Counting Warships Becomes Dangerous

 

Hi

 

The authors of that article are essentially unqualified to write on this topic.  They make the derogatory claim, "Simplicity rules in journalism and politics."  That applies quite well to them, since they do a very simplistic and incomplete analysis of the topic.

 

If the "researchers" at Wired magazine had any brains at all, they would easily find out that the concept of applying FORMAL evaluations of combat power date back to at least the early 1600's, when Britain needed to keep track of how much combat power they had available in different oceans or seas.  The concept of informal analysis goes back to at least the Greeks and Romans who had naval vessels ranked according to how many levels of rowers each ship had...the greater the number of rowers and levels, the more mass and ramming power and deck-warrior carrying capacity the ships had.  However, this system was fairly imprecise as a measurement of combat power, so it was less useful than the Brit or French systems.

 

The Brits formalized the rankings by dividing their fleet according to "First Rate", "Second Rate", "Third Rate", and so on.  That was no comment on the quality of each ship, but was based upon the number of major caliber cannon that each ship normally carried, and hence their effective combat power.  Naturally, they would assign the First Rate ships (100+ major caliber cannon) to major battle zones where they would likely come up against the enemy's most powerful and heavily armed warships.  The lesser ratings would be assigned to zones where the enemy was known to have no large ships, or to general patrol and anti-pirate and anti-slave-trade duties in less hotly contested areas of the world.  Pirates, for example, despite their fearsome reputation, rarely had the most deadly ships on the seven seas (they usually had the rough equivalent of a Brit Fourth or Fifth Rate ship or even less).  Why?  Because they didn't usually have a government paying for the construction, maintenance, or manning of their ships.  First Rate Brit ships were expensive to build and expensive to operate, which is why America's largest ships of the War of 1812 (i.e. U.S.S. Constitution "Old Ironsides" with a typical 44 gun battery, and up to 58 for some missions) were only equivalent of a Brit Third Rate ship.....we couldn't afford anything bigger!  But that was somewhat workable, because the American designers created innovative ships that were armed with heavier guns than the comparable Brit frigates, but faster than the bigger Brit ships, so they couldn't catch us.  Of course, there was the "minor" problem that we only had 6 of those frigates, whereas the Brits had almost 300 ships of all Rates.  So our ships had to be careful to avoid direct battles with large groups of Brit ships.

 

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Randy

 

 

 

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On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 8:16 AM, Beowulf <beowulf@westerndefense.net> wrote:

 

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htmurph/articles/20120508.aspx

 

Counting Warships Becomes Dangerous

May 8, 2012: The U.S. Congress has warned the U.S. Navy to be careful if it changes the way it measures its combat strength. The navy proposes to count hospital ships, patrol boats and other support craft as combat ships (or "primary mission platforms").

In reality, it's never been simple to measure the combat power of a fleet. Early in the 20th century there was an explosion of new ship types (subs, destroyers, battleships, aircraft carriers, fast attack boats armed with torpedoes and so on) and it's still unclear how one should measure all of these new warship types against each other. For several centuries before that it was pretty much a matter of counting the number of heavy guns you had afloat. But for the last century there's been a lot more variety, and measuring the overall strength has become difficult. It only became worse with the introduction of effective anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles in the last half century, as well as the introduction of "smart" (software controlled) mines and torpedoes in the last few decades.

These days, fleet comparisons are best shown on a spreadsheet, with not one overall value, but several (capabilities for landing troops, delivering air strikes, sinking enemy merchant and warships, clearing mines keeping hostile subs from your shipping). Most fleets specialize, and a few (like the United States) are pretty good across the board. But politicians and the media prefer just one number, even if it's misleading. Simplicity rules in journalism and politics.