A U.S. commander ‘sinks’ the George Washington
December 8th, 2009 | Ballistic missile defense Carriers ordnance Science and technology The Pacific | Posted by Phil Ewing
The crew of the carrier George Washington has only six more years to enjoy Japan and lovely Mt. Fuji, according to an alternate-future-history piece in which the flattop is sunk by the Chinese // Navy
Naval egg-heads inside the Beltway and anyplace else people know the term “pacing threat” have been noodling over an alternate-future-history piece in the recent edition of the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s magazine Orbis, in which a Navy scholar describes how the Chinese “sunk” the carrier George Washington.
The piece, “How The United States Lost the Naval War of 2015,” by Naval War College professor Cmdr. James Kraska, is not uplifting. In it, the Chinese sink the GW with one of their super death-ray re-targetable carrier-killing ballistic missiles; deny it; score a propaganda victory after rescuing some survivors; and use the whole thing to consolidate their status as the new rulers of the world Pacific. The impotent Navy does nothing, and suddenly it, the U.S. and the world realize that America’s power has evaporated.
Another new LCS mission — BMD picket?
November 17th, 2009 | Ballistic missile defense Blogs Foreign navies Science and technology Ships The Middle East | Posted by Phil Ewing
An international export version of Lockheed's littoral combat ship fired an imaginary missile in this artist's conception. The company is now saying it can augment its Aegis-edition LCSes with ballistic missile defense capability // Lockheed Martin
As Galrahn and Phib discuss the latest news about the littoral combat ship Freedom’s upcoming deployment, one of our senior shipmates at Defense News has some other interesting LCS gouge: This week at the Dubai Air Show, Lockheed Martin is pitching a “Surface Combat Ship” to the navies of the Gulf states — a variant of its Freedom-class LCS modded with Aegis radar and ballistic missile defense capability.
LockMart and its LCS rival, General Dynamics, both have shown off concepts for Aegis-equipped export versions of their designs, but neither of the trade-show fliers just pulled from Scoop Deck’s desk drawer say anything about BMD. They do include the possibility of a Mk 41 Vertical Launch System — which the U.S. Navy’s version doesn’t have — that could carry a battery of SM-3 or SM-6 interceptors. Or, as Defense News’s Pierre Tran wrote, an Aegis BMD LCS could be the eyes for land-based missiles:
Given fears in the region of a possible missile attack from Iran, a deployment of the Surface Combat Ship in the narrow waters of the Gulf would provide early warning of a missile launch and allow early destruction in the upper atmosphere by the SM-3 missile or at lower altitude by the Patriot PAC3 or other weapon.
No word on the price tag for this souped-up “SCS,” but given the cost issues the first two LCSes have had, it could be steep. It could also have implications for the U.S. Navy’s pending mission as the BMD protector of Europe, for which commanders could want as many hulls as possible, maybe including cruisers, destroyers and BMD-LCSes.
Port visit links
November 13th, 2009 | Ballistic missile defense Carriers Maritime operations Royal Navy Science and technology Ships Submarines | Posted by Phil Ewing
Sailors aboard the carrier Nimitz mustered to get ready to man the rails for a port visit in Japan, much as today's links are mustering to provide you with news and updates // MCSA Robert Winn / Navy
Restricted maneuvering doctrine settin’, ATM cash-withdrawin’, rail mannin’ links, eager to tie up, race down the brow and get into the bars town as quickly as possible:
- After a triumphant visit and commissioning in its namesake city, the amphibious transport dock New York, like so many other newcomers to the Big Apple, is taking refuge in New Jersey.
- The Royal Navy’s newest attack submarine, the Astute, is on its way to the Royal Navy’s famed submarine base in Faslane, Scotland.
- The littoral combat ship Freedom is making a visit to Naval Station Mayport, Fla., the local newspaper reported, nervously pointing out that LCS will “replace” the frigates homeported there.
- Have you heard about this amazing discovery of these World War II Japanese submarines off Hawaii?
- The Missile Defense Agency has announced the next six ships that will be upgraded with ballistic missile defense capability, and, as expected, they’re all East Coast destroyers.
- Remember that movie in which the decommissioned carrier John F. Kennedy inexplicably crushes the White House in a tidal wave? It comes out today.
The maritime strategy enters the terrible twos
October 20th, 2009 | Ballistic missile defense Coast Guard Foreign navies leadership Maritime operations The greenside Washington | Posted by Phil Ewing
The carrier George Washington trained with Korean warships in the Pacific last week. International cooperation was a key plank of the maritime strategy unveiled two years ago this week // MC3 Jeffrey Stewart/ Navy
The famed brown-shoe blogger SteeljawScribe — or as they’d say in Pittsburgh, “Stuhljawr-Scrub” — has reminded the Internet this week that we’ve reached the second anniversary of the unveiling of the maritime strategy (pdf), the document that was supposed to pave a clear road forward for the U.S. naval services and Coast Guard.
