Navy unveils DDG(X) warship concept with hypersonic missiles, lasers
news.usni.org
news.usni.org
Hypersonic missiles, submarines, and satellites (sensors, C&C, directed energy weapons, EMP, rods from god, etc) I think will be the critical force components of this century. If any war breaks out, those components working in concert will take out surface ships and stationary bases first.
The US Navy has a history of being slow to recognize and adapt to these inflection points. Prior to WWII a few forward-looking admirals were warning about, and demonstrating the efficacy and game-changing nature of, carrier warfare. At least one wargame ~10yrs prior to WWII showed Pearl Harbor was vulnerable to a simulated carrier-based attack. But Navy leadership wasn't convinced until actual Pearl Harbor.
Part of the problem is that to maintain the ability to manufacture mega-projects like aircraft carriers, at least one needs to always be in production. Once you repurpose those production lines, it's difficult to restart them.
But I hope they start figuring this out soon, and planning to fight the next war, not the last one, or the US won't have enough credible deterrent to prevent another war.
Hypersonic missiles (as do ASBMs) require targeting. Breaking the "kill chain" is something both sides will be attempting to do in a conflict, but for now the USN has far more experience as a modern Navy than any other nation (sorry Brits...). But hypersonic missiles aren't anything special and really just hyped a lot. Fast is often good, but not always necessary, or even desired if the corresponding tradeoffs make them either more expensive, or limit how many you can carry.
Subs? Subs will always be one of the most lethal combatants. But they have limits. Satellites? They can be jammed, blinded, or destroyed. Sensors? Jammed, blinded or destroyed. EMP? That would be the initiation of nuclear war. Don't want to go there. But making your ships etc survivable to some degree is smart. Better to just outright deter it. Directed Energy weapons? This ship will have that. Modern navies have been experimenting with DE for decades. Whether it's a microwave system or laser, they'll be on this ship and retrofitted where possible to others. They actually help by increasing the volume and depth of your "magazine."
Rods from god will be the game changer once launch costs drop. The guidance tech is already good enough, just need to make it cheap to send up a lot of tungsten into space.
But you can only jam, blind or destroy them starting from some point. There are currently private companies building up satellite constellations that will look at and record the entire surface of the earth more than once a day. It is entirely within the capability of US, China or Russia to today build a satellite constellation that will track the position of every potentially hostile naval surface asset in real time.
Then, if someone starts jamming/blinding your satellites, you will pick up the phone, call them, and tell them that doing so is an act of war and if they do not stop you will have to sink their ships now, while you still know where they are, instead of waiting long enough to kindly let them wander far enough from their last known positions to be able to evade strikes.
The sensor density of the modern battlefield is yes. Hiding something that can literally be seen from space will not work. Defending from strikes will possibly work -- hypersonics/ballistic missiles are generally not very nimble and with modern tech intercepting them with a slower missile can be very economical for the defender.
We're already at this point. Now what?
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43328/u-s-satellites-a...
> U.S. Space Force's General David Thompson, the service's second in command, said last week that Russia and China are launching "reversible attacks," such as electronic warfare jamming, temporarily blinding optics with lasers, and cyber attacks, on U.S. satellites "every single day." He also disclosed that a small Russian satellite used to conduct an on-orbit anti-satellite weapon test back in 2019 had first gotten so close to an American one that there were concerns an actual attack was imminent.
China and Russia have _ALREADY_ begun to live-test satellite jamming / satellite blinding weapons on live US satellites.
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Those satellites are going to be obliterated as soon as China or Russia actually gives a damn. Russia is testing anti-satellite missiles. Etc. etc. They're already well within the capabilities to blow up every single US satellite should they so desire!
Even with RORSats (radar ocean recon sats) it's hard to track ships at sea. And RORSats aren't cheap, and dish size is important in detection range and fidelity. It'll be quite a while before they're deployed in quantities like Starlink. And Geosync orbits aren't cheap in terms of propellant cost etc etc. If you try to use IR sensors, that's tough in a maritime environment. Trying to use some sort of OCR with photosensors might work, but again, weather screws with that.
