Posted on 12/05/2005 12:55:30 AM PST by txradioguy
WASHINGTON -- U.S. Marines, while fighting valiantly in Iraq, are on the verge of serious defeat on Capitol Hill. A Senate-House conference on the Armed Services authorization bill convening this week is considering turning the Navy's last two battleships, the Iowa and Wisconsin, into museums. Marine officers fear that deprives them of vital fire support in an uncertain future.
Gen. Michael W. Hagee, the current commandant of the Marine Corps, testified on April 1, 2003, that loss of naval surface fire support from battleships would place his troops "at considerable risk." On July 29 this year, Hagee asserted: "Our aviation is really quite good, but it can, in fact, be weathered." Nevertheless, Marine leaders have given up a public fight for fear of alienating Navy colleagues.
The Navy high command is determined to get rid of the battleships, relying for support on an expensive new destroyer at least 10 years in the future. This is how Washington works. Defense contractors, Pentagon bureaucrats, congressional staffers and career-minded officers make this decision that may ultimately be paid for by Marine and Army infantrymen.
Marine desire to reactivate the Iowa and Wisconsin runs counter to the DD(X) destroyer of the future. It will not be ready before 2015, costing between $4.7 billion and $7 billion. Keeping the battleships in reserve costs only $250,000 a year, with reactivation estimated at $500 million (taking six months to a year) and full modernization more than $1.5 billion (less than two years).
On the modernized battleships, 18 big (16-inch) guns could fire 460 projectiles in nine minutes and take out hardened targets in North Korea. In contrast, the DD(X) will fire only 70 long-range attack projectiles at $1 million a minute. Therefore, the new destroyer will rely on conventional 155-millimeter rounds that Marines say cannot reach the shore. Former longtime National Security Council staffer William L. Stearman, now executive director of the U.S. Naval Fire Support Association, told me, "In short, this enormously expensive ship cannot fulfill its primary mission: provide naval surface fire support for the Marine Corps."
Read the rest here:
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/robertnovak/2005/12/05/177720.html
Nostagia and the cool factor make me want to bring the old ladies out of mothballs, but in the era of JDAMS and total air superiority they're just an expensive novelty.
The next time the Marines are sent to storm ashore they should be led by a vanguard of all the "brave" pukes that sit in Congress.
But the ground-pounders were duly grateful when the New Jersey showed up just as an NVA human-wave assault across the DMZ was reaching its climax. One of the good guys reported that there was suddenly a bass rumbling sound, "like a thousand freight trains passing overhead" -- and then the entire valley just disappeared. Crisis over.
...the only 2 gun cruisers left are the Des Moines and Salem, I've seen them both and they are toast
How the hell did that happen? They had low steaming hours in the '40's and '50's and then got laid up when MacNamara got in there and started screwing around with what was left of the cruiser fleet. Although it might have started before him. Anyway, they're both sisters of the Newport News, which did strong work during Vietnam and which Hanoi Hannah dubbed "the grey ghost from the East Coast".
I made an error in an earlier post -- the Oregon City class was a postwar class of three ships including the Albany, which was one of the three CA's (including a couple of older Los Angeles class) converted to straight "double-ender" CG's and given tall "macks".....they needed cruiser hulls to accommodate a Talos launcher, or more than one Terrier launcher, I guess. Although Talos was one hell of a missile -- a former weapons watch officer in the USS Horne told me the North Vietnamese MiG drivers would simply eject when they found out a Talos was on the way. The expanding-rod warhead reached a radius of 100' before it disintegrated. Very nasty. The normal deployment for picket duty on the Gun Line was, cruiser with Talos outboard, DLG with Terrier closer to the beach, and a Tartar-armed DDG or DEG inboard. Sometimes, just to bag a MiG, they'd do a switch and station the cruiser inboard, relying on the inability of the Soviet radars to discern the size of the target, which would put the NVAF training lanes within range of the Talos ships.
I don't consider the Ticos or Burkes anything like being on the cheap (The Knoxs, Spruances, and Perrys, now they were a Navy bought on the cheap, but we still won the war with them).
