Gary Brecher Sure has a Fixation With Aircraft Carriers...

[Juubi Karakuchi]

Basic google shows the weapon to be an IRBM. Which is not an anti-ship missile. It's an anti-city missile. Claims of skimming the ocean are ridiculous. Claims of stealth are ridiculous. Any rocket that's flying supersonic is going to be damned obvious. And also, basic google says the missile is twenty plus years old. I don't follow these things in the slightest, but any basic sense tells you that magic DF-21 missile doesn't work like that article writer says.

I don't recall this new weapon,derived from a DF-21, being described as a sea-skimmer anywhere. My understanding was that it would come down on the target from above (as any ballistic missile would). Considering what this weapon is, that the Chinese should try to make it capable of hitting a warship is perfectly believable. It would simply be a matter of decent satellite and terminal guidance (the question being, have the Chinese attended to this or not?). I too take exception to the article's claim that this automatically and invariably spells doom for aircraft carriers. To create an anti-ship IRBM is believable, but whether it is combat-effective (is it really immune to interception?) or cost-effective (this is an IRBM we're talking about) is another matter. My instinct at this point would be to reserve judgement until they actually hit a ship with it (preferably in the context of a test).

I think the issue is NOT whether a warship can fire air defense weapons straight up (vertical launch systems are proliferating like crazy), but whether the RADAR on a warship can detect a ballistic missile diving straight down at it. Of course, when one military manages to make an antiship ballistic missile WORK, another will manage to mount a radar that lets a warship detect a ballistic missile diving straight down at it, and we'll ask ourselves, "the chicken or the egg?" again.

Pretty much, yes.

[PeZook]

All this is nonsense: the SM-3 is operational now, fits into US Navy VLS cells and is perfectly capable of intercepting ballistic missiles.

[K. A. Pital]

Warning time means a lot though. ICBMs, sure, there would be minutes ahead, the warhead would be flying from a known place, et cetera. With a SRBM or IRBM, the warning time contracts, and if there's just a few seconds to react, I wouldn't expect the operators being able to salvage the situation, because several seconds are the reaction time of the radar and computer systems themselves, not even factoring the human component in.

[Beowulf]

Even with the shorter range, there would still be at least 1-2 minutes between launch and impact for reaction to occur in, based off of assumed range that a carrier would be off shore, and the speed of a DF-21.

[Darth Wong]

Why does he believe the basic strategy of the armoured knight became obsolete? Did the concept not become resurrected in the form of the modern armoured vehicle? Does the modern infantryman not once again wear body armour? Has he ever heard of these things called "tanks"?

[Setzer]

IIRC, in one of his earlier articles, he compared knights to tanks, saying they were both powerful and heavily armored, but it was their mobility and speed that made them deadly.

[Darth Wong]

IIRC, in one of his earlier articles, he compared knights to tanks, saying they were both powerful and heavily armored, but it was their mobility and speed that made them deadly.

So he's compared knights to tanks before, yet in this article he uses the knight to prove that the entire concept of the high-cost well-defended fighting unit is a waste of time?

[Nephtys]

IIRC, in one of his earlier articles, he compared knights to tanks, saying they were both powerful and heavily armored, but it was their mobility and speed that made them deadly.

So he's compared knights to tanks before, yet in this article he uses the knight to prove that the entire concept of the high-cost well-defended fighting unit is a waste of time?

Apparently, since nuclear missiles can kill them. Especially magic nuclear missiles that are simultaneously stealth, hypersonic, sea-skimming, extremely long ranged and capable of evasive flight patterns...

[Darth Wong]

Leaving aside his truly bizarre claims about large numbers of Arabs on motorboats taking out a carrier group, the logic in his longbow argument is really, really strange:

The most obvious example is European heavy cavalry trotting into longbow fire again and again. Crecy demonstrated that knightly charges were suicide against the longbow in 1346. But the French aristocracy had so much invested in prancing around on their damn steeds that it took another demonstration, at Agincourt in 1415 to even start to get them thinking about it. I’m no math wiz but I think that 1415 minus 1346…yup, that’s 69 years between catastrophes. Lessons learned? None.

