The latest issue of the Journal of Military History (July 2020) features an article by James FitzSimonds, a retired naval captain and current professor at the US Naval War College, by the title “Aircraft Carriers versus Battleships in War and Myth.” FitzSimonds’ view is highly revisionist: that battleships were actually at least as useful as carriers in the Second World War, in fighting other ships, and that the US, Japanese, and Royal Navies just didn’t realize that. I had thought that battleship revisionism had died a few years back, and my preliminary review of the paper finds it highly problematic. I may write a retort, if the JMH will have JMH’s griping. For now, this renewed enthusiasm for guns-on-ships has me thinking about whether and how military technologies can endure, just linger, and even make comebacks in the modern world. So, with this essay, I will start a three-part case discussion—with aspects at sea, in the air, and on land—of powder cannons in modern warfare.
Conveniently, the latest issue of Proceedings of the US Naval Institute (also July 2020) similarly carries an intriguing article—“Concentrate the Zumwalts”—by retired sailor Ryan Belscamper. I have far fewer problems with his work, even if it is admittedly more speculative. Questioning the US Navy’s rinse-repeat cycle of Far-Eastern deployments, he offers four recommendations for the class of three ships (the title is just one of those). The Zumwalts' initial promise of a transformational suite of technologies, similar to that of the Dreadnought-class battleships of the Royal Navy a century prior, seems not to have been completely fulfilled. Belscamper would like to recover some of what was once on offer.
First, Belscamper recommends reclassifying these “destroyers” officially as heavy cruisers, a type the US Navy has not kept in its fleet since the 1960s. Redesignating these 14,000-ton Überzerstörer would mostly be a marketing point for the crews, but the value of that is often under-appreciated. Second, he recommends grouping the three Zumwalts together in a single squadron in San Diego (even if he does not explain why not at Pearl Harbor), so that they can practice operating as an independent task force. Third, he wants to focus on their role as ship-killers, something that US surface forces had, until recently, under-emphasized. Belscamper does acknowledge that this effort has been ongoing for two years (see David Larter’s article in Defense News of 15 February 2018),
but in the interest of creating the proper ethos and driving home mission focus, this mission must be paramount in their description. Remind and train their crews that their job is to kill ships. Each of these vessels has 80 vertical launch system cells; if half of those cells contain antiship missiles, then these three ships become an existential threat to any navy on the planet.
That’s excellent stuff. Now for Belscamper's fourth part: “fix the guns.” The great embarrassment of the Zumwalt class is that their 155 mm guns have no bullets, and no plans for bullets (see again Defense News: Chris Cavas on 6 November 2016, and Valerie Insinna on 18 January 2018). That is, the service has as yet no replacement for the long-mooted and since cancelled Long-Range Land-Attack Projectile (LRLAP, so helpfully pronounced Lur-lap). As a long-ago naval gunnery officer, I can only imagine that one of the more difficult jobs in the fleet today is that of a gunnery officer on a Zumwalt. Indeed, I am having some trouble imagining how one maintains “proper ethos” and “mission focus” amongst one's gunner’s mates when in that role. I will assume that they are maintaining the guns, but that must be a lonely task—and I offer my thanks to them for undertaking it.
But note also the name: Land-Attack Projectile. The LRLAPs were to have been coordinate-attack weapons, guided by GPS satellite signals and inertial navigation systems to specific points ashore. With a flight time of potentially several minutes over that Long Range, GPS/INS guidance is not generally suitable for prosecuting mobile targets. Indeed, as BAE Systems once briefed me on the cannons—the prosaically-named Advanced Gun System (AGS)—firing at ships was never part of the specification. Then, when the hideously over-budget production run of the Zumwalts was truncated from 32 to three, and thus the guns from 64 to six, the unit price that Lockheed Martin mooted for LRLAPs increased from under $100,000 to nearly one million dollars. Million-dollar multi-purpose missiles, maybe. Million-dollar, single-purpose bullets, probably not.
Could the guns serve a secondary anti-aircraft role? Rear Admiral James Kirk, the first captain (seriously) of the Zumwalt, was more recently the program manager for the class. (He now commands Carrier Group Eleven.) As he told Defense News in 2018, his office was “monitoring [the] technical maturation” of the Hyper Velocity Projectile concept. I think that everyone in the Navy Department has been hoping for that idea, since it was advanced by people around former Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work, back during the Obama Administration. The relative lack of news flow on the concept recently suggests that it may not have panned out. Its total omission from the latest Congressional Research Service report on “Emerging Military Technologies” (17 July 2020) is another bad sign. As hypersonic missile researchers are finding out, controlling weapons at those speeds is fraught with technical difficulty. With the recent departure of Under Secretary Mike Griffin from his job at Research and Engineering, we indeed might not hear much more.
