radarI believe the claims for APAR is 32 midcourse and 16 terminal, though I can’t remember if both are valid simultaneously.
i read the same values in different sources (e.g. janes) but for me it’s not clear how to interpret it. is it per face or overall, do we have to divide it by 4 to get values for a single face, are the channels independent, …
from my point for a single apar face 4 missiles in terminal phase sounds realistic but only 8 in midcourse seems to be too low for a fixed active phased array. so my personal minimum for apar is 8 mid course + 4 terminal phase on a single face.
radarBAE Mk 8: 27 tonnes, 4+4 crew
OTO 76mm: 8.5 tonnes, 7 crew
Bofors 57mm: 7.5 tonnes, 3 crew
where are these crew numbers from?
radarMost possible foes of the RN will be concerned if they hit an incorrect target as it will waste at least one missile, probably more, and some of the regimes that might oppose us will not be aided by killing innocent sailors.
i would not rely on that. but in any case littoral waters may be a high traffic zone but on the other hand you can track vessels visually either from the coast or from other small vessels.
Active Radar Homers and passive/active types are great for open, clear, blue water as soon as you get into the littorals or heavily trafficed regions they are next door to useless. That is why the US has left them off the Burkes and is why we are leaving them off the Fleet subs in favour of additional Spearfish or TLAMs.
you just pointed out why there will be an increasing thread by tv/(i)ir for the c3 in littoral waters. but you stil want to adjust your defence systems to counter blue water threads? do you think that the ashm-supplier all over the world will sleep for the next 10 or 20 years?
For a vessel that needs to be delivered as effective as possible and as cheaply as possible new weapons systems will be very unlikely to fit the bill.
so a 30mm mount will find it’s way to the c3 …
Ah ok so the 3P-firing mount doesnt require an interface with a fire-control radar in order to set the fuse rangegate so the round bursts at the correct distance?. Sounds pretty fancy to me.
a suveillance radar with an update rate of 1sec would be fine (like sea giraffe or trs-3d) but most likely we will not see such a radar on the c3. so they have to rely on e/o-sensors which i agree is not the best way to use 3p.
I agree that a mount firing 3P is more flexible…..flexible to do what though?. Answer, as I’ve said all along, is that its more capable of shooting down aircraft and thats about it. Once again C3 doesnt have to have that capability any more than our current minor war vessels do.
57 mm and 76 mm mounts (especially with 3p) are also more capable of shooting on any other fast moving target like a simple speedboat used by a smuggler …
and non of the rn’s current minor war vessels has a mk-8 mount aboard. so why does a c3 needs this? keep it realy cheap, get the 30mm mount.
The only ‘target’ I could see it engage would be shore-based artillery in which range is the key factor anyway or perhaps an opposition gunboat or something equally low-tech in which case, again, range is the key factor. Anything more advanced C3 is going to run screaming from because its an OPV and NOT a warfighter.
you think about shore based artillery without thinking about land based ashm, you think about gunboats without recognising that they might have some lightwight ashm onboard, …
with the mk8 as a system for ngs you already put the c3 into a warfighter role. and shooting at a fast moving target over a great distance (with unguided ammunition) is not very effective because of the long flight time. for the shorter distance it’s the rate of fire which counts.
Who mentioned the Falklands?. I said South Georgia, ie Op Paraquat, a situation which was decidedly NOT high-density warfighting. In that situation a few rounds from a Mk8 and a couple of squads of RM’s, with the ships Lynx over top, could have very well done a job – without all the troubles of deploying an escort group. Classic gunboat tasking….all possible because of the inclusion of a ‘cheap’ big gun.
i’m not an expert on the falkland war so correct me if i’m wrong but afaik there were a county class destroyer, a type 22 and a rothesay class frigate involved in the operation. a sub (santa fe) was hunted down during the operation. for me this clearly sounds like a warfighting scenario. at the end the recapture was done quick and easily but the rn took it seriously, send out a task force and stil had some luck. sending a “ngs-opv” in here would be the wrong way, and btw 8 helos and 250 soldiers were involved in the operation. this does not fit to an opv.
