Sea Control - Sea Control 175 - The Bilge Pumps

Episode Date: May 20, 2020

1. Alex Clarke's Channel, #NavalHistoryLive  2. Drachinifel's Channel3. Armoured Carriers's Channel 

Hey folks, this is Jared. On this edition of Sea Control, you're going to hear something a little bit different. This is called the Bilge Pumps, and it's Dr. Alex Clark, head of SimSecUK's chapter, and he is joined by a couple of co-hosts with a little more informal approach to maritime security and naval history. So I hope you enjoy the Bilge Pumps. They're going to be with us for a three-episode run here, and then, depending on reception, we're hoping to split them off into their own feed. So please provide feedback. Thanks, and please enjoy The Bilge Pumps. Welcome to The Bilge Pumps, where a bunch of naval geeks spout off.

Hello, and welcome to Bilge Pumps. first podcast but take two on recording i'm alex clark i'm with jamie from armored carriers and we're with now we're with drac and the reason he's been called drac in this and i've been called drac is because his name is also alex so to try and make your lives easier rather than jamie sitting there having alex's in stereo he is graciously going by drac and i am going by alex well we couldn't figure out who was alex prime and who wasn't you know yeah we were tempted to go with alex prime and alex secundus but and then not tell anyone who was who but we decided that'd

be slightly too cruel at least for now it was such a fun idea though that one now you also got to figure out what what have we done wrong here why is the good ship bilge pump so unlucky uh let's see we've lost two rich the original team we were sort of looking at two people have lost family members die recently um then the first recording didn't record yeah probably no the question is though where did we get the bilge pump from which ship because that could be why we're being unlucky well i slept on ark royal because i thought that was would be a talking point because it would be a rather unused bilge pump um but i'm happy to modify the poster any uh with any other suggestions

anyone come on drac which ships bilge pump would you like us to be named for oh depends if we want to be really really unlucky or or not i mean if we're going with really unlucky ones that really had no chance at all of solving anything you could go with royal oak my great uncle was on there so i know exactly what happened to the hymn yeah poor guy but uh yes that that that would certainly be one way of desperately pumping things out and not really having much of a chance against the rising tide of stupidity well if you want a slightly more lucky bilge pump it would have to be hms eskimo if i was going to suggest one because her bilge pumps are always in use

because she keeps losing her friggin' bow the bow is not a front door I've actually got a tribal class model of HMS Zulu that I'm thinking of repurposing as H.S. Eskimo and very finely severing the bow and just having it magnetically detachable

well that would be more accurate it just goes down and the bit goes off and what I love is they made the hull so strong at the point underneath the A mount because they have to

that what happens instead of that bit, the bow goes and the bit of steel which has A mount on it folds down over the top and then you have the rest of the stuff goes into the sea and of course the crew mounts the gun crew from A turret

get of course killed by the explosion But this is the thing that always makes me Is the remarks are that B-Mount continue firing with Accelerity So they just watch Some of their best mates get Mummed and they continue on

And they're all Written up for mentions in the Stratages and things like that afterwards Because they do not stop firing And then of course she turns around and starts advancing On enemy sternwards There's got to be something wrong That does bring new meaning

to the phrase advancing in a real direction, yes. Yes! Usually advancing in a real direction is retreating. In Eskimo's case, it's, well, you've taken off my bow, so now here's the stern coming for you. When I eventually get

around to doing a video on the Second Battle of Narvik, it's got to be a centrepiece. It's going to be rival centrepieces between Eskimo and Warspite, just deciding German destroyers need to be in many different places at the same time. Well, there's also contact going to Here's Johnny into Narvik Harbour.

Yes, you've got a blockade. Lovely. Smash over, sit on top of the blockade and start blasting everything. As I said, Warspite is just being a bully. Warspite is just there to try and stop the Tribals going genocidal. Wasn't fair. Yeah. Actually, I'm not sure. Does that work?

I'm trying to think. Genocidal as in destroying all the enemy destroyers without, you know, killing them. Can we use genocidal for ships destroying other ships? Trying to wipe them all out? I think it's an inappropriate phrase, unfortunately.

Yeah, there's got to be another better phrase for that one. Feeding frenzy? Feeding frenzy? Yes, that one. Definitely. School of Burana. Yeah. we do actually have

dear listeners some structure mainly thanks to Jamie who insists that if he's going to put up with two British naval historians he is going to have some structure to hold on to to try and maintain some sanity

oh also so I can contribute I don't quite have it all available off the top of my head yeah Yeah, we're just faster than you are. And as you can see, there's not much on top of my head anyway. So, what was the number one on up?

I think, Will, you did raise the interesting little incident up in the East China Sea. Yet another incremental escalation, I suppose. well yes as history goes if the Royal, if Navy start turning up and spending more than a couple of hours somewhere they're basically starting to lay claim to it and this one stayed up there was it for 16

or 26 hours 26 hours yeah this is of course the Chinese Coast Guard vessel which decided to drive off Japanese fishing boats from the Senugus which is of course Japanese territory and the Japanese are rapidly

arming rapidly yes the days of japanese maritime self-defense force may be numbered although i must admit i i'm not entirely against the notion of the golden chrysanthemum showing back up again it is a very nice bow ornament yeah um yeah but it's got the same baggage as the swastika seriously well i suppose it's one of those things isn't it yeah in southeast asia it's probably carries a similar kind of weight whereas maybe over here it's more just seen as oh pretty shiny thing well sorry that's the same same way you get hitler themed bars in thailand because they don't i guess i guess to be honest you know it's uh i'd have to look look a little bit more into the history of it

i mean was the chrysanthemum a political symbol like the swastika or was it a long-term naval symbol it was a long-term naval symbol from our but it is very much wrapped up with the naval i did this in the japanese video i was looking at i sort of try and explain that tashima is really far more of a foundation for the japanese martial myth in many ways than the land war and what they're doing because it's it's such a triumph it's such a thing and they have traditional ola and powers this is the first time as a sea power they come to dominance and the chrysanthemum really is sort of part of that mythology yeah i think it's the rising sun flag that people get a worked up with

but that's still in use of Corso isn't it I have a feeling I agree with I think it's going to be interesting, it's going to be a political decision I think myself in many ways the Japanese Maritime Self Defence Force is now a Japanese Navy in all but name

it has been for a long time it has been certainly for a long time and in nicest way they're now building aircraft carriers they have been building for a while They're through-deck cruisers. No, sorry, through-deck destroyers. Through-deck destroyers.

Yes. The Royal Navy's been using that practice for a long time, and they're two island nations. They do like to copy each other. Just getting back to Japan, self-defence force versus Blue Water Navy, you've already seen it take part in joint exercises in the South China Sea,

which isn't exactly its home territory. I mean, it's next door, but it's not home territory. It's also taken part in exercises with Philippines, okay, again, a neighbour, but not home territory. And it's becoming an increasingly obvious, or increasingly common sight, even in the Indian Ocean, where it's begun some exercises, tri-nation exercises, from memory, India and United States.

so to me that says no it's starting to at least test the waters of becoming a regional power once again and yes you've got to you are very right in highlighting that that's not resting easily with southeast asia and in many ways it's you know slowing down maybe the formation of a um a united front against China, because China is keen to remind everyone of Japan's exploits in the 1930s and 40s, and there's a lot of baggage that still needs to be sifted through and sorted out, particularly with South Korea, with still tensions there, not just over the island and the strait between the two countries,

but the whole attitude towards comfort women, which the South Koreans were particularly subject to. So it's not resting easy, shall we say. No, I was going to say, once you head north of Australia, the two largest regional navies by country mile are South Korea and Japan. And unfortunately, they don't see eye to eye on an awful lot of things, even though they have some very capable ships. and between them collectively outside of carrier forces probably actually present a fairly credible threat to the Chinese if they could be persuaded to work together. The main restriction that either of those navies has at the moment

is that they are still very much regional navies. They don't have an awful lot of, if any, logistical train. But they are working on that, but it's going to take them a while, albeit that obviously if they're combining with the US Navy and everybody else to face up against China, they can probably piggyback onto that to a degree. Well, I think that's what, you know, at least that's what Japan seems to be working towards

is the whole combined operations, united operations framework by getting involved in these exercises. So that's not self-defence force behaviour, that's international blue water navy behaviour. And you can sort of see why they're going there, But also, when you're talking about the logistics, and I can understand, I'm focusing on it, but when you consider the size of their ships, and the area we're talking about in terms of how close their own logistics hubs and how many of their allies' logistics hubs, and I say this potential allies, because let's put it this way. But in a major war scenario, you've got the Americans involved, and if the American task force turns up with a Japanese ship, then the other nations, whether they like Japan or not, are not going to send them away. They're going to help look after them, and they're going to act to send the spies.

