I am always amused when self-righteous people attempt to lecture others from a position of ignorance… Thankfully, these days, the ability of individuals to correct those ignorant blowhards, and call them out for what they are, is significantly greater than it was in the past.
However, before we get to the full purpose of this post, a slight deviation…
Take a look at this boat and tell me what you see:
Speaking as someone who spent far too much time in the Persian Gulf, I see an Iranian copy of a Boghammar High Speed Patrol Boat, featuring a fiberglass hull, an absurdly powerful engine, and twelve rocket launchers of indeterminate range and power. As you can see, its crew ranges from one to five, its length ranges between 20 and 40 feet, and its radar cross-section is pretty much non-existent.
Now take a look at this ship and tell me what you see:
I see the pride and joy of the United States Navy personified in the form of the Arleigh Burke-class Guided Missile Destroyer (DDG), armed with whatever you can fit in 96 vertical launch cells, a five inch gun, two R2D2s-of-death, torpedo tubes, and whatever pintle- and rail-mounted crew-served weapons it might have (typically at least four Ma Deuces, but the loadouts varied). She sports a crew of somewhere over 300, is over 500 feet in length, and its radar cross-section is ridiculously small for a ship of its size (and I do speak from some experience on that).
So, tell me – given that information, if you were to plop these two vessels down in an appropriate body of water about 10 nautical miles from each other, and told their respective crews that only one vessel’s crew was going home at the end of the day, who would win?
Hardly any question, is there?
It is fairly likely that the Boghammar would get within range to pop off at least one of its rockets at the DDG (depending on sea conditions and the like), but after that, the fight would be pretty much over, and the DDG would be going home to freshen up its paint job.
So that obviously means Boghammars are useless against the might of the US Navy, right?
Well, take that little boat, and multiply it by a hundred… or a thousand*:
DDGs cost the American taxpayers somewhere shy of $2,000,000,000 (yes, billion with a “b”) each… those Boghammars cost all of maybe $200,000 to produce and arm, if even that. If you were to put equivalent values of vessels in that aforementioned body of hypothetical water, who do you think would be steaming home?
To be certain, a very large number of those small boats would be perforated, exploded, disabled, and otherwise sunk, but it is fair to say that DDG would be toast at the end of the exercise, especially since Iranian Boghammars can also be set up to be suicide boats. Obviously this situation is complicated by adding more boats on each side (the DDGs would have the advantage of significantly better communications, coordination, and control) or the location of the incident (picking somewhere with lots of islands or ship traffic would permit the small boats to “blend in” or hide), but the danger of “small boat swarms” is real (*.pdf warning), we have come face-to-face with it in the past (my LPD was deployed with the ships involved in that incident, though we were not present at the time), and Navies across the world are working on solutions**.
So where am I going with this? One Boghammar against one DDG is going to get precisely nowhere… but a swarm of Boghammars against one DDG will probably come out on top. Just like one man with one gun against a tank is probably going to lose, but a bunch of guys with guns against one tank are going to win.
There is an old saying, “Quantity has a quality all its own,” which is amusingly attributed to Joseph Stalin… Yes, four guys with pistols are, in terms of quality, horribly deficient compared to a tank, but American Mercenary walks you through the steps of how they become more than a match for that armored vehicle, and history is simply replete with examples of under-armed (or completely unarmed) irregular infantry overpowering machine guns, tanks, platoons, and other heavy-duty military equipment when the latter decided to do something stupid… The only requirements on the part of the infantry are the willingness to make the attempt with the understanding that a non-zero number of them will not survive.
Which brings us to this quote of the day:
Gun control advocates seem to believe that it is better to live as a slave than die as a warrior. Unfortunately history has made it clear that such a choice doesn’t exist. The real choice is DIE as a slave or FIGHT as a warrior. And yes, sometimes warriors die. And sometimes warriors are forgotten. And sometimes we fail to secure the God given freedoms innate in every human.
But if you don’t choose to fight you are choosing death. How cowardly.
I sincerely hope that we will never have to test or experience the modern utility of swarm tactics, either on the waters of the Persian Gulf, or on the streets of some city or country in uprising, but the simple truth is that anti-rights cultists are just as ignorant about tactics and strategies as they are statistics and logic, which is not terribly surprising, given that “gun control” requires ignorance.
* – Apparently one of the better images of this concept is not unclassified… However, suffice to say, an aerial shot of several hundred small boats operating in formation is a little… disquieting… to big-ship Navy guys like me.
** – My personal favorites are the CIWS Block 1B variant (which is all kinds of fun to drive around, and definitively makes short work of anything it can see), and the newly-developed 5″ KE-ET round (*.pdf warning).
An Army of Davids – It applies to more than just the Internet.
Is there a link to AM in this post?
I think that any attempt at occupation will end up in a live ammo re-enactment of the movie “Flame and Citron.” If you have Netflix, I highly recommend it.
Never mind. I forgot that AM’s blog URL is “RandomthoughtsandGuns.”
I seem to recall that Molotov cocktails were used with good effect as an anti-armor weapon during WW2. They take no special skill to make, or throw. All that is needed besides that are enough people willing to try to use them.
Linoge you make a really good point about swarm tactics. Scipio used swarm tactics to take down Hannibal’s elephants. It isn’t a new tactic in warfare.
Kipling wrote about this phenomenon over a century ago:
Call it Isandlwana, call it the Finnish response to Soviet tanks, history is filled with instances of ill-armed forces overcoming forces that had superior weapons, by using some combination of superior numbers and/or superior tactics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
Sounds familiar. Why are we still building all those overpriced LCS’s again?