Sorry that is absolute rot!. Manually laid shore guns against an automatic naval mount isnt a contest. The shore battery is putting the rounds out, but, against a moving target they are hardly providing aimed fire. Against that the Mk8 is putting shells down on the target coordinates at 20 a minute. Nothing beats a naval mount at counterbattery.
you can start listing the battles in which a single ship ruled out a shore battery as mentioned earlier.
the scenario highly depends on how trained the shore battery is. if they know what they are doing they will not start firing at a warship which is to far away because hiting a moving target over a great distance in any case has the problem of the long projectile flight time. if they start firing at a short distance and if they are trained it does not matter if the guns is a computer controlled ship mount or not because the can easily track the target with e/o-sensors used by some spotters at the coast, hunt it down with a very high rate of fire. and to repeat myself: in this scenario the shore battery uses the surprise effect, starting firing at a warsh.. eh peacetime vessel which is not prepared to counter this attack and which has to start some uav’s or a helo first to start searching for the battery. in any case the shore battery has either hunted down the opv before the helo has spotted the battery or the battery is on the move because it didn’ managed to hit the ship.
Where is the airstrike coming from?
from the nearest friendly airbase or carrier? do you think in your mine clearing operation in which your mcw aka c3 aka opv is used, nobody else will be nearby? if you have to clear mines somewhere you should ask yourself first who placed the mines, what are his goals and whats the context. normally mines do not materialize in the sea by their own. nobody will send a single c3 which then finds itself at the receiving end of a shore battery.
The C3 is, often, going to be the nearest vessel on scene to any situation around the world by nature of its taskings. If you make the C3 capable of gunboat diplomacy, cheaply, you might just save having to deploy a more capable vessel, of which we wont have all that many anyway.
sending a “cheap” opv to a mission in which a frigate or destroyer is needed may end in a expensive debacle.
Radar is trying to push it in this direction because he cant see a 3000 ton warship as an OPV and it surely must have that basic capability even if its only 3P rounds out of a 57mm Bofors.
no thats wrong. i can see a 3000t vessel as an opv but the problem i have is to put an opv in a ngs role (especially without strengthen it’s defence systems). so if we talk about a opv ok no problem but we don’t need a mk 8 on a opv designed for peacetime operations.
As stated we just had Largs Bay do APT(N) do you think anyone had a Moskit locked on her at any time in her patrol window?.
and was there a shore based battery pointed at the large bay?
….but, once again, we do not have a 57mm or 76mm in the fleet and, AFAIK, are not about to add new weapons systems for our cheap-end capability!.
do you remember that the rn already fielded the 76 mm mounts for about 14 years on their peacock class patrol vessels until they sold the ships? i would not be surprised to much if we will see a 57/76mm on the c3. from my point of view this is more likely than a mk8. of course first to bet on is a 30mm mount.
On the nightmare event that a C-802 gets launched on a C3 it would bang out softkill as fast as possible and get out of the threat zone at the rush!. Thats what minor war vessels do!.
and the same minor war vessel will stay and hunt down a shore battery? do you recognize that there is a gap in all of your scenarios now?
radarYou are misunderstanding the fundamentals of softkill employment. ARH missiles need a seeker activation offset, rangegate and a bearing that means a defined contact provided to the weapon by the launch platform. In the Falklands War our ESM ops were drilled in identifying the profile of the Agave radar carried by the Super Etendard – ‘Condor’ racket as it was termed. Picking up that signature was sufficient to release countermeasures.
ashm can be used on different ways e.g. in a bearing only attack with wide fov and without range gates. and esm works in both directions, so why not firing a ashm on a track based esm only? most potential foes of the rn will not care if they hit a neutral ship so i would not necessarily assume that you will see a search radar first.
Naval chaff, as described above, isnt used the same as an aircraft dispenses chaff.
for sure but they generate a very large rcs in a very short time.
Which ones?.
hsiung feng II for example is already fielded with a dual radar/iir seeker.
See, I’ve heard people say that before, yet it always comes back to the point that softkill does work and has been proven so in many actions – the date is irrelevent as the technology IS proven. We KNOW therefore that its not as easy to distinguish between decoys and actual contacts as you try an make out.
maybe thats the problem, you do not belief that new technology can turn the tide. nsm for example as a iir only ashm was tested successfully with decoys and distinguished between the decoys and the ship. with a second type of seeker and sensor fusion you can further improve such ashm.
Sea Wolf isnt a CIWS any more than Crotale or RIM-7 is. The USN can afford to mount Phalanxes on anything they want…
you can call sea wolf whatever you want, the quoted range is 6 km so i call it a ciws (11km for crotale and 16km for rim-7 m/p/r/…). for the burkes i stil think that costs are one major point but yes essm may do the job and maybe if there is no use for the harpoons they do not see the danger which may require a last line of defence.