So it's going to sound strange, but I don't see that as being such a major trouble in fighting in the South China and East China Sea. I think for the Americans, in terms of if the fighting spreads out beyond the island chains, then that becomes an issue, because where do the supplies start coming from? Where are you getting the supplies? The reason the Pacific War has such a big fleet train is so important. It's because the Americans are mostly getting the supplies from the other side of the Pacific. If you have the option where you have your supplies coming, If you're able to maintain Australia

And Japan as your major Supply hubs You've got supplies Pretty close, you can use Normal merchant ships to get there Do you have to convoy those ships Which navy

Is going to provide the convoys, that sort of thing Is going to be a matter of fact But for actually supplying the fleet trains I don't see that as being a massive Issue to get from those places To the forces you're going to be supplying politically i think japan as we said is obviously is moving more towards a japanese navy than a maritime self-defense force and i think politically for them outside of the immediate strategic

concerns of china itself the whole china situation is actually probably relatively good for their ambitions because as you say that it's relatively close they don't need a massive fleet train to operate from japan to the operational areas off of china so they can they can introduce the idea of them operating more away from the japanese coast in a quasi-defensive role but a forward defensive role without making all the overt moves towards an oceanic navy and then once everyone's got the use to the idea of the japanese operating on some of somebody else's shoreline then it's much easier for them to then sort of slip into the role of okay well now we have we need a fleet train now we need proper carriers it's a lot less of a sharp jump than if they were to announce

tomorrow by the way we're building a couple of super carriers and a ton of fast oilers because then then people start getting nervous and if they build super carriers i bet they go with queen elizabeth's like a size unit with gas power well the other another reason why japan the other reason why Japan would be finding this relatively smooth sailing, I suppose, is that China's making its arguments for it. China's big argument is, well, we need to secure our supply lines to the Middle East oil fields. We need to protect the major shipping lines through Malacca Strait

that carry so much of its trade, its resources, its food. and, of course, those all apply to Japan just as much, if not more so, because if any spat happens at anywhere in that point, be it East China Sea, Taiwan, South China Sea, Malacca, Andaman Sea, any of that is going to directly affect the home islands because it's exactly the same as if there is a spat going on in the North Sea or in the Straits of Gibraltar or the North Atlantic. It's going to be whoever's involved in that spat,

it's going to be impacting, I hate that word, affecting the interests of Great Britain. To be honest, for Britain, the Straits of Malacca are also still fairly major, actually. I was looking at that recently for a study of economic security in Britain. And we, of course, always think of stuff coming from made in China coming to the UK. Well, we export a lot of cars and we export a lot of other high tech goods, which mostly go by sea and mostly go through the Straits of Malacca. And you suddenly realize, hang on, there's a good chunk of that trade is going back that way as well.

And so our economy, we depend on these imported things, which we're importing from that direction. And we're also depending on exporting things in that direction. And, oh, and that might, that probably explains why suddenly, especially with governments when they keep, the thing when you keep doing the defense reviews is the same issues keep coming up and up again. And eventually, a government has to do something about them, or when there is a problem, they have no ability to sit there and go, we weren't told. And I'm fairly sure this is why you're starting to look at it like this. You haven't been paying much attention to politics lately, have you? Well, you see, there are things they can, the things with, you know, as we said in our talk about, you know, our carrier discussion, they were basing them off the plannings they already had in place, for good or for ill. You know The British plan was based off the flu plan Because that's the worst one we normally deal with

Scars have managed to skip past us All sorts of Things haven't turned out as bad As they've been expected to So we would base it off the flu plan It may not be It has its faults It certainly had issues

But that's what we base it off When you're looking at The thing is though And maybe this should be the case Health doesn't have the same Quadranial review As defence does And it's now combined

New study and all these things They keep doing this Well every single study has come back And has mentioned the Far East And us needing a presence there And now Singapore The base there has been Properly stood up

And it's becoming rather similar to Bahrain And well Bahrain has been built up Slowly and has now got a forward based frigate In it and probably will get a forward based river class OPV at some point because it's either going to be that or we're going to have to be basing a second frigate out there and that's far more expensive. So at what point, if you're doing all the same in Singapore, at what point does the frigate get based there? Because they're putting everything in place for the frigate to be

there. They kept doing exactly the stuff as they did in Bahrain. How long before we have a frigate forward based in singapore i think it's going to be definitely one of the performance of the type 31 the interesting thing is going to be whether a type 23 ends up there testing the waters before a type 31 has come online yeah although i must admit actually that sort of looking looking back at history especially the 1930s which obviously you were talking about earlier today it is very interesting you look at it's like hmm it's a major east asian regional power who's very nervous about trying to keep open their supply routes particularly for oil but also import and export of trade in the face of perceived and or actual hostility from across

the other side of the ocean we all know where this has led before yeah yes particularly when trade embargoes are implied yes yes and the thing is in nicest way like similarly they are managing to make very very large public relations exercises issues and they are seemingly not able to understand or actually no they do have people who do understand the differences in the countries they're dealing with outside but i'm not sure if they're listening to them inside yeah because i've met some of their academics i've met some of their people at kings over the is when they've come and visited and they're very smart and they do seem to understand the systems they're coming into so one must think they must be telling people look this isn't the way to do

this this isn't the way to handle this that's the problem isn't it because you know telling people who don't want to hear something it's not necessarily the smartest idea in well pretty much any political system at the moment and i don't know you seem to be able to shout at the prime minister and come out okay yeah but i suppose he's like but he's not sorry he's not employed that by the prime minister though or in any other way associated with him but again i don't know british politics so i'm not the prime minister was accosted by someone in a park when he went for a morning walk to try and because of coronavirus he's had to because he's recovering he's having to take morning walks in the park and he basically goes out with just a

couple of bodyguards and someone a jogger stopped and started shouting at him over the handling of the crisis and prime minister just said sat there thinking said thank you and um good morning and i'm i will try and i will try we're trying our best and then walked on and nothing happened to the guy other than he's possibly going to get turned into a meme at some point but yeah yes it does that doesn't of course that doesn't happen in china we've seen what's happened to a few video So bloggers relating to COVID-19 where all of a sudden, you know, black clad people burst through the door in the background. But, you know, that's I suppose it's just yeah, it's I don't know. Intimidation is becoming a political tool around the world, really.

Yeah. Although I think the other thing is we've also got to take into account that potentially and obviously not being party to the internal workings of the Chinese Communist Party, you can't say for certain. But there is also the potential that China may not be playing the same game that everyone else thinks they're playing, because we, to be honest, sat in a paradigm for the last two centuries, effectively, of an Anglo dominated global sphere, which is a slightly redundant statement. But, you know, I mean, you kind of the last major attempt, serious attempt that came anywhere close to succeeding in displacing at the time Britain from being the the global naval hegemon was the Napoleonic Wars. We then had a century of Pax Britannica. We had World War One. But even in World War One, Germany wasn't trying to unseat Britain naively as the dominant power. They were trying to achieve their own limited aims. And in any case, they didn't succeed anyway. And then you get to World War Two, and it's one of the very few, if possibly the only instance of where the torch of global naval hegemon has passed without the two sides, one going up, one going down, actually having a full on fight in that it just kind of passes over from Britain to America. so within well both our our own generations our grandparents generations and actually within the

the scope of global politics as as relates to modern technologies or industrial revolution and onwards there has always been a global hegemon that is kind of the anglosphere dominance china may very well be looking to upset that and assert itself as the as the hegemon in in the not too distant future but we i think we because we've not had that kind of power shift attempt or success for so long i think a lot of people are probably not even thinking about that it hasn't even crossed their minds but for china they may wear it very well be sitting there and going well in 20 years when we are in charge the same way that they perceive america to be in charge at the moment and and that may that may infer a lot from how they're dealing with people

i mean okay as you say fair enough they're not necessarily dealing with people in the most diplomatic way or the way that promotes their interests the best at the moment but they may well have already got it in their heads that they're going to be in charge in 20 30 years and they're already acting like it yeah that's definitely that definitely definitely sort of helps explain the south china sea doesn't it but i would also add and this is a point if admiral somerville had actually done his job in the indian that might not have happened sorry i couldn't let jamie get away with that one i i i must imagine when i mentioned that

whole thing impossible alternate scenarios around the indian ocean raid i got so much stick in the comments about uh because of that common paradigm that people perceived that the key to butai was all powerful and the royal navy was a distant third in carrier operations so when i pointed out that actually no had had as i think as you mentioned in your in your uh video had the alba course given the correct course information we could very well have been sitting reading about how a couple of Japanese carriers suddenly had Swordfish and Albacore appear out of the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night

at which point first two major carrier kills to the Royal Navy and it could have been more because let's be honest it only takes one torpedo in the wrong place and the Royal Navy are very good at doing flight level attacks and those two carriers could have mounted easily

40 to 50 torpedo aircraft and there's five carriers so If they Especially as at night Will they see them coming The swordfish is bloody quiet The albacore is even more quiet

Because remember the one thing the albacore When they were building it they were thinking again about knife packing They were trying to make it quiet Because they were planning for listening devices Because they thought they would be in service before radar So the albacore Love it or hate it It's actually darn quiet as an aircraft

So for a night attack back on topic back on subject the last thing i'll say is it we might we might just about have managed to get warspite as a museum ship in that case because can you can you imagine the outcry of people of people if they tried to look after in 46 if its biggest major battle honor in world war ii was cape matapan part two snuck up on two congos and a couple of carriers yeah you know in that way if Warspite sneaks up on the Congos in the middle of the night after the carriers

have been taken out by the by the the carriers then Warspite doesn't just get preserved I think she gets deified like Tonga's flagship let's be honest she would probably be sitting next to Victory

in Portsmouth Harbour surrounded by them we could dream yeah and seriously there'll be a lot of american animals coming up going we hate you you stole our victory all i can say is is that obviously operation c has got so much more potential for so much more discussion so um you know i i think i will probably try and do one of my um uh video um accounts based on the the uh on any audio accounts i can find in the iwm

and if I can't find many I might even be forced to attempt to narrate something but maybe I could recruit you guys for it Operation C as I say is just so much the overlooked scenario isn't it?

