Over the last year, three of the four most powerful navies[1] in the world have suffered humiliating defeats at the hands of opponents with no navy at all.
First, there’s Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Until the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it was regularly touted as a decisive factor in any conflict, capable not only of blockading Ukraine but of supporting seaborne assaults on ports like Odesa. The desire to secure unchallenged control of Sevastopol in Crimea was widely seen as one of the crucial motives for the Russian takeover in 2014.
Two years after the invasion, most of what’s left of the Black Sea Fleet has fled Sevastopol to take refuge in the Russian port of Novorossiysk, which is, for now, safely out of the reach of Ukrainian drones and anti-ship missiles. (As I was working on this post, Ukraine hit Sevastopol again, damaging three ships and the ship repair plant there) The Black Sea Fleet has played no significant role in the war, except as a supplier of targets and propaganda opportunities for the Ukrainian side. Its attempted blockade of Ukrainian wheat exports has been a failure.
But for the large community of naval fans, the failure of the Black Sea Fleet hasn’t been a crucial problem. The ominous assessments of its capabilities made before the invasion have been retconned with a narrative of Russian incompetence, Soviet-era holdovers and so on.
The effective closure of the Suez Canal by the Houthi movement is a much bigger problem. Well before the war in Gaza, the US and its allies had a large naval force in the Red Sea and Eastern Mediterranean devoted to keeping this allegedly vital sea lane open. That force now includes two USN carrier strike groups, destroyers and frigate from the Royal Navy and other allies, and a long list of other warships.
At least so far, the Houthis don’t have the capacity to strike US warships. But, even with relatively unsophisticated weapons, they’ve already come close enough to require a US destroyer to use its last line of defence.
The main focus of Houthi attacks has been commercial shipping, particularly any that can be linked in some way to the US, UK and Israel. And it’s these attacks that the joint naval effort is supposed to stop.
The effort has been singularly unsuccessful in this regard. Houthi attacks have reduced shipping through the canal by around 70 per cent, even before the recent sinking of a UK-owned bulk carrier and the claimed escalation into the Indian Ocean. As shippers reconfigure their operations volumes are likely to fall even further.
However, the Houthi effort has had far less economic effect than would be expected on the basis of claims about “vital shipping lanes”. As I pointed out back in 2016, it’s always possible to travel the long way round . And that’s happened, with ships going around the Cape of Good Hope. It’s slower and more expensive, but the extra cost is trivial in relation to the global economy. As Alan Beattie puts it in the Financial Times “Suez, Schmuez: Blocking cargo ships’ passage through the Red Sea hasn’t noticeably hurt global growth or pushed up inflation.”
In summary, most of the claimed use cases for naval power have been shown to be unworkable. Navies can’t support a seaborne invasion against a country armed with modern anti-ship weapons. More generally, they can’t operate freely within the range of land-based anti-ship missiles and drones, a range that is extending all the time. They can’t prevent a blockade of sea routes by nearby land-based forces and they can’t mount an effective blockade themselves if (as in the case of Ukraine) their targets can stick close to friendly shores.
At the core of are two simple facts. First, under modern conditions, it’s impossible for a ship (except for submarines, but that will change soon) to hide from satellites and aircraft . By contrast, it’s easy to hide land-based weapons and to move them about quickly. Second, a ship has to carry its own defences and weapons with it, which is a big engineering challenge. Land based systems can be spread out over a large area.
Of course, none of this will have any effect on the belief of naval fans that pouring vast sums of money into warships is essential to projecting power, preserving peace and so on (or, from a mirror image viewpoint, that the US Navy is central US global hegemony). From long experience, I’ve learned that naval fans are about as open to evidence as creationists and climate science deniers [2]
So, I’ll leave it there and wait for the Gish Gallop to begin.
fn1. China’s PLA Navy has avoided humiliation by confining itself to provocative sabre-rattling. But an attempted invasion of Taiwan, regularly threatened but not undertaken so far, would be an even more catastrophic failure than those discussed here.
fn2. I may have been overly pessimistic here. The National Interest, which ran a piece by arch-naval fan Robert Farley*, playing down the significance of the Black Sea Fleet in January, recently published an assessment of the Houthi attacks, summarised by the observation “Counting warships may no longer be the best guide for assessing a country’s ability to halt and control sea lanes. The strategic lesson of the Black and Red Seas campaigns is that counting warships may no longer be the best guide for assessing a country’s ability to halt and control sea lanes. Unsinkable, shore-based missiles and drones, capable of hitting targets hundreds or even thousands of miles out to sea, can now carry as much or more threat as surface warships.”
- To be fair, before 2022 Farley was one of the more sceptical observers of Russia’s naval capability, considered in the context of a possible great power war. But no one, AFAICT, suggested that the Black Sea Fleet could be defeated by a country like Ukraine.
{ 79 comments }
Alex SL 04.03.24 at 2:26 am
Does this perhaps have echoes of the long refusal to accept the obsolescence of battleships after the invention of air planes? There must be something romantic about the concept navies that short-circuits critical thinking.
In fairness, though, as long as air planes are useful in war, there would presumably be some role for carriers and their support fleet at least.
John Q 04.03.24 at 3:59 am
It does indeed have echoes of that attitude, but naval fans don’t welcome being reminded of the fact.
Aircraft carriers are relevant to the extent the targets of their aircraft can’t be reached by land-based planes or missiles (the advantage of being moving targets has mostly evaporated). But that range is shrinking all the time, as is the range where carriers can safely operate.
On the first point, US planes and missiles can hit China from Guam more than 2000km away, and vice versa. Right now, Ukraine is hitting targets 1000km inside Russia.
On the second, China has land-based anti-ship missiles which may have the capacity to sink aircraft carriers at a range of 1400km. Of course, they may not work. But looking at recent experience, I’d bet on missiles against the air defence that can be put on a warship.
Brett 04.03.24 at 5:22 am
The Houthis get away with it because the US has refrained from carrying out bombing from said fleets to suppress their ability to do missile launches. They’ve just been shooting them down, and they’ve been quite successful even if Suez Traffic is down.
They’ve literally been doing that in the Red Sea and Gulf Area. Houthis have not driven them from the sea. They haven’t even sunk a single US destroyer.
It doesn’t matter if you can see the ship – to actually target it, you have to hit it where it is, not where it was 20-40 minutes ago.
As for land-based systems, they don’t have the luxury of being able to move beyond a certain size. They’re vastly more vulnerable to ballistic missiles.
Brett 04.03.24 at 5:26 am
Also, just because something is more vulnerable does not make it obsolete or useless. Tanks are tremendously vulnerable to modern anti-tank warfare, but still quite useful. Same for most aircraft.
Alan White 04.03.24 at 5:26 am
But clearly the submarine nuclear fleets can’t be neglected here. As long as there is any credence to be put into the doctrine of MAD, and I think myself that MAD is indeed mad, it certainly can’t be overlooked as central to what constitutes US/ally versus Russian/Chinese naval power.
John Q 04.03.24 at 6:28 am
Brett @4 “The Houthis get away with it because the US has refrained from carrying out bombing from said fleets to suppress their ability to do missile launches.”
Say what? Any search engine will tell you different.
https://apnews.com/article/us-british-strikes-houthi-yemen-4ca86a7c0f484fcdf9c386cd752c1878
https://www.arabnews.com/node/2483846/middle-east
They’ve tried and failed
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-the-west-cant-stop-houthi-missile-attacks-on-ships-2024-1
John Q 04.03.24 at 6:29 am
Alan Indeed, nuclear subs are a different story, though their undetectability may not be permanent. I mentioned this in the OP
Vern Walker 04.03.24 at 7:00 am
I think you can add deep sea fleets to that, too.H bomb created tidal ways could be set off a hundred miles, or more, from an alien fleet but be just as devastating when they reached it because there are no ships that can cope with a 500 ft (or more) wave.Thinking bout undersea, too, wouldn’t those same waves scour the sea bed a the passed over ?
Doug Muir 04.03.24 at 9:22 am
“A ship’s a fool to fight a fort” — Admiral Nelson.
This isn’t new. Wooden ships were painfully vulnerable to shore cannon. Then ironclads showed up, and for about 80 years ships were both mobile and nearly invulnerable. Unsurprisingly, Admiral Mahan and his doctrine of Navies Are The Best Thing Ever, Gotta Have One, Yo shows up exactly in the middle of this period. Then airplanes sink Bismarck, Prince of Wales and Repulse and suddenly navies have a new problem.
The big disadvantage of ships is that you can’t put as much stuff on a ship as on a land base. The big advantage of ships is that they’re mobile; they can concentrate, disperse, and go where you’re not. An obvious corollary here is that the naval advantage of mobility increases when navies are operating over vast regions (the Pacific Theater in WWII) and decreases when they’re crammed into narrow waters and/or forced to go head-to-head with fixed land defenses, as in the Red Sea.