Mk8 ammo is bought in batches to maintain stockpiles and is available from commercial sources – Brazil, for example, will be using the mount for the next few decades so even if we were to discontinue our own ammo sources obtaining more would hardly be difficult.
so you are depending on the onliest main user of the 114mm outside the uk. most of their ships are old, maybe in future they will switch to another gun mount because it’s foreseeable that the 114mm will die.
Spares costs for keeping the mount in service will be miniscule compared to buying in new systems even if you have to manufacture a few bespoke components.
my work experience tells me that sooner or later you will reach a point where keeping a old system in service is a pure waste of money. but maybe the c3 will be sold first. 😉
I promise you slamming three or four 4.5″ shells into most ‘large ships’ will serious degrade that ships operations. 3P and 3A ammunition? – so we are still trying to make the ship a warfighter eh Radar?. So not only do we need the new mounts we need the fancy antimissile ammo?!. This is just not necessary for the OPV mission.
i do not make an opv a warfighter, i get it more flexibal and 3p is no “fancy” anti missile ammo, it’s just a flexible pregrogrammable round. maybe you mixed it up with dart?
A 76mm will have to fire a lot of rounds to place the same weight of fire as a few 4.5″ shells, and, at nowhere near the range.
that is not what i sayed. the 76 mm will place more weight in 10 sec or 1 min than a mk8. it’s the time in which you can take down your target that counts, not the number of rounds spend.
Perfectly. The Argentine garrison on South Georgia gave up when a Mk8 started firing on it and coercion ops are much more effective when you have real naval artillery…not a glorified anti-aircraft mount!.
lol. so now you have just placed the opv in a high density warfighting scenario. sorry but the falkland war perfectly shows where you will end without a ciws and this is definitely no place for an opv.
We’ve had Mk8 mount ships in artillery duels with shore batteries – they didnt loose!. Use the ships flight for spotting and the advantage is with the automatic, computer controlled naval weapon over the manual operated, manually-laid shore battery.
when, where against which artillery?
and how long does it take do get your uav or helo in the air (praying that an armee or a group of terrorists which are shooting at you with artillery do not have some manpads). it’s also a question on how many guns the shore battery has, 6 105 mm guns e.g. can provide round about 70 rounds per minute, hard to counter this with a single mk8.
so at the end with mk8 or not you will evade and call for an airstrike (and to say it again this is a warfighting scenario)
Nonsense. Ships main guns have been used for coercion and gunboat diplomacy for hundreds of years. WIGS tasked ships have used their Mk8’s to make druggies pay attention. Both are sub-warfighting tasks that are manifestly better performed by a Mk8 than anything lighter.
if you want to make gunboat diplomacy you will not send a opv. and the drug smuggler (which i agree is a non warfighting scenario and fits well to an opv) would also pay attention to an 57 mm or a 76mm because they have nothing to answer. they can also choose between give-up and try to escape. if they have speedboats and try to escape, a smaller gun with a high rate of fire like the 57mm or 76mm would be the best choice.
all this ends the same way: whenever a mk8 would be the right choice, it’s not a job for a opv/c3.
@Distiller: it would be interesting to see which type of missile was targeted (size, speed) but 75 % success rate isn’t that bad for a system in combat usage even it was not designed for this special usage. but yes in a high density scenario i would not rely on a ciws (which can be also systems other than phalanx) alone.
radarYet you would advocate CIWS hardkill, like Phalanx or Goalkeeper, …
yes i would because there is no reason not to do so. that no ciws shoot down a ashm in combat is not a fault of the ciws. if there was a situation in which a ciws failed and if i assume that a ciws today stil would fail in a similar situtaion, i might think different.
How can you though?. The CIWS could only be considered as effective as the drones you test them against. You make the point as to quantifying the nature of the threat systems ECCM characteristics, well, in the same way how are you sure that your target drones are replicating the terminal evasive manoevres that a C-803 would take, or a Kh-35 etc, etc. What do you have in the inventory that could replicate a 3M-54E Klub?!.
for sure you are right that getting a highly agile, supersonic target drone today is a big problem. but the way out here is to develop such a drone and prove the ciws (and all the other aaw-systems). nobody would degrade the ability of a aster-15 but i would also prove them with such a drone. for the testing itself i would go through an extreme value test with random high-g maneuvers and if the ciws will get them at 30 g it’s also most likley that it get a ashm with 20 g maneuvers.