Seriously, Henderson will have been spinning in his grave because it's what he built the whole fleet, been building the whole fleet for was that operation that we are outnumbered but we can still do this if we do it this way

we've got this fleet we've got it in place and then Sunville has the opportunity yes and it fails on the first night but then he pulls away and that is the thing you see this is the point

this is the point I make about this when I'm looking at China and the rise of and getting back to the South China Sea we've got a navy which is coming which is coming of age but which is doing a lot of things rather like the Soviet Navy did for the whole of the Cold War,

in that it's looking very good, but how much depth is there really to the thought that's going on? With the Soviet Navy, once you lost Gorshkov, you lost most of the rationale going around behind the Navy, most of the stuff which is actually driving the Soviet Navy forward. They stumble around. They go from project to project to project to project, and they they don't really have this concept of what they're going to be with the chinese navy

and chinese forces okay you're either going for a bastion system or you're going for a blue water system and if you try and do a halfway house you're going to end up with a navy which doesn't really satisfy either and you're going to be tempted to use it for a blue water operations away from your bastions it's going to get caught and it's probably not going to survive very long because let's be honest, if you do use their carrier groups and their ships beyond their bastions, they lose a lot of their killer edge because

they are based in large part on Soviet technology which is about 30, 40, 50 years old. And okay, they've modernised it but how much, I'm looking at those carrier designs and I'm going that's not that bad.

Hang on, you've also got to concede here that... You've built a load of blue water stuff for when you're defending bastions. You've also got to concede that, you know, what are they up against? Stuff that's 30, 40 years old? Or at least based on stuff that's 30, 40 years old? Modified, yes. I mean, I think it's a bit more of a general problem than just the Chinas.

Okay, everyone's racing for modern arms. They've got the Zumwalt, who are pretty, you know, flashy. No, they're not anymore. No, they didn't get their guns. They didn't get their missiles. What did they get? They did get their missiles, didn't they? They've got some VLS systems working

But not with all the I think if I recall correctly They've basically got the same kind of stuff That the Berks do Whereas they were supposed to have Was it N-LOS and all this other fancy gizmos Which turned out to be fantastic Expensive and not really work

So they've got the Mark 53 VLS Which is actually a pretty good system Because if they haven't spread the VLS around their hull very cool it's a very good system and i wouldn't be surprised if you see that in the cgx when that eventually gets built or at least a large surface combat and i think that's the program they're calling it now isn't it probably yeah yeah something like that um so the mark 53 vls is pretty good one of the interesting things about the type 45 i was told i have no idea if this is true because the person was telling me was telling it wasn't he was involved in program

but it was down a pub so i i am always very skeptical even if people are in positions where they should know of what they tell me down a pub i just have good reason that the the role maybe the type 45s are fitted to take both the mark 41 strategic length vls and the mark 53 strategic length vls they have the electronic wiring in place because the wiring is quite similar anyways but they have the wiring in place so they can take either one depending on which one's the better the more available system which is sort of quite a nice one to hear but it's also some bit of future proofing but the interesting thing i point i would point out is the mark 53 vls has the same speed of launch as the silver but the capability of the mark 41 so the whole

reason they didn't actually just go for a standardized vls across the whole system was cost and they're actually by by saying they've got the wiring in place of they are admitting that it was literally a cost decision because the Mark 53 was newer and it's more expensive because it is but there again I'm surprised the Americans weren't prepared to give it to the Brits at cost

just to say someone else is using the Mark 53, go on, buy it I suppose a lot of it's going to come down to how exactly the Chinese Navy is planning to operate because obviously at the moment they've got this whole paradigm with the medium range ballistic missiles, they've got massive air

cover from the the wonderfully known people's liberation army air force um they've got all their close inshore fast attack craft and everything and once if they once they extend past a certain point they lose that cover uh maybe the ballistic missiles can reach out that far but the the air force cover starts to tail off um but old badger derivatives probably not the most survivable platforms these days. They certainly are creating nice little, well-defended islands that they can

stage from. They've swamped the South China Sea with islands, but even today I was seeing that they are further enhancing and reinforcing the base in North Africa.

They've done They've got an island off Mauritius, haven't they? Somewhere around that area? Indian Ocean? Yes, they have rebuilt an island. They have reclaimed an island there that's been leased to them for a very long time.

It hasn't been built up as a military base as such, but yeah. It's got a huge deep channel and poor facility for something which isn't for a military base considering its size and population. And it's exactly the same in, you know, is it Cambodia as well?

They're building a quote-unquote holiday resort there that just happens to be capable of carrying their cruiser destroyers. So, and with a massive airfield that's, you know, far longer than any commercial aircraft needs. so they're trying to effectively take their close inshore support and extend that further and further out and then it's just a case of whether or not the bases are sustainable or not

whether or not they'll survive particularly long in a conflict which I suppose that probably to be honest comes down to what exactly is being thrown at it because with the best will in the world launching tomahawks against somewhere like Syria is all well and good

but and obviously a mass cruise missile strike would be the ideal way to cripple those kinds of bases but you probably need some yeah well there's that but also you probably if you're going up against something like the the chinese air defense system you probably want something a little bit less obvious than a tomahawk these days whether that's l rasm or storm shadow or the french version scalpen or something i think a tomahawk is probably with again with the best will in the the world not not a frontline survivable strike asset against a modern air defense system some will get through but not as many as you like you know that's that i think that we're seeing that

now with the whole um the recent uh review of um u.s defense spending you know they've chopped global hawk they've suspended triton you know nice big drones with massive surveillance capabilities but not at all survivable so yeah why would you have a great big billion dollar turkey just flapping its wings

in full range The Boeing X-47 which I've been interested in and the various projects they've got for the UCAV from the carriers because in my mind that's them finally admitting what we did when we cut the intruders was wrong we should have put in an intruder replacement

of, okay, I can sort of see why you're getting rid of the Tomcat. I would prefer you not to. But it's expensive, difficult to maintain, and after the Cold War, difficult to justify, possibly. But getting rid of the range which the intruder gave you, the A6 intruder

and the S3 Viking, those are not things you should be getting rid of. Those were critical assets to give your carriers range. And your carriers having range is the way you counterbalance quite a lot of these things. Yeah, but, you know, I mean, this is getting into the next subject, I suppose, which is arsenal ships.

Yeah. Yeah, carriers. Why have a carrier when you can have an arsenal ship? Do you know what one Royal Navy officer who's now thankfully retired turned around to me once and said? Our carriers are our arsenal ships. That's why you need to support them. And that was a written response to me pointing out that whilst I actually do support the Queen Elizabeth class and do like them, uh it doesn't really work out to be our organic air capability if you just have two ships

you do need more flight decks than two to guarantee you have aviation available especially when you're looking at it to support your amphibious warfare capability whatever that might be and your strike capability and that caused him to sign around and say that the carriers were arsenal ships and i was going uh no that's completely different topic but if you want to go into arsenal ships we can get into that one so i mean my proposition is this is that arsenal ships are going to do to carriers what carriers did to battleships no yes let me let me just let me just put this down uh put put down my reasoning okay what was the big advantage of carriers and strike range strike range okay flexibility

being able to maintain being able to maintain that strike being able to hide and being cheaper didn't take anywhere near as much effort to build a carrier as it did to slap all those massive chunks of armour together around a

battleship if not cheaper then maybe not as hard to build or as long to build depends which carry design you're talking about There's certain less specialised industries that you need for carrier building compared to the massive slab armour manufactories and gun boundaries you need for a battleship. So, yeah, you need less specialised infrastructure, certainly.

