Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations discusses great trends. On maneuver:
During the age of fighting sail, ships used to stay in a tight column for cohesion and sought to be to windward or leeward of the enemy. Battleships maneuvered to cross the enemy’s T. Picket submarines are pre-positioned to scout and attack in waters through which the enemy may pass. Aircraft are put on a CAP station so they can be vectored to a target or can maneuver on their own to attack. Deck-launched interceptors are in a state of readiness that is predetermined to give them time to move into a position for attack. In each case the emphasis is on the timely positioning of forces, which enables one to scout and shoot better than the enemy.
On firepower:
The most conspicuous trend in the history of warfare is the increase in weapon range, from two miles or so in the days of fighting sail to fifteen miles or more in the era of the big gun, three hundred miles during World War II, and six hundred miles or more today.
[…]
The long guns of sailing ships were effective at only about three hundred yards, and carronades were limited to an even shorter distance. Around 1900, before continuous-aim fire, it was estimated that a battleship would take fifty minutes to reduce an enemy to impotence at a range of 2,500 yards. By 1914 it would take only ten minutes, in good visibility, to put an enemy out of action at ten thousand yards.
[…]
In World War II, radar ranging changed that. Gun ballistics became so accurate, with refined fire-control systems, that even medium-caliber 5-, 6-, and 8-inch guns could be fired accurately almost to their maximum range. 9 In the half-century from 1898 to 1948, the effective range of naval weapons increased about tenfold.
The increasing effectiveness of shipboard gunfire was obscured by the growing use of aircraft for bombing early in World War II.
[…]
In the 1930s engineers designed land-based B-17 bombers specifically to carry out attacks on warships at great range. Yet, horizontal bombers turned out to be almost totally ineffective; they had difficulty finding naval targets at long range and experienced even more difficulty hitting them at any range. Naval aircraft of much shorter ranges proved to be the best ship-killers.
[…]
After concluding that, even omitting nuclear weapons, the lethality of weapons has increased by five orders of magnitude—that is, 100,000 times—between the middle of the sixteenth century and the present time, Dupuy uncovers a paradox. While weapon lethality on the battlefield grew, the rate of personnel casualties per unit time shrank. Why? One prominent reason was the increased dispersion of troops on the battlefield.
On counterforce:
Even in their heyday, armor and hull strength were rarely thought of as offering as much security against shells as deep bunkers in the ground. Armor was a dilatory device, used to forestall enemy firepower until one’s own offensive power took effect. In those days, there was much discussion of the division of a ship’s displacement between firepower, staying power (protective armor), and propulsion power. Before and after World War I, each country had its own style: Americans sacrificed speed for guns, armor, and radius of action; the Germans opted for staying power; the Italians emphasized speed; and the British (like the Americans today) incorporated habitability for extended worldwide deployments in big ships.
In the war games of the battleship era, the typical first-line dreadnought had a life of about twenty major-caliber hits; the pre-dreadnought had a life of twelve hits. The loss of firepower and maneuverability was treated as a nonlinear function of the number of hits—that is, a dreadnought suffering ten hits in U.S. war games would lose more than half its firepower and speed.
[…]
American fears centered on the Japanese advantage in line speed (twenty-three knots for the Japanese versus eighteen knots for U.S. forces), the possibility of surprise, and the lurking danger that the U.S. Fleet would be too crippled after eliminating the Japanese to fulfill its mission. (In war games, this was the relief of the Philippines.) The Japanese hoped that their submarines would inflict initial damage, their aircraft and Long Lance torpedoes would effect further damage, and that their Mogami-class light cruisers, retooled secretly with 8-inch guns, would significantly augment the battle line. There were, as we know now, catastrophic surprises to both sides after the war in the Pacific commenced.
[…]
In World War II defensive weapons assumed unprecedented prominence. By 1942 a flood of AAW weapons was being installed, with radar sensors, deadly proximity fuzes, and new, capable fire-control systems to lead and hit fast-moving targets. By 1944 attacking aircraft faced a veritable curtain of fire. In the last year of the war, modern surface combatants had redressed the balance of power they had lost to naval aircraft.
The ascendancy of the ship lasted a mere moment, for at the end of World War II it was eclipsed by the atomic bomb, and armor was not effective as a protection from nuclear blasts. Cover and deception and the urgency of a first strike took on overwhelming significance. Air interceptors, AAW missiles, and ASW weapons were more than ever temporizing weapons. The American posture was all the trickier because the U.S. Navy could never attack first, certainly not with nuclear weapons. How to buy enough time to deliver a massive strike ashore was the tactical question.