Softkill doesnt care about the kinematics or terminal evasion capabilities, in fact, its likely to be more effective as an inbounds terminal velocity increases as the missiles seeker window is that much smaller for refining its target plot.
on the other hand there is less time to deploy the softkills in time and to maneuver the ship to improve the effects of the softkills. maybe you have to buy a supersonic business jet to test this 😉
Not really. The ARH seeker head can never, really, be all that discriminatory because of 1 key problem – target aspect. A ship bows on compared with a ship beam on are two massively different RCS profiles. How do you tell a missile to disregard a contact of x or y sq.m in favour of RCS z when you have no way of knowing what RCS the target will have in the first place!.
my idea is not do preprogramm a rcs of a ship before launch but to monitor the rcs of the target during the attack. of course the rcs will change if the ship changes course but it does not explode from one second to another like a chaff decoy.
rbs-15 mk4 e.g. will have a dual mode seeker with active radar and iir and a more expensive version is planned with additional sar and lpi capabilities. i think there are several ashm under development with similar abilities (they are also useful in a secondary role as land attack missile). and to distinguish between a decoy and a ship no highly developed algorithms are needed. detecting a special ship between several other ships under all aspects may be tricky but to differ between a diffuse ir cloud and a sharp silhouette of a ship you only need a student research project to solve it.
Not so, find a CIWS on a T23 or a late FltIIA Burke – while both have excellent ILMS both are tied to fire channel limits for those systems. If the softkill isnt relied on, as the only layer inside the ILMS, why no CIWS?.
the type 23 has sea wolf, another ciws with similar range limits won’t be that useful. for the burkes i think only the us-navy knows why they go without ciws, i would assume cost issues (why do they not carry harpoons, do they want to rely on the sh-60 only?). and btw why do you move the softkills now to the inner layer, i think the preferable way would be to confuse some ashm first and to shoot at the remaining. there is no much room to use decoys at the lower range limit of sea wolf.
Ammunition…we have, spares….we have,
if your ammuntion is durable for the next 30 or 40 years and you have enough of them, if you have every part spared in numbers which are enough for the whole c3 lifetime, … than you are right. but maybe you want to improve your gun in the future because of some problems, maybe you run out of ammunition or you need new one to face new threads, maybe your old mounts eats up your spared servos faster than you thought. in this cases you have to restart production lines which were not used for many years and all theses costs are only shared to 8 c3 opvs. with a new 76mm you will share this with a lot of other customers. maintenance effort tend to increase over servicetime so starting with a new 57mm/76mm of course is more expensive today and it might also be a little bit more expensive than a mk8 after 10 years service use but imho it is that small to be worried about.
Anti-surface Mk8 is also far more capable than the smaller calibre mounts. The 57mm or 76mm only has an advantage in anti-aircraft over the Mk8 and if there is any potential threat from aircraft there are the DS30 guns and even MANPADS that could do a job as effectively. Realistically if there was a significant threat in theatre we wouldnt be sending a C3, but a C2 instead. Just as we wouldnt send an OPV(H) to patrol the northern Gulf!.
for the anti surface it’s the question of whats your target and goal. if you want to sink a large ship, the mk8 is the winner (but it’s also a very hard job to do this with a 114mm), if you want to shoot at a fast moving target (also outside the range of your small guns) go for the 57mm or 76mm. 3p and 3a plus are also much more flexible in most situations. you can decide how to react in asym. warfare scenarios and limit your lethal force. for a opv which should not be used as a warfighter this sounds more interesting to me than a 114mm ngs mount. (and i think you know that seen over time a 76mm will deliver more metal to a target then a 114mm because of it’s rate of fire)
Whats expensive about a Mk8 we’ve already bought and would be re-using when compared to buying in Bofors or OTO mounts?. What scenarios exist that could see a non-warfighting NGS mission…how about scaring scrap metal dealers off British territory as an example. Coercing a small garrison to surrender by lobbing a few shells in. On MCMW tasking what happens if, in the opponents littoral, a 105mm shore battery opens up to chase you away. Whats a 57mm going to do about that?.
you got this a wrong. what i mean is that a mk8 is a lot more expensive than a 30mm. it might be cheaper than a 76mm mount (if you do not need to modernise or rework them) but if i would not install the cheapest gun (30mm) i would go the whole way to a 57/76mm gun.
are you serious about your “scenarios”? if there are some 105mm shooting at you, you will evade and get out of range in any case and then call for an airstrike. countering fire with a single 114m mount is not a good idea. without accurate target data and the right ammunition you will lose the battle.
and why do you think an enemy shooting around with 105mm guns do not have some ashm around or an old su-22 or something else to make your day really bad? and i don’t think that a cheap slow rotating radar can provide you with data for starting counter fire.
