Yamatrue. the US is really the only nation that has bothered to spend the money to preserve a decent amount of its 20th century capital ships as museums:
And even US can barely afford all those. USS Olympia is on her last legs and I gather several others are in trouble.
YamaFinnish Border Guard sells surplus vessels
Three Telkkä-class patrol boats are for sale. Relatively new, it was quickly found out they were ill-suited for the role (no ice strengthening!) and they saw little operational use.
Yama“Again the thread is about a swarms replacing heavier ships”, remember?
That’s what OP stated, problem is that nobody builds large, ocean-going ships for pure coastal defence role, thus there are no “large ships” which could be replaced by small vessels in that sense.
Although OP talked about ‘FACs’, his vision was not a conventional FAC (which is a self-sufficient warship) but rather a fleet of single-role vessels which would complement each other. Possibly, craft could be built slightly cheaper in that case, but not by much. One fundamental problem is that the resulting fleet is complete one-trick pony whichs components are almost completely useless by themselves. So the “swarm fleet” might work in one or few scenarios, but useless in others.
If you look at what say, Iran is actually building in real world, they’re going for whole orchestra – subs, small frigates, FAC’s, swarm boats, coastal defence missiles, mines, aircraft…because that’s the best approach. You need to present the enemy a wide spectrum of threats.
YamaAn Mk29 missile launcher can easily accommodate ESSM en lieu of RIM-7 NSSMS.
Sea Skua range: 25km
RIM-7 range: 10-19km
ESSM range: ?-50km
ESSM didn’t exist in 1991. If we’re talking about modern setting, it is trivial to find an SSM which would outrange ESSM – even newest variants of Penguin can do it.
YamaWhy does Jutland should show that torpedo boats (which were actually destroyers, not FAC!) are successful equalizers? How many battleships they have sunk or heavy damaged? None (except of the old battleship Pommern at night at the retreat of the German fleet). How they then influence the battle decisively?!
Torpedo threat was decisive factor at Jellicoe’s planning. He knew that his battleline could take on German battleline – but he had to be wary of torpedo attacks, which enables Germans to escape. He was well aware of torpedo boats success at Russo-Japanese war.
I have explicitly stated that in modern warfare usually those wins, which have a better industrial capacity. Therefore there is no option for a weak navy to win against a strong, well funded one – doesn’t matter which ships they bought. But the idea of an FAC as an equalizer is that it can help a weak navy to win – which is an illusion.
Nobody has ever had such an idea. FAC’s can be more cost-effective in their main role – delivering torpedo attacks – than destroyers or other ocean-going warships, bearing in mind their limitations. Which is why many navies built them, and have continued to build them.
But the S-boats did not prevent the landing, they do not even endangered it.
But neither did anything else, so what exactly that is going to prove? You are going to use D-Day as an examples that everything is useless?
You have stated that FACs were able to prevent strong navies to control coastal waters – obviously they were not in the case of Operation Overlord!
As opposed to German battleships, cruisers and destroyers, which apparently did stop Overlord?
YamaPr.21361 could be the one stop shop platform that you might need.
The ~950ton vessel is/can be armed with a wide variety of weapons and can be tailored to meet the specific roles that you demanded.
Patrol/Survelliance
Pr.21630 variant with helo deck.
Anti-Ship
8 x Klub/Yakhont missiles.
ASW
8 x Klub (another variant with hull mounted sonar is there)
Air-Defence
32 x 9M317ME/9M96E/E2 (instead of 8 x cell)^^^ now you model the number of ships needed to make up a decent force to counter the bully effectively.
Although the vessel is impressive on paper, it will also come with a hefty price tag which prevents building them in very large numbers. Basically, light frigate/corvette class vessels are useful in ‘inland seas’ (which Russia has plenty), they have some capabilities of larger warships so they can make up numbers to some degree when operating along with larger warsips, or they can be used in lieu of larger vessels against more modest threats. However, they can’t be considered a “counter” against major navies, as such.
