The Ship Model Forum

Yes, I did, and from a feasibility point of view, it looks neat, but I would not make the same choices you made. Only 48 VLS cells can fit in the barbette of a 16" turret, and that is not a good trade-off. Four-hundred rounds of 16" in a 16" turret is a far better deal than 48 more VLS tubes. VLS can be fit in the super structure, just like the Iowas were supposed to get in the 1990s.

However, if you wanted to delete Turret 3 for a huge helo hangar, that might be worth the added real-estate.

I have been photo-shopping North Carolina plans with 96 VLS cells, Phalanx CIWS, NATO Sea Sparrow, Harpoon, new 5" guns (either Mk45 or the Montana-class twin Mk39 5"/54s), ECM, new bridge, new masts with radars, refueling King post, and sliding pad-eye to fit the 1990s reactivation scheme that was described to me. I am adding helicopter hangars with RAST to fully utilize the potential of a battleship platform. I have so many projects on my plate (21st Century Modernized Iowa, DDH, LCS-1/2 Flight II, SSBN(X), Light NSFS Ship), but to be honest, this would make a fun 2013 build, especially in 1/350.

To be honest, if North Carolina were reactivated like this, there is no doubt in my mind that she would have been retained after the budget scourge of the early 1990s.

cool (did you see my rebuild of the Alabama? on "Modernised USS Montana BB-67" ?)

No problem, man. I am on deployment at the moment, but once I get back in garrison, I will be getting started again on my modernized USS Iowa with a reconfigured LCS-1 and LCS-2.

I was talking with a project manager for the modernization of the Iowas in the '80s recently, and he said that NAVSEA had issued a directive to make configuration plans to modernize the USS North Carolina after the Wisconsin had been put back into the fleet. He did not go into detail about it, but he said that VLS would have been used instead of the Mk143 ABLs.

I had never heard that this was actually on the table, so it has made me think about what kind of configuration it may have been.

K sorry ...didn't have time to read the other posts...it's a point I'm adamant on . thought I was replying to a carrier hugger!

Yes, Cliffy is right. When I wrote that, I was being very sarcastic. I am a battleship proponent. In fact, I am currently reading thorugh the 11" subcaliber reports. They had extremely good performance fired through 16"/50caliber guns with 16"/45 and 16"/50 propellant. They were of great potential for extending the range of the 16" guns beyond the USMC's NSFS range requirements.

I'm pretty sure Dave was being very sarcastic in those posts you chose to quote. Read through some more of his posts. He's the biggest proponent on here for the reactivation of the BBs and most certainly believes they have a very important number of roles on today's battlefield.

hmmm.... didn’t bother checking his facts & see what use the New Jersey was in V.N. or Beirut, or all of the Iowa’s have been, anytime they see action.
The Iraqis were trying to surrender in droves anytime they saw one of the Missouri’s drones flying over, cause they knew what was coming next! A 16” HE round will excavate a crater the size of a tennis court 10 feet deep & an Iowa can throw 9 of them every 2 minutes! No carrier ever invented has ever been able to come close to that kind of firepower & with the introduction of cruise missiles, new propellants & RAP rounds even the range advantage of a carrier (its only advantage) has been lost. Not to mention pilot loss (cruise missiles & 16” rounds don’t have pilots to get shot down & captured!). We’re not suggesting to build 1930s model battle ships, do they build the Yorktown class today? With the advent of new technology (Missiles, Radar, VTOL, Lasers{yes they’re testing a new high powered AA laser} ) the carrier may soon be obsolete & a Large, heavily armed & armored surface warship (a Battleship!) may be the capitol ship of the future, with the carrier becoming just a footnote in history as the temporary usurper.

Bob,

I have not read the world affairs article, but think you are missing the broader point about the implications of Chinese ballistic missiles versus U.S. sea power. Nor is the targeting solution as difficult as you think.

The Federation of American Scientist have several excellent papers on conventionally armed ballistic missiles, the proposed Air-Sea Battle doctrine, Wayne Hughes excellent treatise on naval tactics, and a strategy papers by guys like Andrew Krepinevich, etc. are also help frame the discussion.

The long and short of it is that CVBGs and surface ships are:

1) pretty slow compared to missiles and other aircraft
2) can be tracked and targeted in real time by a number of systems including satellites
3) do not have to be sunk to be put out of action or even effectively destroyed by these weapons

Aircraft, radars and other electronic devices are particularly vulnerable to a number of cheap area effect sub-munitions that can be carried in a ballistic missile. Think of what a hail storm of large ball bearings moving at hypersonic speeds would do to an F-18, a SPY-1 radar, etc. And a ballistic missile can carry *a lot* of sub-munitions. Of course, any hypersonic missile that hits a ship will not need an explosive warhead to bore a large hole right through it. Do the math on how much time a CVBG sitting 500-1500 nm off the coast would have to react to a ballistic missile swarm and it will sober you.