The point of the C3 is precisely NOT to make a fight of things with an advanced enemy though. It should be a cheap, long-range, multirole OPV and a big gun on the front won’t and shouldn’t change that.
a mk8 is not as cheap as a 30mm gun. the problem is that your points “cheap”, “ngs” and “non warfighter” doesn’t matche each other. if you want to go cheap take a 30mm (no ngs, no warfighter), if you want to have ngs you are not that cheap and you are in a warfighter situation.
radarDoesnt mean its not effective but its certainly not proven. In the context of this debate that is enough for me.
and i do not want to call a system proven just because of results which are 30 years old.
Yes there is a wealth of combat experience – just none of it is relevent to CIWS as, for whatever reason, where antiship missiles have been fired CIWS has either been unavailable or, somewhat tellingly, inactive.
if you refer to stark and hanit i think it’s interesting that they didn’t use their softkill-systems. i would not count it as a fault or problem of the softkill-systems because afaik the stark incident was mainly based on human errors and technical problems caused by other systems but there is one question to me: why did they not use the decoys? from my point of view there is a big advantage of decoys: you will never cause a blue on blue with them. shooting some rounds if the situation is not clear would be no big deal. if i remember the report correct, they armed the srboc just at the last minute before impact and never used it.
You therefore have to look to the systems with the widest possible set of operational parameters and, any way you cut it, that is not conventional closed-loop CIWS.
i do not see the problem with the ciws. imho i can easily collect more data about my own ciws than on how an enemy seeker will react on my decoys.
The guidance section. You show a seeker what it wants to see and the seeker will fly to it and thats the bottom line.
and do you really know what the seeker want’s to see? do you know how a seeker will react if a 10.000 sqm rcs just blows of next to the target? maybe it can discriminate between false targets and real ones, maybe it just rescans for a target which is most similar to the target which was tracked first, maybe it makes a random choice (=> 50/50 for seduction like scenarios). with modern microcontrollers you can implement so much different algos to improve the seeker.
the best way would be if the decoys looks exactly like the ship but this is not that easy to get for a single type of sensor. getting a false signature for active/passive rf and ir sensors which is very similar or euqal to the ships signature and which is deployed on the same place to counter dual mode seekers is a big problem and with iir-seekers you are really in trouble.
To be honest Radar I dont believe that there really is a “low acceptance among navies”. If you look around at the more modest naval services softkill is a repeating feature of even quite minor combattants and the developed services are all replete with every kind of decoy, jammer and obscurant. The perception is that hardkill is ‘sexier’ than softkill definitely – its obviously hard to argue that a radar-guided gatling-gun spinning round and letting rip thousands of rounds is anything other than very cool – that is little to base a ships defence on in reality though!.
maybe a phalanx is cool but you can buy a car which is cool or sexy but your defence procurement is based on requirements, facts and money. and i think that the “low acceptance” is not related to spreading of them. yes most warships carry sofkill systems and i would also have some of them on my ship but nobody relies on them so a lot of ciws are installed. if the decoys confuses some ashm, thats fine but if not there will be a ciws to clean the skies.
from my point of view confusing a ashm with a lot of false targets is the best way to use decoys because it does not effect the ships defence operation much (like course changes etc.) and it make it easy to decide early which ashm is stil heading towards the ship. but confusion rounds have to be deployed early to be effective. decoys next to the ship make it hard do decide if a ashm is decoyed or not and in this case the hardkill systems may stil attack these ashm.
I would, personally, be more confident going into a low-modest threat scenario equipped in that fashion than if I had no softkill but a Phalanx bolted atop the hangar.
me not. 😉
The money for the Mk8 logistics chain has been spent already.
established logistics stil costs money. my idea is based on sharing some of them with a lot of other users instead of paying them alone.
What does a 57mm or 76mm give C3 that Mk8 doesnt?. Anti-aircraft capability?. When is a C3 going to be shooting at aircraft?. The Mk8 mount on a C3 isnt to make it a warfighter….C3 isnt a warfighter. The Mk8 is to confer a coercive presence for the ships patrol taskings and could be used for limited NGS in support of its MCMW and in low-intensity scenarios. In that sense its a LOT more effective than the likely alternative – a DS30 and, IMO, actually more useful than either a 57mm or 76mm would be.
a 57mm or 76mm will outplay a mk8 in any roles besides ngs. and i do not see a scenario in which a non warfighter can provide ngs and is not threatened by planes or ashm. is there any “low-intensity” scenario where ngs is needed but where you can be sure that there is no ashm. i think the hanit has shown us that this scenario will not appear. a 30mm has the advantage to be cheap but a mk8 is not that cheap and it’s not that useful so i would go for a 57mm or 76mm.
radarIn fact, I believe, no CIWS or PDMS has ever destroyed an inbound warshot AShM and the nearest that we have come to seeing hardkill work, in operational environments, is the Sea Dart shootdown of that Iraqi Styx.
i think there are hundreds of weapons systems spread around the world which are never used in combat situations. only because a system was never used in combat does not mean it’s not effective.
