seas, but now .... wow, this is a serious problem because the other well deck door (ie the side door on the stbd side aft) is even more poorly thought out. In fact, the LCS-3 build team (Navy and shipyard) asked permission to simply eliminate the stbd side door altogether from LCS-3 currently under construction. FYI, permission to delete that door was denied, although they received PERGRA to delete the CPS air protection system from LCS-3. Hope terrorists don't fire any nasty chem bios stuff towards LCS-3 while deployed.
GREAT story, Sid! thanks for the link to USS Rowan.
And yeah, I remember those haircuts well..... The beards too! :)
Sigh, once again, I forgot to log in. I really must start paying more attention.
As late as the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the IDF actually had several companies of "Super Shermans", M-51s, with the NATO 105mm. They did fine then too, but eventually wore out.
Whew! That off-topic meandering took us from Kursk to the Ardennes to the Golan Heights. Well done!
Sid,
That has FbF written all over it....
got excellent documentary on the last battle of Wittman here, brought down, by Shermans, btw...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqdUafuKEpA&feature=PlayList&p=0536DA5ABA8ECA88&index=0&playnext=1
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