Additionally, ships have this ability to move. A CVN and accompanying ships can move at around 30 knots. If your kill chain takes 30 minutes from detection to launch, the CVN and its escorts can dramatically expand the area your missile needs to scan an acquire the target.
And I won't even comment about how you're equating jamming/blinding with an act of war. We even have ships/planes that are routinely exposed to jamming and blinding gear without resorting to outright combat.
Same reason PLAN is building aircraft carriers which may very well be obsolete against peer adversaries but still useful to overmatch less capable powers aka basically everyone except US and PRC. Of course also a side of big dick energy prestige. Realistically current PLA strategy for US surface combatants and capital assets is a fuck of load missiles from land and plane, of which hypersonics is just one type. That said recent developments posted on SCMP, i.e. info PLA wants world to know suggest sufficient development in IR sensors that optical/terminal guidance without complex kill chain is possible. Combined with claim:
>“With effective hypersonic precision strike weapons, the critical value of ‘strategic depth’ in traditional warfare will no longer exist. All the critical political, economic and military assets of a country will be at risk.”
And another recent PRC reveal of AI assistance calibration to produce magnitude improvement in accuracy and I think PRC (as well as US) are pushing hard on prompt global strike capabilities which IMO is much more significant capability than anything proposed for force on force combat in future air and naval platforms. A fleet of conventional hypersonic ICBMs with accuracy/CEP measured in meters is basically conventional MAD. It guarantees PRC (or US) can sink each others expensive Navy's or other assets as long as they spend more than 30 minutes stationary, which is everything that needs maintenance. Stockpile of PGS hypersonics is potentially an end military hegemony capability. One that could also proliferate to smaller powers with time.
I'm also skeptical of using ICBMs for global strike. The chance of them being confused by peer opponents for nuclear armed versions is very high. And, if I'm a peer opponent and you whack one of my carriers, it's probably time to pull out the nukes. That's kind of the unspoken US policy if a CVN is sunk.
And I don't think any of these weapon technologies will result in an end to military hegemony. There will always be the haves and have nots. And the US has only had unchallenged hegemony for a very short period after WW2.
Can you elaborate? One would think big open ocean that contrasts huge ships are prime environment for IR or optical sensors. I also think it's much more difficult to confuse multiple passive sensors enmass. Spamming EW will disrupt all kill chain in bubble / area, but a carrier group is probably not going to have enough dazzler to disrupt passive sensor in a saturation attack. It doesn't scale.
>being confused by peer opponents for nuclear armed versions
...
> it's probably time to pull out the nukes. That's kind of the unspoken US policy if a CVN is sunk.
TBH I think that's just American exceptionalism thinking because up until now CONUS primary vulnerability was ICBMs and virtually no one had accurate ICBMs for conventional use. Same with ability to sink USN carrier groups. So there's this assumption ICBMs heading for CONUS is going to be nuclear/strategic. Or US can afford to scorch earth if CVN gets sunk due to massive overmatch in US power projection capabilities. But those illusions evaporate once adversaries acquire ability to strike first / retaliate conventionally, especially one backed by nuclear. Game theory has to shift to second strike.
Reality is US adversaries already carve out exceptions for US bombers or SSGNs whose ordnance can all be nuclear tipped anyway. The line between US conventional and strategic platforms is already blurred, but there's benefit of doubt just knowing US can strike conventionally. Same allowance has to be made when others acquire capability. If US sinks PLAN carrier in ocean, one has to expect PRC to retaliate in kind, even if means sinking a US CVN docked in west coast port with an icbm/hypersonic.
> end to military hegemony.
Maybe not, but imo proliferation of accurate icbms dramatically elevates small/middle powers ability to deter when big powers can no longer project force with impunity. It's something more attainable for the have nots versus maintaining a competent navy/airforce. That's like any country more developed than North Korea (including North Korea).
Also, saturation attacks are expensive. Hypersonic missiles will be very expensive; even Tomahawks are far north of $1m per war shot. Same with the DF-21 type ASBMs. These are very expensive weapons, and while a CVN battlegroup is a juicy target, you'll need a lot to conduct a saturation attack.