So I would consider the possibility that (1) rather than “obsolete” we may be looking at a particular technological and military moment where the balance is tipping against navies, but that there’s no compelling reason to think this will continue indefinitely — iow, that you might be overgeneralizing from this moment, and (2) the Black and Red Seas are both very odd and particular examples that may not sustain your general thesis.
Doug M.
Doug Muir 04.03.24 at 9:28 am
I’ll note that the Houthis, while a nuisance, aren’t a serious threat to world commerce. So they’re being treated like a nuisance, not a threat. The US could readily deploy a Marine Expeditionary Brigade into the Red Sea. We literally have those on the shelf, pre-organized, logistical ships all filled up and ready to steam. We could have >10,000 Marines with artillery, armored vehicles and air support, full battle rattle, rolling off the beach in Yemen in well under 30 days.
Obviously we’re not doing that because (1) it would be really expensive, and (2) rather than a quick hit-and-run we’d have to stick around for at least a little while, occupying the relevant parts of Yemen for weeks or months until we could hand off to the PLC or the Saudis, and therefore (3) there would be casualties. Joe Biden has shown an admirable reluctance to put young Americans in harm’s way without a compelling reason, and “sky high insurance rates on the Red Sea route” aren’t compelling. But we absolutely could crush the Houthis, and if they become sufficiently obnoxious, we still might.
The USN isn’t doing great in the Red Sea because it’s in a slugging match with shore emplacements. But that’s almost always been a bad position for a navy to be in — see the Admiral Nelson quote, previous. Ships alone are at a disadvantage just as airplanes alone are at a disadvantage. Ships as part of a combined arms operation… well, historically they’ve been a massive strategic advantage and a force multiplier, and there’s no compelling reason to think that has changed.
Doug M.
Doug Muir 04.03.24 at 9:37 am
@Vern Walker, the effectiveness of atomic weapons against modern navies is less than you might think. They definitely don’t create “500 foot tidal waves”. Most damage is done by thermal and blast effects, and for tactical nukes we’re talking a kill radius of just a few thousand yards. You’d need multiple nuclear strikes to take out a modern USN carrier group — there are a lot of ships, they’re made of very solid steel, and they’re spread out over hundreds of square miles of ocean.
Navies have been studying this for nearly 80 years. There are libraries full of books and papers, plus a decade of actual testing. (What little of the Imperial Japanese Navy that survived the war? Mostly ended up as test subjects for nuclear weapons in Bikini Atoll.) So, this is tolerably well-trodden ground.
Doug M.
Doug Muir 04.03.24 at 12:03 pm
“three of the four most powerful navies[1] in the world have suffered humiliating defeats at the hands of opponents with no navy at all.”
1) China is facing up against the USN, not the ROC / Taiwanese navy.
2) The ROC / Taiwan actually has a perfectly respectable navy, with about 100 ships — including destroyers, submarines, and frigates — and 30,000 personnel.
3) sincerely confused about how “maintaining the status quo of the last 75 years” counts as a “humiliating defeat” for China.
Doug M.
Paul 04.03.24 at 12:15 pm
Years ago while on a military ship as a guest going through the Panama Canal we somehow got into a discussion of naval warfare. One of the officers estimated that his ship a destroyer of a sort would have a life of 30 minutes in a battle with competent enemies. Since then with smart weapons with the ability to target vessels from afar, i can only guess that maybe the only survivable vessels are submarines.
But as noted above naval vessels would still have some limited functionality in conflicts with inferior enemies.
NomadUK 04.03.24 at 12:37 pm
Plus, if the Navy goes out of business, that means all the deep space warships will be run by the Air Force, and who wants that?
Robert M. Farley 04.03.24 at 12:44 pm
Never change, John!
I’ll see if I can get to most of these over the next couple of weeks, but it won’t surprise you to find that I think most of these observations are pure nonsense.
Ebenezer Scrooge 04.03.24 at 1:46 pm
Thucydides is sometimes worth mentioning, even for those of us who are not right-wing lunatics. Early on in his book, he pointed out that the Athenian navy had destroyed piracy on the Mediterranean. This function of navies still persists. Coast Guards may be enough for littoral piracy around countries that can afford decent Coast Guards. But only navies can suppress piracy on the high seas.
Dave Dell 04.03.24 at 2:48 pm
I’ve read that your computer chips better be inside a faraday cage when the nuke goes off within 3-5 miles. I’ve heard (carrier based navy retiree relatives) that modern navies do have those protections in place for the critical components needed for operations. Are the close in weapons systems used as a last resort for missile protection similarly protected? Hope so.
steven t johnson 04.03.24 at 2:54 pm
Mostly agree with Doug Muir especially @12 but not so much @10, where the assumption that the invincible US marines can conquer Yemen, despite the failure of the Saudis to do so for how many years now? Given the very high probability (in my estimation) the US has already been intervening on behalf of the Saudis I see no reason to think the US openly intervening would be more effective than in Afghanistan. The only short-term intervention I know of was Vietnam’s incursion into Kampuchea. They put back Cambodia and left. The much beloved Deng of course invaded Vietnam in a war of choice to take revenge for the Khmer Rouge, so in that sense even that one lasted for years, not to mention US and PRC support for the remnants of Khmer Rouge in the countryside.
“…impossible for a ship… to hide from satellites and aircraft…a ship has to carry its own defences and weapons with it…Of course, none of this will have any effect on the belief of naval fans that pouring vast sums of money into warships is essential to projecting power, preserving peace…”
Given that not all powers have satellites and the highly specialized reconaissance aircraft, this does not have quite the weight assigned here I think. I strongly suspect that when many lesser powers act they are relying on intelligence from the satellites and aircraft of some greater power. Ansarullah I suspect could use drones far more effectively is they had sufficiently reliable and detailed intelligence. I believe they sharply increase the economic impact of an effective differential blockade of Suez, hurting the US et al. much more by allowing friendly shipping through without risk. The claim that they are targeting allies of Israel, not others, is I think more of a pious wish than a reality, precisely because they do not have satellites and specialized reconaissance aircraft. And lower tech means are hampered by….local US naval forces and its Saudi auxiliaries.
Naval forces, especially aircraft carriers, are like rock stars, they always have an entourage. It’s never a fort against a single aircraft carrier, it’s a fort against a fleet. Doug Muir and John Q are absolutely right about the ultimate outcome of a direct confrontation between even a fleet and a fort (“fort” is metonymy) but the ultimate outcome can be a little longer coming, maybe even long enough to be very useful.
And that takes us to the last part, about force projection. The problem is that no one means force projection for peace. They all talk about it but the purpose of force projection is to attack weaker parties. For that purpose, naval fleets are not so clearly obsolete. Doug Muir’s belief the Marines could take out Ansarullah is an example I think.
Aardvark Cheeselog 04.03.24 at 3:44 pm
If there were an upvote button for comments I would not have to post an endorsement of Doug M’s @9 and @10.
Tangentially, the thing linked is the only time I have heard of a CWIS engaging a hostile target. I wonder if it is the first time ever that a threat has gotten close enough to a CWIS-equipped ship to activate it.
oldster 04.03.24 at 4:59 pm
Doug, I appreciate your willingness to push back against your CT colleagues, but this time I think you’re just misreading what JQ said.
You say that you are “sincerely confused about how “maintaining the status quo of the last 75 years” counts as a “humiliating defeat” for China.”
But JQ never said that maintenance of the status quo has inflicted a humiliating defeat on China. Quite the opposite, he said that “China’s PLA Navy has avoided humiliation….”
So, JQ says that China’s navy has not been humiliated. You impute to him the claim that China’s navy has suffered a “humiliating defeat”. That seems like careless reading to me.
Otherwise, though, I agree with your assessments of the Houthis and nuclear tidal waves.
Doug Muir 04.03.24 at 5:32 pm
Oldster @20, John and I have been doing this for… what, 15 years now? He and the team invited me in anyway, which I appreciate.
Careless reading: I literally quoted John’s first paragraph: “three of the four most powerful navies[1] in the world have suffered humiliating defeats at the hands of opponents with no navy at all.”
There’s a footnote, sure. But it directly contradicts the main text.
Doug M.
Mike Furlan 04.03.24 at 5:51 pm
Jeune École for the 21st century.
It was true that cheap torpedo boats could sink battleships in the late 19th and early 20th century. But then the battleship navies started to build torpedo boat destroyers.
Rich countries can pay for navies, and, enough drones to suppress the land based weapons.
Should we spend what it will take? Perfectly reasonable to say no.
Doug Muir 04.03.24 at 5:54 pm
Steven @18, ” the assumption that the invincible US marines can conquer Yemen, despite the failure of the Saudis to do so for how many years now? ”
This is like saying that, because the UNC Tar Heels were unable to beat Georgia Tech, the Kansas City Chiefs would have difficulty beating Georgia Tech.
