2014/07/27

Lethality of navies

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The Information Dissemination blog has embedded a video titled "The future of Seapower Lethality". I admit right away; I didn't watch a single second of it, nor am I interested in its content.
Instead, it's merely an occasion to write about lethality of sea power myself :


A look at military history shows very few cases in which the lethality of seapower was of prime importance. Frigates of the age of sail cruiser for years or decades without firing a shot in anger, for example. Having enough spare sails in storage and a good tailor to fix damaged sails was more imporant to a frigate captain than whether his ship carried 12 pounder or 18 pounder guns.
Early gunpowder naval combat even rarely saw ships sunk at all; I remember to have read about a battle in which the participant disengaged in horror when -unexpectedly - a ship exploded.

Most utility and importance of seapower in history was to be found in safe routine patrols and in fleet-in-being functions. To have the survivability and strength (numbers) to patrol routinely instead of being the underdog (and be forced to cower in harbours or under water) was of great importance. The Royal Navy became the dominant navy of the world without excelling in lethality - but it was able to let hundreds of ships patrol (cruise). This meant a huge demand for dry docks, coal storages, coal shipping, ammunition depots and many harbours during the Ironclad Age up to WW2. They were not much concerned with lethality, and didn't need to be. 

Navies concerned much with lethality were different navies; underdog navies. The German World War navies were very much focused on lethality, particularly on lethality of the submarines. Eventually, the submarines were defeated or want of survivability, safe communications and logistics.
The really poor underdog navies were the ones which weren't very lethal in at least a niche.*

One might think the American carrier fleets were all about lethality, but their strength was first and foremost their radar-supported survivability in 1943-1945. Their lethality was rather modest (and dependent on luck in 1942), with a rather unimpressive sorties-to-damage_done ratio in most engagements.**


So why would people with naval interests today pay much attention to lethality? Sure, it makes little sense to neglect one aspect, but one ought to admit that the an ESSM missile hitting a speedboat gets more attention than the performance of some plastic foam that's usable to fill up compartments for damage control***.

Maybe lethality - potentially spectacular and easy to grasp as it is - has a little bit too much attention nowadays, and maybe this is one of the many peacetime aberrances which military bureaucracies develop after not being tested for real for generations?


S O

*: The First French Republict had at least some fine corsairs, the German World War navies were lethal with submarines (and MTBs in WW2) at least initially, the IJN had its six-month straw fire with an imperssive amount of prizes captured and the Italian World War Navies had at least fine frogmen (and MTBs in WW1). A complete sucker was the Russian/Soviet navy in both World Wars, and the French World War navies were utterly inconsequential as well.
**: There are not enough low hanging fruits for a spectacular average if you are extremely active, of course.
***: or whether good-enough stocks of ammunitions are available to sustain operations.
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7 comments:

  1. I am going to reply to this one paragraph at a time. I am numbering your paragraphs as 1-4 starting with one being “A look at military history”. My paragraphs match the paragraphs of the blog post.
    In the first paragraph you talk about the “lethality” of sail ships in terms of sinking ships and their need for spare sail. In the days before exploding shells ships had difficulty sinking other ships and their main goal was to capture enemy ships. As late as 1805 we can see this at Trafalgar where 10 ships were captured and only one destroyed with Nelson being shot down by close range musket fire. The battles were very comparable to land battle fought on ships. As far as sail was concerned, it meant everything to maintain maneuverability over the enemy. If a ship or admiral was unable to make the best of the weather he could not attempt to outmaneuver the enemy or bring his guns to bear efficiently. As with most land battles in history from Cannae to the invasion of Iraq we can see that maneuverability has more to do with lethality than anything else.
    The first two sentences of the next paragraph are vague and not specific enough to be refuted. “The Royal Navy became the dominant navy of the world without excelling in lethality” again I point you the moment in history where the RN became the dominant navy in the world, Trafalgar. Here the RN fought a fleet that was superior (at least in number of capital ships) and won. The hundreds of ships that the RN required for patrol were due to the fact that the United Kingdom had the most expansive empire the world had ever seen. They were required to maintain freedom of the seas in three oceans. Maintaining freedom of the seas over such vast shipping lanes requires a large number of cruisers. However, these shipping lanes never caused the RN to decline in its ability to defeat European navies in the Mediterranean, the Channel, or the North Sea, wherever European navies of the Victorian era challenged it.
    (Part 1 of 2)

