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WW2 battleships were also utterly useless in actual combat results. Attack submarines and to some extent aerial attacks are what dominated marine warfare during

by yxhuvud 10y ago

WW2 battleships were also utterly useless in actual combat results. Attack submarines and to some extent aerial attacks are what dominated marine warfare during that period. Put everything at the hands of one fighter model and what you get is a single point of failure. What you need in a big war against a worthy adversary is the ability to quickly innovate and iterate on designs, and having a single design that try to do everything is about the worst option available for that. In a war against an adversary that isn't worthy, you can use whatever and you will still win.

nradov 10y ago
That's not true. Battleships were effective in several Pacific surface battles against the Japanese Navy, in shore bombardment during amphibious assaults, and as air-defense escorts for carriers.
- burnallofit 10y ago
  The point is that subs and carriers were far, far more effective than battleships.
  - foldr 10y ago
    That's not so clear, at least in the Atlantic theatre. How would you sink the Bismarck with just subs and carriers? As it happens, the lucky torpedo strike from Ark Royal played a pivotal role in its sinking, but submarines couldn't go fast enough to catch it, and an unescorted carrier would have been extremely vulnerable. It's hard to say for sure, but in a way it seems that the Hood and the Prince of Wales actually stood a much better chance of causing serious damage to the Bismarck than the Ark Royal did, even if that's not how events happened to play out. (And in fact damage from the Prince of Wales's guns did help to slow the Bismarck down and force it to attempt to go to port to refuel.)
- lostlogin 10y ago
  The point wasn't that they couldn't attack ones enemy, it was that they had become vulnerable to attack. The reason they could be used for bombardment was that air superiority had been claimed by carrier based aircraft. I don't recall ever reading of battleships being used for air defence. Have you a source? Smaller ships certainly were but big, slow firing guns that can't point upwards seems like a pointless and wasteful accessory on a huge target.
  - gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago
    Most ww2 era battleships had a plethora of smaller guns many of which were antiaircraft. The exception was the Japanese battleships which were relatively light on the smaller guns - which they even attempted to mitigate using shotgun like shells.
    - throwanem 10y ago
      Sure, but unguided antiaircraft fire tops out pretty low in effectiveness, and aircraft are dangerous to battleships out of all proportion to their size, quantity, and cost - even if you shoot down ninety-eight out of every hundred, the two you miss can still achieve a mission-kill, if they don't sink you outright. And you'll never shoot down anything close to that proportion. Battleships sided aircraft carriers for two reasons: one was to thicken their inner defense ring a little, and the other was because battleships alone, without a friendly air wing to keep the other side's strike aircraft away, were doomed.
  - nradov 10y ago
    What kind of source are you looking for? It's right there in any history of WW2 in the Pacific. US battleships were stuffed full of smaller caliber cannons that were very effective for air defense, especially after proximity fuses were introduced.
- gozur88 10y ago
  > Battleships were effective in several Pacific surface battles against the Japanese Navy... Only because neither the US nor the Japanese had carriers in those engagements. The writing was on the wall when the Brits crippled the Italian gunship fleet with a single obsolete aircraft carrier in 1940.
  - foldr 10y ago
    Pedantic correction: battleship, not gunship.