No, I wouldn't call them "cheap" either -- both those classes represent best efforts technologically. The Kidd class that we were going to give the Gearwheel Chinese, I'm not so sure about. They were latterday improved Spruance-class ships or something -- all the ships from the late 60's forward had NTDS, the Naval Tactical Data System, a forerunner of Aegis, so they weren't exactly blind in a fight, but the lack of Aegis was, I gathered from reading, a primary reason the Kidds were laid up -- and a prime reason for substituting them for the Aegis technology that, given to the Taiwanese, would be in Peking before you knew it (although they don't seem to have any trouble getting information out of Los Alamos, since we're supposed to be so nonracial and look the other way and all, while Chicom agents go around making overtly racist Great China pitches to Chinese-American potential informants).
You're right about the Knox/1052-class DEG's (or FF, I guess they were re-rated). They were the fourth incarnation of the Bronstein and McCloy, which were built by MacNamara as a proof-of-concept of what a single-screw "ocean escort" could do. The idea was, they'd cruise along at 30 knots under cheap diesel power in formation with the battle group, using their DASH helicopter drones and ASROC launchers to drop torps on troublesome Soviet submarines that tried to get close. One thing led to another, and pretty soon the diesels had gone away in favor of steam, the SQS-23 sonar had been replaced with a mighty SQS-26 with a transducer bulge the size of a house (there are stories about the 26 -- one of them once got a return off the African continental slope from U.S. coastal waters......lit one off under just quarter-power one day and killed every fish for 600 yards in every direction......etc., etc.), top speed had dropped to 29 knots with a tailwind.....and the ship still had no AAW capability. (Useful discussion here, much of which I'm pleased to discover I'd recalled correctly before I searched up the site.) The followon 1047's (Garcia class) had two 5" 38's in single mounts, that was all. Later the No. 2 mount was replaced by a Tartar launcher and associated radars: that was the Julius A. Fuhrer (DEG-1) class.....later refined as the 1052's (Knox class). Pure MacNamara, from the conceptualization to the final, awful realization. Obsolete the minute the Sovs figured out how to hang cruise missiles on an SSGN. The "ocean escorts" had no capability against vampires; the Tartar was an early beam-rider, and an unlikely bet to handle an inbound missile stream.
I made the case on another post that keeping all four Iowas in good shape is a good idea. If we need them they will be there. With 10-15 years of a fifty year service life used, that means if we had kept them in service they would be approaching 30 years now. They would be done by 2025. China will be approaching real parity by then, by more than a few estimates. What do you do then? We have carriers in real need of replacement, and they don't come cheap. Save the BBs for a rainy day.
The problem is that you don't know how long you have until you need them, when the other party is the aggressor and will call the shots on timing any lunge across the Formosa Straits. We need to plan, budget, and carry out whatever modernization we know we're going to need to perform on these ships, and we can't do that if they're rusting at a memorial pier in Pearl Harbor. We can do the other improvements you were talking about to the Burke class and build more CVA's (I agree we're in bad shape, with more of our mainstay CVA's going for reef projects), but keeping the BB option alive for when you need it is going to require more commitment than another coat of that fish-oil preservative paint and sealing up the hatches.
Where I'm coming from is, I saw what happened with the inactive fleet in Orange, Texas. (The Naval Inactive Ship Facility, or "NAVINACSHIPFAC Orange".) I was detailed there for a couple of months in 1971 and saw numbers of ships, including 55 DD's and DE's, that had played important roles at Leyte and Guadalcanal. They had been recently stricken from the lists and were waiting to be sold to the breakers or towed out and sunk as targets by NAVAIRLANT. The waste was immense -- everything from typewriters to wire rope to boat motors to brand-new bearings still in cosmoline in wax-paper wrappers in the SK cage. It was criminal, someone should have been hanged. This was our patrimony being flushed down the head. Someone had started pulling the CO2 fire extinguishers off the ships (we found a taker for them -- PHIBLANT whistled them up when they heard we had them already palletized and ready to go) and setting aside the fire-hose nozzles, fire hose, gas masks, and other training items, but that was just scratching the surface. We did what we could -- saved what we could -- even put the word out among the Navy Reserve centers and got one of them a 600-pound binnacle off the bridge of the USS Frankford to put on their reserve center's quarterdeck. Block and tackle, peloruses, OBA's, you want? We got. Ship 'em out -- we became a "Toys 'R' Us" for the weekend Navy, trying to redistribute materiel before the shipbreakers or Davy Jones got 'em. I'm sure someone in the Nam, though, could have used all the 5" 38's, 3" 50's, and 40mm gun barrels we saw being cut around with torches.
