The Navy Thread

There's only ever going to be three Zumwalts. Three. And at a unit cost of "Frick, I didn't think they made numbers that high" it's really debatable if the Navy actually wants them. Considering they grassed up the program for being in breach of the Nunn-Mc Curdy Amendment back in 2010.

http://www.acq.osd.mil/parca/docs/IDA-Reports/Root-Cause-Analyses-of-Nunn-McCurdy-Breaches-Vol-1.pdf If you want the relevant pdf file published by RAND.

Maybe a bit dramatic on the price, but whose bright idea was a destroyer that costs nearly as much as an aircraft carrier?

A "destroyer" that displaces as much as a Baltimore-class CA at standard load, no less.

Could be worse. Germany's got a series of 7200-ton "frigates", and if you want to see some hilarity scroll down to the sensors and the weapons systems, and note what's not there: towed-array sonar, bow sonar, any SAMs beyond SeaRAM, torpedoes, a speed greater than 26 knots...

I thought you were actually joking about that. But you're not?

No. Bow. Sonar. No towed array sonar. How the hell do they expect to find the Improved Kilo-Class that's sitting on the bottom just waiting to smack em in the teeth?

I presume the next round of German austerity demands will involve shanghaiing Greek homeless to become divers keeping an eye out for them?

Since it's Germany, write a letter? Or have it not leave the port at all due to a shortage of spare parts?

edited 27th Jan '16 11:49:38 PM by Greenmantle

Nah You do that.

Given its the greeks, you can probaly just go grab any random one of them too.

edited 28th Jan '16 1:20:59 AM by Imca

The Bremen-class frigates that the F-125 is replacing don't have towed array sonar either, funnily enough. German naval procurement in general seems utterly bizarre.

edited 28th Jan '16 3:50:22 AM by Achaemenid

Going right back to Imperial Germany. I remember that the Bismark had some rather outdated characteristics.

^^ The Germans don't know how to Navy. Never have known, likely never will know.

I think it's just their Leos that didn't really suffer with being Germanic. The Tornado and Typhoon at least were better than expected for a German fighter because they're actually multi-national planes...

The High seas fleet was able to give the royal navy a run for it's money, and their U boats were a menace for most of both world wars.

The High Seas Fleet had only one good engagement. They never fought again after it and completely bumbled the battle.

Jutland is a case study on how NOT to use battleships and battlecruisers.

The U-boats are a very bad point to bring up. They had a reputation for being basically Armored Coffins to their crews because of how appallingly high a casualty rate they suffered. And all they did of note was attack merchant shipping. They had few notable successes against big warships. Meanwhile the US Silent Service damn near blasted about 40% of the entire Imperial Japanese Navy to the bottom of the Pacific. Including a fair bit of their battleship and carrier fleet.

From a linguistic note, it's worth mentioning that ship classification has always been pretty fluid. In the age of sail, frigates were equivalent to the 20th century equivalent of a cruiser, with the American heavy frigates arguably being equivalent to battlecruisers. The word "Frigate" itself is based on an old English word meaning "Boat".

Destroyer used to derive from "Torpedo Boat Destroyer", basically a big gunboat designed to blast small fast moving enemies out of the water. They've gradually grown since then and subsumed the role of cruisers to now being destroyers in general (compare to the Star Destroyers on Star Wars, hardly small picket ships). Hell, some destroyers nowadays aren't capable of destroying anything, having their entire topside dominated by a flight deck.

And then there was the silliness of the Cruiser Gap. tl;dr: Don't get too hung up on the general name of the ship, when you can instead get hung up on the actual capabilities and cost.

What actually was the Cruiser Gap?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruiser#US_Navy.27s_.22cruiser_gap.22 is the robot you are looking for. I think. It smacks of authentically idiotic US Navy-ese.

@Major Tom:

To be fair, we were also fighting like a bunch of incompetents (to maximise fire rates as per Beatty's wishes, for example, turret doors were left open and munitions/charges were just left lying around).

On the Zumwalt cost. Costing as much as which carrier exactly? A 1975 design carrier or the new one? Last I checked the new Carrier is several billion more by comparison. Even going by the Nimitz class the Nimitz is about 4 billion in 2015 dollars and the Gerald Ford class is 10 billion.

High tech and low production run numbers is expensive.

^^ Britain has a long and storied history of naval warfare being conducted like absolute buffoons yet somehow still managing to win.

Jutland wouldn't be the last time you guys acted like dunderheaded morons not worth beans.

re: bow sonar: to be fair(-ish), surface ships' bow sonars have usually been used for active, where at least they can radiate a ton of energy compared to a dipping sonar. On passive mode, they might be able to pick up other active sonars or underwater explosions, but that's about it; for real passive sonar work you need a towed array or a helicopter-style dipping sonar. And I can, kind of theoretically, see why the Germans might want to forgo towed array in the shallow Baltic waters.

To be fairer, that active sonar is an extremely useful bit of kit, and since the F-125's role is explicitly to go far abroad, leaving out the towed array is an utterly baffling choice. (You can rely on offboard sensors—indeed, the deadliest ASW weapon of most surface ships is their helicopter—but leaving out the most sensitive sonar gear you have, the towed array, is a terrible idea.) Also, looking a few years into the future, the ship's active sonar could play the emitter role in a multistatic array (i.e., the sonar sends out a ping, and a helicopter or drone thirty miles away listens for the echoes), potentially increasing its effective range by an order of magnitude.

re: cruiser gap: I could see the argument that the Navy had an incentive not to fight against the perception. Sure it's easily fixable by changing a few letters on the Belknaps and Virginias, but why do that when you can convince Congress to give you more money so you could fund the massively successful Ticonderogas?

@Tuefel: I was comparing to a Nimitz (both ~$4b unit cost), but it's still an appreciable fraction of the $10b unit cost of a Gerald R. Ford carrier.

edited 28th Jan '16 8:42:48 PM by Balmung

Balmung: And your point is what? The Burks are about 2 billion per ship and Ticonderoga Cruisers 2.3 billion per ship. Those are also a notable chunk of the cost of the Nimitz as well. These ships are not cheap.

The BBC: Type 45 destroyers: UK's £1bn warships face engine refit

And also, a possible look into the future of the Royal Navy.

Thinkdefence: UK Defence News and Links – Week 4 2016

edited 29th Jan '16 1:24:30 AM by Greenmantle

Now you know why I call the premier British defence contractor, "British Wasteofspace Systems". Nothing about that Type 45 destroyer situation surprises me in any way.

Really, it seems like we generally vacillate wildly between boneheaded decisions and carrying out plans that would make the greatest admirals green with envy.

@Type 45 issues:

Ohhhh dear.