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Royal Navy Giving Up Anti-Ship Missiles, Will Rely On Cannons For Naval Combat (telegraph.co.uk)
cold fjord writes: It will soon be a bit more difficult for Britain's Royal Navy to rule the waves as it gives up anti-ship missiles as a result of budget cuts. That will force the Royal Navy to go "old school" and rely upon naval gunfire for ship-to-ship combat. Cannon fire as the primary means of ship-to-ship combat has been largely obsolete since the 1950s following the invention of guided missiles in World War 2. Prior to that, cannon fire had been the primary means of naval combat for hundreds of years. Although the Royal Navy ranged up to 16" guns on battleships, the largest gun currently in active service is a 4.5" gun. That will leave the Royal Navy unable to engage targets beyond approximately 17 miles / 27 km, whereas Harpoon missiles provide an 80 mile / 130 m range. The loss of anti-ship missile capability will begin in 2018 and may last for 10 years for warships, and 2 years for helicopters. The Sun quotes a naval insider who said: "It's like Nelson saying, 'don't worry, I don't need canons, we've got muskets.'" The loss of missile capability heaps more misfortune upon a naval force that recently has seen its available frontline combat force drop to an unprecedented 24 warships.
When is the last time the British Navy fired an anti-ship missile from a ship? Almost 40 years? Seriously.
Is anyone seriously planning on attacking British warships with something besides rafts full of IEDs? What's the likelihood that Brits would be involved in a Naval engagement that didn't also involve the American Navy, a force that is nearly cartoonish compared to every other fleet on the planet? Is there some expectation that they'll be front-line in a shooting war beside an American carrier group?
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
since the Falklands. now drones....that's more like it.
Actually, the UK is one of the few NATO countries that does spend it's allotted proportion of GDP on defence.
This is pure incompetence by the Admiralty and the government. In the past, there has been a desire to prioritize number of ships above the capability of those ships. It's a disastrous policy that is driven by people more interested in building their own empires than doing their job.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
True, and that has been the only Russian achievement this century.
And they've been at it so very long, too...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
When Britain really ruled the waves -
(In good Queen Bess's time)
The House of Peers made no pretence
To intellectual eminence,
Or scholarship sublime;
Yet Britain won her proudest bays
In good Queen Bess's glorious days!
When Wellington thrashed Bonaparte,
As every child can tell,
The House of Peers, throughout the war,
Did nothing in particular,
And did it very well:
Yet Britain set the world ablaze
In good King George's glorious days!
And while the House of Peers withholds
Its legislative hand,
And noble statesmen do not itch
To interfere with matters which
They do not understand,
As bright will shine Great Britain's rays
As in King George's glorious days!
(hey, it's not often I get to post a relevant Gilbert & Sullivan!)
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
She voted for Bush's gulf war. She's a warmonger.
One of the reasons Anti Ship missiles suck is due to time of flight and no discrimination systems to filter out what will effectively become a potential target once the platform reaches its designated area and begins its search pattern.
Every target has what's known as an AOU or " Area of Uncertainty ". This is typically designated as a circle around the targets last known position. The size of the AOU is based on:
Length of time since target update
Platform that generated update
Target Speed / heading / etc
The more time that passes, the larger the potential area said target can be in and the larger the circle grows.
Now assume you get really good positioning data on your target. Initial AOU size will vary based on what platform provided the data, but assume it's a solid hit.
Ignoring the fact we'll never shoot just one missile and that it would take forever to coordinate a dozen shots across multiple ships, let's say we just send one off from a few hundred miles out.
So not including super and hypersonic systems, most cruise missiles are subsonic so figure maybe half an hour flight time to reach the target area.
That AOU is going to grow considerably in half an hour and if other ships are in the area, those AOU's can start to overlap. Meaning you can have more than just your target in the search area when the radar goes active and begins looking for something to kill.
Bad news if you happen to be floating in the general area and are big enough to generate a radar return.
Now picture this scenario in a cramped space like the Persian Gulf where hundreds of ships and their gigantic overlapping AOU's make targeting anything a downright pita.
The newer platforms may be more intelligent ( LRASM is supposed to be ) but Gulf War era tech certainly was not. No mid flight updates. Once flying, the weapon was on its own.
Source: Ex Tomahawk Blk II/III TWCS Fire Control type
This is grandstanding to get the British people riled up and get popular opinion to support allocating more money for defense spending. They've set the doomsday date far enough in the future that they have time to let the bureaucrats allocate the money and save the day and keep the missiles on the ships.
