Putin urges increased protection for the fleet against long-range missiles, after Ukraine eliminates another missile ship in Sevastopol, forcing Moscow to move the fleet to mainland Russia.
That the US and her defense contractors see this and are very busy developing solutions against this very potent threat against their own ships. Since the rest of the Wold als sees this… and that includes some people/groups/countries that might want to sink some American ships. If anything this shows how dangerous Iran could make the Persian gulf for American ships.
Magura proves how vulnerable ships can be, especially against modern wolf packs.
So I hypothesize that they will come up with some form of “after market” installable Close In Weapon System (aka… a bolt on CIWS) to deal with these kind of threats.
Most US Navy ships have had CIWS systems since the 70s and have had many upgrades to their tracking systems since then. The US Army adopted the LPWS (C-RAM) which is basically a portable CIWS for land use. (The Russian version of the CIWS is called a Kortik.)
It wouldn’t surprise me if there are already CIWS-type systems for commercial ships operating in hazardous zones.
I have had the pleasure of standing next to a few CIWS systems during live fire testing and it’s quite the experience.
Yes, very much so. The reason I think there might be add ons is due to the nature of the threat.
Very angry, low visible, high speed, armored, unmanned surface vehicles that hunt in packs.
The Rim116 might not be usable because by the time you see them you might not want to / can not use a missile anymore.
The gun based ciws (midas/goalkeeper/phalanx et al.) might not have enough penetration. They are built for engaging unarmored targets.
We can make fun of the Russian expansion of their submarine fleet in de black sea all we want… but if these maguras where an easy threat to deal with they would. No reason to think any NATO surface combatant would do any better when suddenly confronted with a similar threat.
I have no clue what kind of penetration a phalanx has, but Magura is armored… there I also don’t know if this is just against small arms but I’d imagine a bit more. Also a drone boat is not shaped like a normal boat. It is flat with a sloped top so even chance of glancing blows.
So, Gary Brechner wrote an article about this, like 20 years ago: Basically, that the combination of expense to build, and vulnerability to specific asymmetric threats, that huge ocean-floating warships represent, means that in the long term they are doomed as a serious military platform. They should go on the shelf alongside that thing the Nazis did with trying to build small-building-sized tanks, as something that just doesn’t make sense when all factors are considered.
It might seem that the submarinization of the Black Sea fleet proves him out, but as it happens, I coincidentally got to talk recently to an actual military strategy expert on the topic and this was his take:
Deterrence is a relevant factor. Lots of expensive military kit is pretty vulnerable. The issue is, if you do start taking steps to attack it, what’s going to happen to you in response. That’s at the heart of keeping a lot of big powers’ naval forces safe, more so than them being invulnerable. Real no-holds-barred war is pretty rare in the modern world; most military kit goes around most of the time being used for force projection or little proxy wars, usually not full-scale war against peer enemies.
It may be that the big ships are becoming more vulnerable as time goes on, yes, but it’s not like that’s new. Once it does go past the level of “we don’t want to do that / provide weapons so our proxy can do that because we’re scared of the response,” and proceeds to a real fuck-'em-up war, losing big battleships and carriers at a shocking rate has been part of war since around World War 2. They’re hard as fuck to defend and navies tend to be super cautious with where they put them as a result, and once it comes to a real war, they start sinking yes. It’s not like land warfare; it only really takes one day where something goes wrong to sink billions and billions of dollars worth of your navy irrevocably. Adding a new way that that can happen doesn’t necessarily change the shape of the war because it was already happening and was already part of the calculus.
I think, as some other people have said, that most of it is bad strategy and tactics by the Russians, of putting their big naval assets within range of the weapons that can fuck them up and for some reason not reacting (until very recently) when as a result they started sinking like pebbles in a pond.
Wut?
That the US and her defense contractors see this and are very busy developing solutions against this very potent threat against their own ships. Since the rest of the Wold als sees this… and that includes some people/groups/countries that might want to sink some American ships. If anything this shows how dangerous Iran could make the Persian gulf for American ships.
Magura proves how vulnerable ships can be, especially against modern wolf packs.
So I hypothesize that they will come up with some form of “after market” installable Close In Weapon System (aka… a bolt on CIWS) to deal with these kind of threats.
Most US Navy ships have had CIWS systems since the 70s and have had many upgrades to their tracking systems since then. The US Army adopted the LPWS (C-RAM) which is basically a portable CIWS for land use. (The Russian version of the CIWS is called a Kortik.)
It wouldn’t surprise me if there are already CIWS-type systems for commercial ships operating in hazardous zones.
I have had the pleasure of standing next to a few CIWS systems during live fire testing and it’s quite the experience.
Yes, very much so. The reason I think there might be add ons is due to the nature of the threat.
Very angry, low visible, high speed, armored, unmanned surface vehicles that hunt in packs.
We can make fun of the Russian expansion of their submarine fleet in de black sea all we want… but if these maguras where an easy threat to deal with they would. No reason to think any NATO surface combatant would do any better when suddenly confronted with a similar threat.
Would probably be nothing more than a software update. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were already capable of engaging boats.
They are… gun based ciws can easily be used against ribs and such. I just don’t know if a drone boat ban be armored enough to withstand the onslaught.
The amount of armor necessary would render it useless.
I have no clue what kind of penetration a phalanx has, but Magura is armored… there I also don’t know if this is just against small arms but I’d imagine a bit more. Also a drone boat is not shaped like a normal boat. It is flat with a sloped top so even chance of glancing blows.
You mean like a big net that sits 50 feet off the boat to tangle the props of all these drones
Or just put era blocks on ships too… lol
So, Gary Brechner wrote an article about this, like 20 years ago: Basically, that the combination of expense to build, and vulnerability to specific asymmetric threats, that huge ocean-floating warships represent, means that in the long term they are doomed as a serious military platform. They should go on the shelf alongside that thing the Nazis did with trying to build small-building-sized tanks, as something that just doesn’t make sense when all factors are considered.
It might seem that the submarinization of the Black Sea fleet proves him out, but as it happens, I coincidentally got to talk recently to an actual military strategy expert on the topic and this was his take:
I think, as some other people have said, that most of it is bad strategy and tactics by the Russians, of putting their big naval assets within range of the weapons that can fuck them up and for some reason not reacting (until very recently) when as a result they started sinking like pebbles in a pond.
That makes sense. Although a lot of navy power is smaller ships, frigates and such.
But also the emergence of the drone boat in its current form was for sure hypothesized but now that they are here, the race is on to find a solution.
And several types of ships simply have no alternatives. Carriers, helicopter carriers, amphibious transport ships, oilers.