YamaDont try to shift the goalposts. We were talking about a very specific threat….chopper deployed light AShM’s. RIM-7M would have forced the Lynxes (and an equivalent AS15TT shooter) to be VERY careful about their attack geometry. Remember Skua is a semi-active weapon that needed illumination from the Seaspray set aboard the shooter and, so, had to unmask for the missile flight duration. Breda 40’s or OTO76’s not really a problem….a 10-15nm PDMS is something quite different though.
Sea Skua still outranges even Sea Sparrow. Even in the best case, we are looking at the frigate shooting down one – at most – helicopter until disabled by multiple Sea Skua hits.
Platform stability, higher sensor placement/increased battlespace awareness and control, endurance, weapons system diversity etc , etc. There is no contest between the two.
And there is a similar difference between frigate and a cruiser. So what? What is the point? Of course weapon systems have inherent limitations.
Frigate can deploy organic air to self-designate OTH. FAC, unless specially developed and compromised elsewhere, can not. Defensive power comes from the ability to develop and maintain the surface, sub-surface and air picture around the ship. There is no contest in the ability of a frigate to surveil its environment compared to that of a missile boat. In defensive firepower terms look at the Meko/TNC comparison. RIM-7M and 360 degree Sea Zenith coverage compared to 200 or so degrees of optronically directed 40mm Breda!.
There is also a big difference putting all the assets on one hull which can always be disabled by a fluke hit (see rather large number of examples) vs having multiple hulls to spread out the hits.
Identifying from 15nm?. Big slow contacts compared to smaller nimble, faster ones darting around the formation?. Dont thinks its beyond the average Observer to differentiate the Polochny’s from the TNC45’s to be honest. Your last sentence is the important one…when you are willing to accept why the FAC(M) isnt a good choice for escort tasks you’ll start to see the real-world limitations of the platform.
And your small, light frigate would be horribly bad at making missile attacks from say, within the archipelago.
Hey, a submarine makes even worse escort than a FAC. Why do navies keep building such limited platforms?
The problem is that a likely aggressor may well choose to initiate combat from farther out than 250kms as well. You now have weapons like NSM that can be helicopter launched so, soon, any state able to sortie a basic LPH or LHD and a frigate screen will be able to put down precision land attack missile fire 400km or more from the fleet. Its little comfort of course to have your missile boats ready to sortie if they get clobbered alongside the pier!.
But this is once again completely misrepresenting the issue. Even for a navy with OTH amphibious invasion capability, those LHD’s have to come lot closer than 400km to complete their mission.
YamaAgain: FACs were not successful as equilizer and they were also not successful in defending any area – including coastal waters.
In which example did a strong navy not entered an area because of the possible thread of FACs?
Plenty of examples – for starters, threat of torpedo attack by small craft was a decisive factor in Jutland. Overall, FAC threat was usually coupled with mines and/or coastal artillery, so it’s difficult to say which was bigger factor in decision making (mines were arguably always the biggest threat – FAC’s by the way made quite useful minelayers).
There is simply no proof whatsoever for your assertion. None whatsoever.
I have mentioned several examples, in which strong navies entered areas, destroyed the their present FACs and controlled this area afterwards. You argued against these examples with arguments as that the attacking navy was anyway stronger – which only proves that the FACs were useless and not an equilizer…
Such argument would make sense only if you can demonstrate that some other ship class would have made a difference – which you haven’t. Quite the contrary. As it is, your examples are extremely weak. I can just as easily give examples where FAC’s have disabled large warships which according to you, should be immune to FAC attacks.
I can give you some other examples, e.g. all the Allied landings in Europe during Second World War against which German and Italian FACs were completely useless.
Wrong, biggest single Allied loss associated with Overlord was caused by S-boats (Exercise Tiger).
The reason FAC’s were mostly neutralized was because Allied distributed considerable effort to neutralize them. For example, there was an enormous air raid at Le Havre to knock out German naval assets. There were 1200 warships to protect the invasion fleet. etc.