Add to this that the Chinese are in a sea-denial mode - the U.S. and its allies will have to fight their way into Asia to support Taiwan, Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore etc..

It has been established by the US Navy that the power projection of 12 carriers is necessary, 10 is essential, and we are dipping into a maximum of 9 carriers for the foreseeable future. The gap of at least one ship must be filled. Even though it has been established that battleship reactivation is the only way to provide the ordnance delivery and combat capability necessary to maintain the 10-11 capital ship minimum, some want to maintain the position that battleships are impossible...no matter what. Even though the facts establish the feasibility of battleship reactivation, modernization, operation, and combat capability, some wish to maintain that they are to be dismissed.

If battleships are not the answer? What is?

Maybe Seasick has a solution.

Shovel ready projects

Here's some additional evidence in support of the type of "What-If's" we've been discussing. This is a quote from the May 2010 issue of Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute. The article is the "U.S. Naval Battle Force Changes".

"... With the decommissioning of the John F. Kennedy (CV-67) 12 years earlier than scheduled because of budget constraints and Navy neglect, and the ongoing RF/COHs for the Nimitz-class carriers, the effective carrier strength of the Navy has dropped to 10 ships. However, with the planned decommissioning of the Enterprise (CVN-65) in FY 2012 - three years before her replacement, the Gerald R. Ford (CVN-79), is completed - the carrier force level will drop to nine ships."

If we don't replace carrier strike capability with battleships or strike cruisers, what will take the palce of the carrier's strike capability?

Regards,
Bob

Fiji leader wants to replace Pacific allies with China


by Staff Writers
Suva (AFP) Aug 11, 2010
Fiji's military leader Voreqe Bainimarama wants to ditch traditional ties with Australia, New Zealand and the United States, and align his Pacific Island nation with China, it was reported Wednesday.
Speaking to Fijivillage News website during a visit to China, the self-appointed prime minister said China was the one country that understands the reforms he is trying to implement.

The tough thing about IR is the wave propegation does not travel far enough for something going Mach 10 to lock on to. It will have to be radar...which should be equally as difficult to be honest. Diving on a radar contact when you have the water clutter is rather difficult, too.

We are our own worst enemy:

Outsourcing US Missile Technology to China

The Saga of Magnequench

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Magnequench is an Indianapolis-based company. It specializes in the obscure field of sintered magnetics. Essentially, it makes tiny, high-tech magnets from rare-earth minerals ground down into a fine powder. The magnets are highly prized by electronics and aviation companies. But Magnequench's biggest client has been the Pentagon.

The neodymium-iron-boron magnets made by Magnequench are a crucial component in the guidance system of cruise missiles and the Joint Direct Attack Munition or JDAM bomb, which is made by Boeing and had a starring role in the spring bombing of Baghdad. Indeed, Magnequench enjoys a near monopoly on this market niche, supplying 85 percent of the rare-earth magnets that are used in the servo motors of these guided missiles and bombs.

But the Pentagon may soon be sending its orders for these parts to China, instead of Indiana. On September 15, 2004 Magnequench shuttered its last plant in Indiana, fired its 450 workers and began shipping its machine tools to a new plant in China. "We're handing over to the Chinese both our defense technology and our jobs in the midst of a deep recession," says Rep. Peter Visclosky, a Democrat from northern Indiana.

It gets stranger. Magnequench is not only moving its defense plants to China, it's actually owned by Chinese companies with close ties to the Chinese government.

Magnequench began its corporate life back in 1986 as a subsidiary of General Motors. Using Pentagon grants, GM had developed a new kind of permanent magnet material in the early 1980s. It began manufacturing the magnets in 1987 at the Magnequench factory in Anderson, Indiana.

In 1995, Magnequench was purchased from GM by Sextant Group, an investment company headed by Archibald Cox, Jr-the son of the Watergate prosecutor. After the takeover, Cox was named CEO. What few knew at the time was that Sextant was largely a front for two Chinese companies, San Huan New Material and the China National Non-Ferrous Metals Import and Export Corporation. Both of these companies have close ties to the Chinese government. Indeed, the ties were so intimate that the heads of both companies were in-laws of the late Chinese premier Deng Xiaopeng.

At the time of the takeover, Cox pledged to the workers that Magnequench was in it for the long haul, intending to invest money in the plants and committed to keeping the production line going for at least a decade.

Three years later Cox shut down the Anderson plant and shipped its assembly line to China. Now Cox is presiding over the closure of Magnequench's last factory in the US, the Valparaiso, Indiana plant that manufactures the magnets for the JDAM bomb. Most of the workers have already been fired.

"Archie Cox and his company are committing a criminal act," says Mike O'Brien, an organizer with the UAW in Indiana. "He's a traitor to his country."

