Looks like I will be otherwise occupied for about a week, so content through next weekend will be light to none existent. I will try to drop in occasionally. Hope to be back to full strength week of 22 Sept.

I found this video over at CIMSEC where they posted a short review of the progress in the use of UAVs,

I had not been thinking of using UAVs from icebreakers, but it makes a lot of sense. As we have seen, flying helicopters in the Arctic is still a dangerous business. In addition to removing people from a relatively dangerous environment, UAVs have the potential advantage of much longer endurance. The UAV in the video is the Austrian built Schiebel S-100 that is used by the Chinese Navy as well as the French and German Navies and many other agencies.

gCaptain is reporting a helicopter operating from the Canadian Icebreaker Amundsen crashed in the Arctic killing the pilot, the Amundsen’s CO and a scientist.

More here.

Note: I wrote this for CIMSEC which has a broader, largely non-Coast Guard readership. It is post there as well. What goes unsaid is that cutters are well equipped to assume those few cruiser functions that can still only be handled by surface vessels. 

Looking back at Corbett’s writings, he talks a great deal about the need for cruisers, but technology and terminology have moved on and the cruisers of Corbett’s days are not what we think of as cruisers today. Corbett’s “Some Principles of Maritime Strategy” was published in 1911. There were some truly large cruisers built in the years leading up to World War I, but Corbett decried these in that their cost was in conflict with the cruiser’s “essential attribute of numbers.”

A typical cruiser that came out of the thinking of the day was the Active Class (1912). 3,440 tons, 26 knots, and ten 4″ guns. Many of the cruisers of the day were even smaller, many under 3,000 tons.

HMS Fearless, an Active class cruiser

Corbett often referred back to the Nelsonian period. His idea of a cruiser was the smallest warship that could undertake prolonged independent operations, frigates, sloops of war, and brigs, even schooners. Their missions were:

• Protection of our own maritime commerce
• Denial of the enemy’s commerce, including blockade and commerce raiding
• Scouting (ISR in the current vocabulary)
• Screening the battlefleet (both anti-scouting to deny the enemy knowledge of own battlefleet and protection for the swarm of flotilla craft with torpedoes.)
• Communications

Of these he seemed to consider scouting for and screening the battlefleet, unfortunate, if necessary distractions from their primary duty of exercising control over maritime communications and commerce.

In the hundred plus years since Corbett’s writing, the number and types of naval platforms have proliferated and the roles once the exclusive domain of these relatively small surface ships have been assumed by other systems.

Radio replaced the dispatch carrying function of Nelson’s cruisers and improvements continually reduced the importance of the role for 20th century cruisers.

The torpedo boat destroyers first grew from what we would now call FACs into cruiser roles and cruiser size and now emerged as major strategic assets in their own right.

Submarines, which were little understood in Corbett’s time, quickly emerged as the premier commerce raider. Later they took on the role of countering their own kind, just as cruisers once did. They have scouted for and screened surface ships. They also grew into additional roles that make them in some respects inheritor of the battleship mantle as well as that of the cruiser.

Airplanes, also a recent innovation when Corbett wrote his classic, quickly became effective and essential scouts. They began to screen the fleet against the opposing “flotillas” including the enemies own planes. Flying from escort carriers or in the form of long range maritime patrol aircraft that took on the cruisers role of protecting commerce. During WWII they replaced the battleships’ guns.

More recently satellites also assume roles in scouting and communications.

Small surface ships can still do the missions Corbett identified, but it seems other systems may be able to do them as well or better. Are their still roles for the smallest warships that can undertake prolonged independent operations?

There are still some things only surface ships can do. What is enemy commerce is not always obvious. In many cases only a visit and search can determine if a vessel is innocent.

While aircraft and even submarines may protect our own commerce, when ships are attacked far from shore, only surface ships (and their embarked aircraft), can save the crews or bring damage control assistance.

These are certainly not jobs for Burke class destroyers, which are now, with BMD and land attack roles, essentially Capital Ships. We need some minimum number of ships to do these tasks which are essential to the exercise of sea control. Once we establish how many wee need, we can consider if the marginal cost of adding MCM, ASW, ASuW, and/or AAW capability is worthwhile. Frigates once filled this role, in addition to others, LCS are the only ships the Navy is currently building that might do these jobs. Some Coast Guard Cutters may also be appropriate. Somehow, I doubt we have enough, and I have doubts that they are adequately armed to deal with even medium sized merchant vessels without assistance.

Essentially we have a fleet of battleships of several types, CVNs, SSBNs, SSNS, DDGs, Amphibs. Simple and numerous “cruisers,” the smallest ships that can undertake prolonged independent operations, are almost non-existent.

“In no case can we exercise control by battleships alone. Their specialization has rendered them unfit for the work, and has made them too costly ever to be numerous enough. Even, therefore, if our enemy had no battle-fleet we could not make control effective with battleships alone. We should still require cruisers specialized for the work and in sufficient numbers to cover the necessary ground.”

Ref: “Some Principles of Maritime Strategy,” by Julian Stafford Corbett: http://eremita.di.uminho.pt/gutenberg/1/5/0/7/15076/15076-h/15076-h.htm

Photo credit: Loren, ROC Coast Guard ships in Keelung Harbor, 1 January 2007

Earlier we saw this photo and comments indicated that Derecktor, which built nine of the USCG’s 270s had sold the design to Taiwan.

(Additional photos and discussion here.)

I ran across more specifics recently. There are two ships in the class, Ho Hsing (CG-101) and Wei Hsing (CG-102). They both entered service in 1992, two years after the last 270. Compared to the Bear Class, their reported dimensions are essentially identical. They have more than twice the horsepower of our 270s, 15,470 bhp from two MTU 16V1163 TB93 diesels, but still have a maximum speed of only 22 knots (I would have expected a knot or two more). They are slightly heavier than the Bear class at 1,823 tons full load (vice 1,780) resulting in a slightly deeper draft. They do not have a medium caliber gun, fire control system, or ESM system.

The interesting thing about these ships is that they replaced the helicopter capability with four “interceptor boats” each with its own set of davits.

According to Combat Fleets of the World, “The eight interceptor craft (four for each ship–Chuck) were delivered 7-91 from Hood Military Vessels of the U.S.: 12.19 m (40 foot) overall, six crew, two 300-php Cummins diesels driving Arneson outdrives for 35 knots, range 382 nautical miles at 35 kts, 466 nautical miles at 30 knots.

The result is perhaps unique among the world’s patrol ships. We might speculate that they may use these relatively large boats to extend the search horizon of the ship. They might launch two (or even all four) at dawn and use them to search until the approach of darkness on a parallel tracks with the mother ship. Or perhaps they see the problem as, not one of finding vessels to board, but of a very target rich environment, and this is their solution for making the maximum number of boardings.

On the other hand, the result does look a little like the High Speed Transport (APD) conversions of destroyers made during WWII.