In the end, I think that ASBMs/Hypersonics etc will dwindle in time as a threat as DE weapons become common. Right now the biggest issue in defending the airspace around a carrier is magazine depth. But DE overcomes this, especially with nuclear powered vessels.
In the long run, what the USN needs to worry about is the PLAN developing good submarine capabilities. We've let our ASW defenses wither, and reconstituting them will take decades.
Economics of ABM skew towards offense, defenders need more interceptors than incomings while advanced interceptors as are expensive AF, SM3 IIA used to for ABM defense are like ~35M per unit. There's also aforementioned magazine depth, can only fill VLS with so much defense before it compromises offense. As far as I know DE against hypersonics aren't credible, there was a panel on hypersonic defense by CSIS a couple years where experts concluded only counter against hypersonics are advanced interceptors.
There's also some recent (but rough) literature about ineffectiveness of subsonics like tomahawk/tlams against active defense. The TLDR is 1 hypersonic is better at penetrating active defense than salvo of 15 tomahawks. At which point a cruiser with 15 hypersonics has as much offensive capability against actively defended targets as 2 destroyers with ~200 tomahawks. IMO USN would eventually need to move towards expensive attack and defense missiles against peer opponents, or perhaps equilibrium of advanced missiles and missile defense is going to make surface fleet economically obsolete.
I argue the opposite.
All those satellites will be obliterated the minute war starts. Satellites are on obvious, stable paths with almost no means of propulsion. We know where all of China's satellites are, and China knows where all of our satellites are.
Once Satellites are down, the question comes down to whose navy has more Radar than the other. Big ships with bigger radar units is a big advantage. Eyes in the sky (aka: F35 or E2 Hawkeye) is another advantage, especially if those eyes have a degree of stealth (aka: F35).
Now it is interesting to think is somehow a rogue breakaway country can get their hands on a satellite killing or disabling tech. I would have said it’s science fiction some years ago but after flight MH17 I don’t know anymore.
You can't do force projection with a submarine or satellite. This part of the Navy's mission hasn't changed much since the Great White Fleet. Surface ships will be a part of the Navy until Shields hover carriers come online. Also the Navy does do quite a bit of good with their carrier fleet as it makes a great base to run humanitarian mission during times when other infrastructure is down.
Regardless of whether or not the kill chain is vulnerable, you still have to actually launch the missile or plane carrying the bomb. Ships are still the best way to do this, so it's going to take extremely effective antiship systems to make it not worth it.
[0] A kill chain is the processes and systems a weapon needs to actually hit a target. It includes detecting a target in the first place, making sure you actually have a launcher within range, tracking the target while the missile is on the way, and actually impacting the target at the end.
Militaries will probably have to shift to large numbers of smaller, cheaper satellites along with a prompt launch system that can quickly replace attrition losses.
Not quite. Hypersonic missiles are expensive. Aircraft carriers solve the following problem: the easiest way to drop massive amounts of ordnance over the enemy from a large distance is via aerial bombardment. A "smart bomb" dropped from an airplane costs a few tens of thousands of dollars (the guidance kit is the expensive part), while a Tomahawk cruise missile is about 2 million. If you want to project power over distances of thousands of miles, you need air bases in friendly nations, or aircraft carriers (or both).
Hypersonic missiles are fine as a defensive weapon. They do represent a thread to the American carriers, but the US can change its doctrine to account for that.
Now ask yourself this: if aircraft carriers are becoming obsolete, why is China building them? Especially since they already have hypersonic missiles?
Here's an example: Gulf War 1 [1]. The Coalition flew over 100000 sorties, dropping 88500 tons of bombs. The US Navy spent 288 Tomahawk missiles. Each such cruise missile has a 450kg warhead, so that's about 1300 tons, or 0.15% of the ordnance dropped from the air.
Now here's the stunning part: that 0.15% of the contribution cost about 1/3 of the total bill: $0.9 BN out of $2.7 BN (GAO report [2] page 178).
Let's look at it differently. The daily operating cost of an entire aircraft carrier strike group is about $6.5 MM ([3] p 5). That's the cost of 3 Tomahawk missiles. For this you can launch more than 100 sorties, and drop many, many bombs.
