Originally Posted by
Tourist
It is arrogant and naïve
You seem to wear your reputation for aggressive and insulting posts with pride and appear to treat your frequent banning as a badge of honour.
Others take a different view.
Originally Posted by
Tourist
If it were easy to sink warships with 1000lb bombs, then we would go back to building armoured warships impenetrable to 1000lb bombs.
Designers are not stupid.
They have decided that the chances of somebody managing to get close enough to hit you with a bomb are small enough to make armour unnecessary.
The statement I responded to, in a nice factual way, was your comment about bombs vs tough warships. I limited my response to actual weapon effects whilst acknowledging that getting to the point of delivery was the tricky bit. You have now shifted the argument to include CIWS and other counter-air techniques not really germane to the era of dumb bombing; but I will endeavour to educate you a little on these points too as I fear there are many in the RN, Army and RAF that are little too comfortable about this risks posed by attacking aircraft. Indeed, it is reminiscent of the attitude of the RN before the Falklands campaign.
Regarding the utility of armouring warships as a method to defeat the threat was pretty much parked decades ago. The USS Arizona was not exactly short of armour when commissioned but it had quite a bit of additional armour added to respond to the growth in power of naval guns. With no dedicated AP bombs and no means of increasing the impact angle the Japanese dropped a converted AP shell from an aircraft to cut through all the layers of armour, to destroy a magazine and the ship. Even a UK 1000lb bomb has much greater ability to penetrate and fuse correctly than the method the Japanese used.
Post WWII warships have little physical protection against any anti-ship weapon. Perhaps the slowest and broadest weapon I have analysed on striking a warship was an instrumented Tomahawk with no warhead. It had no difficult penetrating the midships and exiting on the other side. Quite simply, adding enough armour to a warship so that it can withstand direct hits from typical attack weapons is just not feasible - designers would be stupid to try.
Warship designs moved away from armour and shifted focus to defeating the aircraft, or the inbound weapon. By the 60's the RAF had decided that only a shift to stand-off weapons (eg Martel) would meet the threat posed by warships. By the 70's most aircraft with an anti-ship role were developing sea-skimming missiles of various speeds, sizes and capabilities. By the time of the Falklands campaign the RAF was on its 3rd generation of anti-ship missile in the shape of Sea Eagle.
Somehow the proliferation of anti-ship missiles caught the RN off-guard, even though it also possessed its own range of anti-ship missiles. Worringly, fleet air defence exercises frequently dictated the attack profiles that the opposing force had to use.
It was not uncommon for Buccaneer formations to be tasked to use simulated dumb bomb profiles rather than their preferred weapons. Even post-Falklands I have conducted an attack with 4 aircraft lofting full sticks of airburst 1000lbs, followed by a further 4-ship delivering direct attacks. Somehow the RN would treat a simulated downing of 1 x loft aircraft and 3 x laydown aircraft as a success. At times they were utterly ambivalent that the first 3 aircraft had delivered 24 x 1000lb airburst weapons on them before the next formation had arrived.
Returning to the Falklands and the RN's hope that attacking aircraft would follow their canned exercises - well the RN got lucky. Whilst the opposing force had a limited stand-off capability, which had to be respected, the majority of the opposing air only possessed a rather rustic dumb-bomb capability, with very few of the bells and whistles used by others. Indeed, the attacks profiles were from a different era - very low-level visually aimed direct attacks with impact fused weapons. A shockingly high number of RN warships were hit and if was not for the poor understanding of the rather rustic bomb fuses used it would have been a slaughter. For a navy that had a NATO-declared amphibious capability the shortfalls were suddenly obvious to all. Being hit by a bomb dropped by a converted C-130 just rubbed salt into the wounds.
So skipping to the modern era, with systems such as CIWS and missiles capable of intercepting inbound anti-ship weapons, have the RN remembered the real lessons of the past? Do we still face the same arrogance and indifference to airpower?
Imagine my surprise when the tasking from the RN still dictates the attack profile to be used on the next exercise. But things have moved on and we are told to conduct multi-axis attacks against a Type-23. They want pop-up attacks with simulated subsonic anti-ship missiles (Hawk T1s), stand-off jamming with fast air closing to visual range for further CIWS and visual AA gunning practise. The fast air is duly slaughtered and the arrogant debrief follows.
In the FJ world it is common to cloak yourself in the capabilities of the opposing weapon systems. We imagine a 'bubble' around us that varies in range, altitude and aspects of the respective adversary. We try to keep the opposing system, aircraft or missile out of this bubble whilst we endeavour to bring our own weapons to bear.
So in answer to your question as to how I tackle CIWS or the missiles carried on the Type-23 (and keeping answers unclassified / wiki based) is that I do not let the capabilities of these systems overlap with my aircraft. How far and how high can a Sea Wolf go? How far can a CIWS fire; how many bursts does it get before a lengthy reload; up to what elevation can the gun, radar and tracking systems elevate to? Do I need to ever place my own aircraft at risk?
A lengthy post that deliberately circles back to the beginning. I have no doubt the RN's appreciation for airpower ensures that they are ready for the Argies now, but as for the ancient 1000lb GP bomb, with a cheap LGB kit that has changed little since the 70s, delivered from high-level on a near vertical profile…