Asks Steeljaw: Did it? Answers Steeljaw: Kinda.
As a guidance document the strategy was useful, he writes, but it was incomplete because it contained no specifics for how many and what kinds of ships the U.S. would need to execute it. Those details were supposed to come in the “Naval Operations Concept,” the force structure document for which the world still waits. (Although incomplete initial versions have bubbled to the surface.)
The NOC, writes Steeljaw:
is increasingly important as planners inside and out of the naval services wrestle with new concepts and capabilities, the most recent example being the significant shift in BMD emphasis in the European theater … This redirection and the attendant gossamer-light expositions of how we will employ sea-based BMD in the maritime strategy has led to a fair degree of mis-information and erroneous assumptions as to general operational capabilities, requirements, and necessary force structure. More detailed explanation, as would be found in a NOC, would go a long ways to alleviate this condition.
On the anniversary of the MarStrat, it’s worth asking: How valuable has it proved for the Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard?
LCAC assault links
September 30th, 2009 | Ballistic missile defense Blogs Carriers Foreign navies Pirates Science and technology Ships | Posted by Phil Ewing
Just as this Landing Craft, Air Cushion, dashed across the waters off Queensland, Australia with a load of gear, so too are today's links coming straight toward you // MC2 Gabriel Weber/ Navy
Air cushion inflatin’, M1A1 Abrams main battle tank loadin’, stern ramp lowerin’, high speed wave-skimmin’ links, flying straight off the water and onto the beach to bring you these updates from across the Web:
- Break out the small arms, warm up the LRAD and tell BM1 to lower the small boat: It’s pirate season.
- The Navy’s newest model command center is as cool as both the Death Star and the starship Enterprise, according to this story.
- Some nice young men from the ballistic-missile submarine Nebraska paid a nice visit to veterans in Omaha on Monday. It won’t be long before ships like the Nebraska can send some nice young women on these sorts of trips, too.
- India may not be having much luck in actually getting its hands on the carrier it’s buying from the Russians, but Indian navy fighters did get to demonstrate some cats and traps — so to speak — on Russia’s existing carrier.
- Mike Burleson is talking about an idea that will make some readers nostalgic and others nauseated: reviving the Arsenal Ship, which he says would be the best way for the Navy to take on its new ballistic missile defense mission protecting Europe.
Gordon Brown’s SSBN situation
September 25th, 2009 | Ballistic missile defense leadership Royal Navy Submarines The Middle East | Posted by Phil Ewing
Arguments are taking place around the world over whether Britain should mothball one of its four Vanguard-class ballistic missile subs // Royal Navy
U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s support for eliminating one of the Royal Navy’s four Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarines isn’t just a British issue anymore — there are reports about it from all around the world, including here in the States. The latest one to catch our attention was this editorial in the Wall Street Journal faulting Brown and his government for scaling back Great Britain’s nuclear deterrent:
[I]t’s no accident that Britain’s nuclear era coincides with her longest period of relative peace in history. Deterrence works, though its effects can only be inferred by crises evaded and battles not fought … All this, while Iran has just upgraded Britain to Most Evil Nation status. It’s an unpleasant reality and something Mr. Brown ought to think carefully about, lest he be accused of being Barack Obama’s poodle.
And that editorial was written before the world learned Friday that Iran has a second nuclear processing facility.
Here’s another thing to think about — what does Brown’s decision mean for the SSBN(X) program?
The U.S. and Royal Navies have said they want to share a common missile compartment for their next generation of ballistic-missile submarines. Will mothballing one Vanguard mean that work has to speed up? Or could it place Britain on the road to eliminating its deterrent mission altogether — as much of the population wants — and mean the U.S. will end up shouldering the whole load for SSBN(X)?
Doubts about the Navy’s Euro-BMD mission
September 21st, 2009 | Ballistic missile defense Navy Science and technology Washington | Posted by Phil Ewing
Commentators online wonder if the Navy's Aegis warships, like the destroyer Decatur, are up to the task of protecting Europe from ballistic missiles // MC3 Kathleen Gorby/ Navy
There are still many questions to be answered about the Navy’s new mission of providing two or three Aegis warships to protect Europe against missile attacks by 2011. And in the few days it has taken to process President Obama’s announcement that he was changing the U.S. missile defense plans, people have started asking them.
Information Dissemination’s Bryan McGrath wonders if the Navy shouldn’t consider forward deploying the BMD cruisers and destroyers somewhere in the Mediterranean or the Black Sea, an idea that could create a whole new Navy outpost abroad, as in Japan.