You forgot that frigates usually have much better radars, fire control equipment, ECM, ESM etc. Their sensor fit makes the difference, the FAC will be attacked before it even detected anything. For this reason FACs would have no chance to survive against any modern frigate.
A simplicit idea. Of course if you put a small ship against large ship on open sea with everything else equal, smaller ship is likely to lose. By same logic, frigates are useless because they would be overwhelmed by cruisers.
On the other hand, a missile attack by FAC flotilla covered by coastline would easily overwhelm any frigate.
YamaThey were never the kind of equalizer they were thought to be, they were never successful in a fight against first class navy. For sure, there were some singular successes, but they did not change anything. They were strategically meaningless, in most cases not even tactically relevant.
I’m sorry but that is just complete garbage. I can think of very few examples of larger ships “decimating” FAC’s, for simple fact which I cited earlier, they seldom met as few navies were as stupid as to risk their high-value warships in a region where they could meet FAC’s.
FAC’s were essential in naval warfare in Baltic and Black sea and to lesser degree North Sea and Mediterranean. Only major navy of WW2 which did not have FAC’s in the beginning of the war – IJN – began a crash program to build them.
FAC’s sure sank more ships than battleships!
YamaIrrelevant….the question is to the value of the FACs under operational conditions. By your metric the exchange rate is 4 FACs to 1 FF – which forces the allies to task more firepower to dispatching those transports 12 TNC FACs or 3 MEKO FF’s?. That takes the cost element out of the equation.
It makes little difference. Your average ’80s FF had very modest air defence capabilities, Sea Sparrows at best. They would be, and were, sitting ducks against almost any kind of air attack. Only meaningful advantage over FAC would be somewhat better seaworthiness, enabling employing weapons in rougher seas, apparently that was one reason why Iraqi craft were so quickly sunk.
Indeed, but, the TNC’s in however many numbers would not have given the capability of the frigate to counter the light weapons used to, ultimately, massacre them. In a simple cost/benefit analysis in no way do the 4 TNC’s come close to the value of the frigate. Which is the whole question under contention.
Depends from the mission – those four TNC-45’s have around two to four times offensive firepower compared to one light frigate. As both craft are essentially hors de combat from single hits, it is not given that a frigate has a better defensive power.
No it wouldn’t as there was nothing stopping the the landing ships being targeted first. The Lynxes could have picked off the HVU’s and left the FACs to recover survivors they were that ineffectual.
Except of course they did not do that, and can’t as they have to identify the targets first and the escort might maneuver themselves to screen the attacks, by self-sacrifice if nothing else. Of course that is not very cost-effective way in the long run, highlighting the simple fact that FAC does not make a good escort.
Yep its known, in the trade, as a threat reduction exercise. Those are all the things that a skilled crew would do…reporting for sick call being the first one!. The only element in what you have written there that could have made one shred of difference would be the employment of countermeasures. Shooting at a small high speed air target with a manually-laid light automatic mount from a small ship is an exercise in faith more than a practical antimissile tactic and threat detection amounts to what when you have no ability to counter the threat or run from it?.
What ‘manually laid’? Any semi-decent FAC has fully automated, stabilized weapon mounts.
It’s a simplistic thought exercise to think that because something is faster, it can’t be ran from. Helicopters might reach the limit of their endurance, for starters.
YamaSo instead of the FACs if the Iraqi’s had deployed a small frigate group of Yavuz-class configured MEKO200’s, as a representative contemporary frigate class, do you think those Lynxes would have been as effective?.
Where do you plan to get this “small frigate group”? At cost of acquiring and crewing one MEKO 200 you could buy four TNC-45 type craft which is what they had (lets ignore that those were not bought but captured from Kuwaiti). Of course one could just as well say that if Iraqi had dozen FAC’s instead of 3-4 escorting the landing ships, they would have gone through – suffering losses, but mission could have been accomplished.
Of course if you give Iraqi equivalent number of much bigger and better armed ships, they will be harder to defeat. They will be even harder if you replace frigates with say, Kidd-class destroyers. But that’s not a meaningful comparison. And mind you, would likely not change the end result.