Too abstruse? Okay, let me spell it out: the Saudi military is, and always has been, hot garbage. They couldn’t beat the Houthis because they’re not very good. In fact, they’re outright terrible. The Houthis have been slapping them around nonstop since 2015, despite the Saudis having greater numbers, being far better funded and equipped, and having access to armor, heavy artillery, and air support.
“see no reason to think the US openly intervening would be more effective than in Afghanistan.”
There are two adjacent governments who could take over, the PLC (the other side of the Yemeni Civil War… okay, one other side of the Yemeni Civil War) and the Saudis. Both would have pros and cons, but the point here is we wouldn’t have to stick around for years doing nation-building or whatever. (We might if we were stupid, of course.)
“The only short-term intervention I know of was Vietnam’s incursion into Kampuchea. They put back Cambodia and left.”
I can think of several, from Tanzania’s overthrow of Idi Amin (1979) to the Russian invasion of Georgia (2008). Go in, make your point, get out… it’s unusual, but I wouldn’t call it extraordinarily rare.
— Yes, this makes Iraq and Afghanistan even dumber. Thanks, George W. Bush and team!
Doug M.
John Q 04.03.24 at 6:09 pm
To be clear, Oldster @20 read me correctly. The Russian, UK and US navies have suffered humiliating defeats, and the PLA Navy has avoided defeat by not doing much.
Neville Morley 04.03.24 at 6:13 pm
Gratuitous Thucydides pedantry: while he does develop ideas about the inverse relationship between piracy and state development, there’s no link to Athens. He notes (1.4) that Minos was the first to build a navy, exert control over the sea and seek to put down piracy, and later (1.13) that the Corinthians did the same thing. He makes no mention of this as a motive for the development of the Delian League, which subsequently became the Athenian ‘empire’.
John Q 04.03.24 at 6:15 pm
“I’ll note that the Houthis, while a nuisance, aren’t a serious threat to world commerce. ”
Agreed. And that’s because “vital shipping lanes” like the Suez Canal aren’t vital. I spelt this out in the OP. But naval fans routinely advance this claim as a major reason for having large navies.
“Ships as part of a combined arms operation… well, historically they’ve been a massive strategic advantage and a force multiplier, and there’s no compelling reason to think that has changed.”
The performance of the Black Sea Fleet in the Ukraine War provides a pretty compelling reason.
Doug Muir 04.03.24 at 6:32 pm
“The Russian, UK and US navies have suffered humiliating defeats,”
Wait, remind me how many ships the UK sent to Operation Prosperity Guardian?
[googles] Okay, apparently it’s… two. Two ships. Out of about 70 in the Royal Navy. Two ships, neither of which has suffered a scratch. (Also, staring hard, it looks like the two ships are swapping back and forth? So, maybe really just one ship?)
This is a very strange definition of “humiliating defeat”. Slight embarrassment, maybe.
“The performance of the Black Sea Fleet in the Ukraine War provides a pretty compelling reason.”
It really doesn’t, but I’m going to let Robert Farley take that one — more fun to watch.
Doug M.
steven t johnson 04.03.24 at 7:03 pm
Doug Muir@23 would be more convincing if there was a high percentage of royal princes in the officer corps, which would convincingly explain why the Saudi military is “hot garbage.” Nepotism and a loyal command structure could be more important than crude notions of competence. Unfortunately I’m not convinced that in practical terms the US is not functionally the Saudi CCC. Were the “Houthis” (Ansarullah) only slapping around the Saudis?
But I have to concede on Tanzania, which I completely forgot. It’s not just because the Georgians attacked South Ossetia and South Abkhazia first, but because the Russians did not attempt to replace the Georgian government. Thus it parallels Deng’s attack on Vietnam. And not only did I forget Tanzania, I forgot the Dominican Republic, Grenada and Panama (any continued US control is neocolonial in nature, not military occupation.)
As to shipping lanes, the question is, vital to whom? Freedom of navigation is not vital to anyone in the US but there are firms in the PRC who find oil delivered by tanker from the Middle East “vital” to their profits. And it seems to me that even stateowned firms would find a sharp drop in energy supplies problematic, given the mandates from the government. The US navy needs to be large to conduct FON activites. Without one, how could they threaten the PRC with encirclement? (Sorry this is slightly disingenuous, I’m not in favor of threatening the PRC.)
dilbert dogbert 04.03.24 at 8:46 pm
Re: Ships against forts
Read Sam L. Morrison’s History of the US Navy in WW2. I did as a kid.
Now in my old and declining years I am viewing YouTubes of the WW2 in the Pacific.
Lots of Japanese unsinkable aircraft carriers that did not sink but got the snot pounded out of them.
The sand islands in the South China Sea are a joke. A Typhoon will sink them. China and sea power is interesting as it is island locked on the east and land locked on the other 3 sides. The major problem China has is demographics. Just like Korea and Japan.
LFC 04.03.24 at 9:22 pm
@ steven t. johnson
Another short intervention: India in what was then E. Pakistan (Dec. 1971). A good account is S. Raghavan, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh.
Re your statement “Freedom of navigation is not vital to anyone in the US….”
Except all the U.S. consumers who want to buy made-in-China or other imported products that arrive by container ship.
Just an Australian 04.03.24 at 9:48 pm
I’m super disappointed that you didn’t quote the war nerd: http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/
And since I’m here: I think you’re overstating the case. It’s an arms race and it does heavily favour the missile sender right now. But I expect that’ll change – soon, launching a drone will invite massive retaliation. The problem with the Houthis is political, not military.
Interested to know what you think will change so that submarines lose their stealth?
John Q 04.03.24 at 9:54 pm
Doug @9 I agree broadly with your account, except that it was mainly the shift to steam power that made it possible for ships to defeat forts. Even before the rise of the ironclad, the US Navy was using the speed and manoeuvrability of steam to defeat Confederate forts.
But as with steel, the gains were exhausted by early C20. Warships today aren’t notably faster than they were in 1900, before airplanes, let alone missiles, even existed. As you observe, that doesn’t stop people talking as if Mahan were still an authority.
John Q 04.03.24 at 11:53 pm
Just An Aussie
On subs, here are a couple of the developments I had in mind, including drones and satellites
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/underwater-drones-could-be-end-submarines-168940
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/oct/05/will-all-submarines-even-nuclear-ones-be-obsolete-and-visible-by-2040
On your more general claim, repeated by quite a few others above, there’s no general principle that says that a technological race must always go back and forth. Sometimes a technology is just obsolete.
In the case of navies, as Doug M points out @9, the balance has become steadily less favorable since at least 1941. Perhaps in another 80 years, things will have shifted back. But there is no sign of this happening at present.
Just an Australian 04.04.24 at 12:31 am
Thanks for the references, I’ll think about those. And I do think the Australian subs are a titanic waste of money technically. If only it wasn’t actually about politics, but since it is, I have no idea whether it’s value for money
Of course there’s no general reason that a race must always go back and forth, except for social dynamics – some variant of Tuckman’s law that tells me that it’s always back and forward. Hell, you’d have thought that bows and arrows are thoroughly obselete in the 21st C, but no. I mean, nuclear armed nation states have gone to war with each other with baseball bats in this century… so I think Navies ain’t going anywhere for our lifetimes
MFB 04.04.24 at 8:38 am
One point not mentioned here is that warships are absurdly expensive and drones are preposterously cheap. Therefore the idea that “we” can just build more warships in order to defend ourselves against “their” drones comes up against the simple laws of diminishing returns. I seriously doubt that the Royal Navy would have accomplished anything more by sending 10 warships instead of 2 to sail up and down the Red Sea pretending to accomplish something.
One thing about the Russian Navy, however, is that a lot of the attacks have been undertaken while their warships were in port, in which case they really ought to have been well defended by antiaircraft weapons based on land, and of course by sensors also based on land. It is possible that this is sheer ineptitude on the part of the Russian military, or alternatively an unusual situation in which a fairly sophisticated attacker happened to be on the other side of a relatively narrow area of sea from a less sophisticated defender. (We shall, I sincerely hope, not have to wait and see whether this is what will happen to one side or the other if the buttons start getting pressed in the Sino-Taiwanese crisis.)
Doug Muir 04.04.24 at 10:34 am
“Doug Muir@23 would be more convincing if there was a high percentage of royal princes in the officer corps, which would convincingly explain why the Saudi military is “hot garbage.” Nepotism and a loyal command structure could be more important than crude notions of competence.”
Dude. This is a thirty-seconds-with-google topic. There are hundreds of articles on the subject of “why does the Saudi military suck so badly”. If you really want to dig deep, I can recommend a book — Armies of Sand, by Kenneth Pollack.