There's simply no comparison between the bang for the buck of aircraft dropped bombs vs cruise missiles.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_air_campaign [2] https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-97-134.pdf [3] https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA575866.pdf
"The USS Ford is the most advanced aircraft carrier the US has ever built. The tally for the total cost is $13.3 billion".
And that is just for the aircraft carrier. Even using your maintainance only numbers: 3 Tomahawk missiles a day is more than 1000 a year, more than 30000 Tomahawk missiles over the 30 year lifespan of an aircraft carrier. That is about 13500000 kg of warhead. If we add the construction cost of the aircraft carrier alone as well, we get an additional 6230769 kg of warhead from the Tomahawks adding up to 19 million kg of warhead. More than double the total dropped during Gulf War 1. You are welcome to also add the construction cost of the other ships needed to support the aircraft carrier. And also subtracting a percentage of the non-smart bombs since a lot of the bombs dropped during Gulf War 1 were non-smart i.e. a lot of them missed their targets.
For the US Navy a typical case would be an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer [1] or a Ticonderoga-class cruiser [2]. Both types of vessels cost $1 billion or more. They both have vertical launch systems (VLS) with respectively 96 cells and 122 cells. Wikipedia says that a typical Ticonderoga missile configuration will include 26 Tomahawk missiles. The other cells are used for surface to air missiles and anti-submarine missiles, so they are basically for defense purposes. You can replace a number of defensive missiles with Tomahawks, but not too many.
A USS Ford carrier comes at $13 BN, but it weighs more than 100k tons. A latest version of Arleigh Burke destroyer costs $1.8 BN (according to wikipedia) and weighs less than 10k tons. You get 7 or 8 Arleigh Burkes for the price of a Ford. But a Ford brings dozens of bombers to the theater and can sustain 160 sorties per day for 30 days, which can drop many thousands of tons of ordnance on the enemy. The destroyers can shoot their (optimistically) 500 Tomahawks missiles, and then go home.
Just as a point of comparison, let's take a look at the annual procurement in smart bombs (Joint Direct Attack Munitions = JDAM) and Tomahawk missiles ([3], page 23)
For the last 3 years (2020, 21 and 22), the DoD bought 28k, 20k and 5k JDAMs at a price of $1.8 BN and 90, 122, and 60 Tomahawks for a total of $1.9 BN. So, if things get a bit intense, and you need to fire 300 Tomahawks, you've just blown through 3 years of procurement and about $2 Billion dollars. Given the option, you'd probably prefer 50k smart bombs, for the same price.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arleigh_Burke-class_destroyer
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticonderoga-class_cruiser
[3] https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudg...
Missiles are the only reason big guns aren’t a thing any more.
Your assessment of the impact of hypersonic missiles is also extremely simplistic they would not make surface vessels obsolete anymore than submarines have. Or even a better example how SAMs haven’t made combat aircraft obsolete…
Hypersonic missiles are extremely expensive and have poor terminal guidance, they are effective against carriers not because they can easily hit them but because they can easily hit them when they are performing air operations.
They are a deterrence and capability denial weapon. And you can develop CONOPS around them just like we have developed CONOPS for denied airspace’s.
Anti ship missiles hypersonic or not were always already a huge threat to surface vessels only recently has anti missile technology actually progressed sufficiently to marginalize the threat from conventional anti ship missiles and even that is purely theoretical.
The idea that somehow faster or better missiles would devolve surface or air warfare back to what essentially is castles and trench warfare without any force projection is ludicrous.
You will always need and be able to project force even against peer and near peer enemies the cost of that force projection would increase.
The idea that China somehow can take out the entire US navy is simply silly, you assume that the tactics will not change and you buy into propaganda and misinformation way too much.
> Missiles are the only reason big guns aren’t a thing any more.
Missiles were the final nail in the coffin for battleships, sure, but missiles reliable enough to hit another ship or land target from over-the-horizon didn't come about till over a decade after carriers obsoleted battleships.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Dec 1941 took out the entire US surface fleet except its carriers. Then half a year later in June 1942, those 3 carriers destroyed the 4 lead carriers of the Japanese combined task force heading for Midway.