Exactly my point. From a couple of Lynxes plinking away with lightweight AShM’s, to engage a contemporary frigate group, you are now looking at tasking significant naval tacair which, although present in no small number, was quite busy at the time or risking surface units by sending them into the weapons envelope of the units they are attacking. The virtual attrition potential of the frigate group is dramatically higher than that of the FACs.
Given that the Gulf was full of Coalition surface combatants with essentially nothing else to do, I find the question completely academic. They could have been just as well been intercepted by a surface action group.
The question is ‘could expert crews in the Kuwaiti TNC45’s have done anything to change the outcome of the naval engagements in Desert Storm’ you have answered ‘absolutely’. Can you expand on how you think the TNC’s and Iraqi OSA’s could have been employed a) to save themselves from being massacred by chopper launched light AShM’s and b) so that they could have had any impact whatsoever on the coalition units in the immediate northern gulf area?.
It’s things like better awareness and threat detection, defensive tactics and employing countermeasures etc. Iraqi boats apparently tried to shoot at the missiles, but failed to hit. And very simply, assessing the threat beforehand. It’s not like helicopters (much less carrier air) used in ASuW role were some sort of secret weapons, Lynxes had already been used in that role in Falklands.
YamaWith a larger, better armed, warship RN Lynxes wouldnt have had so very much of an easy time picking off small combatants. The battle was still overwhelmingly tilted in favour of the coalition but the force expenditure to complete the task would have been very much higher.
Not really. Few contemporary frigates had air defence weapons which would have outranged even Sea Skua. A single destroyer would have been overwhelmingly more expensive than all those FAC’s put together and would have been simply destroyed by carrier based air (which was present in overwhelming numbers), or just mobbed by surface combatants which had little to do anyway.
You have stated earlier that the problem with Iraqi employment of Kuwaiti TNC45’s etc was a lack of familiarity with the systems. Do you think that even with expert crews those vessels could have done anything to change the outcome of the combat or even caused the coalition to have to assign significant resource to reduce their threat?.
Absolutely. Well, the Iraqi would have still lost. The big issue here is that such an operation was not feasible for Iraqis regardless of the technical details of their assets, and maybe they should have realized that.
YamaThe first such type was the Rendel gunboat and some small protected cruisers armed with big guns, later torpedoboats were in favour, than FACs armed with torpedoes, later with missiles. It never worked out.
That is just completely absurd, it “worked out” number of times. Motor torpedo boats sank lots of ships in both World Wars, including front line warships.
Paris Peace Treaty speficially banned Finland from acquiring Motor torpedo boats. I’m sure Soviets would not have bothered if they thought that FAC’s were useless.
The Sri Lankan navy had also no first class equipment, therefore it is probably not the best example.
Well, they did have some first-class patrol boats, things like Super Dvoras, and they proved quite vulnerable against swarm attacks.
The way Sri Lankans countered the swarm threat was that they built their own swarm fleet and outnumbered and outgunned the Sea Tigers. Some pretty big sea battles there.
YamaHmm good point, so the only way to hide it or to make it effective would be to have the “swarm” already in the waters? like patrol boats that can go to a certain location?
This is what was done in “Millenium Challenge 2002”, Red Force had aircraft and small boats circling around seemingly pointlessly, so they were ready at instant when “war” was declared and it was too late to intercept them effectively.
The way Tamil Tigers did it, they had boats hidden in the jungle, where they were quickly deployed with help of tractors and then swarmed Sri Lankans. This worked because Sri Lankans had to operate very close to coast themselves, and were vulnerable.
YamaFor sure – but I have not proposed them in a scenario against a stronger, better funded navy 😉 I have only mentioned that they were usually decimated, see e.g. also the Libyan boats in 1986…
Weaker navies are often decimated, regardless of what ship types they have. Argument that “this and this event proves FACs are useless” automatically presumes that with larger, better armed warship the end result would have been different. But that is obviously absurd, so what those anecdotes are meant to prove?
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