MARITIME SECURITY
Comments (8)
Everyone needs to read "The Utility of Force" by Gen. Rupert Smith. Modern warfare is already too expensive to fight. A rough rule of thumb...for every Infantryman calculate one million dollars per casualty, for every modern fighter aircraft calculate forty million per plane plus one million per crew member per plane lost, for every ship calculate five hundred million plus one million per crew member and for capital ships one to ten billion plus one million per crew member lost. Now think about those numbers every time someone suggests anything that might increase the loss rate.
Brian Foley at 12:47 PM
Agreed. That was my first thought when I heard of the LAW.
The Mk 38 MOD 2 or MOD 3 25mm autocannon, with or without 7.62mm chaingun isn't enough to target, attack, and destroy anything that the LAW is tasked to do! The LAW is not a Coast Guard boat. The Mk 38 has no Anti-missile defense and positioned at the bow, it can't cover the beach landing.
Precision guided missiles---that is what is needed---JQL/JAGM, SeaRAM, SPIKE NLOS, Iron Dome/ AIM-9X/MML, etc. are required. Having a "gunboat" won't work in the age of Anti-Ship missiles, torpedoes, and naval bombers.
So if it is too unsafe to bring the large Amphibious ships close to the beach for unload and support, then how is it ok to bring in an UNARMED LAW to unload, and it have no method of response?
Curtis Conway at 12:07 PM
Even if the issue of survivability could be saved, there is the matter of the operational range of the ship. The ship would need to have space for fuel and munitions for whatever weapons that it has, while also having space to hold the troops and the supplies that the troops and the crew need. Being small is going to make space optimization a headache for the designers.
Then there is the matter of offloading troops and supplies when the ship does reach its destination. Without piers and jetties (assuming that the ship makes an amphibious landing), the ship would need some means of offloading stuff quickly, if the idea is for the establishment of a beachhead.
The concept is flawed far beyond just the individual survivability of the LAWs themselves. We have some of the greatest military technology and brilliant minds in the world within the Navy, Marine Corps, Army and Airforce and we still can't solve the tactical, operational, strategic and huge logistical problems (same ones the Japanese faced in the 1940s) that comes from distributive operations across the Pacific AOR. Technologies change but geography doesn't which is why most wars in human history take place on the same terrain century after century. Also why the Pacific AOR is so hard to control and protect.
First we don't have enough amphibious surface connectors to put men and equipment ashore or pull from shore back to ship rapidly without great risk to the ARG in a contested environment. We haven't got enough LCASs, LCUs or AAVs/ACVs nor the ships with the welldeck space to launch, recover, store, transport, repair and sustain them.
Second we have a false sense of confidence in our NGF, long range precision fires, Armed UAVs, EW and CEW capabilites. Some of those capabilites are still maturing while others are just not realistic in an AOR with 300-500 plus miles between island chains.
Third despite the fact that we have super fast and even stealthy fighter aircraft with cool capabilites they still need places to land or at minimum refuel and the bad guys can find our tankers and airfields to target easily making air supremacy a thing of the past against near peer adversaries like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. All of our FW/RW assault support aircraft have short legs, long maintenance cycles and need places to land and refuel. The keys to successful combat operations are communication and logistics which require supply chain security, secure connecting files and lines of communication. If we can't solve that problem the new LAWs with or without extra armorment won't matter.
And the final cherry on top is we keep assuming that we can just go into these remote islands and hold terrain with smaller units using stealth, low EM signature and hide our long range precision fires among the jungle island terrain, but we have no viable plan to resupply and support (most places mutual supporting islands is a dream) the Marines and sailors on those islands and prevent the local population on the islands from destroying them long before the enemy does.
It took the US military roughly hundreds of ships, thousands of amphibious connectors, thousands of planes and 17million men and women to take those same islands from roughly 8-9million Japanese with hundreds of ships, thousands of planes with will that took two atomic bombs to break. If we think it won't take the same to break the will of the Chinese if they dedicate themselves to war over resources and control in the pacific, we are fooling ourselves.
Might as well armor them up and run them straight at the beaches like an LST if the plan is for them not to survive.
Maui at 10:42 AMThis sounds like a slightly smaller version of a Landing Ship, Tank (LST) that the Navy decommissioned several years ago.
Michael Berry at 9:54 AM
The standard combination of Phalanx and Rolling Airframe Missile would probably do the trick.
Brian Bartlett at 5:20 PM