(fortunately) there is not much experience from real combat situtations to base modern naval warfare on but this is not only related to ciws.
If you’ll forgive the flippancy SeaWolf was ‘well tested against drones’ as well as targets it was never expected to perform against. Its trials reports glowed based on the missiles performance. Those trials meant precisely nothing a few years later when failures started costing lives.
so there was a gap between the test scenarios and the combat situation in the falkland war. why do you think that proofing softkill-systems is more reliable than testing ciws? of course a test result can only be an answer on how a system reacts in the test setup used. if i never test my ciws with very low flighing targets in front of land clutter i do not know how it will perform here. same to the softkills.
You slide a round cannister into a launch tube – it takes no longer than loading a mortar!.
maybe there is a difference between mortar operations where you normally prepare your rounds next to the mortar before firing and a decoy launcher where the rounds are stored seaworthy some meters away from the launcher, maybe 28 kg of a 130 mm chaff round is not as easy to handle than a 13 kg 120 mm mortar round, maybe you do not have enough sailors to let 3 of them work on a single decoy launcher like it is normally done during mortar operations, …
a srboc can be reloaded faster than a phalanx for sure but in less than a minute?
You’ve still got to take the radar from standby back to radiate and then let it track form…more time taken. Comparitively, by this point, the decoy launcher has probably already fired its next salvo and is reloading, if necessary.
i think nobody here knows how long a phalanx needs for this if it is well feeded by the integrated combat system from the ship and it’s also unknown how long the dl-12 e.g. needs to get back in action and to recognise the new rounds and the type of rounds so everything here is speculative. from my point of view it should be no problem to do both processes in a very short time.
Remember that, whilst an offboard decoy (unless its a float) may have a short lifespan the seeker window on an inbound is also equally short.
and you have to place your decoys to be at the right place just at the right time.
Depends on the installation surely. Terma’s DL-12T system (as fitted in the Thetis boats) mounts up to 24 tubes fully compatible with standard 130mm decoy rounds.
and hopefully you have stil some rounds of the right type of decoy in the right adjusted barrel on the right launcher if a second ashm is inbound.
You must see what is written above Radar?. All he says is that softkill is a complex topic and that the general perception is that soft-kill is difficult to quantify in effects terms. Just because there is a ‘perception’ that soft-kill is not as straight forward as hard-kill does not make it less effective – it just means that you have to know something about the techniques to quantify it.
i think the important part is “the use and the understanding of countermeasures is too complex” and “insufficient predictability in action”. do you think the “low acceptance among navies” is caused by missing knowledge they have? the problem is that you need a highly automated and integrated combat managment system to use your decoys effective in a fast emerging combat situation. this may fit to a adequate frigate but if you want to build a low cost opv you will end up with a small decoy launching console on your bridge.
in general i do not belief that we will see a mk8 on the c3. if we want to have a really cheap solution we will see the 30 mm on it and if we want to have a good solution we will use the 57 mm or 76 mm. a mk8 isn’t that useful on the c3 and if the c1, c2 and type 45 will change over to 155 mm than it would also be no cheap solution because a lot of money has to be spend to keep all the logistic chain in service for the c3. so calculated to 30 years it could be even cheaper to buy 76 mm or 57 mm and to phase out the mk8 114mm. both 57mm and 76mm are spread widely and it should be no problem to buy ammunition, spare parts or upgrade them in 20 or 30 years.
so if a c3 should be cheap use the 30 mm. talking about ciws or softkills is needless because this will be a peacetime ship which should be not deployed in any scenario in which it could be in front of an inbound ashm.
if the c3 has any chance to get into such a scenario i would spend extra money to get 57mm/76mm/ciws because i would not rely only on a “cheap” softkill solution. (and i want to effective shoot at planes etc.)
radaras I’ve said it all has to work first time or its game over. IF you BASE your self-defence on that system you are vulnerable to the first 15 pence microswitch fail that brings down the mount traverse motor, or the FCR or the operator console.
i think your decoy launching system also has to work at the first time and if they used the same 15 pence microswitch in the decoy launching console it doesn’t matter if it’s a decoy launching console or a ciws console.
decoy systems also tend to become traversable to get more tactical flexibility so there is also one or more motors at the mount.