Judging from the enormous Soviet naval effort to counter U.S. carrier task forces, the Americans were eminently successful. But they paid a price: with nuclear war in mind, they built ships without much survivability against conventional munitions. They concentrated on long-range defensive weapons—air interceptors and missiles—and neglected the guns and the modern close-in “point” defenses that were analogous to the 20-and 40-mm guns of World War II. They also neglected the development of new soft-kill devices—short-range systems that could not reach out far enough against nuclear weapons.
The Royal Navy followed a similar bent and neglected damage control and point defense. It suffered the consequences when its ships fought to retake the Falklands with conventional weapons.
By contrast, Israeli warships prepared for the 1973 war by developing soft-kill defenses against Syrian and Egyptian weapons so successfully that they all survived unscathed.
[…]
For example, infantry small arms exceeded artillery in producing casualties after the range and lethality of artillery rose dramatically. Often the second-best weapon performs better because the enemy, at great cost in offensive effectiveness, takes extraordinary measures to survive the best weapon.
We saw this phenomenon in the Falklands War. The Argentine air force lost only eight, or about 10 percent, of its aircraft to the British ships’ most expensive AAW defense, their SAM missile batteries (Sea Darts). The Argentine pilots knew that if they hugged the water the SAMs would be ineffective, and the British ships shot down most of the attackers with short-range weapons. Nevertheless, the “ineffective” SAMs were vital to the defense because they constricted the Argentine pilots’ maneuvering room, helped make the British close-in defenses more effective, and forced the pilots to drop their bombs at so short a range that sometimes the ones that hit had had no time to arm.
[…]
Dupuy estimates that between the Napoleonic Wars and the 1973 Arab-Israeli War the average density of troops on the battlefield was diluted by a factor of two hundred.
[…]
When dispersion is an important means of defense, small ships and distributed firepower are an important advantage.
[…]
It was defensive fighting power that decided whether a force should mass or disperse. Today if fleets comprise large ships with strong defenses, commanders mass them and fight the enemy off. If they have small ships or weak defenses they must disperse.
[…]
Tacticians should always remember that the reason for building survivability into a vessel is to gain time for the offense. Critics who talk about surface ship vulnerability ignore this. The less knowledgeable assume that expensive ships should stand up in combat forever; the wiser contend that big ships are not worth the money, and that if someday there is an alternative that delivers superior net force—that is to say, delivers firepower over a ship’s combat lifetime—they will be correct.
[…]
Defensive systems collectively act like a filter (not a wall or a Maginot line) that extracts a certain number of incoming aircraft or missiles. As it is able, a hull absorbs hits and enables the warship to conduct curtailed offensive operations.
World War II AAW weapons destroyed some air attackers and distracted others with a curtain of fire. Modern hard-and soft-kill defenses do the same.
Up to a point, the defense takes out a high percentage of the attackers. When the attack is dense and well coordinated, an active AAW defense will become saturated at a certain point, beyond which most missiles or aircraft will get through.
[…]
Two other trends bear mentioning. One is the growth of a tactical no-man’s-land, a region where neither side can operate its main force and where pickets (aircraft, submarines, and small-surface missile craft) will fight fierce subordinate engagements to create weakness or gather information. The no-man’s-land exists because defense needs room. In conventional war, battle space translates into time to react against attack. In missile warfare it may be that no defense is adequate and that space is needed simply to stay out of reach or to make it too difficult for the enemy to target moving ships.
A smaller no-man’s-land has long existed. In the past, daylight surface actions that used guns did not occur at less than two thousand yards: action was fatal before the range closed to that point. Battle lines did not expect to fight at ten thousand yards, the zone where destroyers lurked. Carriers did not want to approach other warships closer than one hundred miles. A miscalculation or an adverse wind would put guns within range, and it would all be over in fifteen minutes. HMS Glorious discovered this, and many more of the U.S. jeep carriers off Samar might have been sunk at the Battle for Leyte Gulf had Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita not lost his nerve and retreated with his overwhelmingly superior Japanese surface fleet.