Even if we take his descriptions at face value, wouldn't this actually lead to the exact opposite conclusion of the one he makes? If it took 69 years for another battle to occur in which knights fared poorly against longbowmen, then logic would suggest that unless that was an extraordinarily peaceful time in history (which is, of course, utterly absurd), then knights continued to be effective in the majority of battles during that time.

[Setzer]

Well, when he made the comparison, it was talking about city fighting. Being generous, he didn't notice the opposite viewpoint with regards to cavalry.
What he should be doing is drawing more attention to pre-WW2 gushing over battleships or strategic bombing.

[PeZook]

Even if we take his descriptions at face value, wouldn't this actually lead to the exact opposite conclusion of the one he makes? If it took 69 years for another battle to occur in which knights fared poorly against longbowmen, then logic would suggest that unless that was an extraordinarily peaceful time in history (which is, of course, utterly absurd), then knights continued to be effective in the majority of battles during that time.

Well, yeah. Even if we assume what he says is an honest represantation of what actually happened at Crecy and Agincourt, it means that somehow French knights didn't die out over the course of the freakin' Hundred Years War

Not to mention that those damn backwards French won in the end, and continued to be a major power for the next half millenium.

[Isolder74]

Even if we take his descriptions at face value, wouldn't this actually lead to the exact opposite conclusion of the one he makes? If it took 69 years for another battle to occur in which knights fared poorly against longbowmen, then logic would suggest that unless that was an extraordinarily peaceful time in history (which is, of course, utterly absurd), then knights continued to be effective in the majority of battles during that time.

Well, yeah. Even if we assume what he says is an honest represantation of what actually happened at Crecy and Agincourt, it means that somehow French knights didn't die out over the course of the freakin' Hundred Years War

Not to mention that those damn backwards French won in the end, and continued to be a major power for the next half millenium.

It took Joan of Arc for them to get their act back together. The French might have had a good military but the kings needed balls.

[Sea Skimmer]

I think the issue is NOT whether a warship can fire air defense weapons straight up (vertical launch systems are proliferating like crazy), but whether the RADAR on a warship can detect a ballistic missile diving straight down at it. Of course, when one military manages to make an antiship ballistic missile WORK, another will manage to mount a radar that lets a warship detect a ballistic missile diving straight down at it, and we'll ask ourselves, "the chicken or the egg?" again.

It’s not like the whole flight path is vertical; or that even more then a small portion of the end flight would be. The ship is going to detect it further away when its arcing down and engage it in that regime. ABM is also simply in large part collective matter; a group of ships spread over a hundred miles can protect each other and remotely cue missile launches. Any lone ship is dead anyway. AEGIS BMD is also specifically designed to accept feeds from land based radars like AN/TPY-2 and Sea Based X-band which can cover far broader areas. The Navy wanted a future 25,000 ton cruiser which would mount something like a navalized AN/TPY-2 itself, but with the cancellation of KEI such a large ship no longer makes sense as it wouldn’t be able to engage ICBMs the way we’d want something that expensive to be able too.

The Navy isn’t dumb and deaf when it comes to anti ship ballistic weapons, the threat was recognized all the way back in the 1950s when someone realized a nuclear SUBROC would be an effective anti ship weapon for subs. More recently the Soviet Kh-15 aeroballistic missile was viewed as a great threat to warships from the 1980s onward.

Proposals have existed for adding an extra radar antenna to naval phased array systems pointed straight up to fill the hole, but the universal opinion so far is it’s far too much money and top weight to be justified. Newer AESA phased arrays are also much better then PESA sets at scanning at extreme angles off the antenna bore sight.

Question for people who know more about this than me; how effective are anti-missile defences against stealth cruise missiles? I would think something like the AGM-129, but built with contemporary LO technology instead of early 80s stealth would cut the detection range down to the point where a relatively small swarm attack could overwhelm a CVBG. Until recently the US was basically the only nation with decent LO tech but judging by recent UAV developments it is proliferating rapidly, so this option should be viable for most states in the near future.