The Spokane was there, the last of the CLAA's, 500-foot-long, 36-knot hull and all, ready to go to the breakers, or to the target area south of NAS Pensacola. The chiefs and mustang officers in Orange told me Spokane had been redesignated a target in the 60's and used for close-aboard detonations of immense piles of HE to simulate nuclear weapons effects; her frames and hull had been weakened by repeated exercises of this kind. You'd think her engines would have been worth something to someone, though -- all that horsepower, and how many steaming hours? One of the DD's still in reserve, an "improved Fletcher" that I went aboard, had her logbooks still on the bridge, still in dehumidification and looking like they'd just been laid aside a few minutes ago by the departing XO -- 1450 total steaming hours from completion to layup. One round trip to Germany in autumn 1945 and straight into mothballs. No kidding. A lot of those ships were like that, or close to it, especially the 1600's that had been mothballed at the end of the war after perhaps three years' service. All those 35- and 38-knot hulls lying at the pier, and guys were writing articles in the Proceedings about not having enough SSW punch, not enough ships armed with Harpoon and able to accompany a fast carrier group. And we were building 1052's and paying Litton billions and billions of dollars for MacNamara's 3000-ton, 29-knot, single-screw wonders.
So I'm a bit of a turk on asset preservation, and I see the BB's, the CVA's, and our SSN's as national assets that need to be conserved and milked for the last of the good in them, since we've spent such a treasure to build them and in many cases have, even in their retirement, assets that few nations on earth could afford to scratch-build. Even the 638's, as we were discussing, may have value left, that have to be 30 years old now. I got to ride the Pargo in her glory days for a few days during testing of the Mark 48 torpedo, until I was called away by a family emergency. I didn't know how glorious those salad days were, until I realized after reading Blind Man's Bluff that, when I visited her, Pargo's crew was in between Ivy Bells missions both of which would earn them secret presidential unit citations.
The LCS is our low end mix and I'm still waiting to see how that works out.
LCS?
And I guess 5" ERGM means those 5" semiautomated OTO-type mounts? What's the range on those things, anyway? The effective range of the 5" 54's carried in the Charles F. Adams DD's and contemporary types was iirc 29,500 yards.
But yes to your proposal to put off ridiculously expensive new (untried) ship types and just incorporate the best ideas. The long-winded argument about the "ocean escorts" above applies.
The battle between Tofflerian Light Fighters and those that grasp the actual requirements of a modern military rages on. The Congress is so far out of the loop with regards to the real issue at hand that it is unable to actually participate in the debate. The congress does not even know what this debate is. The battle within the military consists on one side of pretty boy codependent lightfighters who are more interested in "looking cool" than combat effectiveness. This sports PT, preppie colledge crowd dreams of great jobs in the defense industry after punching their tickets as officers in the military. The other folks who actually have made war, it's strategy and conduct their profession have been all but completely purged from the Military. When members of this latter group appear and the enemy begins to die they find themselves removed from the area of operations as soon as possible. It is the latter group whose future is in serious doubt as is the effectiveness a preparedness of the US Military. Simple inexpensive and robust systems which do exist in quantity are being systematically dumped into the ocean or otherwise distroyed. As you watch the next 5 Ton Road Bound Humvee or other wheeled crapomatic being blown up along with the Gi;s around it remember the Army is turning over 1200 M113 tracked Armored Personell Carriers that can travel off road and offer greater protection to GI;s to the AirForce for use as targets
I love the Iowa class BBs, but I love the Montana class BBs more, and would love a new design even better.
BB's had to operate under strictures about air superiority during WW 2 -- nothing new there. Of course you need top cover for whatever you do.
That said, when you're a Marine unit commander ashore and you haven't been able to secure a landing strip for Marine Air or Air Force units yet, and the nearest USAF basing area is about nine hours away by air, and the carriers have been called away to deal with a surface or naval-aviation threat, and you absolutely, positively need something really chunky taken out overnight, who're you gonna call?
The challenge is, getting guys to appreciate what they have in inventory already and commit to its employment, before you can sell them the idea, the expense, of committing to a newbuild ship.
Your competition is lobbyists selling foofighter visions of omnipotent new weapon systems that will render all seaborne forces obsolete, etc., etc. -- the military and naval equivalent of vaporware. They will prove to be a fruitful source of knocks against existing systems and equipment.