Better known as 318230.
No, it's not "better" because end-of-life exists for reliability and safety reasons. Carrying old missiles means sinking your own ships with them.
There are lots of ways to sink a ship. When I worked in that business we took very seriously the threat of low-flying aircraft with modern ECM pods and laser-guided bombs. The Queen Elizabeth will be commissioned in May, so while the Royal Navy may not have anti-ship missiles that doesn't necessarily mean it won't have a way to sink ships. I suspect F-35s, with their low radar cross-section, will be well-suited to that role.
And then there are submarines.
The US pays for wars all over the place which have been very expensive. 7-9 Trillion in the Middle East with nothing in return except destabilized countries with a populace that hates and is more aggressive to the US and its allies. Stop giving arms to rebels who turn those weapons on you, close bases that don't do us any good and bring troops to bases that do, and if we are defending a country we should receive compensation instead of paying a country to have a base. Further, there can be cuts to BS departments of money grubbing and lobbying, but that would be a secondary issue to tackle.
The US Defense budget is massive, but we sure don't spend it on troops and weapons. Way too much overhead and far too many pet projects.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
When the enemy mil is warned to stand down, stay home and accept surrender it all looks like winning on TV.
Teams contacted the Libyan mil and gave them an offer. Stand down and walk away. So its not that any ship was "tested", the other side selected to stay home.
Thats not any navy winning, thats having signals intelligence and making a lot of calls.
The Falklands was more real. Lots of hardware issues and code on imported hardware to get working. The lesson learned was never to fully trust imported systems.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
History repeats.
People forget this due to the reversal afterwards, but one of the cost savings of the incoming Thatcher government in the UK was to scrap and sell all the aircraft carriers leaving a gap of some time with no aircraft carriers before HMS Illustrious and HMS Ark Royal (R07) were completed. The Argentinians took note and occupied the Falkland Islands expecting to be safe from a toothless Royal Navy.
They acted too quickly because while the sale of the HMS Invincible in February 1982 to Australia had gone through the aircraft carrier was still in the UK in April when the war broke out. The other operational carrier, HMS Hermes, was going to be scrapped some time in 1982 due to a decision made in 1981 but was still intact in April. The Argentinians got a bit of a shock in facing two aircraft carriers instead of the zero they expected. The carriers HMS Triumph and HMS Ark Royal (R09) had already been recently scrapped under the Thatcher government Navy reduction plan, but they were quite old ships anyway.
If they load those into a cannon they might fly better.
computers came about as a result of artillery calculations.
Not entirely, there were three contemporaries. American computers came about that way. British ones came about as the result of military code breaking. German ones came about for the hell of it.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Not only is the UK one of the wealthiest nations on earth, it is one of a few, if not the only one among NATO nations that spends the recommended 2% on defence.
My guess is that they are hoping the US will continue to pick up the slack since the US wildly over spends on it's military. Not sure how long that will go on with the new idiot about to enter the White House. But I agree that it makes little sense for a maritime nation like the UK to have a second rate navy. The UK might have it's problems but it's not exactly in the poor house with one of the 5 largest economies by GDP in the world.
You can work out what colour it should be, though.
Light grey, like everything else.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Perhaps The Royal Navy have Amazon Prime?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
One thing that is missing from the comments is that the counter to anti-ship missiles - decoys, phalanx defense and anti-missile-missiles - are currently looking pretty good, and with the advent of some defensive lasers, improving a lot. The improvements in the anti-ship missiles is mostly a matter of guidance; the basic tech has ben stagnant for a while. In military terms, something is 'obsolete' for just as long until someone comes up with a counter. Air-to-air missiles were initially touted as ending the dogfight era ... then somebody came up with decoys.
Currently, there is no defense against cannons. So if a ship were equipped with only cannons for offense, and all the defensive toys, it would realistically be able to go tot-to-toe with a conventional ASM armed opponent ... for a fraction of the cost. It sucks, but most ASMs are in the millions to tens-of-millions dollar range, while AASMs are in the tens to hundred thou range ... decoys, chaff are hundreds to a couple of thou ... both the phalanx CIWS and laser defense system (e.g. HELLADS) have a pretty large cost for the weapon itself, but the cost per shot is pretty minimal (a few second burst from a phalanx system is a few hundred dollars; the laser defense costs less than a dollar per shot).
Which is how the pendulum swings. Once the defenses get good enough, someone comes up with a better nut-cracker
You're right, Swedish women love being gang-raped on the streets.
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