The remaining Japanese fleet was faced with a decision to continue the attack on Midway and the US carriers with only battleships/cruisers/frigates/destroyers and no carriers of their own, or to cut their losses and retreat. They retreated, because there was a real risk they could lose all the rest of their fleet even against three weakened US carriers and Midway base's decimated air wing.
That was the moment when carriers proved they were just next level compared to other surface combatants, obsoleted battleships forever, and Naval doctrine began re-orienting around battlegroups with a carrier at the center and surrounding ships providing anti-sub and later anti-missile defense.
Battleships were already obsolete on the naval battlefield in WW2. Their main usefulness was shore and carrier support.
Missiles make battleships even more obsolete, and for the Soviets, even made carriers obsolete ( all Soviet aircraft carriers completed were a hybrid missile cruiser / aircraft carrier design, but their latest design didn't include any missile capability, so they realised they were incorrect).
Anti-ship ballistic missiles, and hypersonic cruise missiles have decent chances against a US task force. That was the Soviet plan in case of war, use "aircraft carrier-killer cruise missiles" from submarines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_aircraft_carrier_Ulyano...
The Ulyanovsk class was too late
The US had far better steel and they didn’t had a lot of experience with a Titanium, when the US learned that the Russians were building submarines out of titanium they weren’t surprised because they thought they couldn’t afford it they knew that the USSR had more titanium than what they knew what to do with it but because the US couldn’t figure out how to weld large titanium structures in atmospheric air.
Welding titanium is a PITA and the Russians simply had far more experience with it after having the luxury of working with it at scale for decades.
As for carriers yes it was a conscious decision because they couldn’t build large enough carriers to have a sufficiently large air wing to cover them at all time and because they knew they can’t compete with the size of a US carrier group.
A Russian carrier was designed to operate as a much smaller task force than a US carrier group and so it had to pull its own weight when it came to surface combat.
The US on the other hand could afford to build a lot of super carriers and field more than enough ships to support them in battle.
If the Soviets could build carriers the size of a US carrier and wield a fleet large enough to support a similarly sized carrier group they would’ve have.
These are neat as a sci-fi idea, but not really in practice. Weapons have to be on-demand; RFG is like "we'll get 'em on the next orbital pass"
Despite the common misperception, the US spends way, way more on social welfare expenditures than defense! I am personally fine with that, I'm just fascinated that so many people believe otherwise when the government publishes its budget online for anyone to see
It's more an issue of value for money, of course, as US per capita expenditure on medical care is 2x what Canada pays, and still manages not to actually cover everyone. In theory the medicare + medicaid + VA budget should be enough to cover everyone, yet it only covers 40% of Americans.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/06/27/884307565/after-pushing-lies-...
However, I have nothing against lowering physician salaries from Lambo to BMW if it means everyone is covered. This is not a position I shy away from.
Further, if 10% of houses burned down each year because firefighters were being paid $10M in salary, would we shrug and say that salaries are just higher here? How about if 10% of the US landmass was undefended because everyone in the army made $500K. I would hope not.
China has newer ships with more stealth and firepower than our set of older Destroyers. Fortunately, China has very few capital ships, but the huge mass of smaller ships (Destroyers, Frigates, Corvettes) that China is building is already outnumbering the US Navy.
You just have to see the game for what it is (a giant scam) and opt out.
The US military should be disarmed and turned into a purely domestically-defensive force.
Do you think your computer chips (Apple M1, AMD Zen, etc. etc.) are going to be readily supplied from Taiwan under these conditions? Is this annexation good and proper for the world? Is it a benefit of US interests to let this happen?
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China has no ability to attack the USA domestically. The issue is what China can do in the Asian-sphere of influence, and whether or not that's net-benefit to us in general.
Not just China either, North Korea almost certainly would flatten South Korea and take over it without the US military presence holding the DMZ. We've also been able to force a peace between Korea and Japan by outlawing Japan's military, and promising protection of Japan with our forces. A lot of our foreign influence and politics revolve around military strength, both the good and the bad.
EDIT: Finally, pirate attacks are virtually nonexistent. Any pirate dumb-enough to try to take over a ship on the high-seas is obliterated by the US Navy. For better or for worse, we actually need a strong navy (with special ops units) to hunt down would-be pirates and discourage them from popping up.