You need a lot more specialised electronics and fuel pumps and all sorts of systems going round the ship. All right. OK, I'll concede that point. But OK, so then we move to the next step, arsenal ships versus modern carriers. okay so one of the big advantages of the carrier battleship was range well there's so many smart missiles around now that have got the range over the 500 nautical miles of a f-35b over the you know what's your combat range of a um f-18 700 if you're in a superiority high flying yeah so you You know, already the currently available missiles, which aren't necessarily ideal,

but there's a lot of money put into making them better. Most of them are already heading down the path of being autonomous slash semi-autonomous. They are self-flying aircraft. They're just probably easier to pack into a container on a container ship, which Israel has already done and already demonstrated and that missile that Israel

demonstrated had a 500 mile range. So what's so hard now to have containerized smart missiles that can be fired from a dumb ship which has no modifications beyond having just containers

arranged on their deck to carry their arsenal and when required launch that volley in the general direction of the target and the missile is smart enough to deal with the rest i think the in a word i would say i think the main difference between a carrier and an arsenal ship is flexibility i think definitely an

arsenal ship especially if you're building on the same kind of scale as you build a modern super carrier certainly can have a longer range and more devastating punch but at the same time there's a number of things that a manned fighter or bomber or strike craft can do from a carrier that an arsenal ship probably can't because i mean for one thing um if you launch a manned strike group from a carrier on aircraft whatever missiles or bombs they're carrying up until the point of weapons release you have the option to redirect that strike, call it back

do all sorts of things whereas if you're an arsenal ship if you volley off 200 cruise missiles they're either hitting the target or you're self-destructing them but in either case you're not getting them back which it limits

your options somewhat and also with a carrier obviously with fighters able to go over the horizon um and or provide radar support beyond the horizon they've got a much more uh a much greater scope for air defense of a of a carrier group or a naval group generally which again an arsenal ship if if you've rigged it for surface to air then theoretically yes it can do a fairly

good job but again it's a single point vector that you can take into account in your calculations if you're coming into strike and it's still limited by physical obstacles like the curvature of the earth or the terrain granted you can get past that to a degree with awax but if you're going to have awax you need a platform to carry that awax on which puts you back to a carrier so but surely awax is uh redundant in this age of um lunchbox size satellites potentially but again it comes down to response time and granularity that there's there's a certain amount of additional data you're going to get from an AWACS that's a couple of hundred miles away as opposed to a satellite that's a couple of thousand miles away um sorry I was just

going to say not necessarily because you know that sort of we're looking at that now the responsiveness of being able to put a uh CubeSat into the orbit into orbit admittedly yes but it can pass directly over your target and as you can see already from commercially available um cubesat um satellite photos and those those are actually limited uh you can get some pretty damn information good information out of those um so it's it's basically altitude and these things are low altitude so you're talking what is it 500 kilometers i can't remember how how how high um low earth orbit is now i think it's something like that so you know it's it's not but then at the same time there's another issue here is what is an arsenal ship is it as a modernized kyrov or is it a container ship

that's just been packed with a few new containers or is it both i think i think certainly in terms of the long-range offensive alpha strike there may well be a a slot for an arsenal ship to fill the where it could do a job better than a carrier and it may displace the carrier in that particular role albeit that if you've got something that's a relatively long range whether it be a uh a drone or a manned aircraft or some kind of long-range stealth platform that you could launch from the carrier to help cue in the final targeting that'd be quite useful um but i think it's kind of it's some it's it's a one role thing maybe two role if you stack it full of surface to air missiles as well the carrier has so many additional roles that whilst it might find its position as the the the

jack of all trades the swiss army knife of the navy being somewhat displaced there are still other roles such as general fleet air defense um the flexibility of strike the ability to vector in from different directions um and other things like even asw considering how many if if you're taking away the long-range strike role from the carrier, you could potentially get a lot of ASW assets on there. So I think the carrier will still, even in the most optimistic scenario, still definitely have a place. It just may

not necessarily have quite as many roles to fulfil as the primary asset as when Arsenal ships get going. I would also argue that the demise of the battleship, whilst I agree the aircraft carrier does beat it, I think the demise of the battleship is

in many ways hastened by the perception of the starting of the missile age, especially at the beginning of the Cold War, that guns weren't necessary anymore, that missiles and aircrafts were going to do everything. Well,

has it changed? But in the nicest way, you then look at the Iowa class come back into service, you look at what they were looking at for the Zumwalt class with the guns. I would say potentially more I'm thinking about

I think possibly for many medium powers the next generation especially after this generation of carriers go, and I'm talking about the Queen Lizard's class and I'm talking about whatever succeeds the Charles the Gaul I'm wondering if cruisers will make a turn

at a comeback but with a mixture of if they've got them working by that point rail guns and lasers and missiles so they're sort of a hybrid of an arsenal ship and a gun ship and then you've got to think because also the trouble is with the missiles and I know this is the biggest problem

against the Arsenal ship is the missiles are getting so gracious me expensive the idea of the Arsenal ship is to be cheaper than the carrier and now the missiles are getting super expensive and yes you can put them in a container

yeah but they're reusable once you fire your 5 million dollar missile and that's it you you you you might as well set fire to that to a pile of money because you're never getting it back at least with a rail gun might cost you 20 million 50 million to install but you can fire several hundred shots from it but the reason why they only a few dollars no not at all that's no that was the problem with somewhat the the shots were so expensive well that's because

they went for some ridiculous like what was it uh well that was the ags it was not technically around them, but they went for some ridiculous rocket-assisted, GPS-guided, laser-guided, everything-guided, all singing, all dancing. It was basically a missile. They basically tried to turn a shell into a missile. That's why it got so expensive.

In a way, the whole point of the railgun is you could take pretty much a lump of tungsten, which is not the cheapest material in the world, I admit, but you could pretty much take any lump of tungsten, as long as it was shaped in the right way, and fire it, and goodbye Vienna.

as we mentioned in our failed podcast um what happens the first time the ship buries its bow into a big wave and uh your poor little precious um uh gun gets wet well a there's no more classes why they have to be covered up and b i'm actually more and more coming around to this perspective is that what they're going to have to do is they're going to have to be stored facing back into the hull so they have the back of the gun pointing towards

the bow, like the Royal Navy sometimes did with guns anyway in high seas and have the gun barrels actually pointing in towards the ship or maybe they go mid-1930s Kriegsmarine and like the Konigsberg class stick the guns on the back

and put the helicopter platform on the front yeah Oh, well, you know, again, it's the extreme tolerances of everything involved in these, you know, magnetic rail weapons and not just weapons, but also catapults. It just doesn't take much more than a bit of a seagull poo to completely wreck it. I think to a certain extent we're seeing the same pattern you see over and over and over again over the last two millennia of naval history. it's funny actually because i i did a like a speed a very very fast speed talk potted history

of the last two thousand two and a half thousand years of naval history um which i'm working on getting some some uh uh pictures and everything for but one of the recurring theme it shows up about three or four times actually five times in there is that you everyone has a technology they start developing a technology and then all the classes of ships start getting bigger and bigger and bigger until they become ridiculously oversized and unworkable and then everyone starts building smaller more adaptable versions of them and the whole thing starts over again um i mean even in the last 500 years you look at the elizabethan cromwellian times you had the frigate that eventually kind of gradually morphed into the third rate and got too big so

they had to reinvent the fifth rate and the sixth rate they went up to being the kind of constitution type super frigates that then got too big and expensive so they gave up on the whole idea then they brought back frigates and sloops in and such like in the in the early part of the 20th century and now we've got frigates quote unquote going into the water that actually out displaced world war one world war two era light cruisers and we're all on that trend up again and then eventually someone will go this is all too big and expensive and silly we must go back to making smaller ships and we'll be back at square one again but it's not just the ships it's the equipment because i would argue and that's when you're looking at the river class batch twos

it doesn't take much to turn those into a fairly decent corvette because they've been built with it and enough spare space in their displacement that a lot of things can be tacked on i've done but not a rail gun now and have a lot of it. Not a rail gun, no. But we're talking about quite a lot of equipment can be tacked onto them. So let's get back to the point

which is where does a rail gun fit? Which I would say maybe on shore. No, it's not going to be able to be moved around. The rail gun is going to be bloody difficult to be around the power supply. I think with the rail gun people are probably going to have to

almost like a double or nothing approach because it does have certain vulnerabilities even if you do have it with a fully encased sealed mounting where it only pops out to actually go into action but it does have vulnerabilities so you can't use it in a rainstorm

you put a little umbrella over the end, a little cocktail umbrella didn't they come up with a didn't they find that when they charged the magnetic field it actually kept the rain away from it Once it gets up to ridiculous Tesla, you get the Moses effect where rain just goes or water just tries to stay away from it. But I think the thing is between the size, the expense, the need to keep it covered otherwise,

the need to keep it away from the sea spray as much as possible, and also, as we were saying before, the sheer power requirements of the thing, if you try and put it on a platform, an 8,000 to 10,000 ton platform, which is where most of the frigates and destroyers look to be heading in the next few years you're basically going to have either

you're going to have a ship where it's built around that you're almost reinventing the monitor where the whole ship is constructed around a single armament system and everything else is secondary to have a balanced yeah well yeah or that's the other option is you

