The development of Germany’s V-1 and V-2 and the US’s atom bomb led the Navy, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations explains, to develop missiles — first Regulus and then Polaris — that could deliver warheads at very long ranges with reasonable accuracy.:
The new missiles were called “strategic” weapons because, much like strategic bombers, their purpose was to destroy an enemy’s means of waging war.
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This led to a bitter rivalry between the newly created U.S. Air Force, which claimed the mission as its own, and a recalcitrant Navy, which saw difficulties with intercontinental bombing at the time and balked at the hidden costs of maintaining bombers at fixed bases far forward in host countries.
The Navy proposed delivering nuclear bombs from carrier-based aircraft, arguing that the mobility that ships offered would enable the bombers to fly shorter distances and would be less vulnerable than land-based airfields.
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In the 1950s, with remarkable energy and technological acumen, the Navy developed and deployed Polaris missiles—and long-range submarines to carry and fire them—arguing that the undersea craft constituted a more stable and survivable deterrent than bombers and land bases because they could not be pinpointed for attack.
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Some of the early Soviet missiles were cruise missiles, fitted with nuclear warheads and designed to be fired by Russian warships—submarines, surface ships, and long-range land-based aircraft.
Their targets were to be American surface ships, particularly aircraft carriers. Since detonating even one nuclear weapon in the vicinity of a ship was certain to destroy it, staying power derived from armor, compartmentation, damage-control techniques, and large displacement would have little value.
Using antiaircraft guns in an effort to shoot down an attacker would be useless if a nuclear weapon were designed to detonate when the warhead was hit.
The U.S. Navy developed surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) to destroy a bomber or missile far enough away for the ships to be able to survive. Indeed, Talos, Terrier, and Tartar SAMs—all defensive weapons—were the Navy’s first substantial venture into guided-missile technology.
The tight defensive formations of World War II no longer were appropriate; adjacent ships would be incapacitated by the massive explosion and poisonous radiation.
Designers initially intended that SAMs would cover several ships at the same time, employing the World War II tactic of defending your neighbor while defending yourself. SAMs were expensive, however, and any one ship could only carry so many. They had to be delivered accurately because commanders could not fill the sky with them by the hundreds the way 40-mm and 20-mm shells were expended in World War II. If anything, SAM distribution against incoming aircraft or missiles had to be coordinated so that commanders could rely on an efficient system of assigning targets to individual ships.
In time the formations were loosened even more and spread out in dispersed configurations. One such was a “haystack” disposition, developed so that enemy bombers could not easily locate the vital ship—the carrier—especially where commercial shipping resulted in the generation of many radar contacts. The fleet’s prime targets were supposed to disappear like needles in a haystack.
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The modern U.S. Navy is a victim of outmoded nuclear war thinking. To this day, most warships have little staying power. One or two hits with modern missiles such as an Exocet or Harpoon will put most warships out of action.
To survive an attack and continue to perform a task, a modern American warship depends heavily on reduced susceptibility—avoiding detection and carrying the kind of technology that will enable it to prevent incoming missiles from hitting at all.
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The Vietnam War contributed to loosening up American formations because warships were able to stand off at sea to deliver ordnance while they themselves were relatively safe from attacks.
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History’s most profuse application of cruise missiles has been against tankers and other commercial ships in the Persian Gulf. The attacks started in May of 1981 and continued for seven years, until mid-1988, ending a year after U.S. intervention that provided protective escorts for ship traffic.
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French arms sales equipped Iraq well to carry out air-launched Exocet missile attacks.
Seemingly, missiles had been used between 257 and 261 times, or in about 80 percent of all Iraqi attacks on commercial ships.
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Only a quarter of the ships hit were destroyed; large tankers proved to be the sturdiest and most resilient.
The so-called Tanker War constitutes by far the biggest campaign against shipping since World War II.
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Estimates show that by 1986 the tonnage damaged beyond economic repair already had reached some 20 percent of all Allied merchant ships sunk during World War II.