It's clear that Cox and Sextant were acting as a front for some unsavory interests. For example, only months prior to the takeover of Magnequench San Huan New Materials was cited by US International Trade Commission for patent infringement and business espionage. The company was fined $1.5 million. Foreign investment in American high-tech and defense companies is regulated by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS). It is unlikely that CFIUS would have approved San Huan's purchase of Magnequench had it not been for the cover provided by Cox and his Sextant Group.

One of Magnequench's subsidiaries is a company called GA Powders, which manufactures the fine granules used in making the mini-magnets. GA Powders was originally a Department of Energy project created by scientists at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Lab. It was spun off to Magnequench in 1998, after Lockheed Martin took over the operations at INEEL.

In June 2000, Magnequench uprooted the production facilities for GA Powders from Idaho Falls to a newly constructed plant in Tianjin, China. This move followed the transfer to China of high-tech computer equipment from Magnequench's shuttered Anderson plant. According to a report in Insight magazine, these computers could be used to facilitate the enrichment of uranium for nuclear warheads.

GA Powders isn't the only business venture between a Department of Energy operation and Magnequench. According to a news letter produced by the Sandia Labs in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Sandia is working on a joint project with Magnequench involving "the development of advanced electronic controls and new magnet technology".

Dr. Peter Leitner is an advisor to the Pentagon on matters involving trade in strategic materials. He says that the Chinese targeted Magnequench in order to advance their development of long-range Cruise missiles. China now holds a monopoly on the rare-earth minerals used in the manufacturing of the missile magnets. The only operating rare-earth mine is located in Batou, China.

"By controlling access to the magnets and the raw materials they are composed of, US industry can be held hostage to Chinese blackmail and extortion," Leitner told Insight magazine last year. "This highly concentrated control-one country, one government-will be the sole source of something critical to the US military and industrial base."

Visclosky and Senator Evan Bayh asked the Bush administration to intervene using the Exon-Florio Amendment to the 1988 Defense Appropriation Act to pry the Chinese money out of the company and force Magnequench to keep its factories in Indiana.

There was precedent for just such a presidential move. In 1990, George H.W. Bush ordered the state-owned China National Aerospace and Export Company to divest its interest in Mamco Manufacturing of Seattle, reportedly because of concern that the Chinese firm could have use Mamco to acquire jet fighter engine technology. The directive came from Bush three months after CATIC had seized control of Mamco. When after six months the Chinese company refused to relinquish its interest in Mamco, Bush ordered the Treasury Department to place the company in receivership and barred the Chinese officials from having any access to its facilities.

Unlike his father, Bush 2 declined to respond to the pleas from Visclosky and Bayh. The Treasury Department, which could have intervened to stop the move, also refused to act. Visclosky says that he also contacted the Pentagon. Its procurement officials admitted to him that Magnequench was the only domestic supplier of the smart bomb magnets (Hitachi holds the other contract), but that it had no idea that company was owned by the Chinese or that it was packing up for Tianjin.

As the doors closed on its Valparaiso plant, a memo came from Magnequench executives advising that its HQ will be soon be relocated from Indianapolis to Singapore. No word on yet whether Cox is moving too.

I don't know, how long have we had infra-red final targeting on our ballistic missiles?

Again, this just reinforces the point that Chinese technology is a generation or two behind. Infrared? Geez, how long have we had that? This is no threat although it is a trend to pay attention to.

As far as the item about selling missile technology to China, that's unbelieveable. Talk about shooting ourselves in the foot!

Regards,
Bob

2008

Retired Rear Adm. Eric Vadon, a consultant on East Asian defense affairs, thought the weapon sounded like a Dong Feng 21 (DF-21) missile, also known by its western designation CSS-5. Although the basic missile has been in service since the 1970s, the Chinese are known to be working to turn it into a homing ballistic missile.

"There's a possibility that what we're seeing is that somebody is calling this thing a cruise missile because it has some of those characteristics," Vadon said. "It maneuvers and it homes in. But a cruise missile breathes air."

The Chinese targetable ballistic missile threat has long worried U.S. Navy planners and military professionals.

"We're pretty certain the Chinese have been working on this for some time," said Bernard Cole, a professor at National Defense University in Washington and an expert on the Chinese military. "It would pose a threat. I don't know how you would counter that missile."

But Cole said the description of a ballistic missile turning into a cruise missile is new: "I've never heard this described this way."

Sources in the Pentagon said the U.S. Navy has not yet moved to add the BMD upgrade to any more existing Aegis ships. But a senior defense official confirmed the Navy is embracing BMD as a mission for Aegis surface combatants - and that all the new DDG 51s the Navy is asking for will be BMD-capable.

McCullough also said that the destroyer modernization program, which will start in 2011 with the oldest ships, will include signal processors "with inherent ballistic missile defense capability." Those electronics will make the ships more easily upgradeable should the service choose to add the BMD upgrade.

