Posted on 04/15/2005 2:27:55 AM PDT by Zero Sum
"There is no weapon system in the world that comes even close to the visible symbol of enormous power represented by the battleship." -- Retired Gen. P.X. Kelly, USMC
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Those words of the former Marine commandant resonate with me. In 1969, gunfire from the battleship USS New Jersey (BB-62) saved my rifle platoon in Vietnam. During her six months in-theater, the USS New Jersey's 16-inch guns were credited with saving more than 1,000 Marines' lives. The North Vietnamese so feared the ship that they cited her as a roadblock to the Paris peace talks. Our leaders, as they did so often in that war, made the wrong choice and sent her home. Now, 36 years later, Washington is poised to make another battleship blunder.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
Actually, I'm a Computer Programmer who spent 8 years inthe Military on the front lines. The best of both worlds. I'm also a historian and never in the historyof the planet has any war ever been won by machinery alone. It still requires a face-to-face encounter with total annhilation for one side or the other.
Kill Hitler, and someone else would have taken his place. Kill Osama, and someone else is there to step into his turban. However, if you level Iraq and put enough men and materiel in place to keep up an unrelenting assault, and the whole thing is typically decided for good.
Just ask the Japanese, Germans, Zulus, American Indians, and MAoris, just to name a few. When you lose sight of that fact, you wind up with the "MacNamarra School of Warfare".
Opps! WW2. My bad.
I speak of the future, with newer ones.
You'll see. It will happen in our lifetimes.
Then you can think back and realise the Laz is a Prophet.
I can understand the love of the battleship. It is an impressive sight to behold, but it represents a different era.
What people fail to realize about the BB's they can be more cost/mission effective from an ordnance standpoint. When the Iowas were in sevice NSWC Dahlgren had developed and under development a whole series of rocket assisted munitions which could be effective up to 117 miles.
The ideal modernized Iowa could have this done (Wisconsin and New Jersey):
Updated electronics: add new communications, radar, countermeasures, and fire control.
Upgrade 16 inch armanent: new powder, new munitions, service the existing new units.
Upgrade secondary armament: remove 5" mounts and replace with automatic 5" 62 cal. Can carry 25,000 rounds of ammo and increase rate of fire. Reduce manpower.
Upgrade missile armament: Retain 32 round ABL launchers, 16 Harpoon launchers and add 64 cell Mk 41 VLS aft of C Turret. Could increase Tomahawk load to 50-60 missiles. Remaining cells can be a mix of ASROC, Harpoon, and Standard missiles. Add two Sea Sparrow launchers in the existing stern 40-mm gun tubs.
Upgrade engineering: Fuel system has already been changed from original C-bunker to gas turbine fuel (marine diesel). Upgrade reduction gearing and redesign new propellors to get a few more knots.
If they are equiped with much more reliable electronics, with multiple redundancies, and better performance. They don't have to be "dumb" steel-hulled ships.
As a crew member of the "Jersey" in WW2 I know the Japanese gave a wide berth to this great ship. It could put up a curtain of flak that was impossible to fly thru. As a 17 year old kid, it has been the greatest adventure of my life.
Another interesting ship that can be built to fill this role could be a monitor. Remember the Brits built the Abercrombie and Roberts in WWII for bombardment and they were very sucessful.
Okay, let's run down the progress of military technology, shall we?
The club or the heavy rock was replaced by the spear and the sword. It still exists as a policeman's billy club and the rifle butt,or something similar, because it still works.
The rifle replaced the spear and the sword 500 years ago, although bayonettes are still around. The rifle is still here and will still be here in another 500 years, just in a different form, in as much different from the Brown Bess as the M-16 is today. that's because it will still works.
Cannon replaced seige towers, trebuchets and catapults, bt the need to apply massive amounts of firepower or force against a fixed fortification or kill a large number of people with high explosives still exists, and will continue to exist.
The tank replaced the horse, and will continue to do so until someone creates the ultimate anti-tank weapon, which of course, will be carried by a man. In the mean time, tanks still work, as do man-portable AT weapons.