Briefly: poor leadership; lack of motivation; lack of training; a divided, fractious, arrogant and backstabbing senior officer corps, more interested in feuds and personal advancement than the mission; enlisted men are low status and are not encouraged to learn, train, or take initiative; NCOs (in the western sense) barely exist, so the gap between officer and enlisted man is huge; an extremely rigid and inflexible command structure; a bunch of cultural issues including an ingrained distaste for “menial” tasks like maintenance and cleaning and a strong reluctance to pass bad news up the chain of command; massive and pervasive corruption; and, the guy at the top (Mohammed Bin Salman) has no idea what he’s doing, but thinks he’s a military genius.
Oh, and political generals. The Saudis have seen a bunch of Arab monarchies — Iraq, Egypt, Libya — overthrown by military coups. Getting whipped by the Houthis is embarrassing, but a military takeover is a terrifying existential threat. So generals and senior officers are hand-picked for absolute loyalty and political reliability, not competence.
“Nepotism” doesn’t even break into the top ten (though nepotism is of course also a problem).
“I’m not convinced that in practical terms the US is not functionally the Saudi CCC.”
Yeah, I can’t help you with that.
Doug M.
Trader Joe 04.04.24 at 12:58 pm
I thought that the point of navies (contra the OP) was that sometimes, possibly, you’ll want to fight an enemy who is not land adjacent (this would be particularly true for countries like the US, UK and Australia).
As such, IF you in fact want to fight someone who isn’t land adjacent the only conceivable way to land troops and material is via boats and if you’re going to bring such stuff by boat you damn sure need protection for those boats – hence a navy.
Its certainly the case that sometimes it would be imprudent to fight someone that isn’t land adjacent and its certainly possible that if you still want to fight them you could achieve some of your objectives with arial projectiles of any flavor (from drones to nukes). That said – you’ll never occupy someone using those devices – if you feel the need to occupy you’ll need a boat.
In all of the examples cited as “humiliating defeats” navies were not being used for their ideal purpose. To take just one – the red sea, there is no possibly way to defend the shipping lanes there using anything other than boats. You couldn’t possibly fly enough air sorties to defend a commercial vessel and drones would be dubious at best. Its easy to agree the US and UK haven’t been perfect – but what would be better if one agrees that the lane in fact should be defended from Houthi attacks.
I agree with the OP that Navies have already past their best days, but just as ICE vehicles are not as good as electric, navies still have some uses, just not always the ones they are tasked with.
eg 04.04.24 at 1:11 pm
These observations are consistent with my own broader understanding that under prevailing ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance) conditions, relatively cheap and plentiful drones and missiles are increasingly making capital military equipment (surface ships, airframes, tanks/APCs) little more than expensive and inviting targets.
The proliferation of this relatively cheap, land based drone and missile technology has tilted the playing field against force projection, reinforcing “the tyranny of distance” against the old maritime empires in favour of their former colonies.
The geostrategic implications are serious.
russell1200 04.04.24 at 1:37 pm
Navies equipment may be obsolete or wrongly thought out. That would be pretty normal. Some of the supposed killer weapons will be useless, others may come to dominate. Most will be somewhere in-between. What will likely be true is that even where they do dominate, there will be great shortage of actual equipment. I am not aware of major, technology driven war that didn’t have some sort of major equipment/ammunition shortages after the first sharp battles.
But what you otherwise describe is pretty close to the reality in WW2.
The British had a blue water navy and couldn’t stop the Germans, with the help of air power, taking Norway. Granted the Germans took huge casualties, but they generally could not be stopped from taking territory their air force (the Luftwaffe) could dominate. It was just a matter of what casualties they were willing to take: Crete-yes, Malta-no.
That reality goes a long way from making a blue water navy obsolete.
Salt Lick 04.04.24 at 2:02 pm
Subs, et tu?
Salem 04.04.24 at 2:24 pm
Right, the poor state of Arab militaries is famous and much-discussed. But behind all the reasons Doug correctly identifies, the ultimate reason could be said to be – military competence doesn’t matter too much. Saudi Arabia isn’t in a real war, and isn’t going to be in one, so there’s no Darwinian impetus. When Iraq was losing the war with Iran, they did reform their military – because it mattered.
Which ties it back nicely to the navy question. When’s the last time a Western navy fought a serious engagement? Arguably, not since the Falklands. It’s been such a long time since they’ve been under the intense competitive pressure that real war brings, so it’s very likely a real war would revolutionise doctrine. Hopefully we don’t find out how.
steven t johnson 04.04.24 at 3:41 pm
LFC@30 1971 was a little early for my interest in politics to reach past the US. I did tend to think of this more as just another war against Pakistan.
Doug Muir@36 I thought I already mentioned the need for loyalty above crude competence. The cultural issues seem to me to overlap very strongly with the monarchism, which cultivated the ethos of aristocracy. The corruption is the pay off for loyalty (see the Venezuelan military?) But the notion that Muhammad bin Salman is at the top and is a delusional idiot really does not strike me as showing nepotism is not an issue, but highlights that it most certainly is. Prince William is not at the top of the UK military.
c1ue 04.04.24 at 6:36 pm
This article is a perfect example of a somewhat reasonable point, blown completely out of proportion.
First of all: it is nonsense that you can hide stuff on land but not at sea. The problems are not identical but they are very similar: can you find 100 specific ships in the entire world’s oceans easily via satellite? The answer is no. But you could track 1 or maybe 10 or 20. You cannot track 100 because there simply are not that many satellites.
This is the same paradigm as land: you can track 1 specific tank or whatever, but you cannot track 100 or 1000 – it is just that there are more platforms on land than on sea.
Secondly: this article focuses on attack. What about defense? Patrolling? The oceans and seas are big – the area of the Black Sea is 2/3rds of the nation of Ukraine. But unlike the land – Ukrainian drones can use “neutral” third party satellites, buoys, drones etc to find their targets and attack them. Ukraine itself could never do it, and a direct war between NATO and Russia – these same resources would not be available.
Similarly, focus on the survivability of any platform, by itself, is unproductive. All platforms are vulnerable in some way whether land or sea, human or hardware. The reason the risks to said platforms are accepted are because of the missions achieved.
Can swarms of drones travel 5000 miles to patrol off a distant shore?
Can swarms of drones check pipeline and undersea cable status?
Can swarms of drones operate in an adversarial environment whether weather, electronic counter measures, cost, uptime, reliability etc?
Edward Gregson 04.04.24 at 7:44 pm
Speaking as someone who’s done some robotics work related to underwater drones for naval uses, the idea that they’re going to make submarines obsolete within a few decades seems…optimistic. A couple things about the underwater environment that may not be commonly appreciated:
– It’s slow. Slower than surface vessels, and the smaller a vehicle is, the slower its max speed. Drag both makes travel slower and more energy demanding, worse for smaller vehicles.
– There’s (effectively) no communications unless you surface – optical comms or radio will work over a very short range, acoustic comms will work over about 1 km or less (subject to conditions), verrrrrry slowwww communications can be done using VLF or ELF but the underwater vehicle can receive only, and at an extremely low datarate and needs to drag a long wire antenna (with the concomitant drag)
– Sensing and navigation is extremely difficult – vision is pretty much useless, so most long-range autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) navigate using extremely precise (and expensive) inertial navigation systems (INSs), surfacing periodically to get a GPS fix when the error accumulates. People are working on doing navigation and SLAM using sea bottom landmarks observed with active sonar, but it’s not as reliable and of course active sonar lets everyone else in the water know you’re there. For operations under ice where you can’t surface and get GPS fixes, you pretty much cross your fingers every time you send it out, because pretty frequently a multi-million dollar vehicle doesn’t come back, and those are research vehicles, not military vehicles that have to avoid active sonar.
– Military subs mostly use passive sonar (with human interpreters) to avoid detection, which is much more sensitive in something big that can drag a towed array than in something small that can’t.
– Power is always a problem. Hydrocarbons are the most energy-dense small vehicle fuels we have. Without air, you’re stuck with either batteries, hydrogen/oxygen fuel cells, bringing oxidizer, or hydrocarbon-electrics with frequent surfacing. All basically the same paradigm of storing power on the surface to use underwater. Research AUVs will go for a couple of days at a few miles an hour. Underwater gliders will glide slowly for months, but only because they’re basically free-drifting. Modern air-independent propulsion subs will go a few weeks submerged, but only moving very slowly. With nuclear reactors, however, the max speed underwater is about 10x the vehicles I mentioned, and the underwater range is unlimited, which is why all US Navy subs are nuclear. If any non-nuclear vehicle is going to engage a nuclear sub (or notice it), it basically has to be by a lie-in-wait ambush with some degree of foreknowledge.