High stealth missiles have some practical problems in terms of mounting radar (vs. an IIR system like on JASSM that need only activate, its covered by a nose cone normally, at that last moment to attack a fixed land target) for hitting a moving ship, and in obtaining high supersonic speed without costing as much as a jet fighter does individually. Pretty much it’d have to be subsonic, and as warship radars are relatively high power it’d still be spotted at a tactically significant distance. We don’t really expect to engage low level missiles at more then about 25 miles already after all. They would increase the threat but probably not anymore then a missile flying at mach 3 would in terms of reducing effective reaction time.

[Raxmei]

Leaving aside his truly bizarre claims about large numbers of Arabs on motorboats taking out a carrier group, the logic in his longbow argument is really, really strange:

The most obvious example is European heavy cavalry trotting into longbow fire again and again. Crecy demonstrated that knightly charges were suicide against the longbow in 1346. But the French aristocracy had so much invested in prancing around on their damn steeds that it took another demonstration, at Agincourt in 1415 to even start to get them thinking about it. I’m no math wiz but I think that 1415 minus 1346…yup, that’s 69 years between catastrophes. Lessons learned? None.

Even if we take his descriptions at face value, wouldn't this actually lead to the exact opposite conclusion of the one he makes? If it took 69 years for another battle to occur in which knights fared poorly against longbowmen, then logic would suggest that unless that was an extraordinarily peaceful time in history (which is, of course, utterly absurd), then knights continued to be effective in the majority of battles during that time.

He also forgets the Battle of Patay in 1429, in which French knights charged and annihilated the opposing English longbowmen with few losses of their own. Armored heavy cavalry continued to be used with some success into the pike and shot era. The lesson to be learned from Crecy and Agincourt is that undisciplined charges into prepared defenses are a bad idea.

[Adrian Laguna]

He also forgets the Battle of Patay in 1429, in which French knights charged and annihilated the opposing English longbowmen with few losses of their own. Armored heavy cavalry continued to be used with some success into the pike and shot era. The lesson to be learned from Crecy and Agincourt is that undisciplined charges into prepared defenses are a bad idea.

Worth noting that at Agincourt the knights were dismounted and trekking through mud. So not only were they charging into prepared defences, they were slowly charging into prepared defences. Largely the blame at Agincourt can be laid at the feet of the commander who was a complete moron and did not properly use the assents he had on hand. IIRC his second in command saw the disaster coming, but his protestations fell on deaf ears. There was nothing inherently wrong with the weapon systems employed by the French, only their tactics.

Also worth noting that frontal assaults against prepared defences did work for the French, if they were properly planned and executed. This was the case when Joan d'Arc broke the Siege of Orleans by directly attacking an English field fortification. The fighting lasted all day, and cost d'Arc an arrow wound to her shoulder, but the French prevailed.

[Setzer]

You know, he mentioned Jeanne D'Arc in an article decrying the myth of French military impotence. He just seems to be willfully ignoring the utility of carriers.

[Jim Raynor]

Gotta love this moron's grand plan for the US Navy to switch to a fleet of small expendable missile boats. The American public will not tolerate throwaway ships and sailors.

These dodos always have one thing in common: whether it’s knights charging with lances on very expensive horses or top gun brats like McCain zooming onto carrier decks in history’s most expensive aircraft, you’ll always find that the worst, most over-funded services are always the ones where the rich kids go to show their stuff. Seriously: why are there aircraft carriers? For asses like John McCain to crash on.

The fact that carriers can project power far better than regular warships, provides air cover and radar warning (AEW aircraft) that other warships can't, and far outranges any regular warship that the enemy may have is apparently lost to this guy.

In the unlikely scenario that America actually goes to war with a major power like China, his mosquito fleet of missile boats would be far more vulnerable to the regular anti-ship missiles that China already has plenty of, than a carrier would be to his wanky fantasy anti-ship ballistic missile. Assuming his missile boats don't take heavy casualties, the Army and Marines would bitch over their inability to provide air support.

[Big Orange]

Not to mention not having a big mobile stockpile of supplies at hand that is less easier to sink than a basic cargo vessel.