Well, the off-road capability probably goes at a discount in urban areas, but your point about crew protection is well-taken. If nothing else, guys can line the bottoms and sides with sandbags on the inside and go to work that way.
That business of expending them as targets is the kind of thing I'm talking about. Other than weapons testing, there is no excuse for destroying government property with live rounds.
We're down to that? We had more tenders during WW 1.
Please don't let that get back to opposed services. We needn't simplify their targeting problems unnecessarily, need we?
Sorry, nice idea but I want to win if we have to commit our forces. The only reason to follow anyone in our congress would be out of curiosity.
Please don't get me started on M113s and the Army "lighter is better" plan.
The idea that we couldn't have the first BB out in under 6 months is crap. If we need 'em, there are plenty of us out here to run 'em. The old uniforms are tight but I could probably get into them for a chance to fire up those big 600 pound boilers (they could spring for blue coveralls and that problem goes away). NAVSEA in Philly still has the M-type lab (I think?) for us to warmup on while they pull the dehumidifiers out of Wisconsin. The gunners are a little tougher but we could man up 1-2 turrets before the powder charges are reworked and Dahlgren still has the proof guns to check out the safety proceedures. Boat drivers (and I'm one of them) would answer an ad in the sunday paper to spend a couple of years helping out our ground pounding brethren. With a good escort around them we don't need any big time upgrades to just pound targets ashore. Hell we could steam those things on half the plant just to get steel on target.
Salem and Des Moines went to category X in the late 80s, No upkeep since the late 70s, sorry they're to far gone. The Newport News was in fact pretty effective and that is what I base my assertion that getting 2-3 8" guns out with every ESG(MEU) is our best bet for getting the Marines NGFS assets. The New Jersey took it to a new level which, if I could scrounge up about a dozen Arsenal ships with one modern triple 16" turret each, I would jump on it but this won't happen either.
The Kidds are with Tiawan and are what all of our Spru cans should have looked like. They are great ships and the NTU program made them close to (in some cases better than) Aegis.
LCS is the new Littoral Combat Ship HERE:
http://peoships.crane.navy.mil/lcs/
(the Navy's implementation of their 'Street Fighter' theory.
The 5" ERGM is the new round for 5"/62 caliber (5"/54 replacement) They are trying to get about 35 lbs of submunition out to 60+ miles. I guess you can figure out what the Marines think of that idea. They would do better with some of the M113s and 120mm mortars.
You might be interested in these sites:
http://www.house.gov/hasc/schedules/Work7-20-05.pdf
http://www.nvr.navy.mil/
This is probably the 2nd or 3rd most powerful fleet on earth and all are headed to the breakers or target duty:
http://www.nvr.navy.mil/nvrships/S_B_09.htm
Note: this is a NAVY site so nothing I say in my posts is not available on a google search.
The FRAMs were about gone when I got into the Navy. All those old ships were just not up to the real possibility of war at sea with the Russians. The FFs and FFGs could do more, even with their limitations, than all of the Fletchers/Bensons and FRAMs that you were refering to. We could have done better but like I said these are the ships that helped win the cold war. In the end they did their jobs and did them well. I'm confident that what we have today is up to the tasks ahead, however I (like other arm chair admirals/generals) would like to see some common sense tweaking of what we have.
1. Not familiar with NTU -- modernized NTDS, I take it?
2. You might discuss the changes made by Aegis, and why the Navy decided that a) Aegis was a be-all, end-all that was worth benchmarking all our surface combatants to, and that b) non-Aegis ships like the Kidd class weren't worth keeping on active duty. The last I had heard, it was salient characteristics of the Aegis battle-management system that led to the Vincennes incident in the Persian Gulf. It's also worth keeping in mind that Aegis and its associated radars are technology that is now over 20 years old.
3. I'm confident the Taiwanese will do a good job of keeping the Kidd class operational. An acquaintance who visited a Taiwanese-operated, ex-U.S. DD reported that you could eat off the decks. They also managed to wring an additional 15 years' active service from the ex-Japanese Yukikaze, last of the Kagero types and survivor of the naval battle off Okinawa in which Yamato was sunk. Rearmed with American 5"-38 twin gun mounts, Yukikaze soldiered on as iirc Tan Yang under the Gearwheel flag.