I don’t think they’re going to put nuclear reactors in schools of small uncrewed active AUVs to let them spend months at sea actively tracking and pursuing nuclear subs, I don’t think they’ll make antisubmarine aerial drones with the onboard power to operate far offshore and run a cryocooler for a superconducting magnetometer, or a sensing laser that can penetrate 200 m of water (from the links). A lot of this “transparent ocean” stuff seems to be fundamentally confused about the size, speed, power and smartness limitations of uncrewed systems. It doesn’t seem much different from someone in the Cold War saying submarines are obsolete because we can just blanket the entire ocean in sonobuoys.
Similarly with the idea that drones and missiles have made carrier groups and the like obsolete. It’s a harder problem than people think for an antiship missile (much less a “small cheap” drone swarm) to locate a carrier group 1000 miles out, fly that distance and intersect the moving target that probably knows it’s coming, then do serious damage to what is basically a floating nuclear-powered airbase with its own point defenses and drone swarms, and it comes down to the required size and power making the missile/drone much less small and cheap than the hype makes it sound. Modern peer state all-out superpower naval conflict would probably have ship loss rates that would horrify modern sensibilities, but that’s naval war and it takes more than that to say that crewed warships are obsolete.
Cian 04.04.24 at 10:30 pm
Doug Muir: “The US could readily deploy a Marine Expeditionary Brigade into the Red Sea. We literally have those on the shelf, pre-organized, logistical ships all filled up and ready to steam. We could have >10,000 Marines with artillery, armored vehicles and air support, full battle rattle, rolling off the beach in Yemen in well under 30 days.”
So a tenth of the size of the Houthi army. Really, what could go wrong?
Cian 04.04.24 at 10:40 pm
The red sea is about the worst possible environment for a navy to operate, so I’m not sure one should draw too many conclusions. Other terrible environments would include the Persian gulf (a war against Iran would certainly be interesting, if probably relatively short) and the Chinese coast.
There are a lot of signs, for those that care to look for them, that the US navy probably isn’t very good. A lot of poorly maintained ships, with undertrained crews operating with the wrong weaponry and overstretched support ships. If you use up a significant chunk of your fleet’s weaponry (weaponry that can’t quickly be replaced) against the Houthi – then what are you even doing.
Nick 04.05.24 at 2:00 am
“One thing about the Russian Navy, however, is that a lot of the attacks have been undertaken while their warships were in port, in which case they really ought to have been well defended by antiaircraft weapons based on land, and of course by sensors also based on land. It is possible that this is sheer ineptitude on the part of the Russian military, or alternatively an unusual situation in which a fairly sophisticated attacker happened to be on the other side of a relatively narrow area of sea from a less sophisticated defender.”
In the case of Sevastopol, this was more so a problem with the outlying geography. It is quite difficult to set up overlapping radar systems to detect incoming missiles and drones when said weapons are traveling on or very close above the ocean itself. For the later examples, they are taking circuitous routes around the edges of the Black Sea to maximize the surprise factor.
Mind you, Russia has so far refrained from targeting the USA’s ISR capabilities, which are the main reasons these plans have had success. In a peer-to-peer war the satellites, UAVs, and AWACs that are currently providing Ukraine with up-to-date info would become legitimate targets.
John Q 04.05.24 at 3:09 am
Salem @41 The Falklands War had lessons for both sides.
The Argentines learned to their cost that they should have bought more missiles and checked that their bombs were in working order before starting a war. That lesson seems to have been learned pretty widely.
The Royal Navy learned that its existing anti-missile and anti-aircraft defences weren’t enough to stop even a third-rate opponent sinking a bunch of warships, so big improvements were needed. If that lesson has been learned, it doesn’t appear to have been learned fast enough.
And though it always annoys naval fans when this is pointed out, the fact that the Falklands was the only significant naval war in 70-odd years suggests that the use cases for warships are few and far between.
Kevin 04.05.24 at 12:52 pm
I did a six-month patrol of the Falklands in 1984, two years after the war. I was on HMS Southampton, a Type 42 destroyer of the same type as HMS Sheffield and HMS Coventry which were sunk in the war.
Naval doctrine up until the Falklands War was that guns were useless and we should get rid of them in favour of missiles. The big lesson from the Falklands was that missiles were unreliable and, actually, guns were very still useful against aircraft. In fact, my Defence Station was a twin-barrelled, 30mm anti-aircraft gun and my Action Station was in the gunbay of the main 4.5in gun.
I would agree that these ships wouldn’t last long against, say, Chinese missiles, but they can still be very effective against smaller navies and supporting (and opposing) land invasions. The Royal Navy’s investment in aircraft carriers is absolutely insane though. I expect them to last about two days in a big war.
I was also a submariner. For a good while to come, I don’t believe warships stand a chance against modern submarines.
steven t johnson 04.05.24 at 2:53 pm
One of the lessons of the Falkland War the Argentines learned is that it doesn’t matter how unattractive and how far away and how unimportant it is economically, The Empire does not accept a fait accompli and will go to war. You need a navy to guard your sheep thousands of miles away. But I don’t mean to advocate for navies on the grounds you need them to fight lesser foes far away, because those I believe to be insufficient reason.
Cian 04.05.24 at 3:38 pm
There hasn’t been a peer to peer war in 80 years, so I’m not convinced this point is as significant as you think. During that period naval ships have been used significantly for a variety of purposes.
Western navies have been configured for what have effectively been a series of post-colonial wars. In a peer to peer conflict they’d mostly last about ten minutes. The Carrier fleet in particular would get annihilated by modern submarines, missiles and drones. But concluding from that naval ships are obsolete seems a little premature. Tanks are still being used in Ukraine, even if it’s pretty obvious to everyone that large massed tank battles are a bad idea. In WWI and WW2 navies entered into those wars with completely erroneous assumptions about naval warfare, but by the end navies were still vital, even if they were used very differently.
Cian 04.05.24 at 3:47 pm
Carrier groups are pretty easy to detect, and carriers in particular are not hard to spot (they’re big, they show up on satellite). It wouldn’t be a single missile, it would be a swarm which would quickly overwhelm the defenses of any US naval carrier fleet (which struggle with a single, non hypersonic, missile). The US has no defenses against hypersonic missiles, or ballistic missiles. China has both, and could launch them from it’s shoreline.
I agree with you about submarines. I suspect that after the next major war naval conflicts will involves small groups of relatively small ships, and submersibles of various kinds. Surface ships are horrifically vulnerable to submarines – submarines are extremely difficult to detect.
No, but I suspect aircraft carriers and large carrier groups are. But it will take the loss of one to prove that. Also, I think we’ll discover that the side that can build naval ships quickly and en mass will win because of those horrific loss rates. Which won’t be the US.
Peter Erwin 04.05.24 at 7:35 pm
“navy fans”?
Oh, I get it: “People who know more about the subject than me, including people who have been studying this professionally for years, but can’t possibly match my uninformed, unresearched gut instincts.”
“Humiliating defeats”?
OK, the Russian Navy in the Black Sea: nine ships sunk or otherwise destroyed, including the flagship of the fleet, plus about ten ships seriously damaged. (Plus about ten or so boats.) And, yes, most of the surviving ships withdrawn to the eastern side of the sea. So, yeah, that’s arguably a pretty humiliating defeat.
And the US Navy in the Red Sea? (I’m ignoring the absurd attempt to count the inclusions of a single Royal Navy vessel as a third “defeat”.) How many of their ships have been sunk? (zero) How many of their ships have been damaged? (zero) How many planes or helicopters lost? (pretty sure that’s zero, too) How many of their sailors killed? (I think one guy fell overboard, not during combat, and was declared lost.) Has the US Navy retreated from the Red Sea? (not yet)
Calling what’s been going on the Red Sea a “humiliating defeat” is pretty farcical. It sounds like the sort of nonsense only a diehard Houthi propagandist would produce. (So, when did you start working for them?)
Stephen 04.05.24 at 8:29 pm
steven t johnson@50: re the Falklands war, “You need a navy to guard your sheep thousands of miles away”.
I remember, during the preparation for the Falklands task force, hearing a Clydeside shipworker being interviewed on radio. To the best of my recollection, he said this:
“A Fascist military dictatorship that has imprisoned, tortured, kidnapped and murdered thousands and thousands of its own citizens has launched an unprovoked attack on a peaceful and unaggressive British dependency. The British navy are preparing to go south and sort the Fascists out. I am a Communist. It is my plain and obvious duty to do everything I can to help the Navy defeat the Fascists.”
I suspect stj might think that man was the wrong sort of Communist.
I don’t know if he really thinks that the Falklands war was about sheep. Given his other delusions, I would rate that as improbable but not entirely impossible.
Cian 04.05.24 at 8:40 pm
OK, the Russian Navy in the Black Sea: nine ships sunk or otherwise destroyed, including the flagship of the fleet, plus about ten ships seriously damaged. (Plus about ten or so boats.) And, yes, most of the surviving ships withdrawn to the eastern side of the sea. So, yeah, that’s arguably a pretty humiliating defeat.