Navias and Hooton estimate that less than 1 percent of the 800 to 1,000 ships that entered the Gulf each month were hit—about the same overall total as the fraction of sailings lost in the Battle of the Atlantic, although not as bad as the worst of that period, when up to 20 percent of merchant traffic was lost. 4 Also reminiscent of the Battle of the Atlantic, there was a remorseless buildup of shipping losses in the Gulf until the United States responded to pressure from the neutral states there and started to convoy reflagged Kuwaiti tankers.
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Like torpedoes, tactical missiles were conceived and developed to attack warships.
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Broadly, the carrier battle groups of the U.S. fighting fleet could not offer direct protection for tankers sailing up the Persian Gulf; only individual convoy escorts could fend off attacks by the Iranian threat, which in this instance comprised land-based aircraft and a flotilla of assorted small coastal combatants. But the security of the escorts depended upon air cover, present or prospective, from the American carriers standing outside the Strait of Hormuz.
Safe transit through the Gulf waters also depended on mine-clearance operations, carried out largely by European countries, which had joined the effort by the mid-1980s.
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The axiom that “a ship’s a fool to fight a fort” is tempered by the caveat that in order to influence events on land, navies must either circumvent or destroy the enemy’s ability to send land-based aircraft and missiles over the coastal seas.
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In the first cruise-missile attack on a ship, during the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, an Egyptian salvo of four Soviet-made Styx missiles sank the Israeli picket-destroyer Eilat. In 1970 the Egyptians conducted what was in effect a live-target test of the ability of the Styx to home on targets smaller than a destroyer; they fired four missiles and sank an Israeli fishing boat, the Orit. In the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971, India successfully employed nine Styx missiles against Pakistani warships and merchant vessels, some of which were in port.
Next came the best wartime laboratory for study of missile combat—the Arab-Israeli War of 1973. The two sides exchanged 101 Styx and Gabriel missiles in five separate battles with devastating effects on the Syrian and Egyptian flotillas and no harm whatsoever to the Israelis.
After that came the South Atlantic War of 1982, in which Argentina achieved well-publicized results with air-launched Exocets and, for the first time in combat, with land-launched missiles as well. In the same war, but less well-known, Royal Navy helicopters launched Sea Skua air-to-surface missiles at two Argentine patrol boats, sinking one and severely damaging the other.
In February 1991, during the Persian Gulf War, two Silkworm antiship cruise missiles (ASCMs) were launched from a land site in Kuwait, aimed at the USS Missouri (BB 63), which was bombarding Iraqi positions with 16-inch shells. Although the Silkworms malfunctioned and did not inflict any damage, the incident is noteworthy as the first and only time in a war that a ship-fired surface-to-air missile has shot down an ASCM, the honor going to a Sea Dart fired by HMS Gloucester.
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Whether in terms of incidents, damage achieved, weapons fired at a target, or cost of ordnance expended, missiles and missile warfare dominate modern combat at sea.
Briefly, large, defenseless commercial ships showed very high hit-probabilities, but the damage by no means has been uniformly fatal. Hit-probabilities against warships that defended themselves were far lower, yet substantial and usually with devastating effect. Perhaps the most interesting and alarming statistic is the number of successful attacks on defendable ships, such as HMS Sheffield, that failed to protect themselves.
Disconcerting in its tactical implications is the case of the Atlantic Conveyer, hit and destroyed in the South Atlantic War. Two Exocets, launched by a pair of Argentine Super Étendard jet fighters, homed on HMS Ambuscade, one of the screen ships in the Royal Navy formation stationed east of the Falklands. The Ambuscade launched chaff, which distracted the ASCMs and saved her from harm. But once the Exocets had flown through the chaff cloud they searched for another target and found the SS Atlantic Conveyor, destroying the ship and the important cargo on board. By saving herself, Ambuscade failed in her mission to protect the other ships in the formation.