The FRAMs were about gone when I got into the Navy. All those old ships were just not up to the real possibility of war at sea with the Russians. The FFs and FFGs could do more, even with their limitations, than all of the Fletchers/Bensons and FRAMs that you were refering to.
A few Fletcher-class ("2100-ton/2100's") cans were FRAM'd -- you could count them on the fingers of one hand. Most of the FRAM conversions were bigger Allen M. Sumner and Gearing ("2700") types. The FRAM concept, as I pointed out, rested on an idea that basically didn't work -- call it "DDH on the cheap". The Canadians went ahead with the full-fledged DDH concept, we never did. The Soviet Moskva class were great, big DDH's with full-scale ASCAC's. I've never heard of a full appraisal of the Canadian and Russian experience with these ship types and their effectiveness as ASW escorts. We never got there, though -- the DASH helicopter drone just wasn't a workable, all-weather weapon system.
Another competitor was the IKARA/MELKARA system, and I've never heard of an evaluation of that approach to ASW, either, as a stopgap approach to full CVS accompaniment.
Come to think of it, we never got anything like the mileage we could have from our stock of old CV/CVL with their 33-knot hulls (the CVL's were built on cruiser hulls with cruiser engines, as opposed to the oiler- and civilian-transport-based, 18-20kt CVE's).
My beef with what happened to the reserve fleet over the years was that most of it was allowed to go to waste, when better maintenance would have been very cost-effective over time. A former USS Washington crew member visited her at Bayonne in about 1960 and found both the North Carolina's in deteriorated condition, with the teak decks buckling, etc. -- he called it to the attention of someone still on active duty, and the Navy bureaucracy's response was promptly to strike the ships from the Navy lists. (I saw these ships, btw, myself, in 1957, when I returned with my family from a nearly three-year tour in Newfoundland, where my dad, an active-duty USAFR radar officer, had been building the Pine Tree Line with the RCAF and Canadian Marconi. I asked my father, as our ship stood in toward the East River and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, what those huge gray shapes were over near the Jersey shore, and weren't they vulnerable to a Russian attack? He replied, reassuringly for a 9-year-old boy, that "if the balloon goes up, they'll be gone in 48 hours -- the Navy will take care of that." I suppose he thought so.)
My thought was that LBJ and Dick Nixon should, when they appreciated what the problems were, have built a new class of big, dedicated ASW destroyer like the British London type and the later Soviet types, and converted those older DD's to AAW/surface-warfare escorts to see us through the 70's and into the 80's, rather than playing FRAM games with them. They could have continued to lay up the best of the later classes and brought them out later, when the older wartime construction began to play out. (The USS Laffey, a Gearing-class DD, on her refitting trials in 1969, ran 39 knots for two hours.)
The 1600- and 2100-tonners were too small for the FRAM conversions anyway (they said), since the basic problem was to mount a big ASROC launcher and the DASH hangar topside, which was why those ships were left at the pier. The Navy's response instead was to convert and wear out the newer DD's while continuing to build glorified 1004's/Dealey-class DE's (which the USS Bronstein site I pointed you to states that the 1037's and all their 1047- and 1052-class successors were), which in turn were based on the humble, single-screw, I-need-an-escort-ship-in-a-hurry, 20- and 28-knot, 1400-ton DE's of Ernie King's "two-ocean Navy", the 20th-century equivalent of Abe Lincoln's "90-day wonders".
So the question arises, why were 1600-ton and 2100-ton destroyers too small for ASW, but 1400-ton single-screw escort types bulked up to 2600, then 3000 tons, were not?
The real answer is that they shouldn't have been tasking the ASW mission on ships that small to begin with. (Reviewing the history of a purpose-built, proof-of-concept ASW platform, the USS Mitscher, might be helpful at this juncture.) Which reminds me that they had an entire fleet of 33- and 36-knot light cruisers to work with instead of building a whole new fleet of "destroyer leaders", but let's not go there.
In short, they bypassed and squandered an amortized national resource base so they could continue to cut corporate-welfare checks to Avondale Shipyards and Litton Industries.