I doubt the US would do any better if it had a naval base next door to a first world enemy (because NATO are responsible for these missile strikes, even if there’s this ridiculous pretense otherwise). It’s an extremely difficult operating environment.
If the Russians were targetting the US/ally ships from Yemen in the red sea using their military satellites, then there wouldn’t be a single US ship left in the region.
Their mission was to keep the red sea open to western ships and protect them. They’ve failed to do this. If you fail to achieve your self-declared military objective then that’s a loss. What’s worse is that they’ve demonstrated to the world how inadequate US air defenses are against missiles and drones. They’re fighting a militia force armed with 70s missiles, home made drones and little in the way of targetting systems. And they’re struggling to shoot them down, and are only able to do so by using up very expensive (and hard to replace) missiles. Maybe you don’t think it’s humiliating, but the world that lives outside the western bubble probably does.
Up against an enemy armed with modern missiles (better than anything the US has) and how long do you think their ships would last? US military deterrence is weakening fast.
Edward Gregson 04.06.24 at 4:44 am
Cian @52 This was kind of how I used to think about aircraft carriers, but again when you actually put detailed thought into energetics and such it stops looking so clearcut.
Let’s say it’s the 2030s (the realistic time for a South China Sea war over Taiwan, since China is nowhere near ready now). China launches hypersonic missiles at a US carrier group.
Hypersonics go from Mach 5 to Mach 25 so for the missiles to get to the carrier group 1000 miles away takes 3 to 15 minutes. At those speeds, they glow in IR so presumably the carrier group will be almost immediately aware of them from US satellites. The swarm has to strike the carrier to sink it; near misses won’t do. The carrier and its escorts will launch counter missiles, use CIWS radar-guided machine guns and electronic warfare and jamming to mess with any sensors on the missiles or their comms links to satellites above. To not get missiles shot back at it from survivors, the missile swarm has to sink about a dozen ships.
By the 2030s they may also be using laser weapons for missile defense, with no ammo depletion problem and very fast steering. If the hypersonic missiles are dependent on satellite data, they need it for the whole trip because the ships can move, and near misses aren’t enough. That means there need to be satellites well-positioned the whole time, which means China needs a lot more of them. The carrier group may also launch ASAT missiles to destroy some of those satellites (whether in time or not), or destroy them with the aforementioned laser weapons (which likely could be done in time), or at the very least attempt to use lasers to blind them.
At hypersonic speeds, the missiles have a terrible turning radius, so they’re not good at hitting things that move at the last minute, or at dodging things coming to hit them. They’re also not cheap. Currently a Russian Kinzhal goes Mach 10 (nominally) and costs $10 million, but Ukraine has shot down at least a few of them with donated Patriot air defense systems. The US LRHW goes Mach 17, but it costs $40 million, about half as much as an F-35 fighter jet.
If a surprise attack destroys a carrier group, that’s not the end of it; the US has 11 of them. It would mean war, and we can expect that all of those satellites used to find the carrier group and guide the missiles would themselves become targets immediately. Both sides would start blowing away the others’ space assets since they’re very useful and very vulnerable. Nobody really knows how that shakes out, but there may be no satellites for the duration of the war, or maybe whoever can build and launch waves of replacements quickest gets space intelligence and the other doesn’t (with SpaceX, the US would currently win that contest).
Carrier groups deal with this by having a wing of antisubmarine warfare planes and helicopters screening a zone around the group all the time, presumably with hydrophones, sonobuoys, active sonar, etc. They also sometimes have their own escort attack subs.
The US lost multiple aircraft carriers during WWII. But it built 105 of them. They’re not the Death Star, they’re a particularly large but still fungible ship class.
Doesn’t seem like a safe bet. China’s economy has been faltering of late. It’s partly why things are tense.
Cian 04.06.24 at 6:53 pm
Greg @56
US satellites are currently unable to detect Russian hypersonics (unless something has changed recently). China also has ballistic missiles that can go 8000kms. Such missiles wouldn’t need satellites for the entire distance (naval fleets are slow moving, and hard to manouver for one thing), as Naval fleets have huge radar and electronic signatures. A naval fleet is a pretty dense target, and naval ships are not (as you seem to imagine) terribly manouverable, particularly if they’re part of a fleet.
US counter-missile technology stagnated during the 80s, as did their Electronic Warfare. Lots of money was invested in other programs, which mostly weren’t terribly successful (Lasers, an incredibly impractical weapon, are a good example of this). The idea that the Patriot missile system which struggles against the SCUD missile (in the first Iraq war they failed) is shooting down hypersonic missiles in Ukraine does not seem terribly likely. Given the Ukrainian propensity towards exaggeration, I’m guessing this probably hasn’t happened.
We don’t know how much Russian hypersonic missiles cost, but given that the $10 million estimate comes from the west, it’s probably lower than that. The Chinese can almost certainly manufacture them for even less. Let’s say $5 million – it could be less.
US destroyers can cost between 2-4 billion, frigates are around a billion, For the new high tech ones that the navy is so excited by, multiply that cost by 10. US aircraft carriers cost about $12 billion – but they also take 6-8 years to build (a number which seems to be rising).
100 missiles seems like quite a decent return on investment. If I fire 100 missiles and I take out one ship, then I’m winning (and that’s ignoring the cost of the anti-missile weapons). Realistically, I’d take out far more than one ship. Of course during that exchange these ships will have had to have fired many anti-missile systems, and so will be running dangerously low on defenses – defenses which mostly have to be replenished in dock. Even if my naval fleet survives, it’s not proving very useful to me.
To address some other points. I don’t think US naval fleets carry ASAT missiles, and if they do they wouldn’t have enough to knock out all of China’s satellites (they have a lot over their own territory for some strange reason). In the hypothetical situation where China and the US are racing to launch more missiles – China surpassed US satellite launching capacity recently, and would presumably also be able to use Russian launchers. In ten years… it seems unlikely that the US would win that fight.
Modern US ship building capacity is pathetic, as its ability to manufacture steel (both of which are going to be needed in order to replace ships). China has 50% of the world’s shipbuilding capacity, and about 230 times that of the US. The US would not be able to replace it’s current fleet, or even a substantial minority of it.
The US has also very little industrial capacity to make the basic things you need in order to fight a modern peer to peer war. As we’ve discovered in Ukraine, it can’t even replace the weaponry its sent to Ukraine quickly.
In all the exercises I’m aware of, submarines easily penetrate aircraft carrier fleet defenses. Submarines are exceptionally hard to detect.
Doesn’t seem like a safe bet. China’s economy has been faltering of late. It’s partly why things are tense.
Things are tense because the US is acting extremely aggresively towards them. There’s the trade war, rapid scaling of US bases in the region, the attempt to impose an embargo on chip technologies, and all kinds of other extremely hostile actions (the attempt to destroy their mobile phone company, the forced sale of TikTok, various forced sales of mineral rights in places like Canada).
And China contains much of the world’s industrial capacity. The US contains almost none of it. US military pretensions are increasingly threadbare.
hix 04.06.24 at 8:18 pm
Somehow, even conceding all the weak pro navies arguments made, they still look like an awful waste of money at best. Or worse, like a bullying instrument against poor nations, just causing rightful anger and fear towards the west.
steven t johnson 04.06.24 at 10:16 pm
Stephen@54 omits my remark about how economically unimportant the Falklands were to the Empire, in the context of how the Argentines should have learned the Empire does not surrender territory (well, until it’s made to by someone stronger.) That shows I didn’t claim the war was about sheep, which Stephen pretends to think I might have meant. No text can be proofed against a hostile misreading.
The thing about the UK kicking Argentina’s ass, aside from affirming the principle of the inferiority of neocolonies, was that it was a big boost to Thatcherism. I have no idea why a Clydeside steelworker would think the Royal Navy was fighting the fascists. That’s like think the US invaded Taliban to fight for women’s rights. Also, Galtieri et al. have less claim to the fascist title than wolfsangel and sonnenrad badge wearing politicians who derived from the OUN-B and the Social National Party and so on. There’s no Communist duty to fight that bunch, or so I’ve been informed.
John Q 04.06.24 at 10:46 pm
Trader Joe and Hix
It’s precisely the idea (popularised by Mahan in C19, as Doug Muir observed above) that navies can be used to project power against distant countries that leads me to dislike them, and to point out that most of the other supposed uses don’t work.
Peter Erwin 04.06.24 at 10:47 pm
Cian @ 55
I doubt the US would do any better if it had a naval base next door to a first world enemy (because NATO are responsible for these missile strikes, even if there’s this ridiculous pretense otherwise). It’s an extremely difficult operating environment.
I’m not really sure what the argument here is, but the majority of the Russian ship damages and sinkings have been done with Ukrainian weapons (assorted aerial and naval drones, plus their own Neptune anti-ship missile and some short-range ballistic missiles). And of course even the UK-supplied Storm Shadow missiles were fired by Ukrainians flying Ukrainian planes.