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    1. "In the days before exploding shells ships had difficulty sinking other ships"
      Triere captains would have disagreed.

      "I point you the moment in history where the RN became the dominant navy in the world, Trafalgar."

      The RN had been dominant ever since it won the 3rd war with the Dutch in the 1680's.

      "The hundreds of ships that the RN required for patrol were due to the fact that the United Kingdom had the most expansive empire the world had ever seen."
      The Portuguese and Spanish would have disagreed at least till the 1750s.

      "Maintaining freedom of the seas over such vast shipping lanes requires a large number of cruisers."

      In wartime, yes. Yet in peacetime smaller units (sloops of war, xebecs) were the relevant ones because the peacetime threats were almost exclusively small, nimble ships during the 17th and 18th centuries.

      "However, these shipping lanes never caused the RN to decline in its ability to defeat European navies"

      This is completely off-topic; I was writing that they didn't pay much attention to lethality. Endurance and survivability were greater concerns.

      Compare the 18pdr / 24 pdr frigate topic between the British and the French; peacetime opinions on "lethality" tend to resemble the case for 24 pdrs.

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  2. Underdog navies are rarely focused on lethality. This is basic Mahan (whose principles built the WWI German Navy). “The German World War navies were very much focused on lethality, particularly on lethality of submarines”. Your point here seems to be focused on WWII Germany with some ignorance of the High Seas Fleet of The Great War. The German Fleet of World War I was largely developed not on the point of lethality but on survivability. A cursory glance at the statistics of these ships will show you that the German High Seas Fleet lacked the gunnery of the Grand Fleet while being better armored. You refer to the German submarines as being the lethal arm of the German navy’s but are ignorant of the fact that submarines are the descendants of the cruisers that you disparaged in the second paragraph. They were relatively useless against warships and only dangerous to lightly armored merchant ships or ships surprised in port or at anchor. U-boats had a very low lethality against well-armed opponents and 30,000 of 40,000* men serving in WWII U-boats died because of the effective allied convoy system that could be considered lethal in its own right with its ASW abilities. Your footnote at the end of this paragraph is wrong but again too vague for me to really rebut it well without further explanation of what you mean.
    In the last paragraph you talk about the lethality of carriers, which are solely focused on lethality. Their major drawback is that they have little inherent defensive capabilities. Had they been equipped with 70 defensive fighter planes we (I am from the US) wouldn’t have lost a ship at Coral Sea, Santa Cruz, or Midway. As the post WWII world has shown us the greatest advantage of aircraft carrier has been their ability to project airpower (or lethality) over land as was seen in the Korean War, Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and the Global War on Terrorism. These ships have been the epitome of the phrase “the best defense is a good offense”.
    As we can see from this your arguments are lacking and often flat out wrong. I would like to make a point on the influence of seapower upon the world but the fact that your arguments lack real factual basis I find myself incapable of doing more than simply correcting.
    *This number comes from the movie Das Boot. While I can’t assure its accuracy I doubt it is so far off to really disprove the point.
    (Part 2 of 2)

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    1. The Hochseeflotte did not think of itself as an underdog, but as a challenger in the North Sea and as the dominant force in the Baltic Sea.

      I'm not "ignorant of the fact that submarines are the descendants of the cruisers" - it's simply not true. The high seas submarines were descendants of commerce raiders. Some cruisers were employed as commerce raiders, but the cruiser job also includes defensive patrolling in dominant navies, and submarines had no such defensive patrol tasks (with boarding of ships for inspection) ever - and only SNNs gained much of a defensive role.

