Warship Woes Part 2

Mike Burleson

At the close of the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800s, Great Britain found itself in the position as the world’s only superpower. As often happens, questions soon arose on the need for new ships of the line for the Royal Navy in a time of peace. With the arrival of steam power, followed soon by large guns with exploding shells, the very existence of England’s “wooden walls” were in doubt.

While confusion reigned in the battlefleet, a naval force was quietly establishing the colonial empire the big ships had recently won. Small steam powered gunboats armed with cannons and eventually Maxim machine guns were spreading the new Pax into the underdeveloped world. As author Max Boot writes, the gunboats “Made it cheaper and easier to run an Empire”.

America does not have an Empire in the traditional sense, but it does have a responsibility to continue the hard won peace in the aftermath of the Cold War. Spreading democracy and free trade is in its own national interests as well as rising nations in the Third World. Like the Royal Navy in the 19th Century, it may wish to continue the construction of giant battlefleet ships, but what it really needs are gunboats.

Big ship advocates; those who wish to build more powerful carriers, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines, are at odds over the size, shape, and cost of future warships. Questions are being debated in naval circles such as; “Should the new ships be more stealthy?” or “Nuclear power or Gas?” and “Are traditional warships obsolete in the cruise missile age?”. Meanwhile, crises in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere continue unabated.

Modern gunboats, also called fast attack craft (FAC), patrol ships, and corvettes, have greatly evolved from their Victorian Age ancestry. Most are very fast, carry missiles as well as guns, include stealth features such as smooth decks, and are fitted with the latest electronic warfare suite. Examples include the Israeli SA’AR class, the Norwegian SKJOLD, and the Swedish VISBY.

The benefit of the smaller ships is they are cheap and can be built in large numbers, thus offsetting America’s rapidly shrinking fleet. They could also hold the line at sea while the battlefleet works out new designs, much as the gunboats did for the battleships in the Age of Steam.

Gunboats are also durable, able to withstand a direct missile strike in many cases. This was proven in the recent Israeli-Hezbollah Conflict, when a terrorist-fired cruise missile struck an IDF corvette off Lebanon. The warship’s radar was not operating at the time, so no defenses were able to react to the attack. Still, the vessel managed to limp back to port under its own power.

The Navy needs ships which are expendable, to put it bluntly. The loss of a tiny FAC or corvette with their handful of crew would be far less catastrophic than 300 crewmen in a destroyer, or 5000 in a supercarrier. Another lesson here is: the smaller the ship the less of a target.

America should continue to build experimental ships, such as the giant DDG-1000 stealth destroyer, but at over $3 billion each, only a very few. Meanwhile, the real fighting strength should be invested in cheap but plentiful gunboats which can carry the war to the terrorist foe in their lairs, as well as “show the flag” to wavering allies. Then can the tradition of John Paul Jones be upheld in a fast ship that can go “in harm’s way”.

My blog is at newwars.blogspot.com

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Mike Burleson is a regular columnist with Sea Classics magazine and an advocate of Military Reform. He resides in historic Charleston, SC. http://tv.groups.yahoo.com/group/honestnews/ http://newwars.blogspot.com/

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