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
I know this.
A carrier with seventy aircraft on strike missions with a half hour turnaround, one hour travel, launch, and retrieval time and with a forty five minute loiter (requires mid air refueling with serious bomb loads) is two hours and fifteen minutes per mission or less than eleven missions per day per aircraft. At ten hours flight time per pilot per day you need two hundred pilots. At three hours and forty minutes over the target per day per aircraft and seventy aircraft in service you have about ten aircraft over the target 24 hours. This sounds like plenty but ten aircraft will be out of munitions very quickly during a major enemy attack. A bit of SAM fire will neutralize aircraft (so you need Wild Weasel and stealth bombers) but not 16" shells. The aircraft must not break down nor the pilots nor carrier crew either. Land based aviation is much worse without nearby full scale air bases. A CVN is very vulnerable a hundred miles offshore to the newer weapons designed by Russia and inplace by the Chinese for a Taiwan Straits war. An old BB is extremely cheap. There is a lot more.
"Call me silly, but I think there is an aesthetic consideration here, too. Having battleships with big be-jeezus guns is intimidating and, in their way, beautiful."
Not silly at all. We use the Carriers in "Show of Force" missions when we want to drive a point home to certain countries.
The same can be done just as easily with the BB's.
You must be ex-Air Force, my old man's service. Those guys never figured out the value of the words "occupy" and "loiter". Sometimes you just have to be there, or be square. Air power can make things go boom, but it's the repeatability, your ability to make the other guy's intolerable situation persist along the time axis, that makes victory permanent. Otherwise you're just handing him a bad afternoon. You can't just paste a target and call it Miller time. We supposedly learned that lesson in our postwar assessment of air power's contribution to the victory over Germany -- and its severe limitations, which were very much more significant than Hap Arnold and Curt LeMay would admit while the war was in progress.
Osama's watchword is persistence. His strategy is to wear down the West and fatigue our people's efforts. He is Rudyard Kipling's nightmare. The antidote to Osama is to make him and all his followers permanently dead, or their efforts permanently nonviable because of your own persistent presence, or that of responsible governments that won't put up with him. Air power doesn't give you that. The Navy, however, does give you that over 2/3's of the earth's surface, and big-gun FS for the Marines ashore is part of that picture.
We need the BB's, and we aren't just making stuff up. The defense contractors are, because they're selling systems, not systematic success.
Doctrine produces success, and you equip for the missions that doctrine says you need to carry out. BB's and CV's are the legacy equipment that has been designed around that continuing mission. Neological DD's that look like Civil War monitors are designed around Don Rumsfeld's and George Bush's favorite word: "cheap" ( = "no people"). They're a distraction from what is needed, a reversion to interwar Republican cheapness in defense spending.
I would ask him to give a scenario in the current war where the battleships would have been of use. I would ask him what he values more; the LHAs and LPDs which get the marines to the conflict, or the battleships which are of limited use in this day and age because he won't get both. I would ask him where in his current planning he can forsee the marines storming a defended beachead where air power would be unavailable. In short I would ask him to defend a multi-billion dollar expense in a plaform with such limited utility. How about that?
-The simple reason is COST. Not only would they need to be refitted, we no longer have crews to run them.-
I was involved with the re-commissioning of the BB's in the early 70's. Same arguments then by the Marines about shore bombardment. What most fail to see is the cost of manning a BB and then you get into the cost of re-arming them. Then you have the problem of limited range, 20 miles max with conventional ammo and longer with unconventional, along with less accuracy compared to A/C dropped munitions (the reverse of what we had in WWII when the BBs were more accurate).
Finally, they need to get well within shore launched missiles which may not sink them but can blind them.
All in all, you get little bang for your buck.
And Bush gave Rumsfeld his decision parameters, to-wit: he choked DoD's budget, after saying during Campaign 2000 that he'd increase it. He did tax cuts for blue-haired widows in Park Avenue instead -- go on, make me a liar if you can. You can't.
Get your facts straight and quit hiding
My facts are straight, and I'm right here.
Bush's highest priority is tax cuts, and he won't discuss why.
And when has such a situation impacted the marines in the current conflict?
They aren't just the big guns...they serve as TLAM launch platforms as well.
So do aircraft, submarines, cruisers, and destroyers.
They could be a launch site for Predator and other Armed UAV's.
So could aircraft carriers, LHAs, LPAs, LPDs, LSDs, etc.
The guns on a Battle Wagon have never just supported Navy and Marine assets.
Yet the marines are the only ones pushing for them.