At Agincourt weren't the French knights and men at arms (stumbling around exhausted and vulnerable in the mud) also mostly killed by British infantry wielding clubs/axes/halberds/maces/hammers anyway?

The War Nerd is not a fucking idiot all of the time, he sees a comparison between Medieval knights and modern Main Battle Tanks:

If you think as a tank as an internal-combustion knight, you get a better sense of how it's meant to work. The armor is concentrated up front, so the knight/tank can attack without having to hold back. The idea is that he has to able to shrug off what they throw at him while he's spurring the warhorse full-speed over the battlefield -- then hit hard.

If he's unhorsed -- if the tank is forced to stop and deal with lots of dismounted enemy -- then it's all over. It's as easy as knifing a turtle.

A tank has two assets, firepower and speed. In a city, both those things are gone. It can't fire freely without killing civilians, and it can't move fast without crushing them in their houses. All it can do is sit there waiting for somebody to find the right firing angle to hit it on the lighter armor up top or underneath. It's like taking a knight and stationing him at a corner like a traffic cop: sooner or later somebody's going to slit his hamstrings with a cheap pocketknife.

Link

[Starglider]

High stealth missiles have some practical problems in terms of mounting radar (vs. an IIR system like on JASSM that need only activate, its covered by a nose cone normally, at that last moment to attack a fixed land target) for hitting a moving ship, and in obtaining high supersonic speed without costing as much as a jet fighter does individually. Pretty much it’d have to be subsonic, and as warship radars are relatively high power it’d still be spotted at a tactically significant distance. We don’t really expect to engage low level missiles at more then about 25 miles already after all. They would increase the threat but probably not anymore then a missile flying at mach 3 would in terms of reducing effective reaction time.

Well that suggests two strategies;
a) fire the missiles in volley, where only some of the trailing missiles have radar, and they datalink the target position to the leading missiles.
b) use a stealthy subsonic cruise stage to get to close to the target, then go active, locate the target and fire off a supersonic/hypersonic second stage for the final dash to the target.

Of course both of those increase the missile cost to infeasible levels, but would either work in principle?

[Sea Skimmer]

Well that suggests two strategies;
a) fire the missiles in volley, where only some of the trailing missiles have radar, and they datalink the target position to the leading missiles.

The really big Russian P-700 SSMs more or less already do that. They get fired in groups of four, with one missile flying up at about 7,000 meters as a leader while the others fly at 100 meters. The leader uses its radar in bursts to find the general target area, passing data to the other three missiles, when they get close all four go active and make individual attacks. If the leader is shot down, another missile climbs to take over its role. It won’t work to have the missile with the radar trailing, because the radar sets on missiles just can’t see very far. Even if cost was no issue, antenna size is.

It wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense to only have radar on specific missiles though. That’d mean you are producing two different missiles, and if the radar missile fails then the others are screwed. Ideally every missile would have radar and IIR (IIR need not occupy the nose, it could go in a side blister), each with a stealthy cap and with use selected during mission planning.

Really though, it would just be better to put the radar, and the stealth on a reusable platform so that cost is no longer such a sever limitation on design. Then use it to cue IIR guided missiles into acquisition range. Such a platform could also launch missiles itself which no longer need to have massive range as the platform acts as defacto first stage, collect SIGINT and do other functions, maybe even transport one or two humans to tell it what the fuck to do. Of course we’ll also need some kind of flat decked platform to fly it off….

b) use a stealthy subsonic cruise stage to get to close to the target, then go active, locate the target and fire off a supersonic/hypersonic second stage for the final dash to the target.

The 3M-54E version of Klub does that minus the stealth as I’d expect you know. Adding stealth is a bit pointless. If you are over the horizon then you don’t need stealth on the missile, and once you cross the horizon the supersonic second stage should be designed for the maximum possible speed as IR stealth will not be possible (way too much friction flying down low) and the USN is not alone in using infrared missiles for terminal defence. Stealth is going to just slow it down.