I kind of getting tired of controlling myself about this type of comments that lacks the most basic understanding of the reality...
For God's sake, China has nuclear ballistic missile in the 60s...
What kind of sutpidity am I seeing...
> Do you think your computer chips (Apple M1, AMD Zen, etc. etc.) are going to be readily supplied from Taiwan under these conditions?
And how many computer do you think you're gonna make with those chips without all the other parts which overwhelmingly come from China?
We aren’t, at least not militarily. The only thing we’re going to do about Ukraine is try and convince the Europeans to agree to multilateral economic sanctions, which some of them won’t do because Russian natural gas is their only reliable source of energy now that they’ve decommissioned a bunch of perfectly good nuclear power plants.
> An army twice or thrice less big could easily fend off China's threat on Taiwan
Look at a map sometime. Taiwan is an island, which means the primary means of defending it will be the Navy, not the Army. If the Army gets involved at all, something has already gone significantly wrong.
Even setting that aside, China has a bigger army than we do. So if we were going to take your suggestion and use our army to deter theirs, making ours even smaller would not be helpful.
My mistake, English isn't my native language, thanks for pointing that out. I actually meant “military”. In French «Armée» is used to refer to all military branches together and I mistakenly translated it to “army”.
So your plan is... to cede Ukraine to Russia, cede Taiwan to China, and let the Kurds get slaughtered and have Iran build a nuke?
Sure, its annoying that there's problems all around the world, but we all know that no one else is going to step up to do something about it. If no one else is stepping up, then we should. That's about it.
Letting Iran's nuclear program complete would seem like a major mistake. Letting North Korea's nuclear program progress + their space / ICBM program progress is also a mistake IMO. Etc. etc.
First, Ukraine and Taiwan are independent themselves. No one can cede them to any other. One can refuse to offer helping hands when they are needing them.
Second, get your facts straight. There had not been evidence, I mean evidences that not manufactured by the Iraq WMD type nonsense, that Russia or China really planning to invadr Ukraine or Taiwan.
I mean Taiwan is effectively independent. Everyone knows that. If China want to save face, why not grant that? China never said that they would invade no matter what, right?
Its not an invasion. According to their viewpoint, Taiwan doesn't exist as a nation. Its just another part of China and always has been.
Like US pretend that there is Uyghur genocide, but literally does nothing to prevent it. Because they know that there is no genocide.
Same here, China knows Taiwan is independent, but as long as everyone does not say so, China is perfectly OK to play along.
It's EU's problem, not the US (and I say that as an European) and the current Ukraine crisis originate from US's push of NATO eastwards, in complete violation of American engagements towards the Russians in the 90s.
> let the Kurds get slaughtered
Well, the US's involvement with the Kurds cannot really be counted as a major success…
> have Iran build a nuke
That's Israel's problem. (Even though, btw, I'd argue that it would have a stabilizing effect on the area, not the opposite). And the US army isn't actually doing anything to prevent that (nor did they prevent NK from getting it one decade earlier).
> Sure, its annoying that there's problems all around the world, but we all know that no one else is going to step up to do something about it
The US is creating a good chunk of those problems by themselves though… (Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Irak) And I'm not even sure it's entirely by accident: the Defense has been needing enemies to justify its budget since at least the down of the USSR…
USA / Europe have plenty of PCB manufacturers. The important components (resistors, inductors, capacitors, and chips) are made by Taiwan, Japan, USA.
USA _can't_ make TSMC's 5nm chips. We've given them tax-benefits to encourage TSMC to build a fab-lab in Arizona but no. That technology is literally outside of our reach (until TSMC's Arizona lab is finished anyway).
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Even then, that Taiwan was able to build such a technology is incredible. Clearly they've got a culture worth protecting.
To single it out, the idea of NK desiring invasion of SK is utterly ridiculous. Tom Clancy tier ridiculous.
How would US specifically benefit from this?