You would not dispute the fact that a chaff rocket, pyrotechnics rocket or floating RF jammer is, mechanically, a far simpler system than a state-of-the-art CIWS I trust?.
in general yes but the decoy systems also getting more complex today. it doesn’t matter if a ciws e.g. has a mtbf of 30 days and a decoy system has a mtbf of 60 days as long as there is a good chance that the system will work by the time i need it. at the end of the day it’s fortune if the ciws or the decoy system worked in the minute the attack started, the important point is that both systems have to be reliable enough to belief that they can work.
of course it’s a problem if my ciws fails every day or every test but as i sayed earlier if i’m not happy with the reliability of my ciws i have to improve it or change it until it matched my criteria. this could be done by increasing the mtbf of the system or by making it fault tolerant by reducing/eliminating the single points of failure or by duplicating the ciws systems.
from my point of view it does not make much sense not to use a hardkill system only because it’s reliablity is not as high as the reliability of softkill system. the corollary would be not to put a radar on a ship because it’s mtbf is much higher than the mtbf of a binocular. the right way is to improve all the systems constantly to have as much of them available if we need them. and if i take a look on how widely spread ciws are today there can’t be a huge reliability problem. and they are well tested against both drones and real ashm.
Decoy launchers can be reloaded in seconds and brough back into readiness in next to no time after that.[…] How fast can you reload a gun-based CIWS in a streaming attack and, if you have on-mount sensors, how long does it take to re-initialise the system after the reload is complete?.
60 seconds also makes a minute. a srboc for example has to be loaded round by round. with 6 barrels on a single mount one minute per mount would be a good time. on the other hand there are fast reload systems for phalanx which make it possible to reload it in less than 5 minutes. re-initialising should also be possible in “next to no time” because usually the ciws is integrated to the ships combat managment system which will provide initial target information and engagement order.
I reiterate that it is very much easier to saturate hardkill defences […] than broad aspect soft-kill.
i think this depends on the scenario. a ciws will get problems if more than one ashm will arrive at the exactly same time because it has to get it one by one but in a streaming attack it can handle 3 or even 5 ashm until it runs out of ammunition (gun based). in this case the decoy launchers will run empty first.
Stretching the point a bit radar!. You are suggesting that no ships wouldve been sunk by freefall bombs in the Falklands if all RN ships had mounted a Phalanx?.
i sayed that a ciws can engage planes whereas softkill-systems are completely useless here. i’m no visionary so i can not say if no ship would have been sunk but i think it would be very unlikely that a ciws didn’t hit something if deployed.
The point is though Radar that those earlier missiles were decoyed by peer-technology systems. Syrian P-15’s may, by today’s standards, be antiquated, but, to the Israeli Navy at Latakia in 73 they were anything but. They defeated that threat with softkill.
there are two major issues here:
– only because their softkill worked, it does not mean that a hardkill systems would not perform equal or even better. there was no adequate ciws 1973.
– a match result between a and b which occured 35 years ago does not necessarily means that another match today between a+ and b+ will result the same way.
AGM-84’s, AM-39’s etc have been defeated by softkill under operational conditions and both are current service weapons who’s seekers capabilities, generally, are unchanged in the sense that they still operate in the same frequency bands and still respond to defined RF contrasts.
only because a radar is stil using the same frequency does not mean that it stil react the same way. imho a ashm can be improved much in terms of electronic, microcontrollers and software making them more ecm-resistent without changing the frequency of the radar.
Passive/Active seekers really are nothing new Radar and the counter to them – is well known and well proven.
imho it’s a very dangerous position to think that if a single system is well known all systems have to be equal. especially between passiv seekers there can be incredible differences which are only limited by your engineers knowledge and your money to get it.
an interesting citation for the end of this post:
“From my point of view the biggest problem of shipboard countermeasures is its ‘black magic’ aspect,” said Heinz Bannasch, product manager at Buck Neue Technologien GmbH (Neuenburg, Germany). “With all these different IR and RF grenades and rockets for short-, medium- and long-range deployment for confusion, distraction, or seduction in combination with jamming devices, hard kill, ship maneuvers, etc., the use and the understanding of countermeasures is too complex. Low acceptance among navies for shipboard countermeasures is not so much due to a perception of overall low effectiveness of the technology, but from insufficient predictability in action.”
