Tag Archives: Royal Navy

Ohio-class Replacement Details

Ohio-class Replacement Details

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The Ohio-class Replacement nuclear powered ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) is the Navy’s planned sea-based strategic nuclear deterrent. U.S. Navy officials outlined the capabilities of the boat this month.

“The Ohio Replacement is not, is not, a multi-mission platform,” Capt. William Brougham, US Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) Ohio-class Replacement Program Manager, said at the 2012 Naval Submarine League Symposium in Falls Church, Va. on Oct. 18.
“We don’t turn into a multi-mission platform that’s going to go off and do things that you see on television,” he said.

The Ohio Replacement is scaled back from the initial Analysis of Alternatives (AoA) for the program, then dubbed SSBN(X), conducted by NAVSEA in 2009. The initial AoA called for a boat that would have cost $6 to 7 billion but with the reduction in capability the Ohio Replacement drove costs down to $5.6 billion a copy. The eventual goal of the reductions is to produce the boats at $4.9 billion a copy.

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Timeline of the Polaris Missile

Timeline of the Polaris Missile

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On late October 1963, USS Andrew Jackson launched first Polaris A-3 missile from a submerged submarine, off Cape Canaveral, Florida. The Polaris program served as the template for the current Trident missile program which forms the backbone of the US strategic sea-based deterrent.

Cid Standifer is a freelance reporter, web designer and translator based in Arlington, Va. She has written for Military Times, Inside Washington Publishers and the Roswell Daily Record.

Shifting Targets

Shifting Targets

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Proceedings, October 2012
We must reconsider our strategic perspective and organizational culture amid an emerging naval revolution.

Today’s U.S. Navy faces trying times in every dimension. Accelerating technological trends are stressing naval development and adaptability, while the Army and Marine Corps contend with costly rebuilding after the long wars in southwest Asia. Yet domestic economic and infrastructure demands and the growing national deficit are cutting into defense resources. After a half-century of U.S. maritime dominance, rival naval powers are emerging. While technological developments threaten accelerated depreciation of the Navy’s capital assets, growing international competition, rising costs, and declining resources all pose severe challenges.

The rules of the game are changing in fundamental ways. Is the Navy organizationally and culturally prepared? Specifically, will the systems currently under development help expand or reduce the range of scenarios in which the service can be effective? What balance should be struck between investing in legacy systems rather than emerging technologies? These are questions we should be investigating.

Naval support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has been critical for a decade, but the Navy has been unable to focus on sea control and naval warfare at the same time. Marines and sailors with Regimental Combat Team 8 conducted Operation Eastern Seal in Helmand province in November 2011. U.S. Marine Corps Photo

Naval support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has been critical for a decade, but the Navy has been unable to focus on sea control and naval warfare at the same time. Marines and sailors with Regimental Combat Team 8 conducted Operation Eastern Seal in Helmand province in November 2011. U.S. Marine Corps Photo

During the past ten years, naval support for the land wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has been substantial and critical, even if largely unnoticed by the American public and political leadership. But this effort has come with a cost: the Navy has been unable to concentrate on its broader missions of sea control and naval warfare. Future strategic perspective will have to shift from one of small wars to the full range of naval warfare. In this process, history can play a productive role. Scholars believe history helps us empathize with the past and see it on its own terms, while decision-makers often look to it for lessons that shape solutions to real-time problems. Even though that approach runs the risk of superficial and inappropriate analogies, properly conducted case studies can broaden perspectives, illuminate issues, and structure questions that are key to informed and creative problem-solving.

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World Naval Developments: Royal Navy's Type 26: One Ship, Many Missions

World Naval Developments: Royal Navy’s Type 26: One Ship, Many Missions

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Proceedings, Oct. 2012

In August, the Royal Navy released details of its next surface combatant, the Type 26, a modular ship. Announced plans are to build 13 of these vessels to replace the surviving 13 Type 23 frigates. All were intended primarily for antisubmarine warfare (ASW); the Type 23s were conceived as minimum towed-array ships to work in the Greenland-Iceland-UK (GIUK) Gap mainly in support of maritime patrol aircraft. With the end of the Cold War, this mission disappeared, and the Type 23s found themselves carrying out a wide variety of peacetime missions, such as drug interdiction in the Caribbean and anti-piracy work off Somalia. An incidental effect of the change from harsh GIUK waters to calmer ones is that the ships’ hulls have lasted far longer than expected. (Cynics may suspect that the ships’ longevity is really the consequence of successive governments’ reluctance to buy replacements on a timely basis.)

type26_0Comparing the Type 26 to the U.S. Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) shows how wide a range the concept of modularity covers. The Type 26 is a 5,500-ton frigate that can be built in one of at least two versions. In appearance it is a scaled-down Type 45 destroyer with the same sort of tower foremast, in this case topped by the Artisan three-dimensional radar rather than the big Sampson of the Type 45. The Type 26 was conceived as part of a long-running project to design a Future Surface Combatant, which was originally to have been built in three versions of varying capability (and cost).

The Type 26 is apparently the ASW variant, presumably a direct replacement for the current Type 23, with much the same systems as the projected modernized Type 23. They include the Sea Centor vertically launched suface-to-air missile (replacing the current Seawolf) and the Type 2087 low-frequency active-passive sonar (towed pinger plus array plus medium-frequency bow array). Sea Centor is an active-radar-guided derivative of the current British short-range air-to-air missile, also known as CAMMS (Common Modular Missile System). It uses an uplink for mid-course guidance. The ship will have a single gun, either the 4.5-inch currently standard in the Royal Navy, or perhaps a derivative of the U.S. 5-inch/62 (BAE owns United Defense, which makes the U.S. gun). There may be provision for a more powerful gun; in the past BAE has advertised a 155-mm gun within the footprint of its 4.5 inch.

