Isegoria

The evolution of firepower warrants deep reflection, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations explains:

The development of the torpedo at the beginning of the twentieth century enabled an inferior force to defeat a superior one because the new weapons delivered a highly effective pulse of firepower that could be delivered from many small torpedo boats or from an undetected submarine. The effect of this on tactics in World War I was astonishing.

In World War II, aircraft became the means of delivering fatal “salvoes” because an air wing could reach out 200 nautical miles or more, and the effect on tactics was even more stunning.

In the modern missile age, this salvo threat has achieved new status. When the “pulsed power” is a missile salvo, a weaker side that is outnumbered by as much as two to one can win—if it employs better scouting and command-and-control that enable it to “attack effectively first.”

Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations looks at modern tactics and operations:

If Trident submarines could be targeted, they would go down with many warheads—more than the number of nuclear weapons that would be expended to sink them. These huge submarines seem to have been designed on a cost-effective basis—that is, economies of scale drove the concentration of twenty-four missiles in each vessel, each missile armed with eight multiple independently targeted reentry vehicle warheads (MIRVs), without regard for the possibility that the submarines might be detectable someday. Had the designers factored even the remote possibility that these boats might be tracked at sea or else attacked in port or at dispersed harbors they would have distributed Trident missiles on more submarines, even though that would have been less expedient.

The most striking illustration of the concentration of warheads in the modern nuclear arsenal was the MX missile, which carried about ten. A natural but unforeseen consequence of the first strategic arms limitation treaty, or SALT I, which counted missile launchers rather than warheads, is that the land-based MX system was considered destabilizing because it offered the enemy an opportunity to destroy many warheads with one in a first strike.

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The most recent ASCM attacks from warships or aircraft were in the Falklands War in 1982 and in the extended Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. This should be no reason for complacency. First, new missiles have become hotter and harder to defend against. Second, although there have been no recent sea-launched missile attacks on ships, there have been a great many attacks from the sea, using land-attack missiles. On land it is much harder to assess the number of hits achieved, the effects on the different conflicts, or the recovery time needed to restore an airfield, replace a missile launch site, or reopen a factory. Partly as a result of land-attack missiles from the sea, both states and insurgents have increased the numbers and ranges of missiles to counter them. Third, attacking ships by missiles is less costly than defending against them with hard-kill systems, especially with surface-to-air defensive missiles. Fourth, saturation attacks, in which many missiles arrive on a target simultaneously, have not yet occurred, but such tactics seem likely to be used in the future.

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It is a reminder that the decision to mass or disperse depends on defensive considerations, not offensive ones, and it has done so since World War II, when aircraft carrier battle tactics were developed. In cases when defenses are likely to be stronger when the ships are concentrated, the fleet should be massed the way the U.S. carrier fleets were concentrated in 1944. If defenses are weak, however, as they were against attack from the air in 1942, then a dispersed force is more effective and the need to out-scout the enemy and attack effectively first will be more urgent.

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The principle abides: a fleet that cannot reliably attack first must mass for effective defense. If its defense cannot be made effective, then it must fight dispersed and win by out-scouting the enemy so as to avoid all attacks.

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There is no compelling rationale for sending large, expensive, and highly capable warships into contested coastal waters unless they are able to take several hits and continue fighting without missing a beat. It is better to fight fire with fire, using expendable, missile-carrying aircraft or small surface craft. In fact, ever since the introduction of numerous torpedo boats, coastal submarines, and minefields early in this century, contested coastal waters have been taboo for capital ships, and have become the almost exclusive province of flotillas of small, swift, lethal fast-attack craft.

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A warcraft with great offensive firepower and little means of defense is extremely vulnerable and creates a highly unstable tactical situation. To perform effectively, it depends on a first strike, a stealthy attack, or a better combination of scouting and weapon ranges. A warcraft with such a mix of attributes is an anomaly. Why is such a “mistake” built? Ostensibly, because designers believe that in cases when the measure of effectiveness is simple firepower, ? or ?, it is cost-effective to put many good shots in each craft. But that ignores the force-on-force nature of battle. A better measure of effectiveness is how much deliverable firepower it can muster over its combat life, which is a combination of offensive firepower and counterforce.

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A major consequence of massing for defense is the guarantee that the enemy will be aware of the fleet and its general location. In such cases, electronic-warfare tactics should be designed not to mask the presence of the fleet, which is impossible, but to complicate the enemy’s efforts to track and target the key units that constitute its striking power.

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Some countries will use fishing boats and small vessels that resemble innocent coastal traffic to detect and report enemy presence.

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In cluttered, confined waters the normal advantage of longer-range weapons aided by targeting with satellites and over-the-horizon radar is muted or lost. The cost of individual missiles is also more important in coastal combat because more warships and UAVs likely will be engaged, and running out of ordnance is an important consideration.

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Remotely controlled surface vessels can remain on-station for long periods of time and carry relatively large payloads—both valuable for deterrence. The growing potential for autonomous undersea surveillance and for attack in shallow or confined seas will increase the threat to high-value nuclear submarines and other capital assets, making less expensive manned and unmanned nonnuclear submersibles all the more useful in waters such as the Yellow, Arabian, and Baltic Seas.

The fact that precise homing enables tacticians to equip smaller platforms with offensive capability has led to two recent advancements in missile warfare. One is a system called Club K, developed by the Russian armed forces, in which box launchers are carried on trucks, where they can be at least partially concealed, and can be dispersed widely. The vehicle mobility gives an attacker both maneuverability and survivability at low cost. The mobile launchers also can be used to replace or expand offensive power at sea quickly in cases where larger warships are damaged and cannot be repaired immediately; the launchers can be installed on a wide variety of vessels of varying sizes.