Guided projectiles like this design have another flaw - if they don't maintain GPS lock, they go somewhere but not to the target. That can be pretty rough for planning for safety to innocent bystanders...
The rail gun is another "defense vendor special" - nobody has solved the inherent problems of rail erosion (only lasts a few shots), acceleration and EMP loads on explosive payloads and fuzes, etc.
The major defense companies are big on Powerpoint presentations and cost estimates, but short on fulfilling the promises.
False dilemma. Why limit yourself a priori? Why not see what all your mission profiles are and what tools you'll need for them, instead of limiting scenarios for consideration because you're so busy trying to werewolf one weapon system you don't like because you associate it with Ronald Reagan and non-Bushliness?
There, I loaded you up like you loaded him up. Nice to see you again, Non-Sequitur.
Please tell me what the HELL your dislike of the Bush tax cuts has to do with ANYTHING involved in this thread?
Or are you jsut suffering from a case of keyboard tourettes and just spew "tax cuts bad bush sucks" uncontroably on every thread you are on?
*rolls eyes*
During the big sandstorm at the beginning of April, 2003, when everything turned orange and ops ground to a halt.
With the advent of armed unmanned attack aircraft, the last rationale for using battleships is gone.
The only reason anyone wants the battleships reactivated is because of the romanticism associated with them. They are no longer practical weapons platforms.
Why do you think Ronnie went for them like a big-mouthed bass for a mayfly?
He knew what he was doing. He was old Hollywood; he knew the value of a symbol.
He appearently did.
He's not going to go up to the hill and plead his case without the facts.
Your proposed "questions" come off as uninformed about the WoT and the military.
Especially the one about LPD's. Those ships can't provide the artillery support required by Marines going ashore.
Oh and as for your questions about Marines hitting the beach?
I guess you missed their 500 mile inland drive in the opening weeks of OEF.
They BB's could patrol the Gulf area between Iraq and Iran and ensure the Oil Tankers go about their business unmolested...not to mention stop potential smuggling vessels bringing supplies to the terrorists.
If anything that right there would relieve the USCG assets that are doing that now over there and bring them back here to perfom their primary mission of Homeland Security.
"Yet the marines are the only ones pushing for them."
Because the Marines are the ones that NEED them.
Not to mention it would relieve the strain on the Army FA battalions in and elsewhere.
As long as the hulls themselves are kept intact they can be rebuilt and recommissioned. Even the North Carolina, Massachusetts and Alabama just one and two years older than the Iowas could be overhauled, modernized and recommissioned. Why stop at 4 when you can have 7?
You need to change your description of yourself from a "small R Republican" to what you really are...RINO.
"The new weapons on the DDX will be ETC (electro-thermal-chemical) weapons. They'll have a much longer range than a standard 6" weapon, and with the improvements in explosives since the 1930s will have much improved damage delivery. Additionally, the rounds will be guided, meaning fewer will be required for any given fire mission."
If they can even get them to fire.
"The Navy claims that the "firepower problem" -- Marines call it "steel on target" -- will be solved by a new, five-inch, Extended Range Guided Munition (ERGM). Under development at great cost since 1996, the Government Accountability Office said in 2004 that the ERGM program is rife with cost overruns and that "its problems have led to test failures and delays."
In truth, the ERGM should have been scrubbed in March 2000 when the Marines told Congress that neither ERGM nor any other five-inch round would meet Marines' lethality requirements. Worse still, a May 2001 internal Navy report admitted that ERGM won't meet Marines' volume of fire requirements either. Both needs can easily be met by existing 16-inch guns on the battleships."
"Even if the Navy convinced Congress to build more of the DD(X) class -- at $2 billion to $3.5 billion each -- these small, thin-skinned vessels are highly vulnerable to volleys of "sea skimmer" missiles. And a terrorist action, like the 2000 attack on the USS Cole -- which crippled the destroyer and killed 17 -- could do similar damage to a DD(X). Naval officers admit that heavily armored battleships are practically impervious to such strikes, but claim that what the DD(X) lacks in armor it will make up in stealth and speed. To embattled Marines that just means their nearest naval gunfire support will be far out at sea and traveling at high speed -- neither of which contribute to accurate "steel on target" for troops fighting ashore."
http://www.military.com/Opinions/0,,FreedomAlliance_041405,00.html
Where are you going to use them. Iraq has very little, and Afghanistan has NO, coast line. The Persian Gulf is too narrow and shallow for the navy to risk major assets in if we fight Iran. There really is no useful mission for the battleships right now. However, if we fight Korea or China, there would be so they should leave them in mothballs. Navy all ready has enough battleship museums. Have at least two I know of.
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