USS Zumwalt DDG-1000 Out For Sea Trials

[Noname117]

"On 17 March 2006, the Secretary of the Navy exercised his authority to strike Iowa and Wisconsin from the NVR, which cleared the way for both ships to be donated for use as museum ships, but the United States Congress remained "deeply concerned" over the loss of the naval surface gunfire support that the battleships provided, and noted that "navy efforts to improve upon, much less replace, this capability have been highly problematic."^[53] As a partial consequence, Congress passed Pub.L. 109–163, the National Defense Authorization Act 2006, requiring that the battleships be kept and maintained in a state of readiness should they ever be needed again.^"

From the wikipedia page of the USS Iowa. As a result of the naval gunfire support debate, it was decided that the battleships could be recommissioned in case of an emergency until another ship sufficiently replaced them in the role. The Zumwalt class was indeed designed to replace them in the naval gunfire support role, but with the cancellation of most of the class the gap is still left open. The gun the Zumwalt is designed with, the 6 inch AGS system, is a significant improvement over the 5-inch guns mounted on the Arleigh Burkes, as it is more capable of shore bombardment, and I am pretty certain that the railgun they plan on equipping one of them with will be good for that purpose too.

Edited December 13, 2015 by Noname117

[Shpaget]

On 12/11/2015, 2:31:20, Red Iron Crown said:

I'm not so sure, Nibb31. Low radar cross section improves survivability against anti-surface missiles, most of which are radar guided; almost every modern Western destroyer and frigate has bgun implementing it. 

Ship stealth is easily countered by changing the guidance system of missiles. Take a satellite / recon plane photo / submarine data / whatever to roughly locate enemy ships, launch the missiles in the general direction of them and when in general area (determined by GPS or even dead reckoning) the missiles turn on their ADF system and the enemy air defense radar suddenly becomes a beacon to guide the missile to it.
If the enemy turns the radar off, the missile can still use heat signature of the ship, or even computer vision to reacquire the target.

[Red Iron Crown]

4 hours ago, Shpaget said:

Ship stealth is easily countered by changing the guidance system of missiles. Take a satellite / recon plane photo / submarine data / whatever to roughly locate enemy ships, launch the missiles in the general direction of them and when in general area (determined by GPS or even dead reckoning) the missiles turn on their ADF system and the enemy air defense radar suddenly becomes a beacon to guide the missile to it.
If the enemy turns the radar off, the missile can still use heat signature of the ship, or even computer vision to reacquire the target.

It takes time to develop new missile guidance, test it, get it into production, and get it deployed. In the meantime low radar cross section for naval vessels reduces the chance of detection and increases survivability against many existing threats. Besides, lowering radar cross section is not incredibly costly, it mostly involves being more careful about exposed shapes with awareness of what reflects better.

Even so, a large proportion of actual threat vectors are not from top-tier navies that can "easily" develop new systems; instead they're from smaller navies that source their hardware from other nations and have only their current stockpiles of existing antiship missiles, most of which are radar guided.

Contrary to popular belief, naval vessels rarely use their radars. EMCON is fairly standard practice, with passive sensors or at worst one or two active radar "pickets" doing detection for the whole group. IR or visual guidance is OK for the terminal phase of a missile attack, but it's not overly great for acquisition.

[Shpaget]

While I agree that introduction of a new system takes time, and that reducing radar signature is beneficial, complete radio silence includes shutting down systems such as Phalanx CIWS, which leaves them open to conventional missiles.

[Red Iron Crown]

19 minutes ago, Shpaget said:

While I agree that introduction of a new system takes time, and that reducing radar signature is beneficial, complete radio silence includes shutting down systems such as Phalanx CIWS, which leaves them open to conventional missiles.

CIWS is off almost all the time for EMCON reasons. By the time it is needed stealth isn't a factor anymore, there's already a missile on terminal approach. Naval ships keep their emissions to a minimum to avoid detection but once a missile attack is initiated against them they'll light up the radars for air defense missiles and guns. 

[RainDreamer]

Well, we are getting closer and closer to that sci fi future where everything just look so damn sleek.

[Shpaget]

How do you know a missile is on the way when your radars are off? Visually? By the time you see it, it's about to hit you anyway. Advance scout could offer some time for the information to reach the guy who turns on the CIWS, but without a radar, they would see it only if it flies right pass them, and if they do use a radar to extend their detecting range, they become a priority target.

[Red Iron Crown]

5 minutes ago, Shpaget said:

How do you know a missile is on the way when your radars are off? Visually? By the time you see it, it's about to hit you anyway. Advance scout could offer some time for the information to reach the guy who turns on the CIWS, but without a radar, they would see it only if it flies right pass them, and if they do use a radar to extend their detecting range, they become a priority target.

Passive sensors, those missiles are emitting radar signals.

Another scenario is using radar pickets, either aircraft or ships. You might have one destroyer with its radar on providing coverage for a whole battlegroup under EMCON. The enemy doesn't know if it's a single ship or a fleet, and you can do tricky, misleading things with the relative positions of the picket and group.

[Shpaget]

Missiles with active radar homing use it for terminal phase, so that leaves little time to react.

The one destroyer performing radar services for the fleet is susceptible to the method I described in my original comment. Once destroyed, the fleet has to reassign radar duty to another ship that becomes vulnerable.

[Red Iron Crown]

It's the Catch-22 of active sensor use: Go without and you're relatively blind, turn them on and everyone knows where you are. The radar picket method is a compromise. The picket itself is definitely vulnerable, that's the price paid for getting radar data and why relatively low value units are used for it.

[Shpaget]

So you take them out one by one until they run out of low value ship and have to resort to usage of bigger ones. Stealth is a very hard thing to do.