Scott Locklin calls battleships a ridiculous but awesome idea, another gleaming phalanx hopelessly outmaneuvered by horse archers — in the form of torpedo boats.
If, because of the physics of scale, a larger ship is faster, better armed, and better armored than n smaller ships of the same tonnage though, how is a battleship ridiculous or poorly suited for maneuver warfare?
And if one destroyer can take out multiple torpedo boats, does that make torpedo boats ridiculous and poorly suited for maneuver warfare? And if a cruiser can take out multiple destroyers…
This seems like a case of paper-rock-scissors, not simple superiority and inferiority.
I see a few grains of truth in what Locklin says though. Building the original Dreadnought seems perfectly reasonable. It’s the response — let’s build our own big-gun battleships! — that resembles a primitive male mating display — let’s grow our own big-antler rack! A predator doesn’t catch and kill prey by growing a bigger antler-rack. (I vaguely recall Donald Kagan making that point in his On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace.) So the Germans should have put their naval resources into torpedo boats and subs — and, later, torpedo-bombers.
The other issue is that battleships may have made sense in 1906, but by WWII the literal and figurative ascent of air power was hard to ignore — at least in retrospect.
(Hat tip to Nyrath.)
The big ships had their place in history. Even in WWII, they had a function (mostly as a mobile, massive, effective shore battery for island landings – a 105 mm howizter is great an all, but an 18″ gun just does so much more damage to enemy bunkers), and the fact that they were so big made it reasonable for them to be simply bristling with anti-aircraft guns, making them pretty resistant to air attack, even.
The problem is that technology is constantly evolving, and a big ship today simply makes a big target. Satelite technology means that you cannot hide. Cruise missile technology means that they can shoot at you even when you don’t know that they are there. ICBM technology means entire fleets are destroyed by an hypersonic attack for which they have no defenses at all.
Even cruise missiles, for which the claim is that we have defenses in the form of phalanx guns, can easily overwhelm those defenses if more than, say, a half dozen are fired at once. The Milleneum 2002 war games proved that big ships are a liability against even a technologically backwards enemy. In 2002, a virtual war game fought in the persian gulf pitted our battle fleet against a rag-tag group of “insurgents” in pleasure boats and cessna aircraft. A coordinated, instantaneous assualt by these pleasure craft using old-school silkworm cruise missiles put 24 of our ships on the bottom of the gulf in less than 2 hours, and crippled twice that many. Estimated casualties would have been in the range of 20,000 souls. One of the ships “sunk” was a Nimitz class aircraft carrier.
Big surface navies have their place, but as active devices of warfare? Not so much anymore.
I find a lot wrong with his essay, but I’ll say one thing: the idea of the all-big-gun battleship was not a ‘mating display’ but rather [a reaction to] the inadequacy of pre-dreadnoughts’ mixed-caliber armaments during the Russo-Japanese war.
The big thing missing from his essay is the idea of combined arms. It’s not an either-or, and army or fleet being able to be filled by the phalanx or elements being able to maneuver, but having both — or the idea of combined arms.
You’re right: one battleship can take out multiple PTs, but one PT can take out multiple battleships, and the PT is a fraction of the cost.
The key to all this is really the potency, range, and autonomy of modern armaments. The battleship’s speed, armour and armament are invalid now not because the PT is better, but because the cruise missile is better.
The torpedo boat is dependent on decent weather, much like the torpedo plane. The logistics, too, work much better near a coast or in an island chain than in the middle of the Atlantic (or halfway to Midway Island).
The more primitive the technology, the more dependent on ideal conditions (for that tech).
Foxmarks, that’s an excellent point — and one of the main shortcomings I would have highlighted of the Jeune École-type tactics.
I would argue, however, that this should mean the focus of military shipbuilding then ought not be upon making a few expensive ships, but upon many cheap ones.
One can make an excuse for, say, the Type 45 as having good radar is still very important on the modern naval battlefield, but designing and constructing new aircraft carriers when a combination of destroyer-launched UAVs for close air support and submarine-launched cruise missiles for tactical bombing can do the same thing for a fraction of the cost is inexcusable.
I find it has more to do with the physics of explosions. Sure, you can armour the crap out of your floating fortress, but the torpedo boats hardly have to twitch their explosive loads to compensate. Explosives are already too powerful for any solid armour to contain. Even if the enemy fortress spent billions of dollars on plating, the solution is simply to shoot again. A second warhead costs what, a couple grand?
The size just makes it easier to hit. It means more tonnage of weapons meet the sea floor per successful strike. It also means tonnage is the wrong metric. For the same cost in manpower and cash, you can get vastly greater tonnage of torpedo boats.
The engineering trade-offs get interesting in a hurry. Historically, punching through thick armor had meant mounting big guns, which required a big ship. Torpedoes side-stepped that need for a large, sturdy firing platform.