A further irony is that the Argentine pilots actually had hoped to hit the aircraft carrier HMS Hermes, which was also in the formation and had a flight-deck full of Harrier jets.
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If there is a new lesson from the South Atlantic War, it is not that warships are vulnerable to missiles, but that aircraft armed with bombs cannot compete against warships that are equipped with modern defenses.
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Large, protected ships such as battleships are valuable partly because they can take hits and continue fighting.
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Ships must have warning in order to deal successfully with missile attacks. In modern sea warfare the outcome between two forces armed with missiles will often be decided by scouting and screening effectiveness before any missiles actually are launched.
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In World War II it took a lot more punishment to sink a warship than to incapacitate it. Comparing tables 7-1 and 7-2, the average was five times as many 1,000-pound bombs and two or three times as many torpedoes.
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Beall’s conclusion is that vulnerability is proportional to the cube root of displacement. Since displacement is roughly proportional to the three dimensions of length, beam, and draft, the cube root reduces the measurement to one dimension. The Brookings study concluded that a hit by one large warhead would incapacitate a modern warship up to 300 feet long, and another similar warhead is required for every additional 100 feet. By that measure, the Proceedings article concluded that to kill (not sink) an aircraft carrier would require seven missile hits, three missile hits would kill an Aegis cruiser, one or two were required for a frigate, and one would be enough for a patrol craft.
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The results are disconcerting to the tactician because all of them show the flatness of the kill curve. In fact, the BuShips data indicate that only a few more hits were required to sink a battleship or carrier than to sink a heavy cruiser. Can modern designs be effective against cruise or theater ballistic missiles to keep a modern combatant in action? The classified 1990 study by NSWC Carderock asserted that a great deal can be done; moreover, the toughening will come at only a modest increase in cost. Whether this is so, the Navy’s current inventory is mainly in large warships that are potent offensively but depend almost entirely for survival on reducing susceptibility by a layered defense of combat air patrols, SAMs, and hard-kill and soft-kill point defenses. Even more important, American warships depend for survival on out-scouting the enemy and attacking him not only effectively, but decisively first. These are tactics suitable for a fleet in the open ocean. The tactics will lose their efficacy in littoral waters.
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Since a large ship enjoys economies of scale, it will carry more fuel, ordnance, aircraft, or Marines than several smaller ships of the same total cost. The analytical conclusion is, therefore, “bigger is better.” The important disadvantage of a large, supposedly efficient ship is the hazard of putting many eggs in one basket. Indeed, the Beall, Humphrey, Schulte, and BuShips studies all reflect a diseconomy of scale. If a 60,000-ton ship carries twenty times the payload of a three-thousand-ton ship but can only take three or four times as many missile or torpedo hits as a small one before it is out of action, then that is a substantial disadvantage offsetting its greater payload.
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Coastal navies use land installations to scout and attack from as safer, cheaper, and more resilient than large warships. Their fighting ships are small and heavily armed. They depend for success on stealthy attack and surprise by out-scouting the enemy. Their ships are short-legged with austere habitability, because they can sortie to perform brief, stressful tasks.
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Borrensen puts the operational aim of a competent coastal defense in full strategic context: a coastal state will not attempt to defeat the navy of a maritime state, but instead will endeavor to inflict sufficient pain on that navy in an extended campaign so that the enemy will not think the game worth the candle.
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Joergensen offers a pointed warning that the U.S. Navy is not sufficiently configured or practiced to defeat a coastal power without severe losses. The implication of both articles is that it will not take a high-technology coastal defense to inflict pain and suffering on a high-technology, blue-water navy.
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The U.S. Navy’s principal responsibility is to safeguard the oceans almost anywhere, though not everywhere at once. The other side of the coin is to deny movement of enemy shipping and the means of war—an easier mission that usually comes with the territory when the first mission is achieved.
Weakness that comes from disregarding these two missions invites another country to build up a blue-water fleet to move into the power vacuum.