(Buck Neue Technologien GmbH belongs to Rheinmetall and produces the MASS trainable decoy launcher)
radarsorry jonesy but if you call this nuts you should start looking for a better ciws. i don’t know if phalanx for example today has the same reliability problems it may had years ago but this doesn’t matter because there are a lot of ciws around and at the upper end is ram.
if you think that all this systems are not reliable why do we waste so much money to get them?
and in a streaming attack of ashm how long your decoys will be deployed? 30 sec? and how fast you can reload your decoy launchers? sorry but softkill systems can also be saturated.
and some ashm are capable of doing a second run if the first one runs into a decoy (reattack), some decoy systems have to be deployed early to work, some are affected a lot by the weather, a decoy is not able to shoot down a plane (how much ships were hit by a ashm and how much were hit with bombs during the falkland war?), …
This is a debate that goes way back and there is no real definitive answer save for the observation that many times more antiship missiles have been defeated by softkill than destroyed by CIWS if you actually look at operational performances.
maybe you could start list all the decoyed and destroyed ashm but that is not my point. the point is, that most (if not all) of these decoyed ashm situations are 20 years ore more ago. and nobody can forecast if a state of the art ashm can be decoyed like a exocet or a silkworm 20 years ago. it is impossible to proof a softkill system with all ashm which are available today.
a hardkill system on the other hand can be proofed easily with sub and supersonic target drones at any time. and if you realize that maybe your phalanx tends to jam you can improve it and test it again, or you can choose a different ciws.
a softkill system can only proofed if you can get all the state of the art ashm-seekers or you have to wait until you really need it in wartime.
Passive/active radar is as old as the hills….it was fallible when the Yanks used it in TASM and it still is today. IIR is the danger but it seems people are slow to realise it!.
maybe it’s a false estimation to think a system which failed years ago will still fail today but anyhow putting all of them in a single ashm is the trick.
radarthe difference between softkills and hardkills is that by using softkills you pray that the engineers of your opponents ashm didn’t make a good job. if you use hardkill-systems you rely on the work of your own engineers independent from the quality of the ashm-seeker.
both may work but i would prefer hardkills as my major defence and use softkills only as a low cost additional defence.
imho in the future ashm will get more and more dual/multisensor seekers with acitve/passive radar and (i)ir. this makes it a lot harder to defeat a ship with softkill-systems.
radarthe last (5.) one: the twin 25 mm gun of an austal patrol boat for yemen.
radari will quote for the fourth one: a ex uscg reliance class cutter with a second life as a navy opv.
i was sure that this bridge/superstructure design was familiar to me but i never thought about the uscg. 😉
radarthe 3rd one (middle): comandante joao belo class?
radarThe Spanish have an F100 in the group along with the Burke – any reason you think they’ll leave the USN ship to it?. If not there’s another pair of directors and, according to the Spanish Navy, 64 ESSM and 32 SM-2!.
i’m not sure that both ships belong to the same surface group. afaik the burke is in the black sea to support the civilians with food etc. and most of the other ships are there for a nato exercise. if both ships operate in the same group ok, but maybe not.
You cant ignore the fact that the Bazalt isnt a skimmer either!. If SPY-1 doesnt pick up a high altitude diver at the farthest extent of the SM-2 engagement envelope there is something very wrong there – seeing that is the weapon profile that the system was developed to defeat. 5 fire channels combined with ESSM and softkill against Moskit I’d not be so confident in from the attack perspective.
as far as i know the bazalt is also able to use a low-low profil which is not that low (30 m => read: 38 km radar horizon) and which limits both speed and range but it also limits the time for defending the ships dramatically.
even the high-low profil would make it not that easy to get the missiles before they drop under the radar horizon because this will happen maybe 100 km in front of the ship. shooting with sm-2 to late means lossing the sm-2 for nothing as soon as the bazalt’s are below the radar horizon because of the absence of an active seeker. but in this case the fleet is alarmed and can prepare their defence and start shooting as soon as the ashm are detected again.
but i would prefer a low-low profile because this gives the attacker a good chance to overtake the defence. it will take the ships some precious seconds to get ready and to get the permission to start shooting.
radarand i didn’t say “the entire strength of the Black Sea fleet, plus several naval strike squadrons” 😉
a cruiser and 3 missiles boats means 16 bazalt’s and 20 moskit’s. shooting down 36 supersonic ashm starting at a range of 30 km will drive the three mk-91 on a burke crazy, especially if the attack is well planned (different flight paths, simultaneous impact). imho this number of missiles is more than a single burke can handle at such a short distance.
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