Cian @ 57
The idea that the Patriot missile system which struggles against the SCUD missile (in the first Iraq war they failed) is shooting down hypersonic missiles in Ukraine does not seem terribly likely.
You do realize that there have been numerous upgrades of the Patriot system between 1991 and now?
China surpassed US satellite launching capacity recently, and would presumably also be able to use Russian launchers.
Where are you getting that idea? According to Jonathan McDowell’s 2023 space report, there were 20% more US satellite launches than Chinese launches in 2022, and about 60% more in 2023. And if you count number of payloads or total mass placed into orbit, the US outdeployed China about ten to one in 2023 (e.g., 1182 tonnes versus 122 tonnes).
(And why would China bother with Russia’s increasingly decrepit and failing lanch systems, with their awkward far-northern launch sites?)
And China contains much of the world’s industrial capacity. The US contains almost none of it.
Hmm… searching online (e.g.) suggests China is indeed first, with about 28% of global industrial production. The second-largest country is… the US, with about 17%. Not exactly “almost none”.
John Q 04.06.24 at 10:51 pm
As has been observed above, we don’t know how carrier battle groups would perform in a war between the US and China.
But the point of the OP is that the assumed casus belli, a seaborne invasion or naval blockade of Taiwan, isn’t going to work. Taiwan is already much better prepared than Ukraine (let alone the Houthis), and is getting more missiles all the time. The PLAN scenario for transporting 100 000 or more troops to Taiwan relies on using civilian ferries, not carrier battle groups. As recent events have shown, they would be fish in a barrel.
Edward Gregson 04.07.24 at 5:01 am
Cian @57
I’ll go quickly:
– I see no reason why, if it is indeed true that the US can’t detect Russian hypersonics, that would continue to be the case going forward – they’re extremely hot and can’t stay below radar.
– Why would them being part of a fleet make a difference? They’re not close enough to run into each other. Those pictures you’ve seen are photo ops, they operate miles away from each other in practice. Again, you have to hit the ship, probably multiple times for the carrier, not a hundred feet left of the ship, and you do not turn on a dime at mach 25.
– A hypersonic cruise missile has to go mach 10 to 25, steer and have sufficient sensors and sophistication to guide itself to a target that is trying to kill it. It will be cheaper if you skimp on any of those aspects as the Russians likely do, but no longer worth hyping as a “hypersonic weapon.” Russian/Chinese versions will either cost similar to US versions in PPP terms, or be PoSs.
– And US defense production was backwards and moribund during the interwar years – until WWII started and they began churning aircraft out out by the thousands (and aircraft carriers by the dozens). These things are expensive per unit in part because they don’t build a lot of them.
– “Realistically” we (us, here) have no idea how many ships will be taken out per missile.
– Standard US shipborne antiballistic missiles can be used as ASAT weapons against targets in low Earth orbit. Military reconnaissance satellites of the type we’re talking about are in LEO circling the Earth every 80 minutes, not staying over China’s territory because then they’d have to be in geosynchronous orbit about 22,000 miles away.
– SpaceX is the world leader in cheaply building and launching satellites, and it’s just a private US company, not a government. Russia is near death as a space power.
– We’re talking about a 3rd world war. They’d build up the capacity they need, and they’d have advance warning because China will take a decade to prepare for a Taiwan invasion if it really means it, and won’t be able to hide it. And the US has a lot more friends in the world than China, and is more materially self-sufficient than China.
– The US doesn’t want to supply Ukraine due to the political nihilism of the right, it’s not materially incapable.
– Exercises will apply made up advantages and handicaps to participants to even out the odds and make the exercise more valuable as training. Without knowing the rules of the game, the results don’t say much. For example, an exercise might start with a diesel sub underwater close to a carrier group, even though carriers operate a thousand miles from shore moving 20 knots and a diesel sub could never go that far and that fast without surfacing.
– China has a government that derived its legitimacy from a decades-long economic boom and is now facing economic stagnation, it has seen a return to strongman personality cult politics, it has a looming demographic crisis, it has no friends in its neighborhood but North Korea. It has been at least as aggressive to the US and allied countries as the US has been to it (wolf warriors, secret police stations, nine-dash line) due to that return to strongman politics. It probably won’t try to retake Taiwan because it’s a terrible idea, but it has been nursing the hope for decades; the concern is the urgency that it might feel that if it is to be done it has to be in the next 10 years or never.
Edward Gregson 04.07.24 at 5:29 am
John Q @62
I don’t know if we should take it as a given that China plans to use civilian ferries, they’re probably trying a bunch of stuff out while they decide if they want to attempt it at all. They’re also building their own version of a US Navy landing hovercraft, and bought some big ex-Soviet landing hovercrafts as well.
Maybe it would help if you clarified what you mean by navies being obsolete. The use of ships in war? The continuation of a separate military service that concerns itself with ocean warfare? Or just the idea of blue water navies that can operate far from their home countries and project power?
I think it’s a failure of imagination to think that the world without navies would just be the current one with slightly more Houthi missile attacks and Somali pirates. The concern is that you might see nations themselves start to exploit their seaways, levy tolls on trade, grab territory and pirate each others’ marine resources in ways that would be much more damaging to the world. Superpowers have been deploying navies against this possibility for decades or centuries so it’s hard to imagine, but then it’s hard to imagine superpowers spurning any overseas military intervention more distant than their coast guard patrol and more measured than an ICBM strike.
Like the Falklands War you’ve mentioned; all a bit farcical and ridiculous, yes, but it was a revanchist military dictatorship trying to forcibly annex thousands of British citizens, and there probably wasn’t a desirable end that didn’t require Britain to have a navy.
John Q 04.07.24 at 7:47 am
@64 PLAN only has a handful of proper landing ships, mostly obsolete
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_People%27s_Liberation_Army_Navy_landing_craft
so ferries are the only option for the foreseeable future to convey any significant number of troops.
This would create all sorts of problems
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jillgoldenziel/2023/01/31/chinas-ferry-tale-taiwan-invasion-is-a-legal-nightmare/?sh=1b2c93145ceb
if PRC actually tried it, but there is no evidence that they are going to.
On your broader issue, the evidence is that navies can’t stop piracy or keep sea lanes open. If international law and diplomacy don’t fix the problem, the only option is to the long way around. On a spherical planet, there’s always a long way around. Or else, put boots on the ground, as Doug suggested above.
Edward Gregson 04.07.24 at 8:49 am
John Q @65
I am in no ways an expert on this, but from what little I’ve heard in Twitter conversations between IR people, the foreseeable future for a Taiwan invasion is in the 2030s after years of build-up. They seemed to think anybody talking about it happening in 2025 (as in the link) is probably just being excitable, attention-seeking or trying to boost their fief, even if they’re a high-ranking official or general, who frequently (on both the US and Chinese side) have been known to say zany or inflammatory things. It will likely become pretty obvious over the years if China is actually seriously preparing to do this or not.
I don’t know how you would go about proving or disproving that navies reduce piracy or keep sea lanes open given that superpower navies have been continuously tasked with doing that, globally, for centuries now, there was tons of piracy when they started, and almost none now. In modern times, off the top of my head the British navy prevented the Falklands annexation and increased naval presence seems to have drastically reduced Somali pirate activities, but if that evidence doesn’t count, what would?
If you need to put boots on the ground in an overseas place not near a friendly country that will let you use its territory/airfields, you need a navy to put them there. You mentioned the ever-increasing range of drones and aircraft, but, it isn’t ever-increasing. If missiles are being built with longer ranges, that’s an (expensive) design choice. You still can’t fly your fighter jet from England to the Falklands, dogfight the Argentines and fly home.
John Q 04.07.24 at 7:09 pm
I agree with your IR friends, but the admirals and generals are making a lot of noise
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=us+admiral+predicts+war+china+2023
As regards sea lanes and pirates , it’s not too hard to do the numbers
https://johnquiggin.com/2016/03/20/keeping-sea-lanes-open-a-benefit-cost-analysis/
https://johnquiggin.com/2016/05/02/pirates-militarism-whack-a-mole-173/
Edward Gregson 04.07.24 at 7:52 pm
I don’t think the strategists take it as a given that there wouldn’t be large scale targeting of merchant shipping. Seems like China would definitely want to harass or blockade resupply to Taiwan. If the war didn’t go nuclear (big if!) I’m not sure the conventional struggle could be expected to be quick and contained anymore than for Ukraine/Russia.
Not my area of expertise, but it is someone’s. The argument might be more convincing if it engaged more with that.
KT2 04.08.24 at 3:20 am
The Kaiser: “I must have a Navy as good as Grandmamma’s”
B Russell: “Hence the present level of taxation.”
From;
Bertrand Russell
Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1950
“What Desires Are Politically Important?