either go with that or you go big or go home you're effectively reinventing either the large cruiser or the battle cruiser where you build a ship that is big enough that the freeboard keeps the thing out of the way with most of the sea conditions and it has the space for a reactor

and it has the space for multiple rail guns and it has the volume to support the capacitors and the missiles and the radars and then someone goes along with their mech ship the Maersk missileer so you've got Kormoran and

you know that container that you thought was carrying iPhones is carrying a long range autonomous very fast missile yes

there again okay let's say for starters we've already been over with hypersonic missiles if it's one of those well we haven't been over for everyone who's listening but we did in the previous hypersonic missiles they're also just as finicky as railguns in many ways in looking after them. So it's probably not going to be a

hypersonic missile in that case if you've got it rolling around in a container on a regular container. But it can still be supersonic. It can be still a supersonic. But then if your ship, if you put all the railgun tech in it, you've probably got laser-based closing weapon systems

which of course move at the speed of light. So can they come on counter it in time? That's going to depend on the sense of battle. It's also going to depend on how close they allow that ship to get. And if they're in the Straits of Hormuz or Malacca, they can probably get closer without arousing suspicion. But in most of the world's oceans,

if you've got a merchant ship which is straining far too close to a warship in about the range of 100 or so miles, or even, you know, if it's serving away that, it's not going to be a surprise attack, is it? I can mention a couple of U.S. destroyers that would argue with it at that point. Yes, we can all mention a couple. Yes, gentlemen, we won't... Oh, getting into those poor U.S. destroyers.

I remember I was sitting with a Royal Navy officer when one of the first ones, sorry about the McCain, came in, and he was sitting there going, But you just keep to You just You keep on this side You just turn this way And I went

Yeah but the trouble is And the big problem the Americans are having Especially for having a navy the size they have Is they're actually not getting enough officers through To be able to do the training then They have a very large navy Which means they don't have enough officers But at the same time they don't have a large enough navy

for all the jobs they're doing because their ships have got so expensive so the ships are being overworked and the crews aren't getting and the officers aren't getting the time they need to train up yeah there's a reason there's a lot of job openings in seventh fleet nowadays yeah so there's a reason there's a lot of job openings in seventh fleet at the moment yes um but yeah i think i think with that yeah it's definitely a case of that they're being very badly overworked and uh i know a few people who who are who are in the u.s navy and they've they talked about like even even 10 years ago there was there was time to sleep there was time to catch up on your paperwork to work on your career prospects and there was your job time and

now it's basically job job job job job job job some sleep uh half an hour to try and keep up with your career paperwork and then it's back up to getting everything keeping everything working because there's just not enough people and a lot and some of the people who are coming in are obviously new recruits fair enough they need to be trained up but you don't have the time to do that so you're roping them in to do jobs that they're probably technically not qualified to do um but probably can do under supervision but when the person who's supervising them has to go off and do something else or is shattered because they've been doing 20 hour days for a week then mistakes are made so not an ideal cf was supposed to solve all this by being requiring smaller crews

and then yeah and then of course you've got the the occasional bad officer who slips through like I think I can't remember it was a it might have been a either a berg or a ticonderoga one of the two but um I know one US captain actually got helicoptered off the ship because they decided that I think it was a ticonderoga I think they decided racing another warship for bragging rights through the San Francisco bay was a good idea um which the number of problems with this concept is is far longer than we've got time to time to go over but that included things like um slamming the ship at a but we're slamming the power plant up to beyond its design spec which was straining it quite badly slamming the ship through waters at speeds it was never designed

to go at um and so on basically just for a point of pride which is not contact becoming any kind of commanding officer so shockingly enough there was there was an sh60 waiting to take them away very very quickly after that but at the point that you've got your navy to the you've overworked your navy to the point that an officer like that can slip through the cracks to that higher rank there will be some issues you need to address like would you be trusting such overworked tired stretched crews

to control and maintain a rail gun or do you put them on a ship that okay it might not be just a super tank a super cargo

ship with a bunches of containers on deck but it might be a well let's put it this way one of the Latorial ships with its useless ships ripped off and a few containers trapped on the back

yeah the whole idea of the Latorial ships was that they were supposed to be able to take those containers on the back and that hasn't proved that I'm not so sure about that one I dove into that one at first didn't I yeah you did that one you know that that the littoral ships and containers are basically the proof that this

doesn't work they're specifically designed to take containers of equipment and it really causes trouble i think again they've made them more complex than they need to be so yeah i think there's probably a medium a medium to it i mean you you can look back again historically and see and see this kind of thing where where there's where there is a role where a specialized ship can do a specialized task very well it does get built by the larger navy or navies of the time but it doesn't take over um i'm things like say world war one they build the arithusa class as big destroyer leaders even though they're technically like cruisers but they don't build the entire they don't switch the entire cruiser force over to arithusas um and and actually well

actually using exactly the same class name in world war ii uh well 1930s world war ii trade protection you've got the the arithuses running around but you've also got the leanders the towns and the counties so i think the arithuses were basically built to use tonnage so you've got you've got i think i think there's there's definitely as missile technology advances and as as the the onboard sort of ai if you want to call it that um gets better there probably is definitely a role for a large vessel carrying a lot of missiles as a as an alpha strike package But I don't think it's going to ask, you know, haven't arsenal ships been around for ages anyway? I mean, Kirov's, the big destroyers, they were basically just arsenal ships with large numbers of multiple types of missiles.

um i i think i think when i said when you say arsenal ship i think at least in my mind it it brings to mind more of a very offensive based sort of uh naval strike and land strike cruise missile type complement unless you want to turn it into a massive surface to a missile farm um but with the with the earlier ships you mentioned it's like yes destroyers these days and in the past have been able to carry a certain amount, but they are primarily rigged to air defence. And with the Kirovs, yes, they carry a lot of missiles, but they are very mono-task ships.

The Kirovs exist to try and punch holes in American carriers. You couldn't use them. And wouldn't that be the role that a modern arsenal ship would be designed or intended to do? I think you'd probably want an arsenal ship to be able to do more than just the one thing, because well one um if you build an arsenal ship in the way in like a modern kirov design you're looking at and it's almost monotasked well one it's a very very clearly a a very pointy stick

aimed at a very particular target if the if a western power builds a kirov it's pointed at china if anyone else builds a kirov it's pointed at the usa maybe the uk it's it sends a fairly clear message which may antagonize people you don't want to antagonize in in in certain ways whereas an arsenal ship a little bit more flexibility maybe don't fire something the size of a small bus at people um something slightly smaller and that gives you the flexibility then to do yes you can take on carriers but you could also take on smaller surface combatants without it being hilariously uneconomical you can attack land targets um i think an arsenal ship would be looking at that more generalist there is a thing that we want dead we want it dead as opposed to

a kirov where using the using the kirovs major major missiles against destroyers or land targets was overkill and they'd run out of missiles very quickly what's the reason you use one of them against a um terrorist in off the coast of somalia just to see if they could fire the missile yeah the russia the russians have interesting habits with their big missiles i know they they in the Ossetian-Georgian war they erased a couple of Georgian patrol ships by firing missiles that I think probably had a reasonable argument to displace significant port that like the missiles themselves probably displaced a significant portion of the displacement of the Georgian patrol vessel so that ended with postage stamp size bits of ship all over the place but that's

using a very big sledgehammer to go after a very very small nut I know they haven't managed to make any progress with the reconstruction of the Kirov fleet, but they did start. The Peter Veliki is pretty much the only one which is even partially. It was supposed to be launched a couple of years ago, but it's still halfway. But do you know anything about the rationale behind that rebuild? Were they turning it into an armoured arsenal ship, or was it just an upgrade of the 1970s technology? Well, they were replacing the big missiles with the Kalibra range, weren't they? So that is heading more in sort of Arsenal ship direction,

but really that's because that's the best missile range they have at the current thing. And yes, it does make more sense when you're dealing with regular escorts and regular land targets than the huge missiles they're carrying. But no, I'd say it's more sort of an upgrading existing one. It's got arsenal ship overtones, but it's got arsenal ship overtones like a Ticaronga class has when it's carrying a whole load of Tomahawks. It's got arsenal ship overtones in terms of if the Type 45s have been fitted with a decent missile load from the get-go, rather than being fitted for but not with. and and to an extent they're making do with what they've got they have the kirov hulls they don't really have the capability to build a new ship of that a new warship of that kind of displacement

very quickly or very easily at the moment and also with the best will in the world to the poor old gunets of it's not in the best shape and they again they don't really have the capability of building a carrier the same size or larger in in anything like the immediate future china can and is obviously the uk has the the americans have the the the french have been obviously looking to replace charles de gaulle at some point the russians at the moment are kind of in a rock between a rock and a hard place they don't have the capability at the moment to build a large surface combatant whether that be a kirov successor or a carrier so they're stuck with what can we do in the in the more immediate term to keep us credible on on that kind of playing

field and refitting the kirovs is basically the only solution they've got left sure they can build a they can try and build a fleet carrier at some point in the future but it's going to take them a while it's going to be about about 15 or so years and that's if they started doing it working on it now to put the infrastructure in place and i don't think they're going to be working on the of the structure now that was in place. So what would, I was going to say, in that case, what would an Arsenal ship be? I mean, I think that's, this is the thing here,

is that we've gone from my initial concept, which is the Israeli approach of containers on a cruise ship. I see that as a modern, kind of like a Q ship, Because if you stick a couple of containers Aboard a regular container ship Maybe the crew know, maybe they don't But that's a Q ship, that's a surprise attack

And the thing is, you don't want all those containers Aboard the ship, they don't need to be missiles In fact, you don't want them to be Because you want it to pass muster If you're taking a container ship And are replacing every container For a missile launching survey A, people will suddenly be looking at you

Going, why is there a massive container ship Going out to sea with such a light load on it because again you're not going if you're going to do that you're not going to want your containers to be on the top of a load of empty containers so it sticks high or if it's full of containers and it's on the top that's very very expensive again and you know so okay maybe china might do that but most of the other countries in the world have to answer for their budgets and even russia would sort of be going, excuse me, Mr. Putin?