Thus, fixing the guns under Belscamper’s plan probably means providing some proper ship-killing rounds. The range of the LRLAP would have been somewhere between 70 and 100 nautical miles, as variously reported. To achieve the long range, the shells were to be further propelled outside the barrel by rocket boosters—making the weapon a sort of cannon-rocket hybrid. That range is impressive for a cannon, but it is a bit short for an anti-ship missile these days. On the other hand, as he describes it, with six guns on three stealthy ships, possibly separated by many miles,
an enemy combatant would face the very real possibility of receiving a high rate of fire from multiple directions and undetected threats. Assuming a 10-round-per-minute firing rate and 50 percent accuracy, such combined firepower would put 30 rounds of ammunition into an enemy vessel in the first minute. Speed of kill matters; the more quickly an enemy combatant is destroyed, the less information that combatant will relay about the nature of the attack. The less enemy fleet commanders know about why they are losing ships, the less those enemy fleet commanders will be able to do about it.
That might be worth trying to close to 80 miles. With enough development money (though that’s a big if), these 155 mm anti-ship AGS rounds could conceivably come in three varieties: passive infrared-homing, active radar-homing, and anti-radiation (passive emissions-homing). That’s rather like the rumored doctrine for Russian fighter aircraft: salvo a bunch of different missiles from long range, and then run, while the enemy tries to choose amongst which types of countermeasures to emphasize. Radar jamming, after all, just tends to attract anti-radiation rounds. For the Zumwalts’ guns, at that range, the angle of terminal attack would be almost vertical, so the heat-seeking rounds would be heading down the enemy's stack.
Another advantage of the cannon is the multiplicity of its rounds, or the distribution of its lethality, as the Navy likes to say these days. Those 60 rounds, outbound in a minute, and inbound with perhaps simultaneous arrival through trajectory-shaping, would make for a difficult raid to annihilate. (Trajectory-shaping does require closer range, but that might be worth another hour’s closure.) No one round might do great damage, but the flock could not be ignored. Combine that with an anti-ship missile salvo, and the complex attack could be vexing.
Of course, do not try this trick with unguided rounds. At that range, a targeted warship running a volume-search radar may very well see a barrage of incoming 155 mm rounds, and quickly change course, watching the splashes with satisfaction. After quickly calculating the trajectories of the incoming shells, that ship might next be firing a salvo of its own anti-ship missiles not just down the bearing of the attack, but converging on the specific firing point of the attack from multiple bearings. That would not be fun, even for a Zumwalt.
The bigger question is whether the Heavy Cruiser Squadron would even make it to that range. Admiral Kirk once wrote in Proceedings that “the wave-piercing tumblehome and superstructure shape, combined with the elimination of topside equipment, are inherently stealthy resulting in a radar cross section 1/50th of [Arleigh Burke]-class ships.” If the ship were actually intended for area air defense, with those purpose-built high-energy radar arrays, stealthiness would not much matter. A ninja with a flashlight in a dark room is still a guy with a flashlight, so the ships could attract anti-radiation missiles like mad. If they were meant for anti-surface warfare, and planned to survive through stealth, then the Navy would need to do everything it could to keep their cross sections clean.
Indeed, the title of Joseph Trevithick’s recent article for The Drive makes this issue clear, for another type of stealthy warship: “Photo Emerges Showing Sweden's Stealthy Visby Class Corvette's Tiny Radar Signature” (5 December 2019). It’s apparently about the size of a small navigational buoy. The Visbys are not armed heavily for air defense, because as I once hear a Swedish Navy official put it, “invisibility is actually easier than invincibility.” From a mile-and-a-half, an automatic radar plotting aid can track it, but from the edge of its missile range, not hardly. A Zumwalt, however, is 23 times the size of a Visby; the ratio of their surface areas is less from any angle, but the difference is still dramatic. That’s trackable from much further. Worse, as Tyler Rogoway had earlier reported for The Drive, we already have some indication that the US Navy has given up, returning a bunch of topside equipment (specifically a bunch of non-stealthy exterior antennas), thus cluttering up that cross-section.
In light of all that, is the prospect of closing to 80 miles with a yet-to-be-designed round worth the investment? If we’re wondering, then what’s the alternative? Perhaps it’s loading up the Zumwalts with SM-6 multi-purpose missiles. Those can kill incoming ballistic missiles, and kill aircraft at 150 miles. As demonstrated in tests in 2015, they can also kill ships at least that far out, and they’re more lethal ship-killers at that. The LRLAP carried a 24-pound charge inside a 225-pound round. A lot of those may be needed to kill a frigate. In contrast, the SM-6 carries a 140-pound warhead inside a 3,300-pound missile, moving at Mach 3.5. Well, it would be lighter after burning most of its fuel, but one gets the point—a frigate might not take more than one of those. The difference in energy-on-target is huge.
Even with the distributed nature of cannon rounds, if a missile can put perhaps ten times the energy on target as a cannon shell, what’s the point? Do the guns really need fixing to keep the Zumwalts in the fleet? So instead, should the Navy just remove the Advanced Gun System from those ships? All that weight and space might usefully go to some other weapon system—perhaps even a high-energy laser, or two, or a few, with which the Navy has had more success of late. After all, after the Extended Range Guided Munition (ERGM) and the Ballistic Trajectory Extended Range Munition (BTERM), the LRLAP was the Navy’s third failure to develop a rocket-boosted round for its guns. Perhaps it’s time to back off the rocket-boosting in favor of just plain rockets.
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