…
“The same sort of thing happens in modern Europe. When the British Government very unwisely allowed the Kaiser to be present at a naval review at Spithead, the thought which arose in his mind was not the one which we had intended. What he thought was, «I must have a Navy as good as Grandmamma’s». And from this thought have sprung all our subsequent troubles. The world would be a happier place than it is if acquisitiveness were always stronger than rivalry. But in fact, a great many men will cheerfully face impoverishment if they can thereby secure complete ruin for their rivals. Hence the present level of taxation.”
…
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1950/russell/lecture/
Stephen 04.08.24 at 4:09 pm
Steven t johnson @59: you say “I didn’t claim the [Falklands] war was about sheep, which Stephen pretends to think I might have meant.”
What you previously wrote @50 was ““You need a navy to guard your sheep thousands of miles away”. That has the obvious interpretation that the war was about guarding sheep. I didn’t pretend to think you might have meant that, I asked if you could really mean that: something that I judged unlikely but not, in view of your other delusions, not entirely impossible.
It seems that you not only misrepresent what other people write, you don’t understand what you have written yourself.
This has drifted a long way from the original question of the usefulness of modern navies. Your contribution as I understand it is that the Falklands war should not have been fought because Imperialism. I can see no point in continuing this conversation.
steven t johnson 04.09.24 at 4:08 pm
Stephen@70 ignores context. In context, the last clause immediately before cited the unimportance of the Falklands even to the English (although not too right-wing politics of Empire, where cost-benefit analysis plays no role.) Thus, the obvious interpretation is, sarcasm.
I’m not a very good writer, but I am never troubled by people asking what exactly I did mean. I conclude the problem is sometimes I’m altogether too clear and convincing, but when I’m not, the overall import still more or less discernible. And I’m on the wrong side so the details of what I meant don’t matter.
Cian 04.09.24 at 10:26 pm
Peter Erwin @61
I’m not really sure what the argument here is, but the majority of the Russian ship damages and sinkings have been done with Ukrainian weapons (assorted aerial and naval drones, plus their own Neptune anti-ship missile and some short-range ballistic missiles). And of course even the UK-supplied Storm Shadow missiles were fired by Ukrainians flying Ukrainian planes.
The targetting has been carried out by NATO. Using NATO reconnaisance planes (which would have been shot down in a conventional war) and satellites.
The Saudis had a pretty modern Patriot system that failed to shoot down Houthi rockets, which were essentially SCUDs. There’s never been any evidence that the thing works, but it’s manuacturer has done it’s best (with DoD support) to obscure that fact. The Israelis also have some of the same technology as part of their Iron Dome, which also doesn’t seem to work very well.
Where are you getting that idea? According to Jonathan McDowell’s 2023 space report, there were 20% more US satellite launches than Chinese launches in 2022, and about 60% more in 2023.
A possibly erroneous source it seems.
Hmm… searching online (e.g.) suggests China is indeed first, with about 28% of global industrial production. The second-largest country is… the US, with about 17%. Not exactly “almost none”.
This is by economic output, which isn’t a hugely useful metric for these purposes and also doesn’t really work for comparing countries for a variety of reasons (US capacity is overcounted, Chinese capacity under-counted). Apart from chemicals, where the US is still world leading, most US industrial production is assembling using imported parts (many of those parts imported from China). The US doesn’t have much in the way of steel capacity, shipbuilding capacity, or (remarkably) military industrial capacity. It does have a lot quite sophisticated manufacturing facilities, but none of them would be useful for making weapons.
If you were to look at the kind of stuff, and the kind of workers, you’d need to produce weapons for a war then the US mostly doesn’t have them. If the US had large domestic inventories of the weapons it needed then maybe this wouldn’t matter, but by the DoDs own account, in a war against a peer it would run out of many things in about 3 months.
Cian 04.09.24 at 10:32 pm
John Q @ 62:
The PLAN scenario for transporting 100 000 or more troops to Taiwan relies on using civilian ferries, not carrier battle groups. As recent events have shown, they would be fish in a barrel.
We don’t actually know what China’s plans are. There was an exercise.
My guess would be, simply based upon things China has actually done when Taiwan has annoyed them, is that they would impose a blockade. Simple, relatively cheap and pretty difficult for the US to break.
There was a time when China wouldn’t have considered that an option – but given recent US economic actions the costs of such an action are rapidly declining.
Cian 04.10.24 at 3:06 am
Edward Gregson @63:
Maybe reduce your diet of propaganda a little? It’s not healthy. Xi Jinping might be many things, but strong man with a personality cult is really pushing credulity. I’m also not convinced that China refusing to be bullied by US/EU diplomats is really ‘aggression’, nor can I take terribly seriously complaints from the poor lickle diplomats that China isn’t more like the US/EU, instead of like a third world doormat. According to international law the nine dash line is inside China’s internationally accepted borders – even if the US apparently only recognizes international law when its convenient.
China is only friendly if you define country as G8/EU. Otherwise it has plenty of friends – more than the US probably. It has friendly relationships with many SE Asian countries, and friendlier relations in the S/Central Americas than the US. Those relationships have been strengthened by Biden’s ill advised support of the Israeli genocide.
And thanks to Biden’s extraordinarily terrible foreign policy it’s now also very friendly with it’s northern neighbor, who also have lots of raw resources and energy that they’re happy to sell to China. The Biden administration solved their biggest foreign policy dilemma for them. Maybe Biden’s secretly Chinese.
In any war in the SE Asian pacific the US would be at a huge disadvantage. Land forces are more powerful than naval forces, you have logistics issues and physical caps on what you can do. To make things worse, the US Asian fleet is pretty decrepid, and the sailors are overworked and undertrained (as a recent report pointed out). China also has the strategic advantage. All they have to do is blockade Taiwan, which is far easier than trying to break a blockade. Maybe they would be stupid enough to invade Taiwan, but they certainly don’t have to.
But its hard to see why China would want to start a war, as the power differential between China and the US is only going to improve in their favour (and I suspect the US foreign policy elite realize this, which is why they’re getting so bellicose). If the Chinese wait long enough then the US will be about as relevant in the region as the British. And they seem like a patient bunch, unlike the US.
such a scenario working out well for the US (or the Taiwanese).
John Q 04.10.24 at 11:26 am
Cian: The blockade option cuts both ways. If China closed the SCS to Taiwan’s trade, Taiwan could retaliate in kind, closing off most of China’s seaborne trade.
China has much more to lose there, especially if EU and US follow up with trade sanctions. Taiwan could still trade by air and using ports on its Pacific coast (not well developed at present, but that could change fast in an emergency)
Edward Gregson 04.10.24 at 8:26 pm
Cian @74
Unless you can point me to Hu Jintao Thought being promulgated under that name, alternately explain the rise in SCS confrontations and the ongoing treatment of Uyghurs during Xi’s tenure, or give an innocuous reason why you can’t post Winnie the Pooh on Chinese social media, I think “personality cult” and “strongman” work fine as terms.
Under what international law is the nine-dash line legal? Because international law says you get your 12 nm of territorial sea and 200 nm of EEZ, and no other nations bordering the nine-dash line recognize it, not just the US.
Which SE Asian countries is China friendly with (especially such that they could be considered part of its bloc rather than the US’s or neutral)? Be specific.
What exactly is Biden’s terrible foreign policy that pushed Russia into China’s arms? Be specific.
In the discussed war in the SE Asian pacific, the US/Taiwan would be at a huge advantage because they would not be the side trying to carry off a seaborne invasion 10 times the scale of D-day. That advantage being so stark that the US arguably wouldn’t even be necessary was the motivation for the original post.
All the “Chinese century” stuff was based on the idea that they would someday attain the per capita productivity of the US at 5 times the population. While ultimately desirable on apolitical human welfare grounds (as it is for any country), that’s looking like it’s not going to happen in the foreseeable future, or under this leader. And while the “patient” line might have had some credibility during the era of calm technocrats, right now it seems like orientalist hype about an autocracy as twitchy and reactive as any other.
J-D 04.11.24 at 12:18 am
In a spirit of solidarity with Stephen, I observe that that’s been the conclusion I’ve drawn from past experience of exchanges with steven t johnson–Stephen, it’s not just you.
steven t johnson 04.15.24 at 3:34 pm
By the way, Robert Farley has “answered” John Quiggin. My personal objection that the naval forces are primarily for projecting aggressive force and threat of force against much weaker rivals, rather than defense against aggressive peers, remains personal.
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/04/on-naval-power
Stephen 04.15.24 at 7:38 pm
J-D@77: thanks for your solidarity.
To be fair to steven t johnson, I’ve known people who were far less susceptible to rational discussion. I once worked with a woman – kindly, competent in daily tasks, well-meaning – who believed simultaneously and with equal faith in Marxism, Christianity and astrology. I think I remember stj renouncing the first, and I do not suppose he supports the other two.
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