So Q-ships, okay. So those are sort of more Q-ships, I see, than Arsenal ships. Arsenal ships are when, if you take a container ship and you festoon it with nothing but missile launchers, that's an Arsenal ship. Or if you build a ship, which is literally just packed to the brim with missiles, and it's

pretty much a hull containing missiles, that is an Arsenal ship. Anything else, you're sort of building a variation of an escort, and This is why I say the Arsenal ship concept is a great idea, and I've used it myself. I've done blog posts on it in the past as use of something to project an idea of what we think about how many missiles and the missiles we're carrying, what we think about in terms of what we're going to be using these VLS-4 on ships. But I see more of the case of It's going to be a case of If you're using those

Cruise missiles into spaceships That's a Q-ship role And I do see that coming about Especially for powers which are Seeking to do Again, it's the Napoleonic Wars They're trying to supplant the Major hegemonic power

Maritime power But on the cheap In a way which is going to stress about or in a way, like the Germans in Model 2, which is going to distract the British from the main front. It's going to keep them quite elsewhere in the world. Arsenal ships, I think it's more a case of you're going to get ships carrying

maybe a more and increased versatile VLS load, especially, I know Jamie loves CubeSats. I have to say, I do see the utility of them. I think that's going to be, especially for reconnaissance, i think more in case if you're looking for a ship to have a its own airborne early warning you're going to get uavs and rotary uavs with awk ability um i always remember hummingbird a106 i think boeing's little rotary uav why not launch why not launch your own cubesat well launch your own cubesat yes but i think it's gonna sound strange the height level of the uav becomes

are something that's useful. And also, depending on where you are, orbits may not be practical and the like. Yeah, you know, it's the nicest way. So I think a rotary UV, because the reason I bring up the Hummingbird is A, they proved pretty useful in Afghanistan, the six of them which were sent out there,

but they were designed as gunships. But they also had a version which was made by radar, DARPA, which was out of a radar which could see through forest canopies. Now, in the nicest way, if you're carrying a radar which is powerful enough and precise enough to see through from fire from i think it was a thousand a full kilometer up they're measuring it at through all the layers in a jungle in the rainforest in the amazon and see what people are doing on the

ground and what actual people pick out their belt buckles are that radar's got to be a pretty capable radar that you could probably with a few tweaks turn into a fairly decent airborne early warning radar system. And those tweaks might even just be a case of changing the software patch, which means you could flick between

the two. I'm not a specialist in particular radar, I just remember reading the article and thinking. And okay, that becomes a very useful tool for your ship to have. Especially if you're looking at the strength of But I think an arsenal ship, in my cases, I'm looking at a ship which has the VLS, which possibly has the ability to launch CubeSats, has the ability to launch all sorts of missiles, but it's probably a regular destroyer or frigate in its main supply.

it might actually even be something we might need to bring back the phrase cruiser because an arsenal ship will be general purpose rather than being something which is an air defence asset or an anti-submarine warfare asset it's going to be a general purpose asset so it's either going to be cruiser

or probably actually thinking about it politically more likely sloop I think my vision of an arsenal ship I would actually call it a fleet asset it's not something that you can send off on its own it's not going to be doing its own missions

it's something that you send out with a large surface action group or a fleet because it's going to be mono-tasked to we have lots of missiles you look at modern destroyer and i think this is this is possibly where it's going to see its its utility the number of threats that a naval group has to deal with um have and continue to multiply um it obviously back at at the beginning of the 20th century, it's guns, then it's guns and torpedoes, then it's guns and torpedoes and submarines, then you add aircraft into the equation, then you add missiles launched from aircraft, missiles launched from ships, aircraft bombing, now you've got UAVs, you've got stealth,

you've got potential directed energy weapons, potentially even got ballistic weapons, space assets which require their own sets of defences, and all the other old threats that are still there. So you've got a lot of different threats that a ship has to deal with, then that's where you see nowadays you've got any decent size one destroyer. It's got helicopters on the back. It's got different radars all over the top. It's got missiles of bewildering varieties and numbers in its cells, plus a surface gun and some of its own surface to surface missiles. And I think especially with with this advent of directed energy weaponry and potential ballistic or space threats,

the sheer number of things you've got to deal with may start stretching the what you can actually fit in a given ship and then because at the moment you've got ships trying to do both the offensive and the defensive roles all within the same hull and especially if you're going to end up with this kind of monolithic confrontation between a large chinese fleet and a large american dash someone else's fleet you're going to have to start rationalizing and going well actually if if we've stuffed our ship with so many different things we've only got a dozen sams and a dozen cruise missiles and a dozen and ass rock two whatever we can't actually defend ourselves against any of those threats because we're very slightly good at everything but not particularly

good at anything specific at which point an arsenal ship as a fleet asset makes a certain amount of sense because you can then say right well actually we're going to take our destroyers back to the original idea this is our air defense it just carries sm2 sm3 sm6 essm whatever else we're going to pack it at all 96 cells out with that and here is our our arsenal ship it's just carrying tomahawk lrasm whatever else you want to call call it or if it's a uk version presumably a naval top storm shadow variant and it's storing our offensive strike capability and that's relieving our other combat ships of a lot of these other duties so they can they can focus on what they're good at and you're using the arsenal ship effectively as a giant floating magazine it

can't defend itself against submarines or such like that's what the rest of the fleet is for and then maybe you it doesn't necessarily become its own independent strike platform but it you queue in from other things so you've got say your stealth platform whether it's a f-35 a uav or whatever and that can go out and find your target maintain its stealth it doesn't have to carry external weapons it doesn't have to have to expose itself particularly it finds your target it queues back with a directed link back to your fleet and says right i have found what we need to kill and then the arsenal ship goes here have a hundred surface strike missiles so what you've described there is where i was leading to you've described a carrier replacement

what you have let me finish you've got your vulnerable big ship in the middle which carries everything you've got your screen to protect it that screen is now much more

focused on its role of area defence you might have your convoy 100 miles away with its dedicated anti-air escort and anti-submarine detection they use up their two or three anti-submarine weapons but they're still more than capable to guide in those that are coming

in to assist from over the horizon from the arsenal ship likewise you've got your amphibious force going onto the ground you've got your close support close escort not having to carry the weapons they are using their radars their optics their situational awareness to take over control of those dumb fired missiles from the arsenal ship and direct them where they're needed so what you've got is a delivery platform but without the accoutrements of directing the weapons that delivery it doesn't need massive radar outfits it doesn't need massive communications networks what it needs to do is be able to talk and coordinate with the vessels that are the eyes and ears and lob the kind of ordinance that's needed in the right direction at the right time

yeah but i think i think the carrier has us it the carrier will still have things the arsenal ship can't do so if you're talking about amphibious operations if you've got a stealth aircraft with a few bombs in its in its internal weapons bay you can have that circling overhead so if there's a need for immediate air support you could have a bomb on target in a minute or two with an arsenal ship with the best will in the world it's still going to be it's going to take against peer rivals against peer rival or near peer rivals well this is what i say if you're if you're using a stealth aircraft that's got its bomb bay shut and it's not carrying external weapons it's still a relatively survivable platform it's going to it's going to be even

if it's not standing directly overhead it's still going to have a reaction time that's a lot faster than an arsenal ship that's potentially a couple hundred miles away which in a especially if you talk about amphibious operations and that kind of thing that kind of difference in reaction time between a few minutes and 15 minutes could be is going to be the difference between life and death of people who need support and then you've got things like the distant air defense role massive we'll have your monitor there instead we'll have your monitor there instead yeah but you can you can you can if you've got your monitoring ship out there you can you can blow that up with the best wheel within the world it's it's uh fighters fighters for distant air defense