Even if the Pentagon and Congress approve the request to build more DDG 51s, the new ships won't start to come on line until at last 2015, estimated Eric Labs of the Congressional Budget Office, who also testified at the July 31 hearing.

Here's another item dated 2007

Thursday, May 17, 2007

‘Latest Chinese missile technology to target US carriers’

TOKYO: China plans to equip its upcoming missiles with infrared technology to give them the ability to hit US warships in Asia, a Japanese newspaper said on Wednesday.

The upgrade is part of preparations for a potential conflict over Taiwan, which China considers part of its territory and which has a security pact with the United States, the Sankei Shimbun said.

Citing unnamed military sources in Japan and Taiwan, the conservative newspaper said that China was developing an infrared detection system for its medium-range Dongfeng-21 missiles so they can pinpoint warships.

The upgraded Dongfeng would discourage the United States or Japan from sending in their warships equipped with the Aegis technology designed to shoot down incoming missiles, the newspaper said. The Dongfeng-21 has a range of some 2,150 kilometers (1,350 miles). The Sankei estimated that around 100 are deployed.

Western analysts have also speculated that China is also developing a next-generation long-range Dongfeng-41 capable of hitting the US mainland.

Beijing has repeatedly threatened to invade Taiwan, where nationalists fled in 1949 after losing the civil war to Mao Zedong’s communists, if the island declares formal independence.

The United States and Japan in a first-of-a-kind statement in February 2005 declared that a peaceful resolution of Taiwan Strait issues was a common strategic objective of the Pacific allies.

Looks like the Chinese somehow manage to get the technology they need. In addition to US tech, theyt also get Russian tech in that Moscow has delivered the Mach 4.5 Anti-ship cruise missile to China. And you know reverse engineering and theft of intellectual property are a Chinese forte.


Bill Gertz INSIDE THE RING
-

4:45 a.m., Thursday, October 15, 2009
President Obama recently shifted authority for approving sales to China of missile and space technology from the White House to the Commerce Department -- a move critics say will loosen export controls and potentially benefit Chinese missile development.

The president issued a little-noticed "presidential determination" Sept. 29 that delegated authority for determining whether missile and space exports should be approved for China to Commerce Secretary Gary Locke.

Commerce officials say the shift will not cause controls to be loosened in regards to the export of missile and space technology.

Eugene Cottilli, a spokesman for Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security, said under new policy the U.S. government will rigorously monitor all sensitive exports to China.

The presidential notice alters a key provision of the 1999 Defense Authorization Act that required that the president notify Congress whether a transfer of missile and space technology to China would harm the U.S. space-launch industry or help China's missile programs.

The law was passed after a late-1990s scandal involving the U.S. companies Space Systems/Loral and Hughes Electronics Corp.

Both companies improperly shared technology with China and were fined $20 million and $32 million, respectively, by the State Department after a U.S. government investigation concluded that their know-how was used to improve China's long-range nuclear missiles.

Section 1512 of the 1999 law requires the president to certify to Congress in advance of any missile equipment or technology exports to China that the export will not harm the U.S. space-launch industry and that "missile equipment or technology, including any indirect technical benefit that could be derived from such export, will not measurably improve the missile or space launch capabilities of the People's Republic of China."


Henry Sokolski, director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, said restoring Commerce Department control over the sensitive experts is a "step backward."

"It's as though Commerce's mishandling of missile-tech transfers to China in the 1990s never happened," said Mr. Sokolski, a former Pentagon proliferation specialist. "But it did. As a result, we are now facing much more accurate, reliable missiles from China."

Mr. Sokolski said he expects the U.S. government under the new policy to again boost Chinese military modernization through "whatever renewed 'benign' missile technology" is approved.

"It was foolish for us to do this in the 1990s and is even more dangerous for us to do now," he said.

Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, which monitors export control policies, said he was surprised by the decision to shift responsibility back to Commerce -- a change that Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush did not make.

"It is shocking that it would be delegated to the secretary of commerce, whose job it is to promote trade, rather than to the secretary of state or the secretary of defense, who have far more knowledge and responsibility within their organizations for missile technology," Mr. Milhollin said.Mr. Milhollin said a similar delegation of power would have been criticized in previous administrations. "In fact, the delegation turns the present law upside down because Congress passed it after finding that the Commerce Department had improperly helped China import U.S. missile technology in the 1990s," he said.

Edward Timperlake, a Pentagon technology-security official during the George W. Bush administration, said he agrees that the new policy likely will loosen export controls on dual-use technology that could be used to boost China's large-scale missile program.

China's military recently displayed new long-range and cruise missiles during a military parade in Beijing marking the 60th anniversary of communist rule.

"It looks like we're going to have Loral-Hughes part two," Mr. Timperlake said of the policy shift.