OUR KIND OF WAR

 As I look at the fruits of science and engineering coupled with infinitely cheap and expendable weapons I wonder what our generals and admirals think of the new kind of war. Back when I was just a lowly Ensign we used to practice Damage Control on the Ship with the attitude that reeked of optimism. We would call the blow that inflicted the damage, Hit Alpha and we would then scurry madly from the Repair Lockers to embrace and correct the damage, fight the fires, battle the flooding and end the immediate danger of burning to the waterline or flooding and sinking. It was relatively easy.

Now of course I knew intellectually that our putative enemy was the Soviet Union. We all did. What we studied in schools of higher naval learning was our understanding of Soviet tactics and what we saw of them was that a massive ancient Bear D would appear far far away on our radar horizon and our electronic warfare systems would detect the Downbeat Radar and the Bear Bomber would datalink our location to a Regiment or two of Backfire Bombers and they would flood our vicinity with scores of shipkilling missiles that moved very fast.

Hit Alpha was a sort of misnomer because those who knew suspected that Hit Alpha was going to be followed in rapid succession by Bravo, Charlie and Delta with maybe an Emerson Lake and Palmer thrown in because in war there is no such thing as overkill. Still, we carried on.

That was open ocean and naval war in the littoral and narrow seas. If you throw carrier battle groups into monstrously stupid places like the Persian Gulf the enemy Air Force and Navy are of no account at all. They can destroy every ship and sweep them all from the seas just by firing hundreds of ground launched shore based anti-ship missiles. When you think about it this is not only the correct strategy for Iran but also for both Chinas. There is no need to go to sea and mix it up with the big boys when all they have to do is serve tea and biscuits to the crews manning the hundreds of shore based missile launchers spread up and down the coast and even a few dozen miles inland.

It is a well known hint of madness to even talk about using warships to engage shore batteries. There are two primary reasons for this of course. Firstly, shore batteries don't run out of ammunition anywhere near as rapidly as a ship does and secondly, shore batteries don't catch fire, explode and sink.

There was a kind of ship that we in the naval service used to mention idly and which then the Royal Navy actually used a bit in the Falklands War. You can take any existing merchant hull and bolt or add any number of weapons to it and turn it into a modern Q-ship that can launch devastating attacks. It can't take it but it can dish it out. As I pointed out in the first 3 paragraphs, warships cannot take it either. It's some kind of myth that a properly built Naval He-Ship can shrug off the damage that wounds lesser ships to death and dooms them to sink but it's simply not true. Any hit at all on a modern warship will almost certainly amount to a mission kill if not a total kill.

My world class destroyer was so well designed that all of the ship's computers and fire control and fire direction equipment was lodged in the forward superstructure which would be the main point of aim for just about any radar homing missile. Any hit on that structure and it was fight's over. There was no more gunfire control, underwater battery fire control, anti-air defense or anything else.  That, oddly enough, remains the situation today with all warships I am familiar with.

Naval warfare has boiled down to an essential fact best articulated by Confederate Cavalry Commander, Nathan Bedford Forrest during the First Civil War; "Get their first with the most." The first contender to cycle through the detect to engage sequence will inflict the most devastating blow on the enemy. As long as the missile and drones ripple off successfully it really doesn't matter if they are slower then the enemy's missiles since they will complete the kill. If one side proves too slow to execute the OODA loop and radios for permissions to fire and fires half-heartedly at the enemy then it is over.

On the other hand, deception in war is taken for granted. I used to mock people long ago who swore blind that they would never lie, cheat or steal. I would point out that without practicing the arts of deceit that one would never get very proficient at it and war is unforgiving to those who are slow or dull-witted.

On that note I wonder if there is anyone who writes for the U.S. Naval Institute anymore. A century ago a lot of thoughtful articles would come out of its Proceedings and the same could be said for the War College in Newport. I stopped reading them when all they wanted to embrace was women in the naval service at every level and then DIE and then the sort of puerile nonsense that tried to sell us all on the idea that the Littoral Combat Ship was a stroke of genius and that we'd all be far better off for having bright Admirals who all thought exactly the same and never let a single spec of hesitation mar their glorious path to victory. Yeah, there towards the end it read like all that Soviet literature from right after the war.

It would be nice to think that someone in the United States has been devoting some thought to how we can make really cheap and really expendable munitions that don't need to cost an arm and a leg and that we can make hundreds of thousands of them here in America using parts made in America from parts made in America with software that has undergone full end-to-end testing and been test fired under all circumstances but I don't think we've actually done any of that.

I kind of wonder if the light attack aviation guys have considered the full effects of manpads literally everywhere on the field and if the armor guys have worked out that topdown anti-tank munitions with shaped charged cost under a thousand bucks and are ubiquitous but I really don't think those guys are out there right now at Aberdeen or Yuma testing their current inventory against the suddenly cheap and lethal smart weapons our enemies. have today. I'll bet they haven't even started trying to procure any examples for study and testing yet. 

There are no stars tomorrow for finding your own weapon systems vulnerabilities today.