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To: NTHockey
Well, the point about surface ships is that the trend is always to bigger. A destroyer in WW1 was barely 1000 tons displacement. By WW2 a fleet destroyer was 2500 tons. By the height of the cold war they were pushing 4000 and the new US destroyers are pushing 6000+. For the USN, it doesnt really matter because "destroyer" is merely an approximation of size. The RN regards a frigate as something that hunts subs and a destroyer as something that shoots down planes. So in the RN frigates can be (and frequently have been) larger than destroyers.

Naval gun support is now largely redundant. The conventional wisdom is that it is far too dangerous to bring ships in that close to a hostile shore, and as you say, most of them dont have the gunfire to make it worthwhile anyway - all the more so because modern land artillery emphasises volume of fire whereas naval artillery stresses accuracy. Naval strategists have now largely delegated land attack to rockets, bombs and precision munitions from aircraft, although the recent development of stand off guided land attack missiles like tomahawk has seen direct naval fire support make a bit of a comeback. Really though, these precision guided land attack missiles are far too valuable to be used on anything other than high priority high-value targets. Direct support of say, an amphibious assault by suppressing beach defences, would almost certainly be done by aircraft.

27 posted on 03/22/2012 7:28:19 AM PDT by Vanders9
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To: Vanders9

[quote]Naval gun support is now largely redundant. The conventional wisdom is that it is far too dangerous to bring ships in that close to a hostile shore, and as you say, most of them dont have the gunfire to make it worthwhile anyway - all the more so because modern land artillery emphasises volume of fire whereas naval artillery stresses accuracy.[/quote]

The RN used naval gunfire to suppress artillery and destroy at least one Libyan convoy. I wouldn’t say it is redundant, especially considering that a ship can carry a hell of a lot of cheap shells and only a limited number of very expensive guided missiles for hitting prolific but dangerous enemy targets...


35 posted on 03/28/2012 6:04:25 AM PDT by sinsofsolarempirefan
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