I've seen the pictures of rafts of DEs lining the Deleware River waiting their chance at the cutting torch. A sad sight for any sailor, and yes an apparent waste of the blood, sweat and tears of millions not to mention the treasure. The truth is the developements in sound isolation of machinery plus prarrie/masker hull and propellor quieting made all of those ships obsolete. The Dealys, Norfolk, Mitschers, Shermans etc that were built in the 50s and early 60s began the evolution of those technologies. The larger hulls made it possible to incorporate larger and more powerful sonars, that were usable in seastates that were unthinkable in WWII. The increases in technology also required greater generator capacities than the older ships could accomodate. Possibly the most important thing that we gained by building those classes was the ability to design and build warships. If those capabilities are allowed to wither away you will not be able to replace the ships when they finally are used up.
NTU - New Threat Upgrade - was a program that gutted and rebuilt the AAW capabilities of our Terrier/Tarter ships. They were as good, and in some situations better than Aegis. The reason that Aegis won out as the mainstay of the fleet was the age of the hulls on which it was based. The NTU ships were like the FRAMs, all used up.
Aegis is a battle management system that improves a warfare commanders situational awareness. That humans can commit errors even with the most modern systems should be no surprise to anyone. The man who must make life and death decisions in a matter of seconds will always be second guessed by those who would never consider making the commitment to live under that pressure.
The age of Aegis is almost irrelevant. The system is actually much older with it's start around 1961 with RCA. The system grows as improved radars, computers etc become available. The Anti-missile capability is more of a software patch than anything else. So the system is what we need it to be not like all the old systems that were seperate sensors, launchers and communications that needed to be interfaced by the operators.
Trust me when I say deck space for helos is not our problem. Building hybrid helo ships was a waste and most are now gone and will not be replaced. DASH may have been ahead of its time. We are doing alot more work on drones now and I think we could have had it then if we had just stuck it out.
As far as cruisers in the ASW role. One of things we learned in WWII is that the DEs were better with the sonars of the day at prosecuting subs because of their tighter turning radii. The bigger Fletchers and Sumners could loose a squirming sub before they could setup a good attack. This would be especially true of a light cruiser. We did try it with the Albanys and Long Beach, with only marginal success. The reason we had so many leaders (DLGs) was that there were a lot of FRAMs to be led. When they went away these ships usually became CGs allowing our term 'frigate' to be applied to the DEs that were more representative of our allies 'Frigates'.
The CVLs just could not handle the size/weight of aircraft developed in the 50s. They could have been used as helo or support carriers but why, we had gobs of Essex class carriers that required fewer men per aircraft carried to operate. In addition the lower practical limit for all weather carrier ops was about 15,000 tons. These ships had limitations that made them virtually wortless to our navy (We did transfer two to the French and 1 to Spain - That's another sad story. Google USS Cabot and see what her final fate was, not pretty)
The bottom line is we have to look forward not back. The ships of today are excellent in their own right and though 16" guns and such can not be replicated today we have some capabilities that reduce our dependence on these older technologies.
Not really. Not unless you make a "rule" that laid-up ships must be reactivated with their original weapon systems intact, and that they be required to engage vampires with quadruple 40mm mounts.
The British heavily updated HMS Renown and Hood in the 1930's with additional AA and a great deal of armor, reducing Renown's top speed somewhat but leaving her still a very fast, very heavily armed battle-cruiser, and just the thing to deal with raiders like Hipper and Prinz Eugen and the Japanese cruiser divisions that prowled the Indian Ocean from time to time -- both ships, if they'd been available, would have been very welcome in Ironbottom Sound during the desperate night fights with the Tokyo Express. The point being, none of those ships was stuck with her 1921 standards of protection (except Repulse, alone among the British capital ships) or secondary and antiaircraft armament. The same thing was true of the Italian, U.S., and Japanese fleets between the wars.
When you talk about Prairie Masker and hull quieting, I assume you're talking about the improvements of the 60's and 70's (Prairie Masker was 60's technology). You're rearming the submarines but not the opposing surface force.
The larger hulls made it possible to incorporate larger and more powerful sonars, that were usable in seastates that were unthinkable in WWII......
As far as cruisers in the ASW role. One of things we learned in WWII is that the DEs were better with the sonars of the day at prosecuting subs because of their tighter turning radii. The bigger Fletchers and Sumners could loose a squirming sub before they could setup a good attack. This would be especially true of a light cruiser. We did try it with the Albanys and Long Beach, with only marginal success.
As a side issue, I thought the Albany and similar conversions, and the Long Beach, were all AAW ships. The CAG's and CLG's certainly were. I'm unaware of any ASW trials for these ships.