      "U-boats had a very low lethality against well-armed opponents and 30,000 of 40,000* men serving in WWII U-boats died because of the effective allied convoy system (...)"

      I basically mentioned the latter by restricting the claim to the early phases of both World Wars and the former is simply untrue unless you consider the British in the Mediterranean or the IJN capital ships as poorly armed.

      "Their major drawback is that they have little inherent defensive capabilities."

      Their air defence had become impregnable by late 1943 and they forced IJN submarines to submerge in a radius well beyond the ship's horizon. 30+ kts carrier battlegroups with radar were able to avoid gunfights at all times. Damage control, reserve displacement and with the RN even horizontal armour hardened these ships very much.
      It's ridiculous to call this "little inherent defensive capabilities".

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  3. I responded to your comments on my blog http://karlscapitalships.blog.com/2014/07/29/navy-lethality-part-2/ . I apologize for my quite rude tone from my initial reply. It was quite out of line and I think opened a negative environment to what could be a fun debate about naval warfare.

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    1. A Triere is a Greek warship, not a Roman one. The Romans introduced boarding of ram ships as an important tactic (and late large projectile weapons). The Greeks and Phoenicians focused on ramming.

      The Hochseeflotte behaviour in wartime didn't fit pre-war anticipations becuase of a coal shortage and because it was a political fleet:
      "(...) Tirpitz's "Risk Theory," which held that Britain would not challenge Germany if the latter's fleet posed such a significant threat to its own."
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Seas_Fleet

      "I speak to the carriers “little inherent defensive capacities” as a carrier’s incapability of defending itself against its own armament."

      Then you're ignoring the ships' purpose. No wonder we disagree. Besides, I claimed its offensive power to have been rather modest. From your perspective, it was nonexistent.

      "I think the early battles of the war that I pointed out best show this as the [CVs] had a high probability of being sunk if they were found by their counterpart’s air wings at open sea."

      Actually, German and Italian air power was quite frustrated by RN CVs in 1940/41. And the Americans had one of their carriers in the Coral Sea already well-equipped with 40 mm.
      Your description fits only small carriers and the IJN at Midway - which was the early WW2 concept of a CV that did not succeed. Similar to Soviet and Italian submarines.

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  4. If you have limited ability to put hull numbers to the water, you focus on making these few hulls as lethal as possible. If you have a large number of hulls and are a seapower, you focus on endurance in order to control the sea lines of communication. Lethality optimized ships are useful for clashes in restricted bodies of water and disruption of enemy sea lines of communication. You do need a certain level of lethality to enforce will with enduring ships, but the optimization is on a combination package of endurance at sea and lethality. It is not just as pure breed lethal as a coastal defensive force that has no aspiration of slogging it out in a sea lines of communication control match.
    While all ships need to be lethal, does the US navy increase lethality at the expense of endurance and what does it mean? There is no other global power than the US that is really capable of controlling the global sea lines of communication to any sufficient degree to power a wartime industry. All the other, rather coastal navies go for increasingly lethal systems that are meant to keep the enduring US ocean fleet out of the green waters. UK and France have naval expeditionary forces that are an appendix to US developments. The problem is that the US can cruise the oceans, but must stay away from coastal waters, unless the upper lethality and lower exposed platform costs. As long as their capital ships have a veritable chance of escaping detection and the fuel demand does not skyrocket for wartime deployment, due to nuclear platforms, the US navy is going to dominate with current lethality levels. However, they want to control, who washes his hands in the sea and go all the way to the beach with a corresponding demand for becoming as lethal as the short legged counterforces in this environment. In this sense, the lethality discussion, without endurance considerations and chances of encounters, is symptomatic for missing out, what missions are accomplished and what opportunity costs get squandered in a quest for an infinite goal.

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