are going to be far superior to a to a single point target that can't move anywhere particularly quickly relative to an aircraft and then you've got the massive anti-submarine support role because especially if you've redirected most of your destroyers assets and time to the air defense role they're not going to have the time to also be running anti-submarine warfare which means your anti-submarine warfare is going to be don't run entirely by your frigates you only have a limited number of those and so a carrier that can then field another couple of dozen anti-submarine helicopters to to work into your frigate net is going to massively strengthen your your defenses and i think this is the thing at the moment you've got well it used to be the race between guns and

arm and now you've got the race between guns and defense systems or offensive systems and defensive systems more generally with the offensive systems that are coming online nowadays becoming a very much more of a threat and they're having a period of ascendancy you need that ability to really almost turtle up and have as much defensive asset as you can and whilst the carrier whilst the arsenal ship i think yes it could displace the carrier in the long range alpha strike capability the carrier's flexibility to provide all sorts of defensive roles and more precise time sensitive strike roles means that i think the carrier the carrier and the arsenal ship may complement each other but i don't think at the moment they're going to replace each other until we see some

if i mean if we see some massive paradigm shift in the technology like i don't know some form of lidar that's not affected by clouds if that combines with high-powered laser weaponry then that could be a particularly bad time to be an aircraft of any description at which point high speed low altitude missiles may be the only way to get that kind of support in but we don't have that at the moment so with with the current foreseeable technology in the next 10 20 years i think an arsenal ship as a complement yes as a carrier replacement entirely not not at the moment i don't think you see i see an arsenal ship as really sort of a surface version of an ssgm it's something useful but it's your alpha strike tool and i also i i think i sit there and go when

people tell me that the americans haven't already got the arsenal ships i go well they've had a higher class ssgms for a few years and they've been very very useful and that's been that sort the way they provided the Arsenal ship with security was having as an SSGN so it could sneak in launch its missiles and then get out and that was its role its initial mission was get in

avoid everyone else fire your missiles get out that is your job avoid and the Russians did the same with the Oscars yes it's sort of the Alpha Strike role and the Alpha Strike role is the thing which suffers the trouble

I would say in a nice way, if you're doing a peer invasion amphibious operation suppression of enemy air defences is going to be pretty high up there and one of the interesting things I've noticed is that as much as everyone else has gone into stealth, the US Navy

has kept up with the jamming quite heavily and you've got the Super Growlers the EG-18s which are very, very useful pieces of kit and you look at the u.s navy and it's approached the f-35 and it's sort of reluctant with the f-35c almost to take

the plunge and you sit there and you go well why is it and it's because they're not quite so sold on stealth as the rest of the as the rest of the world is because they're looking at stealth and thinking okay yes this is useful this is going to get us close but is this going to get us close when we really need to get close and what else do we need to do? And the thing is, do you go with jamming or do you go with stealth? At the moment, they're trying to balance the game.

And also when you go with stealth, you don't really actually go with strike, do you? And you don't go with range because as soon as you start bolting things onto the outside of these stealthy aircraft, they're no longer stealthy, which means they've lost their one-trick pony appeal. Yeah, and the big weakness of stealth

is always going to be more developments in sensors stealth stealth is basically yes we're fragile yes we could be horrifically slaughtered but you we could that's not going to happen as long as we're not seen um but that relies on everybody using the current well not even the current a specific subset of the current radar technology if people start investing in significant sized long wave radar arrays i know i know actually australia's got one sitting out in the desert somewhere um yeah and then and then you've obviously got things like more advanced infrared tracking systems possibly lidar all other sorts of interesting sensor technologies that might be coming out in the future if you strip away that cover of stealth all of a sudden things can get

very very bad for you whereas if you're as you say if you're taking your jamming assets and going i don't care what kind of sensor asset you have you just can't see anything um if you'll know i'm here but you know yeah and you know let's face it you know jamming technology would be getting leapfrogged every couple of years but it'd be a hell of a lot easier to replace that jamming module than to replace an f-35 yeah and to be honest if you consider the british are still planning on putting their jamming pods on their f-35s so we're going to have stealth aircraft which can take jamming pods? Which are overloaded...

Yeah, okay. We won't go down that path. Basically, I often sit there and go I think the F-35 is the greatest program by the US Marine Corps and the Royal Navy known to mankind. They've managed to get everyone else to pay to build them a

to pay to build for them a Vistal aircraft, which is actually there, the only ones who really need it, because of the scenarios they're in and the ships they're operating from. And they're going to get more. But basically they've managed to get A whole air forces And other people who really

The stealth F-35 Is not possibly the best solution To pay for building them An F-35 A stealth F-35 When you know What they needed was a pistol aircraft They needed a Harrier replacement

Yes Alright well I think that might be That might be putting Arsenal ships to bed have we ticked off your list Jamie I think we have did we come up with a third subject I don't think we did did we

I think the third ship was going to be rail guns and battlecruisers I think we covered that didn't we there is always my hypothetical dream for a Royal Navy command ship which we won't call a battlecruiser for reasons of not wanting to explode

that's just That's just my pie-in-the-sky dream for if we actually funded the Royal Navy properly. Well, that is the thing. I was sitting there and I wrote an article about Philip Vian for a magazine,

Warships International Fleet Review. Who knows if it gets published or not? I love them. They are a wonderful magazine, but they get so many articles that go in, and then they come out. Ian does a wonderful job,

Ian Ballantyne, but I think if there's a magazine which is sitting in the market going, there's thousands of readers, there's hundreds of people who want to contribute and who aren't quite happy to pay to contribute because they write good stuff, there's never enough

space to publish at all. And I was writing about Philip Vian, and really, Philip Vian gets a lot of flack in the first aircraft carrier squadron because when he moves from indomitable

to formidable, people get moved about. And they don't like it because they lose their cabins and all these things they've seen. One of the interesting things was Philip Dehan actually looked at before taking him on,

he was trying to get the permission to go into a cruiser or any other ship to use his flagship because he knew how cramped the space was on the carriers. And he thought, frankly, my staff can better go on to one of these larger cruisers or the battleships, which are designed with an admiral's space and with a proper admiral's space for an admiral's staff. They only started

really putting an admiral's space on carriers after there was a rear admiral aircraft carrier appointed. So that happens in 1930. Now, let's be honest, even the latest war designs are not really designed around an admiral having a huge staff and being the big fleet commander. By the time you've got the first aircraft carrier squadron in the Pacific under Philip Vian, he is pretty much de facto the fleet commander at sea, because Fraser is so busy dealing with the politics and other things. In other words, his staff is now a full staff. He's surprisingly enough on Formidable, one of the earlier carriers.

There's even less space than there had been on Indomitable for accommodating that staff. So, having, I think, when I'm looking at Albion and Bulwark, when I'm looking at the Queen Elizabeth class, they're designed with these brilliant spaces, yes, but they are task force spaces. What happens if we are having a fleet as the theatre command space, i.e. the Northwood role, and they actually need to run and they can't be run from Northwood because Northwood's dealing with something else? We don't have anything that can take that level of staff, that level of command, without you having to start getting rid of people, or as Sandy Woodward was doing so happily on Hermes in the Falcon's War, repurposing half the ship's staff. Just a flash of inspiration to you. instead of the Battlecruiser that's not a Battlecruiser, why not sell it as

the Britannia that's not Britannia? The Royal, yeah. Yeah, we've been trying that one. The one I was thinking of, I've got a very crude sketch design somewhere or other in one of these endless shelves.

I actually cribbed a whole bunch of different things, because I don't know if you remember the old RV Triton, the little trimoranic concept yes yes yes we we um we leased it i think yeah to detect our um deadly um refugee boats yeah so i i took a i took a theme off of that and i i must i stole one of the few decent ideas from the lcs as well and i basically came up with a a rear swept trimoran design but at something approaching 22 to 24 000 tons um and it just it had i think it had 96 vls forward and and a gun and then a substantial superstructure running all the way basically

from the from the gun backwards just massive vanguard style monolithic superstructure full of command space staff accommodations, a couple of radars on top for good measure and then a lot of the stores and supplies and everything that you would normally have that you're displacing with the massive command infrastructure

those will go out effectively onto the little pontoons on the sides and where you've got this big rear deck now, imagine I think it's the Independence Class LCS with its nice big helicopter deck at the back, but now imagine that on a

mid 20k ton ship you can actually support quite a number of helicopters off of there so it's actually got its own it's got its own massive vls system it's got its own significant size helicopter air wing for transport communications and a little bit of asw purposes but effectively that's just so it can look after itself and in the center you've just got this massive command infrastructure so it's got the it's firepower density wise it's probably it's not got the firepower density that you'd expect for a a ship in that range if you compare it to something like an eight to ten thousand ton asset like a type 45 or a burke but it's still got more than enough firepower to take on probably any two of those ships and make and make them think twice and it's

got this big command infrastructure as well so you can you can you can just sit there and go right this is our flagship it's not necessarily going to work as a it's not going to act as in a in a very offensive role it's it's defending the fleet with helicopters and sub helicopters it can contribute to the surface air to the surface to air missile defense but it's not an offensive platform let's say it looks after itself and it sits there and it coordinates everything it coordinates airstrikes it coordinates anti-sub warfare it coordinates the fleet defense and that means that the carriers can worry about doing the carrier stuff the type 45 can do the type 45 thing the type 26s can do their thing and all the decisions are just being taken from this one big

command asset that is still mean enough that if you get a forklift war type situation where people are trying to snipe off your big assets it's not going to be the easiest task in the world when it can when it can stand up to itself for itself let me put a budget i was expecting jamie to suggest an Arsenal ship. Yep. I was also expecting Arsenal ships to come out of James. No, no, no. I was actually going to say that

I've got a budget proposal for you. There's an awful lot of unused luxury liners out there at the moment. So we can have three command ships so that you don't

when you lose one, you don't lose all your command stuff. You can play the shell game. You're talking about modern versions of HMS Belolo. You can play the shell game, send all three out, and it's like, guess which one our Admiral is on. I think we can pretty much... Yeah, why not?