(1) Many people living in the US (myself included) would feel much relieved at their tax dollars not going toward bombing teenagers, weddings, or whatever other Enemy Combatants were yesterday identified with a High Degree of Certainty
(2) The money currently flowing toward said bombing could be repurposed toward general domestic social good, for example in housing, healthcare, or education
(3) Hard to overstate the whole "not continually murdering people on an industrial scale" thing but many people in the US are general humanists and would probably appreciate it
An effective "defensive force" for a nation like the U.S. in today's world needs offensive capabilities.
While degree is arguable, we certainly cannot simply ignore everything else that goes on in the world and expect to retain a viable domestic defense.
The idea that we'd have a "purely domestically-defensive force" doesn't compute. What does that even mean—defensive weapons guarding the homeland and forces deployed to protect only our coastline/waterways, land masses, and airspace?
Meanwhile China claims Taiwan and Russia re-annexes Ukraine and the rest of the former Soviet-bloc countries, etc.?
Of course we need to project power in various spheres of influence in order to provide for our overall defense. And, of course, that means offensive capabilities as a deterrent.
It's been thirty years of shame for the USN and unfortunately, ship building takes a long time and if you lose building capacity, that compounds the issue.
Having defensive measures certainly help level off the disparity, but active defense is always harder than offense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_052D_destroyer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_052C_destroyer
That's a lot of ships being built for a country that supposedly believes hypersonic missiles obsolete surface warship fleets.
China has no missile-defense platform. If we want to kill their ships, we'll just shoot much cheaper tomahawks (aka: subsonic missiles) at them.
So, am I wrong to assume this will, if at all, only be used against defenseless targets, such as political/civilian targets, as show-of-strength to justify the massive budget and "whoa thats cool"-factor (which, to be fair, it has)?
In a potential Taiwan conflict, when would either side use nukes? China wouldn't use them unless they believe they can't successfully take Taiwan without them, but who would they use them against? Nuking Taiwan makes their newly-captured territory worthless, while nuking the US will start a chain of nuclear escalation that probably ends in MAD. The US wouldn't use nukes unless they believed that they couldn't defend Taiwan without nukes, but Taiwan and the US have been investing heavily (as evidenced by this new ship) in making Taiwan defensible, and besides that, Taiwan's value (like its cities, chip fabs, etc) are vulnerable enough that they can be destroyed without nukes. Neither side wants a nuclear war.
Both sides had poison gas in WWII, but nobody used it.
It's good to be able to counter China without having to go to nukes to do so.
Is any threat from China fabricated? Depends. Are we going to defend Taiwan, or not? If we are, then it's China who's "fabricating" the threat.
1. Navies still rely on surface vessels for many roles/tasks. While subs are the most lethal killers afloat, there's a lot of roles they can't fulfill.
2. Surface vessels are hard to automate. The attempts to reduce staffing costs led to debacles like the LCS, and contributed to issues with the Ford CVN class.
3. Smaller surface vessels (as shown with the LCS) can't really stay on station as long, transit long distances as well, and deal with the same weather conditions. Additionally, they can't carry as many munitions, limiting their ability to fight. And some weapons simply won't fit on small ships (the hypersonic missiles mentioned in the article, as well as larger VLS based weapons).
4. While a greater number of small ships seems to increase your survivability, the lower capability of these small ships don't make the tradeoff worthwhile.
5. Studies have shown that larger ships (especially large carriers) are generally more effective dollar for dollar than smaller ships. I think this translates to surface combatants as well as carriers.
6. Automated surface combatants have issues if they're not "managed" by a controlling ship that has personnel that can do maintenance as well as deter people from screwing with them. Ships require continual maintenance, not just the electronics etc, but the ship itself. Otherwise you end up with rust buckets that don't last through their planned service life.
As to your second question, larger ships simply have better economies of scale. Larger generators, more missiles, bigger radars, etc. If you could quantify capability, larger ships have more capability points per dollar. (On the other hand, you sometimes don't need all that capability, and there's always more missions to be done, so a cheaper ship can be more cost effective even if it's less efficient.)
Automation changes things to an extent, but it's way too early to talk about fully autonomous ships; any automation is just progressively automating various duties in order to have less crew members. And that's a process ongoing since the Cold War ( notably Soviet ships and especially submarines were far more automated than US equivalents, with much less crew for a similar vessel).