    - gozur88 10y ago
      The reason I said "gunship" is there weren't just battleships in that fleet. But there were no aircraft carriers.
- Stranger43 10y ago
  The problem with military white elephants like battleships or F-35's is not that they aren't effective in their dream engagement it's that they eat so much of the budget that the forces wielding them loose the ability to engage in more dispersed real world engagement against an enemy willing to adopt their strategies. 20% better at 3x the cost is usually a bad bargain in a battlefield increasingly dominated by dispersion strategies and that was what eventually killed the Battleships, they were to expensive for convoy duty and too slow and vulnerable to torpedo and air attacks for the line of battle fighting that actually happened doing WWII.
ufmace 10y ago
> What you need in a big war against a worthy adversary is the ability to quickly innovate and iterate on designs, and having a single design that try to do everything is about the worst option available for that. That's what you might think with a certain naive look at WWII. All indications are that in any modern conflict between countries with the capability to manufacture this kind of hardware, it'll be all over before there's time to design or build anything. You win with what you have when the war breaks out, or you lose. Assuming you're lucky enough for it to not go nuclear, since any country like that can also build lots of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, and they pretty much all have already.
gaius 10y ago
WW2 battleships were also utterly useless in actual combat results. WW2 battleships proved their worth as late as the 1990s when nothing else could deliver the shore bombardment capability.
- throwanem 10y ago
  But that only works when you can be sure no one's able to go after the battleship with torpedoes or bombs. In any environment contested by a remotely modern opponent, battleships aren't survivable enough to matter.
  - gaius 10y ago
    Sure, but the modern battlegroup concept with have a Destroyer or two for air and submarine defence. The carrier USS Carl Vinson is in the South China Sea right now with 8 Destroyers as escort.
    - throwanem 10y ago
      Meanwhile, any opponent we're likely to encounter there has supersonic anti-shipping missiles, against which only CIWS point-defense cannons are likely to be useful. CSG-1 mounts only sixteen such weapons, and each only has magazine space for, at best, 20 seconds' sustained fire before requiring downtime for a manual reload. While the Phalanx CIWS is inarguably impressive in specification and testing, the thing about the US military is that, whenever we get into a fight, we're always 150% ready - for the last war. It takes us a while to figure out what we're doing in the current one, and it costs us. I see no reason to imagine this pattern shouldn't hold in a new war against an opponent equipped with Moskits.
      - jabl 10y ago
        I thought that the Phalanx was in the process of being phased out in favor of some short range missile system (RAM?)? Phalanx is awesome for taking out subsonic missiles flying a straight trajectory. A mach 3 monster doing evasive maneuvers, not so much.. Think of the problem: - At Mach 3, the missile is flying at roughly the same speed as the unguided bullets the thing is firing. If it's additionally doing evasive maneuvers it's going to be pretty hard to hit.. (though I guess at Mach 3 it's not going to do very much acrobatics, but perhaps even a little bit is enough to make the CIWS miss?) - Mach 3 is close to a km per second, and I guess the realistic range for a 20 mm cannon isn't that much, lets say 4 km for the sake of argument. And below, say, 1 km it probably doesn't matter if you keep firing at it or not, it's likely to hit you out of sheer inertia even if you hit it. So that gives you around 3s time to fire and adjust the aim. Not very much..