Seriously, there are going to be so many of these luxury liners out there just tied up, rusting, because... Yeah, sure, some people will go back to sea for cruises, but I think you'll find... My aunt and uncle already are planning on it next year, and I'm sitting there going, You're both in your 70s It ain't going to happen

But beyond that The casual cruiser Cruise goer Is not going to be going back into the market For a long time to come So you've got these holes out there Some of them are very big Some of them are very powerful

Most of them are very modern Look I know conversions always end up being Far more expensive than you know sold by the various marketing agencies but look you've got a lot of space in those casinos

to put up consoles you know you've got a lot of you know equipment there to keep the Admiral happy with his afternoon meals I do swear that that's one of the reasons why we've seen a stop in the

sort of the production moving towards the new the the forward uh well they they keep coming with different names for them but the um basically the literal strike ship i think it was the brish were going with the lsf which didn't look anything like a literal combat ship and um i i am half suspecting the reason they've been held up is they thought well hang on if we hold this design up we can get a far better deal on the second-hand ships in a few months time than we can right now we can get something really pretty for the same price but i think the budget option certainly has it has its attractions i think it depends on what kind of war you're gearing towards um if you're if you're gearing

towards more of the kind of yeah the the forklands the gulf wars that kind of thing where you're you're expecting to be able to dominate or at least heavily contest your your enemy's um ability to operate against you then yeah converted liner of some description probably makes a lot more sense financially and it's got as you say it's got the space i'm i'm i guess my concept is more looking towards the idea of uh of it's it's as much of a combat asset as anything else in the fleet it just happens to have a slightly different role so yeah i'm looking at it it's like this is the heart of the formation if you're going out to fight china russia whoever else um it's the kind of thing where you can command an entire fleet and even if half your escorts get blown

away in the middle of combat you're still able to look after yourself and you can recover back and contribute meaningfully to the to the to the comp to the combat as well yeah i mean yeah that's that's there's there's obviously a lot of advantages in that um And beyond that, it's also obvious that whatever your command ship is, it's going to be the primary target, just like, you know, the command tank with its nice little flag flying off the aerial. You know, these things are going to be what everyone looks for first. So a converted liner might not be the ideal and most survivable platform,

but it might be the one that you get, because where are you going to get the money to build the battlecruiser? In World War II, they were using converted liners. And I'm going through them and the only one which got sunk from my memory of the command headquarters ships was the one which was the converted

frigate. Because it looked like a frigate? Yes, pretty much. It got hit in D-Day. Right. It got hit. And there was a whole debate as to whether or not the Royal Navy was calling it an aerial or were calling

the German missiles aerial torpedoes not because apparently channel 4 channel 4 uh program said that they described as aerial torpedoes i find it very unlikely that the native and the royal navy which has already been facing missiles is going to start thinking about this thing as an aerial torpedo as sort of i i have a i have a feeling that the um yeah but i suppose again that comes back to the thing is By the time of D-Day, the Allies very assuredly have the upper hand when it comes to deflecting enemy air and sea attacks. So, yeah, again, it comes back to this kind of thing of what do we think the battle space is going to look like? Are we dominating it and we just need to streamline our assets and our methods of coordinating everything?

or are we thinking about sailing into harm's way under a hail of fire and increasing our combat effectiveness more so than our just general operational interlocking capabilities? And the other thing, the minor aspect to my idea is the fact that because it's much more geared towards, as combat-wise, it's much more geared towards rapid reaction self-defence, it also makes perfect sense to be the kind of command vessel that you'd send into confined waters like that you have in the middle east because you stick a carrier in the middle of

as you say in the gulf of hormuz or the persian gulf or whatever and a lot of its abilities like we were discussing earlier like the fact it can stay hidden have kind of gone away and it it takes a while to launch an aircraft compared to how long it takes to launch a missile or fire up a gun so you are if you if you want to assert your dominance and you're using a super carrier in those kind of waters you are putting yourself a little a bit out vulnerability wise yeah my surprise is that the iranians do not put more money into building land-based artillery gun turrets and just huge 15 inch guns because seriously they could close those straits quite easily with a decent more than 15 inch gun and it's got to be cheaper and easier than the missile

systems they keep having the missile systems are still more mobile yeah i think i think it's the mobility issue they're probably more worried about it i think this actually this comes back right i think one of the one of the first long videos i did with military history visualized talking about coastal defenses it the general problem with a fixed asset of a coastal defense is everyone knows where it is and so they can make very specific plans to either go around it or get rid of it it's the endless problem of yeah you you can you can have as many guns as you like in one fixed battery but that just means you've given the enemy the exact blueprint of what they need to build to get past it unless of course you make everyone pretend that you uh you pretend to

everybody that you've actually decommissioned it and no one takes account of it and then they sail past it and then some angry norwegians pop up and blow away at the blue guy hello we're not actually dead yes and i think you know that's that's going to be china's issue isn't it you know everyone knows exactly what they're putting on those islands and it's an awful lot um but it means that they can you know design a way to bypass those uh um defenses so and speaking as the one who with a sister who's a geotechnical civil engineer she's not exactly sure how stable those islands are. You might not need to use as much of a missile load as you

need. Those reports are already starting to filter out. I've seen a couple here and there that bits and pieces of them might already be starting to crumble. Particularly some of the more underground components that they've built like their

magazines. Washed space. High quality concrete is not... You need very good quality control on your concrete for saltwater construction and we've already seen with some of the bridges they've been building that they've been having issues across the and i'm looking at the big bridge they've built across from the mainland to hong kong which of course this you know sort of

umbilical cord to tie hong kong more to china lovely but am i i'm looking at all that concrete and thinking, that's a lot of concrete. It's a tremendous amount of concrete. I'm not sure I'd want to drive over it. Yeah, well, I mean, this is why, even

when you're controlling very well for your concrete, this is why the sea defences and such that you put up, whether it's sea walls or the massive tank trap style things and such, they only tend to last 15, 20 years before they need um they need replacing or repairing because the sea is a very very cruel and harsh place to be

um and yeah if you've got if you've got a fault in your concrete it only takes one one bad pour one bad batch and uh if you're operating in an environment where you're constantly exposed to sea conditions that will the sea will let you know in a very violent manner usually at the time you really really really don't need it although it does bring up the interesting possibility as much as you wouldn't want to wish something like the Boxing Day tsunami on anybody. But it does bring up the interesting possibility that given that it is sitting on the ring of fire, a Boxing Day earthquake tsunami type situation in or near the South China Sea could actually be one of the few cases of massive environmental disaster actually has a significant impact on the global military strategic outlook,

because if you've got a bunch of artificial islands you're basing your strategy on and they're maybe not necessarily built to the best of qualities and then you get an 8.0 earthquake and a massive tsunami racing across the region, there's probably not going to be that many of them left afterwards. The only two problems you get with that is even if it is accidental,

there are going to be people who are considering a conspiracy theory because it's going to work so well in so many other nations. and um then you have to deal with what do you do to the chinese rebuilding efforts after do you go and indict them because you now have proof of what they're going to be building and they're not supposed to be building because those aren't their territories so how do you respond you then end up with a you know a two-fisted response scenario what happens and of course if you go help them with the recovery efforts because you're doing humanitarian relief on those people who've been trapped by that, because they have got civilians

and they've got people there, you'll then acknowledge are you then acknowledging that those islands belong to them? That's what I say it would be an incident where a simple earthquake suddenly throws the entire strategic balance of the region on its head

and with that I think it's probably a good spot to leave it Let's hope the recordings have worked Hopefully I've got to I've got a backup on my phone, and I've got the computer working, so hopefully. That was great fun, guys. Thank you so much.

Thank you. That's good. Great fun. So, again, this was The Bilge Pumps with Dr. Alex Clark. If you enjoyed it, please let us know, and we'll hope to see you next time on Sea Control.