Also, the Zumwalt which is a larger ship overall has about half the crew of previous generation destroyers.
The goal is not to build an uncounterable weapon. The goal is to have a variety of weapons that force contradictory responses.
> wouldn't for instance a heat shield coated with a highly reflective material completely neglect its effect?
Good job negating the laser. Except the warship also has AI-guided missiles who will lock onto your highly-reflective paint way easier.
Combined Arms: by defending yourself against one weapon, you made yourself vulnerable to another. You're not trying to survive against a laser, you're trying to survive against a DDG warship.
The DDG has lasers, homing missiles, and guns. Your anti-DDG weapon needs to survive all three of them to be effective.
[1] at least from an amateur's point of view
* HEAT rounds are countered by reactive armor. Using an explosion upon impact means that the opponent can "counter-explode", and negate the physical effects of your explosion.
* SABOT / Armor Piercing rounds are countered by range.
* Big guns (120mm+) are countered by smaller targets spread out over a larger area. Big guns take a longer time to reload and fire, meaning you can easily get surrounded and killed.
* Small guns (12.7mm and smaller) are countered by various forms of armor. Sure, they can be fired extremely rapidly and kill many soft / unarmored targets. But a small-gun will never do anything to a tank or larger warship.
* Direct fire (both big and small) are countered by trenches and bunkers. It doesn't matter how big your gun is, it won't go through a dug-in dirt position.
* Indirect fire beats trenches. You lob your mortar very high into the air and drop them down on the enemy.
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All weapons are countered by a strategy and/or technology. Lasers seem like the "combined arms" counterpart to Guided Missiles. The more your paint absorbs RADAR, the worse it will perform against lasers.
Big guns vs Small Guns is your Tank + Soldier combined arms. Small guns lose to tanks. Big guns win vs Tanks. Big Guns lose vs soldiers, small guns win vs Soldiers.
All weapons have some defense that beats them. Every defense loses to another weapon.
War isn't some kind of rock paper scissors as in RTS games.
No. The goal is to force the opponent to play rock-paper-scissors, while you don't have to.
Every M1 Abrams tank (aka: 120mm platform) is supported by an M2 Bradley (aka: 30mm platform). Do you know why? Because there are things a 30mm gun can do that a 120mm can't.
And vice versa.
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By sending an M1 Abrams + M2 Bradley at the same time to your opponent, _THEY_ have to play rock paper scissors against your known strategy, depending on if the M1 Abrams reaches them first, or if the M2 Bradley reaches them first.
Add on a few 155mm indirect fire Howitzers, a few infantry who know how to use mortars + small arms fire, and now the opponent is playing rock-paper-scissors against so many different possibilities.
The Tank Commander/gunner isn't playing rock paper scissors at all. They see the target, then choose the right ammo, and then shoot what's appropriate.
“Amateurs discuss tactics, professionals discuss operations, teenagers discuss gun caliber”, here we are.
I'm not entirely certain what you want to do or what your point is in this discussion. I thought you wanted to discuss the properties of lasers and how they could be (or could not be) useful in a fight?
Regarding lasers, I wanted to have insight from more knowledgeable people on that topic (because my naive view is certainly wrong), but you have efficiently shown me that you aren't that person.
That's a lot of information about the nitty-gritty of IFVs (aka: M2 Bradley).
Weapons discussions are always relevant to the realm of tactics, of which the US Army absolutely makes detailed discussions and manuals about.
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In any case, the field manual absolutely cares about the 25mm to 30mm cannon on the M2 Bradley / IFV platform. The "Combined Arms" battalions follow this guidance, to maximize the amount of uncertainty the opponent faces on the battlefield.
These details matter. And I'm almost certain that the "Laser" weapon will be seen in some kind of light akin to this theory.
As of April 2021, the Navy announced they were going to try to replace the guns with 12x hypersonic missiles. Lots of details: http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNUS_61-62_ags.php
It's hard to imagine, but the future 2x 0.6MW lasers (not in the initial plans for this new DDG(X)) actually sound like a possible cost saver. Different use though: "slow" moving 83 mi 155mm projectile has much different uses than a fast moving but much more limited range/power laser.