by yxhuvud 10y ago

nradov 10y ago

That's not true. Battleships were effective in several Pacific surface battles against the Japanese Navy, in shore bombardment during amphibious assaults, and as air-defense escorts for carriers.

burnallofit 10y ago
The point is that subs and carriers were far, far more effective than battleships.
- foldr 10y ago
  That's not so clear, at least in the Atlantic theatre. How would you sink the Bismarck with just subs and carriers? As it happens, the lucky torpedo strike from Ark Royal played a pivotal role in its sinking, but submarines couldn't go fast enough to catch it, and an unescorted carrier would have been extremely vulnerable. It's hard to say for sure, but in a way it seems that the Hood and the Prince of Wales actually stood a much better chance of causing serious damage to the Bismarck than the Ark Royal did, even if that's not how events happened to play out. (And in fact damage from the Prince of Wales's guns did help to slow the Bismarck down and force it to attempt to go to port to refuel.)
lostlogin 10y ago
The point wasn't that they couldn't attack ones enemy, it was that they had become vulnerable to attack. The reason they could be used for bombardment was that air superiority had been claimed by carrier based aircraft. I don't recall ever reading of battleships being used for air defence. Have you a source? Smaller ships certainly were but big, slow firing guns that can't point upwards seems like a pointless and wasteful accessory on a huge target.
- gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago
  Most ww2 era battleships had a plethora of smaller guns many of which were antiaircraft. The exception was the Japanese battleships which were relatively light on the smaller guns - which they even attempted to mitigate using shotgun like shells.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    Sure, but unguided antiaircraft fire tops out pretty low in effectiveness, and aircraft are dangerous to battleships out of all proportion to their size, quantity, and cost - even if you shoot down ninety-eight out of every hundred, the two you miss can still achieve a mission-kill, if they don't sink you outright. And you'll never shoot down anything close to that proportion. Battleships sided aircraft carriers for two reasons: one was to thicken their inner defense ring a little, and the other was because battleships alone, without a friendly air wing to keep the other side's strike aircraft away, were doomed.
- nradov 10y ago
  What kind of source are you looking for? It's right there in any history of WW2 in the Pacific. US battleships were stuffed full of smaller caliber cannons that were very effective for air defense, especially after proximity fuses were introduced.
gozur88 10y ago
> Battleships were effective in several Pacific surface battles against the Japanese Navy... Only because neither the US nor the Japanese had carriers in those engagements. The writing was on the wall when the Brits crippled the Italian gunship fleet with a single obsolete aircraft carrier in 1940.
- foldr 10y ago
  Pedantic correction: battleship, not gunship.
  - gozur88 10y ago
    The reason I said "gunship" is there weren't just battleships in that fleet. But there were no aircraft carriers.
Stranger43 10y ago
The problem with military white elephants like battleships or F-35's is not that they aren't effective in their dream engagement it's that they eat so much of the budget that the forces wielding them loose the ability to engage in more dispersed real world engagement against an enemy willing to adopt their strategies. 20% better at 3x the cost is usually a bad bargain in a battlefield increasingly dominated by dispersion strategies and that was what eventually killed the Battleships, they were to expensive for convoy duty and too slow and vulnerable to torpedo and air attacks for the line of battle fighting that actually happened doing WWII.

ufmace 10y ago

> What you need in a big war against a worthy adversary is the ability to quickly innovate and iterate on designs, and having a single design that try to do everything is about the worst option available for that. That's what you might think with a certain naive look at WWII. All indications are that in any modern conflict between countries with the capability to manufacture this kind of hardware, it'll be all over before there's time to design or build anything. You win with what you have when the war breaks out, or you lose. Assuming you're lucky enough for it to not go nuclear, since any country like that can also build lots of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, and they pretty much all have already.

gaius 10y ago

WW2 battleships were also utterly useless in actual combat results. WW2 battleships proved their worth as late as the 1990s when nothing else could deliver the shore bombardment capability.

throwanem 10y ago
But that only works when you can be sure no one's able to go after the battleship with torpedoes or bombs. In any environment contested by a remotely modern opponent, battleships aren't survivable enough to matter.
- gaius 10y ago
  Sure, but the modern battlegroup concept with have a Destroyer or two for air and submarine defence. The carrier USS Carl Vinson is in the South China Sea right now with 8 Destroyers as escort.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    Meanwhile, any opponent we're likely to encounter there has supersonic anti-shipping missiles, against which only CIWS point-defense cannons are likely to be useful. CSG-1 mounts only sixteen such weapons, and each only has magazine space for, at best, 20 seconds' sustained fire before requiring downtime for a manual reload. While the Phalanx CIWS is inarguably impressive in specification and testing, the thing about the US military is that, whenever we get into a fight, we're always 150% ready - for the last war. It takes us a while to figure out what we're doing in the current one, and it costs us. I see no reason to imagine this pattern shouldn't hold in a new war against an opponent equipped with Moskits.
    - jabl 10y ago
      I thought that the Phalanx was in the process of being phased out in favor of some short range missile system (RAM?)? Phalanx is awesome for taking out subsonic missiles flying a straight trajectory. A mach 3 monster doing evasive maneuvers, not so much.. Think of the problem: - At Mach 3, the missile is flying at roughly the same speed as the unguided bullets the thing is firing. If it's additionally doing evasive maneuvers it's going to be pretty hard to hit.. (though I guess at Mach 3 it's not going to do very much acrobatics, but perhaps even a little bit is enough to make the CIWS miss?) - Mach 3 is close to a km per second, and I guess the realistic range for a 20 mm cannon isn't that much, lets say 4 km for the sake of argument. And below, say, 1 km it probably doesn't matter if you keep firing at it or not, it's likely to hit you out of sheer inertia even if you hit it. So that gives you around 3s time to fire and adjust the aim. Not very much..