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A disadvantage of the concept is its very invisibility. Influence requires that in edge-of-war scenarios and crises, the deterring force must present the threatening enemy with a visible threat—a task that usually requires the presence of clearly identifiable warships.

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Cares’ analysis is both startling and compelling, showing how, by forcing the enemy to spread his attention among many separate units, a force of ships carrying unmanned attackers and defenders can defeat similar numbers of enemy ships. Cares demonstrates mathematically that because of the power of a numerical advantage, adding only one unmanned surface vehicle in each LCS dramatically increases combat effectiveness.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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When dispersion is an important means of defense, small ships and distributed firepower are an important advantage.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Space will be an additional plane of action, as different tactically from the air as the air is from the surface.

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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.

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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.

U.S. Central Command has confirmed that the airstrikes on Iran involved the first combat use of the Low-cost Unmanned Combat Attack System, or LUCAS drone:

The LUCAS platform is a one-way attack drone reverse-engineered after the Iranian Shahed-136.

Built by the Arizona-based SpektreWorks, the drone, which can be launched via catapults, rocket-assisted takeoff and mobile ground systems, is a spinoff of the company’s FLM 136 target model, one designed for counter-drone training while simulating Iran’s Shahed variant.

The FLM 136 model carries a range capability of around 500 miles, with a maximum payload of 40 pounds, or “roughly twice the explosive yield of a hellfire missile,” according to Alex Hollings, host of Sandboxx News’ FirePower.

With a maximum takeoff weight of 180 pounds, the FLM 136 is significantly lighter than the Iranian Shahed. The platforms are also immensely more cost-effective — and scalable — compared to the more advanced munitions in the U.S. arsenal, carrying a price tag of around $35,000 per unit.

Few militaries have tested the limits of armored warfare in dense urban terrain as extensively as the Israel Defense Forces:

After-action reports from the IDF’s Ground Forces Command noted that armored units reduced infantry fatalities by more than 60% compared with operations where tanks were absent or delayed.

The tank’s ability to deliver precise 120 mm fire, thermal imaging, and heavy armor proved decisive in breaking fortified positions.

However, the 2006 Lebanon War exposed vulnerabilities.

Hezbollah’s use of advanced anti?tank missiles such as the Kornet?E inflicted significant damage, prompting the IDF to accelerate the development of the Trophy Active Protection System, which became operational in 2011.

Since its introduction, Trophy has intercepted more than 90% of incoming anti?tank threats in Gaza and Lebanon, according to Israeli defense manufacturer Rafael. This transformed the tank from a liability back into a survivable, mobile fire base.

In the 2014 Gaza War and the 2023–2024 operations in Gaza, tanks again proved essential.

IDF commanders reported that armored brigades enabled rapid breakthroughs in neighborhoods like Shuja’iyya and Jabalia while providing medical evacuation corridors and suppressive fire.

In The Soldier’s Load and the Mobilty of a Nation, then-Colonel S.L.A. Marshall examines the soldiers’ fire load:

Outdoing Schamhorst, von Moltke in his time decided that 200 rounds of ammunition was a more fitting load for the sturdy Prussian. That became the standard requirement for modem armies. Both sides used it during the Russo-Japanese War, and most armies likewise used it in World War I. So far as may now be learned, no one of any importance saw fit to question whether that figure of 200 rounds had any justification, either in tactics or logistics. In the American Army in France of 1917–18, our commanders usually adhered to the practice of requiring troops to carry a full ammunition load during the approach march, even in moving into a “quiet” sector. And in bot weather the results were brutal. We can write off the general policy with the simple statement that troops usually had to carry ten times as many cartridges as there was any likelihood they would use.

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But we deviated from it, not primarily to lighten the soldier’s load but to make room for other types of ammunition.

For example, during the last two years of operations in the Pacific, the rifleman put across a beach generally carried eighty rounds for his MI or carbine. This special dispensation was simply granted him that he might the better carry eight hand grenades, or in some cases five. It was presumed that in the close-in fighting he was likely to meet, five to eight grenades would give him a wider margin of safety than double the amount of his rifle ammunition.

In the event, such calculations were found to have little practical relation to what took place along the line of fire. When you examined company operations in atoll fighting in detail, it was evident that the soldier who used grenades at all was almost as rare as the man who fired as many as eighty rounds from his rifle in any one day of action. Which is to say that the load of grenades the line was required to carry did not promote either increased safety or greater fire power. Eight grenades are a particularly cumbersome burden. They weigh 10.48 pounds. Had the grenade load of each man been cut by three-quarters (giving him two grenades) it is a reasonable assumption that the over-all and expedient tactical use of that weapon would not have been reduced, and the force so lightened would not have been made more vulnerable.

With all hands carrying eight grenades, the number of men making any use of that weapon at all was consistently less than six per cent of the total in any general action. Research showed further that the grenade was rarely put to any practical use in the initial stage of an amphibious attack. This was also true in Europe.

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This same argument would eliminate altogether any further issuing of the bayonet. That weapon ceased to have any major tactical value at about the time the inaccurate and short-range musket was displaced by the rifle. But we have stubbornly clung to it-partly because of tradition which makes it inevitable that all military habits die a slow death, but chieffy because of the superstition that the bayonet makes troops fierce and audacious, and therefore more likely to close with the enemy.

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In the Pacific fighting of World War II, more men were run through by swords than by bayonets.

In our European fighting there is only one bayonet charge of record. That was the attack by the 3d Battalion, 502d Parachute Infantry, at the Pommerague Farm during the advance on Carentan, France, in June 1944. In that attack three of the enemy were actually killed by American bayonets. It is a small irony, however, that these killings took place about six minutes after the main charge had subsided. And it is a somewhat larger irony that the one junior officer who actually closed with the bayonet and thrust his weapon home was subsequently relieved because he was not sufficiently bold in leading his troops.