The second is the growing vulnerability of ships in port. Ports have traditionally been havens for navies superior and inferior. Although few harbors have ever been absolutely safe from attack, the strategy of the nation that has the weaker navy has been heavily influenced by the consideration that a fleet-in-being could be reasonably safeguarded in port. But this has changed; the security of ports has diminished. Pearl Harbor, of course, marked the transition, as did several other striking if less well-known events. On the night of 11 November 1940, for example, a handful of torpedo planes from HMS Illustrious surprised the heavily protected Italian fleet at the port of Taranto. They put three of six Italian battleships out of action for six months and one for the rest of the war, and the Italian fleet fled to Naples. 14 After Sherman’s carriers struck Rabaul in November 1943, the Japanese navy was so stunned that it soon withdrew to Truk. Not much later, in 1944, carrier strikes penetrated Truk, and the Japanese, unable to challenge the United States at sea and completely frustrated by the U.S. Navy’s ability to concentrate overwhelming air power against any island bastion, withdrew into the western Pacific. Today, almost half a century later, ships are often safer outside of home port than in.
On scouting:
The dominant trend in scouting has been the increasing rate of search and the increasing range of reconnaissance, surveillance, and intelligence-gathering systems.
[…]
Double the range of the enemy’s attack aircraft and you quadruple the area to be searched. A barrier search—a scouting line—can sometimes cover the perimeter of this expanded area. The bent-line screen invented late in World War II to detect submarines in front of a carrier is an example. Still, tactical commanders cannot often be satisfied with a scouting line. For one thing, it is usually pervious: submarines that can approach submerged and launch missiles are a threat that seemingly springs from anywhere at or inside a missile range. For another, searches cannot always be continuous. In World War II, when scouts or patrol planes in tactical support were launched by the Japanese and Americans at dawn after a night without reconnaissance, they were never sure how far out the enemy might be found.
[…]
Recall the scouting line thrown out in advance of the World War I Grand Fleet. Its placement was not governed by gunnery range, but by calculating the time it would take to relay a signal to Jellicoe by wireless, plus twenty minutes to allow for the shift from cruising formation to battle line before the enemy closed to weapon range.
As we have noted, in warfare space is equivalent to reaction time. Now that missiles can approach at twice the speed of sound or greater, reaction time is so compressed that the scouting line must account for both missile range and the time it takes to act against air, surface, or submarine launch platforms.
Some authorities illustrate this with three circles or pie slices. The smallest is the region of control: any enemy inside it must be destroyed. The next is the region of influence or competition, something like a no-man’s-land. The largest is the region of interest: friendly ships must be prepared to deal with an enemy inside it. Scouting seeks targeting data in the first region; tracking in the second; and detection in the third. So the effect of the increase in weapon system range and speed has not been simply to increase the area in which weapons may be delivered, but also to expand the size of the battlefield so that it includes the entire region of scouting and preliminary maneuver.
The vertical dimension of the battlefield also has been extended—deeper beneath the surface to the seabed and higher above it to space.
[…]
Space will be an additional plane of action, as different tactically from the air as the air is from the surface.
[…]
The first wartime role of aircraft, on land and at sea, was scouting. Aircraft were so successful in this that the antiscout—the pursuit plane—was invented. In World War I all other aircraft roles were inconsequential by comparison. The same sequence of events is certain to hold in space.
[…]
Like antiaircraft fire in World War I, earth-launched anti-satellite systems are not the best countermeasure. Neither are the current means of cover and deception. As a direct result of the fundamental importance of scouting, “pursuit” systems in space will be invented to destroy surveillance satellites. Space bombers will follow some day soon.
On command and control:
The great deadliness of modern surprise attack can be illustrated numerically. When guns answered guns, a two-to-three disadvantage could not easily be offset by surprise. For example, according to Bradley Fiske’s model of exchanged broadsides, to gain equality the inferior force (call it B) would have to fire for ten minutes unanswered by A. That is about 60 percent of the time it would take A to eliminate B if both sides exchanged fire. For B to obtain a two-to-one advantage over A before A started to return fire, B would have to fire unanswered for twenty minutes, the military equivalent of the Chesapeake being caught unprepared by the Leopard in 1807. Compare this with the model of carrier warfare in World War II. If B, with two carrier air wings, could surprise A, with three, B would sink two carriers at a blow and have instant superiority. Coordinated modern missiles have the potential of inflicting similar shock on a fleet. A surprise attack of the scale from which a fleet might recover in the age of big guns will be decisive in a modern naval war.