Let's grant for the sake of argument that the larger WW II destroyers may have had difficulty depth-charging furiously maneuvering submarines (and there were a couple of interwar classes that were bigger than either the Fletcher- or the Sumner-class DD's; these mounted as many as eight 5"/38's in early marks of twin shielded mountings and displaced some 2300-2500 tons).
Granted arguendo that a big destroyer or DL might have had difficulty running down an enemy submarine using then-current tactics and weapons (which the arrival of the hedgehog and Y-gun and other early projector weapons was supposed to remedy), nevertheless the tactical situation that gave carrier admirals the biggest headaches after about 1960 involved a mix of SSN's, SSG's, and SSGN's launching coordinated attacks with cruise missiles and tube-launched standoff weapons. Tactics had changed a lot, from the 50's to the 70's, and tactical radii were no longer that big a consideration. A bigger one was whether the ship had space to accommodate a towed TASS/STASS/SURTASS (different monikers, same basic equipment) array.
Absent the need to make high-speed depth-charge runs directly over the target, larger, even cruiser-type hulls were back in the ASW game.
Building hybrid helo ships was a waste and most are now gone and will not be replaced. DASH may have been ahead of its time.
I guess I'll have to take your word on that. People are enamored of drones now, thanks to their success in the Gulf War and the WoT (mind, they haven't yet faced a competent enemy, with the possible exception of Saddam's AAW net), but the sailors I knew in the 70's were fond of telling DASH stories whenever the subject came up. I think that they'd have liked DASH even less if a number of them had gone kerplunk close aboard with Mark 44 war shots still attached........usually they just lost the drone and its exercise round.
The CVLs just could not handle the size/weight of aircraft developed in the 50s.
OK, that's a point. The older carriers certainly couldn't stand up to the pounding they'd take from big, heavy jets like F-4's and F-14's. But it doesn't apply to helicopters, as you noted.
They could have been used as helo or support carriers but why, we had gobs of Essex class carriers that required fewer men per aircraft carried to operate.
Not sure about your point about fewer men per aircraft: the Midways had 4000-man crews and carried 137 aircraft, and the Essex class required 2900-3000 men to operate a fuzzy total of 85-100 aircraft (say 95 just for grins). The two principal CVL classes were the late-war Saipans which had 1500-man crews and carried 48 aircraft (half an Essex, in other words) and the earlier Independence class, which had 1400-man crews and flew 45 aircraft. It seems to me the ratio of crew to aircraft is holding up, and doesn't improve unless you go in the other direction and point to the small CVE's that carried 21 aircraft and had crews of about 500.
Also, sometimes you don't need an entire ASW helicopter wing to support your task group. A smaller ship would make sense, as long as it could keep up with the group. At 33 knots, the CVL's could keep up.
In addition the lower practical limit for all weather carrier ops was about 15,000 tons.
Is that for fixed-wing aircraft? Jets or propeller aircraft (like S2's)? Or would it be true for helicopter operations as well? I don't think so, if a helo or an Osprey can land in the sweet spot amidships and then be towed forward or aft.
These ships had limitations that made them virtually wortless to our navy.....
Gosh, I really don't know about that. With good speed and water-tight integrity, they offered low steaming hours on good hulls that could be "remanufactured" to spec, including (for the DD's and CL's, since you brought it up) the German innovation from WW I, of forefoot auxiliary rudders to help maneuverability.
Possibly the most important thing that we gained by building those [postwar] classes was the ability to design and build warships. If those capabilities are allowed to wither away you will not be able to replace the ships when they finally are used up.
Ah, that sounds like the real reason.....the one the lobby has always trotted out. "The need to feed." Yeah, well.....that's what I've been talking about. And I strongly disagree. That's the rationale that supposedly dictated that our national patrimony be thrown away, squandered, sent to the breakers for two cents a pound, or to the bottom. Because Litton and Avondale Shipyards needed to keep selling us something we already owned in exuberant excess.
We needed weapon systems and upgrades. We didn't need hulls. They sold us hulls because they needed to sell hulls, complete ships, to feed their "need to feed." That's just corporate welfarism, and the problems it was supposed to cure would be better solved by looking at why other nations' shipyards were undercutting ours, so that U.S. shipbuilders needed U.S. Navy contracts just to survive.