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Searching for Nelson's Quote

Searching for Nelson’s Quote

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Rising young U.S. Navy officer Stephen Decatur earned famous praise for ‘the most bold and daring act of the age’—or did he?

Lt. Stephen Decatur, Naval History and Heritage Command

Lt. Stephen Decatur, Naval History and Heritage Command

Late in the evening on 16 February 1804, the ketch Intrepid , commanded by Lieutenant Stephen Decatur, entered Tripoli Harbor. Almost becalmed in the dying breeze, the Intrepid drifted with agonizing slowness toward the captured American frigate Philadelphia , lying under the massed guns of the bashaw’s castle and harbor fortifications. As the Intrepid approached, a Barbary lookout on the Philadelphia spotted the Americans and cried out the alarm. The Intrepid tied onto the frigate. Decatur and 60 men boarded the Philadelphia , scattered or killed her harbor watch, and burned the ship. They then made good their escape in the Intrepid, with only one sailor slightly wounded.

The raid into Tripoli Harbor helped establish the reputation of the U.S. Navy, small as it then was, and is an iconic part of the service’s history. Almost equally known in American naval lore is that Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson, upon learning of the raid, called it “the most bold and daring act of the age.” It’s no wonder such a statement has assumed a hallowed aura. Nelson was a brilliant and daring naval officer, perhaps the greatest admiral in the long maritime history of England, and if he said the raid was without equal, his audience (posterity) can accept it as truth. Equally important, there is the sense of a laying-on of hands by Nelson, who died 18 months later in the moment of his greatest triumph at Trafalgar, “blessing” a seminal event led by one of the dynamic officers in the rising navy from across the Atlantic. It’s a dramatic story, loaded with symbolism.

But did Nelson actually call the burning of the Philadelphia “the most bold and daring act of the age”?

No contemporary or near-contemporary biography of Decatur, and no early account of the Barbary Wars, contains the Nelson quote. In what may have been the first attempt to provide the public with an account of Decatur’s life, Washington Irving’s 1813 article in the widely read Analectic Magazine , Nelson’s comment is absent. An 1819 collective biography of early American military and naval officers, written when Decatur was alive, makes no reference to the Nelson quote. The first full-scale biography of Decatur, published in 1821 (just after his death), contains no hint of it, nor does the first great history of the U.S. Navy, James Fenimore Cooper’s, the first edition of which appeared in 1839. 1

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30 Years Later: U.S. and the Falklands War

30 Years Later: U.S. and the Falklands War

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reagan_and_maggieReagan Readied U.S. Warship for ’82 Falklands War

While publicly claiming neutrality between Argentina and the U.K. during the 1982 Falklands War, President Ronald Reagan’s administration had developed plans to loan a ship to the Royal Navy if it lost one of its aircraft carriers in the war, former U.S. Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman, told the U.S. Naval Institute on June 26. more

Combat Fleets ’82: U.K. Carriers in the Falklands
webUSS-Iwo-Jima-LPH-2-1984
In the event of the loss of a British carrier in the 1982 Falklands War, the U.S. was prepared to loan a helicopter carrier to the U.K. Royal Navy.
Collected are the entries from the 1982/1983 Combat Fleets of the World of the British carriers and the ship the U.S. had prepared to loan the Royal Navy. more

Combat Fleets '82: Falklands Carriers

Combat Fleets ’82: Falklands Carriers

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In the event of the loss of a British carrier in the 1982 Falklands War, the U.S. was prepared to loan a helicopter carrier to the U.K. Royal Navy.

Collected are the entries from the 1982/1983 Combat Fleets of the World of the British carriers and the ship the U.S. had prepared to loan the Royal Navy.

USS Iwo Jima (LPH 2)

USS Iwo Jima underway in 1984[U.S. Naval Institute Archives]

USS Iwo Jima underway in 1984
[U.S. Naval Institute Archives]

Builder: Puget Sound NSY
Laid down: 2-4-69
Launched: 17-9-60
In service: 26-8-61
Displacement : 11,000 tons light (17,515-18,300 fl)
Speed: 23 kts
Dimensions: 183.6 (169.5 wl) × 31.7 (25.5 wl) × 7.9 (hull) meters
Armament: 4/76.2-mm DP (II × 2)—2/Mk 25 Sea Sparrow launchers (VIII x 2)
Aircraft: 20-24/ CH-46 helicopters 4/CH-53 heavy helicopters 4/HU-1 utility or AH-1 attack helicopters
Electronic Equipment: Radar: 1/LN-66, 1/SPS-10, 1/SPS-40, 1/SPN-10 or SPN-43
Electronic Counter Measures: WLR-6, ULQ-6, 4/Mk 36 SRBOC chaff TACAN: URN-20
Machinery: 1 set GT; 1 prop; 23,000 hp
Boilers: 4 Combustion Engineering (LPH 9: Babcock & Wilcox); 42.3 kg/cm2, 467°C
Electric: 6,500 kw
Manning: 47 officers, 605 men +190 officers, 1,900 Marines

Remarks: LPH 9 conducted V/STOL suitability trials during 1972 and for
several years thereafter operated up to twelve AV-8A Harrier. The
ships have also aeted as carriers for RH-53 minesweeping helicopters.
One folding side elevator forward, to port; one to starboard, aft of
the island; 70-m hangar. Excellent medical facilities (300 beds). LPH
9 has an ASCAC (Air-Surface Classification and Analysis Center).
LPH 12, to a slightly different design, carries two LCVP in davits.
Two Mk 63 gunfire control being removed. Two 20-m Vulcan/Phalanx AA to
be added.

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