Hot Air’s Dafydd ab Hugh rejects the principle that Aegis BMD is a “new” answer for ballistic missile defense, because it’s been around for years, along with the notion of using it instead of developing new land-based missiles: “It’s like saying we must kill development of the Joint Strike Fighter because intelligence reveals that the most imminent enemy air threat can be countered by deploying our existing F/A-18 Hornets… and by golly, we can’t do both,” he wrote.
And this comment at Floppin’ Aces has the most detailed objections yet on the Web to relying on the Navy to protect Europe. Here are some of the highlights:
♦Positioning ships and maintaining them on station indefinitely is problematic.
♦If Turkey is pressured into denying access to the Black Sea to our ships, what then?
♦Aegis is a very expensive system that involves more than 600 different contracting entities by itself. Ships are maintenance intensive, spending months in dry docks or at pier side, and require more personnel to operate than land systems. The rotation of crews for training and rest is another factor to be considered. At the very least, the USN will need to increase the size of its current fleet of Aegis equipped vessels and add the corresponding personnel to complement them. The process will take a great deal of money and a long, long time.
♦The financial cost of relying on a single system like Aegis will be staggering but the costs should that single system fail, could be incalculable.
What do you think — can the Navy pull it off?
From ‘greyhounds of the sea’ to surface boomers?
September 18th, 2009 | Ballistic missile defense Life at Sea Morale Science and technology Ships Washington | Posted by Phil Ewing
The destroyer The Sullivans, one of three East Coast warships scheduled for the Aegis BMD upgrade, could be tasked with a BMD cruise in European waters // MC2 Daniel Barker/ Navy
The Navy’s cruisers and destroyers got a new mission this week after President Obama’s announcement about his changes to U.S. ballistic missile defense goals. Designed as multi-mission combatants with enough firepower to level a city or bring down an air force — at the same time — two or three of the Navy’s Aegis warships instead will serve as BMD barges, loaded up with SM-3 missiles and ordered to patrol the North Sea and the Mediterranean. Starting in 2011, two or three must be on station protecting Europe at any given time.
Marine Gen. James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described his vision Thursday for why the Navy should get the assignment:
A single Aegis can carry a hundred-plus or minus a few, depending on their mission configuration, of the SM-3. So this is a substantial addressal of the proliferation of the threat that we’re seeing emerge.
It would also be a substantial change for an Aegis warship’s load-out, which usually is a smorgasbord of SM-2, SM-3, Evolved Sea Sparow, anti-submarine and Tomahawk missiles. And it would be an even more substantial change for the ship’s crew, which would have a deployment more like a ballistic missile sub than a surface ship. Instead of swashbuckling high-seas adventure and visits to exotic ports, the ships will steam a box.
Or will they? Navy officials on Thursday had no details for what the new Aegis in Europe commitment will look like. Maybe a BMD cruise in the Med would be nothing but luxury — a sunshine circuit of Rivera, Italian and Greek port visits.
What do you think? You’ve got to have at least three cruisers or destroyers sailing around Europe at any one time. How would you set up the deployments?
Wayne E. Meyer: Sailor, innovator, “Dragnet” fan
September 2nd, 2009 | Ballistic missile defense Historical Science and technology Ships Washington | Posted by Phil Ewing
The destroyer Hopper used its Aegis system to track a test ballistic missile and destroy it with an SM-3 missile July 30 in the Pacific Ocean. // Navy
Scoop Deck visited a destroyer not too long ago in the company of a surface warfare officer who’s been serving in the Pentagon for awhile, and who was rejuvenated, she proclaimed, by recharging her batteries from what she called “the power of Aegis.”
The man who was instrumental in the creation of that power, retired Rear Adm. Wayne E. Meyer, the “father of Aegis,” died this week in Washington, and he has already been the subject of encomiums online and elsewhere. The crew of the destroyer that bears his name even Tweeted their condolences.
Given the occasion, Scoop Deck began paging through Naval Sea Systems Command’s official history about the development of Aegis, and discovered some little-known details about then-Capt. Meyer and the early days of the modern naval era.
Missile hits missile. Again.
July 31st, 2009 | Ballistic missile defense ordnance Science and technology Ships | Posted by Andrew Scutro
//U.S. Navy
A few days ago we posted about an upcoming ballistic missile intercept test from the destroyer Hopper in the Pacific. According to the Missile Defense Agency it was a success, recorded on video. It was the 19th successful test of the seagoing Aegis-BMD system out of 23 attempts. Details.
Hitting a ballistic missile with another missile is often compared to hitting a flying bullet with another. There are plenty of short videos out there of gun range trick shots, especially with shotguns and clay pigeons. But this unique short shows a guy who hit a ping-pong ball with an arrow. Judging from the perforated backstop, this was not a lucky first shot.