Sidebar Moderator, please eliminate my earlier duplicate post above; I screwed it up by dropping an HTML tag. TIA.
Just a personnal note up fron that may be lost with all the back and forths. I'm enjoying the conversations on this subject nad hope that you are as well. That said, here we go.
I would not make the point that the ships would reactivate as built. I think that the mix of new and modernized ships that we ended up with was pretty good. The Essex class modernizations not only gave us a more flexible set of capabilities (Fixed/Rotary wing as well as Strike/Support) than the CVLs could, they also let us make use of the excellent steaming characteristics of the Essex class. This was no small issue, with the life cycle cost of fuel included.
The manning levels that I would use for comparison would be as modernized. First, the numbers you used included the airwing personnel. Since the squadron structure handles this drop about 1/3 of your starting numbers. Next as modified the Essex class dropped 16 of 20 5" guns plus all of the hundreds of 40mm and below weapons. This is significant when say 20 per 5" mount reduces crew by about 320 + the 40s/20s. The CVLs had a couple dozen 40s and some 20s. No big savings in crew. The rest of the manning is about proportional to the number of aircraft carried so about a wash there.
The displacement issue came up in the 30s in studies done on Langley, Ranger, and Lexington/Saratoga. We decided on the 20,000 ton Yorktowns as the best compromise. We filled out the treaty tonnage with the 15,000 ton Wasp. The comparison held up until the Jets started to arrive, making the point moot.
The Albanys and Long Beach were primarily AAW but carried an SQS23 hull mounted sonar and ASROC pepper box. The rest of the earlier single end conversions (CAG/CLGs) did not get the ASW gear.
I left out part of the size issue from the ASW perspective. Helos changed the equation when they became the primary inner zone ASW asset. If DASH had succeeded the size issue would have gone away, with FRAMs being just fine. When you had to get SH-2s on the DD/DEs in the screen, you now had a 4000 ton lower limit to get higher seastate aviation capability. Manueverability became secondary to bigger sonars and helos. Also the arrival of faster nukes meant that direct attack by the surface ships was less likely since the nukes could jump out of ASROC range even against a FRAM. The gas turbine Spruances tried to solve part of this problem with the quick response from patrolling at 10-12 knots to chasing down a cavitating nuke at 30+ knots. As far as the different tails go, size was an issue there but even the Bronsteins carried a big tail (it cost them their 3rd 3" popgun) We probably over did the tails in the 80s. Your case about how we spend money holds up here. We put TACTAS on everything from FFGs through Aegis CGs (about 100 ships) when about half that number would have been good enough.
I also heard the DASH stories, pretty wasteful modifying several hundred ships to operate and support a totally untested weapons system. It should be noted though that DASH was a response to our desire to upgrade and continue operating WWII vintage ships. Had we decided to build more ships that could handle helos we would not have gone through that fiasco. I can't say it would have been cheaper but it certainly wouldn't have left a gapping hole in our ASW capability that lasted through the 70s. When we dumped the last CVSs after Vietnam we were really hurtin' and a bunch of old retread ships didn't help matters.
A note about the CLs you mentioned. Yes, they could at great expense have been upgraded (New sensors, weapons, machinery isolation, prarie/masker ...) but how much more survivable would they be. The WWII experience says a badly damaged ship could continue to fight on. But with the advent of the 'Sensor Era' that replaced the mark 1 mod 0 eyeball, a mission kill that would leave a ship blind was a better solution. Your enemy ends up with a cripple to protect and then fix as opposed to a lost ship and crew to rally around (Remember the Maine!).
I really can't refute the idea that without the military contracts the Military Industrial Complex couldn't survive, however short of total isolationism we would be toast without the strength of our armed forces. I would not want to be in a position where we were worried about Canadian or Mexican forces reaching parity. The technology does result in many good things beside warfighting capability. Our current discussion being possible only because a military program resulted in the internet.
BTTT
By Cruise Missle.. A battle wagon could be a bodacious cruise missle platform.. for many different kinds of cruise missles.. even launching mother cruise missle carriers releasing baby cruises as into the theater as needed.. guided by maybe a Predator.. You know, we need a VTOL Predator.. it could operate as a WACs or a command module.. properly fitted..
Actually a battle wagon could be a stand alone intimitator.. as useful as a carrier.. as a matter of face all cruise missles should be VTO.. and ancillary CM helpers should be VTOL..
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.