The wooden trireme was replaced by the galleon which was replaced by the iron-clad, which was replaced by the dreadnaught, wich was replaced by the aircraft carrier. That's almost 3,000 years of combat at sea, where no human being could survive or support himself, bit which is still worth fighting over because it allows the movement of goods and materials. In the end, the armed ship, organized into fleets, still works. It will continue to do so until travel over water is no longer necessary.
The airplane is 100 years old and many of it's missions have been taken over by guided missiles, ICBMS, smart bombs, stand-off missiles, and SAMS, but they're still here, aren't they? In fact, they're continuing to evolve until they become invisible and capable of aeronautic maneuvers that would kill the pilot. However, they still require people to fly them, maintain them and run them, and always will, because a machine can never mimic the thought processes or think in the abstract like a human being. The day when AI becomes that powerful, we no longer have a need for human beings,period.
The atomic bomb obviated the need for massive militaries in the old sense (the mobilizing an entire populations), but we still have militaries because other people have them, and those militaris still represent threats that nuclear weapons cannot fend off. A nuclear weapon is not a military weapon, it is a POLITICAL weapon. This will continue into the futre until the human race goes the way of the T-Rex. Why? because it still works, when applied properly.
The purpose of this little jaunt through history is to teach you that even though the menas change, the ultimate nature of warfare has not -- it's still about imposing your will onthe other guy and more often than not, you have to level his society in order to do it. Such a savage notion still requires savage means --- people on the end of a rifle, behind a cannon or dropping bombs.
The flip side of all this savagery is that since war is stilla human endeavor it is still regulated by human emotions and logic. Colin Powell talked Bush I into stopping the first Gulf War because he was saddened and disgusted by what our guys did to retreating Iraqis. A machine is not capable of that. Firthermore, removing people from the scene of carnage by leaving them in a control room somewhere to guide the robots causes them to lose those emotions and logic until it becomes a machine vs machine rather than man vs man, and then you lose all perspective. Might as well destroy all life on the planet if we ever get to that point.
Tehcnology is great, but it should never ever, nor will it ever, remove human beings from the necessity of putting themselves in danger.
I understand your point perfectly. I'm not saying we should immediately take all the BB's out of mothballs and modernize them at exhorbitant amounts of money. ALl i'm saying is that he capability should continue to exist. Whether that means battleships or not is not my decision to make. However, this is what we have, at hand, and quite frankly, it would be much cheaper to refurbish them to the tune of $2B apiece if the only alternative is to wait for the Navy to design and fund something that will require 20 years and 10 times as much.
you work with what you have, but the fire suport mission has been sorely neglected for forty years now and it's something we should have.
Robots and nanites are.
You'll see.
And you'll rue the day you doubted me.
I remember how PROUD I was when Ronaldus Magnus had the weapons sytems up-dated on the Iowa class Battleships!!Hey,just ask the people that were shelled by those 16-inch rifles in Lebanon and Irag!!!I know that The USS Missouri is moored at Pearl Harbor(next to The USS Arizona).Are the USS Iowa,New Jersey and Wisconsin up at Bremerton?The keel was laid for a fifth "Iowa class",but she was never completed.
But isn't the whole point to be able to inflict harm with total impunity?
Rue, I say, RUE.
The USS Missouri was hit a number of times by kamikazes.She was the stage upon which the instrument of surrender was signed at Tokyo Bay,1945!
The New Jersey is at Camden, NJ,; Wisconsin at Norfolk, VA and Iowa at San Francisco, CA and all are open to the public. Wisconsin and NJ are still held as Navy assets.
Think about what you just wrote: AUTOMOMOUS ACTION.
That would entail the abilty of the machine to think for itself, not only logically, but abstractly, and develop it's own sense of self, it's own tastes and dislikes, and eventually, be able to make it's own excuses for slaughtering the guy who built it.
In that case, it's no longer a machine, it's a human being with mechanical parts, and it too, will fight others of it's kind with whatever weapons it's demented little electronic mind can devise and be just as savage. The robot will merely replace the man until a new technology it develops does the same thing to it.
As a computer programmer (automation programming, no less) I can tell you that the day will never come when machines comepletely replace human beings ni any endeavor. After all, who prorgrams and builds the machines?
Corret, but once you reach the point where you can inflict complete harm with complete safety, then aren't you on the way to becoming a tin-pot dictator with no respect for life?
This will go down into that special hall of predictions:
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