Same with the Allies in WWII.
The Germans had some of the scariest tanks on the field. Yet the Allies can produce more tanks at a faster rate. Guess who won out.
I would be curious to see how a swarm of those boats would show up on radar, and if they have any capacity for anti-aircraft defense (specifically against a squadron of Super Hornets armed with Vulcan cannons going 1000 mph).
Remember we use to take out Japanese boats with tiny little PT boats,and did a darn good job of it.
Unfortunately our military continues to train/equip itself for the last war that we fought. Besides submarines all of our naval fleet (including aircraft carriers) is obsolete. We haven’t figured this out since the end of WWII, even when al-Qaida showed us with the USS Cole. It’s a sad state of affairs since we quickly realized in WWII that the Battleship was obsolete in favor of the aircraft carrier. Since then aircraft technology has drastically improved and the carriers are no longer needed. Cruise missiles launched from submarines are the same as those launched from surface ships, except that the enemy doesn’t know they are about to be launched on until it is too late.
The Army and the Air Force is only slightly ahead of the Navy in training/equiping to fight the last world war.
@ Reputo:
I have a friend who is a military historian, and you should get him talking on why we waste billions of dollars on what are essentially fixed targets (aircraft carriers).
@ Robb Allen: Ayup. As the saying goes, never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups, and anyone willing to rush a tank, no matter how big the mob, has to fall under that category at least partially…
@ Sean D Sorrentino: Yeah, his post was the inspiration for this one. (And his URL is too damned sneaky, in my opinion…
)
Will have to see if I can snag that movie.
@ Dave_H: Hell, you do not even need a lot of people… you just need an urban setting with the ability to get above the armor in question. Break out a window, chuck the bottle, and run like hell… The infantry that invariably accompanies tanks will nail a few folks, but the rest will make short work of all but the most advanced tin can even today. …Which is part of the reason tankers hate cities.
@ AM: Another perfect example! And, no, it is nowhere near an original idea to any time period… but that just goes to show how mindnumbingly ignorant your average anti-rights nut is.
@ AuricTech: On the flip side, to be fair, we must also highlight the Battle of Rorke’s Drift… if the folks using the lower/no-tech weaponry do not employ intelligent tactics, make use of natural advantages, or otherwise attempt to gain an upper hand in some fashion other than numbers, they are going to be slaughtered wholesale, especially with modern repeating arms (those have pretty much eliminated the possibility of Zergling rushes, except in positively epic forms). However, a bit of thinking, a bit of cunning, and a bit of deviation from the norm, and you get things like the Finns spanking the Ruskies like red-headed stepchildren.
@ Chris from AK: Heh, I was actually going to highlight that exercise, but I figured that my point was proven enough without waxing on about the tactics involved in it, and how badly it went for the big ships…
As for the LCS’s, to be fair, they are faster, shallower, and more capable than the vast majority of the Navy ships out there now, and they do have a dedicated small-boat-interdiction module, from what I understand… they pretty much represent a return to the “cutter” concept (for the Navy… CG cutters are different), and at least that is movement in the right direction.
@ AntiCitizenOne: The Germans were also largely better at employing their tanks, but that is one scenario where raw numbers did carry the day.
@ bluesun: Depends on what radar you are talking about… If we are talking about the SPY-1 that is on the DDG above, I have honestly never seen their repeater feeds, but I would imagine picking out the boats could be fairly simple… If we are talking about the AN/SPS-55 surface-search we had on my FFG or the 64 on my LPD, however, I can guarandamntee you those boats disappear into the surface clutter. We never encountered any in a large enough mass to constitute a “swarm”, so I cannot speak to that, but we typically found small boats better with a commercial Furuno unit, but even then, you have to have the repeater zoomed in close enough to pick out the dot, and the clutter is still a factor.
Hornets may not be a good use against swarms, but Seahawks mounting similar gatlings or Ma Deuces are actually one of the currently-preferred methods. Most of those boats only have sighted weapons, so a helo definitely gives the advantage. Of course, the shoreside missile installations in Iran know that, so…
@ Michael: Ayup, and we lost a damned lot of them, but they still made the dent they needed to.
@ Reputo: I am not sure I would agree with the notion that aircraft carriers are superfluous these days (show me a combat aircraft that can do everything the F-18 does, and still be able to reach every point in the world from our land bases in one hop), but you will see no other disagreement from me. Right now, our overall military might is our saving grace, but in the future, as warfare becomes even more asymmetric? Dunno.
What are the international regs on thermonuclear tipped torpedoes?
Sadly, not very permissive… or, at least, our own government is not. Once you are out in open waters, folks can pretty much do as they please, so long as doing so does not damage anyone else…
Carriers exist as mobile airbases – which means rather more than a place to launch airstrikes out of (though they do that a treat as well). They have immense utility outside of warfare – just ask the kiwis if they’d rather have a CBG or the equivalent measure in Littoral Combat Ships.
For the pure military aspect, of course, they’re rather vulnerable to expensive and high-tech specialized counters, or huge frigging swarms. The second you can stay out of range of – I still haven’t figured out why we put CBGs into the Persian Gulf in the first place. The first, well, no-one knows…
“Projection of force”… In short, since we no longer have battleships, we employ the next-most-intimidating ship we have… and when it comes to a couple acres of sovereign US metal, carriers are pretty damned intimidating.
Sure, other boats may be more individually destructive, and sneaky about it to boot (I am looking at you, SSGNs), but there has always been something to be said for letting your enemy know that you can and will kick his ass if he gives you the opportunity… and making sure he gets the point.