If the enemy meanwhile has some kind of AEW system to see over the normal radar horizion, then relatively modest RCS tweaks, plus the small size of the missile will greatly reduce detection range already. However odds are if the enemy has AEW at sea, then he also has fighters and bombers. Those will sink any surface ship or aircraft launch platform before it can fire, so winning becomes a matter of winning control of the air. Once you have control of the air you can spam cheap weapons at enemy warships until they run out of ammo if all else fails, and it becomes easy to execute complicated attack plans (planes attack from all directions at once with both high and low flying weapons ect…)

Submarines can launch missiles, but for the most part not in tactical significant numbers. Probably the best use of a stealth anti ship missile would be as an individually fired weapon. Just one single missile fired from a sub might just go totally unnoticed until it hit. Submarine sonar is accurate enough that it should be able to get an IIR guided missile into acquisition range if it’s fired from fairly close in, say 30-75 miles, without needing updates. If it misses well then at least you only lost one missile.

Really I think this is what you are going to find. One can think up some very complicated and potentially effective anti ship weapons, but at the end of the day the best way to defeat a naval surface force is going to be conventional air power seizing control of the sky. If not for political restrictions preventing the Soviets from building fleet carriers, and forcing them down the big missile line of development I don’t think we’d be seeing nearly so much about anti ship missiles today or ever.

Stealth is in generally just much more useful against land targets. On land you can use terrain masking and knowledge of the enemy’s defensive batteries to greatly increase the effectiveness of both conventional and stealth air attacks. This way you aren't totally relying on stealth to survive, you are just using it to decrease the odds of being hit when you fly into parts of the flight path which are exposed. This is particularly true for a small low flying missile. You can also actually plan to blast gaps in enemy defensive by targeting key radar sites. This just doesn’t work nearly so well at sea when all the enemy defensive are continuously mobile and often more heavily armed and equipped then any single SAM site on land.

[Ilya Muromets]

Oh, wow, this guy is nuts. Just plain nuts. Turn the US Navy into a bunch of small missile boats? Seriously? Last time I checked, there were lots of things that missiles couldn't do that a bunch of multi-role aircraft could. The problem is getting decent numbersof said aircraft there without having to fly them all the way over--oh, wait, that's exactly what the USN's carriers are for.

On the plus side, maybe this guy'll be referenced to in a take that in Pantheocide.

[frogcurry]

One question: does this Chinese missile use a MIRV-type system, or does it have a single massive explosive warhead?

[Isolder74]

The moment that aircraft advanced to the point of being able to carry weapons that could destroy a battleship they made the battleship obsolete. No matter how big you make the guns or what missile launchers to put on a battleship the carrier can always outrange it. The carrier can always out strike it too. whatever missile you can arm the battleship with there will always be some way to get something similar onto the pylon or hardpoint of a fighter/bomber and deliver it at a range longer the the battleship can manage.

These magic ICBM anti-ship missiles can't take the carrier out of an operational usefulness for one major reason. "4.5(or whatever it is) acres of sovereign US territory where ever you need it."

[Sidewinder]

The moment that aircraft advanced to the point of being able to carry weapons that could destroy a battleship they made the battleship obsolete.

That is NOT the reason battleships are considered obsolete. Weather conditions can still prevent a carrier from launching aircraft, denying friendly forces air support. A battleship remains a useful bombardment platform in these conditions, and can lob shells at significantly lower cost than launching a fighter-bomber loaded with air-to-surface munitions. But if all you want is a mobile gun platform to provide artillery support to marines and amphibious forces, a destroyer w/ a 5-inch gun will suffice in most situations, w/ significantly lower operating costs than a battleship.

Of course, the little guns' shorter range makes the destroyer vulnerable to enemy shore defenses, including aircraft. But these are usually a carrier's FIRST targets- by the time the destroyer is close enough to fall prey, the enemy shore defenses are likely already destroyed by carrier-borne aircraft.

[Nephtys]

One question: does this Chinese missile use a MIRV-type system, or does it have a single massive explosive warhead?

Wiki says it's a single 200-300ish kiloton nuclear warhead.

If stuff like that starts flying, a lot of people are pretty screwed.