sealordlawrence said:
The existing 5 inchers are woefully inadequate to provide fire support of the kind needed for sustained support of ground forces ashore. They don't have the range, can't deliver a powerful enough payload, lack versatility, and are not expandable. Even the Navy acknowledges this, hence the AGS program.
No, the Navy acknowledged that they wanted something else, not that they needed it.
Regarding Harrier/JSF and Cobras- while tremendous assets, they don't come close to what can be achieved with heavy cannon fire. Plus, they are far more expensive and complex. Of course, once you get beyond the range that can be reached from the sea, they're your only option until heavy artillery can be brought forward (our deficiencies with landbased heavy artillery is another topic).
The air craft are more flexible than any naval cannon and are perfectly sufficient. The ability of the USMC to rapidly bring M777 ashore is another factor to consider.
With all the problems cropping up with the basic design of these ships (seakeeping, placement of the missile launchers, manning, propulsion, etc.) I don't think we can single out the AGS as the main cause of the program's problems.
Take a look at a cross section of DDG1000 and you will see how much the ship was built around the gun systems.
Ironically, if we had kept the BBs (we'd have to come up with something to replace them about 10 years or so from now), we wouldn't have had to come up with something like AGS and maybe things would have turned out differently.
Yeah, the USN would have been even smaller as it maintained 4 man power hogging museum exhibits with little versatility.
Please excuse the way I'm formatting this, when I try and intersperse with multiple quotes I produce something even more difficult to follow than my usual ramblings
"No, the Navy acknowledged that they wanted something else, not that they needed it."
I must confess I don't understand this statement at all. Are you saying the Navy just went out one day and said, "You know what would be really swell? Let's go develop a new cannon for no particular reason!"? The Marines, Army and Navy might disagree with you. The main reason for AGS was to provide fire support and strike because the existing 5 inchers with their limited capabilities and numbers (note that the Arleigh Burkes only carry one each) couldn't provide what was needed, something that had been of concern since the 1960s, hence the MK81 8 inch mount, the various iterations of the Autonomous Naval Support Round (ANSR), etc. In fact, the original concept of AGS was that it would not even be in a turret, but would be vertically mounted.
"The air craft are more flexible than any naval cannon and are perfectly sufficient. The ability of the USMC to rapidly bring M777 ashore is another factor to consider."
Actually, this isn't true unless you restrict the comparison to existing naval cannon. The aircraft are superbly capable and flexible, but require an ashore infrastructure and unless they happen to be already overhead and have sufficient warload and gas available when you need them, a new technology naval cannon is going to do better most of the time,
as long as it's in range. Once outside that range (and that's the rub) aircraft and mobile artillery, which doesn't move very fast, are pretty much your only choice. Plus that naval cannon is a lot cheaper to operate. Now, one of things we've found is that trying to pack usable capability in a shell operable from existing cannon is problematic. Witness BTERM (canceled), ERGM (canceled), etc. The latter was working towards being able to deliver at extended ranges the awesome warload of 19 pounds. At the time of cancellation, cost was approaching $191,000 a round. A good portion of this was trying to fit all that tech in a round that could use existing 127 mm tubes. Hence, AGS.
"Take a look at a cross section of DDG1000 and you will see how much the ship was built around the gun systems".
Absolutely true, but so what? Fire support was one of the main reasons for DDG1000's existence. This is like saying, "It would be so much easier and cheaper to develop bombers if we just dropped the requirement for them to carry bombs".
"Yeah, the USN would have been even smaller as it maintained 4 man power hogging museum exhibits with little versatility".
Not going to go into an explanation of what could have been done with Battleships, that's a discussion for another forum. But, keeping mind that
they already existed, and with their much larger and more powerful main battery, many of the problems associated with trying to cram stuff into the smaller shell were simplified, and you didn't need to develop and build a new platform . As far as versatility goes, again without going into off-topic detail, they were much more versatile than you might think, for the types of missions we'd use them for today. However, restricting the discussion to simply fire support and strike they were really, really good, much better than anything we've had since. As far as manning goes, even though the Navy always had plenty of volunteers for those ships there were a number of proposals to reduce manning requirements (BTW, ever noticed the size of ship's company on a CVN?). For example, there was no longer any requirement for them to be able to sustain 33 knots. Therefore, you could mothball half the plant and operate on the remaining plant until overhaul time on that half, then reverse the process and operate on the other half and eventually overhaul them both and then do it again. Another was to further reduce the number of 5" weapons. There were others. My point, though, was that if they (or something like them) were available, AGS probably wouldn't be needed and the situation you decry with DDG1000 might have been avoided.
