FutureWarTHINK 005: BEWARE Small, Fast Boat (SFB) Swarms!
High Explosive Drone Small, Fast Boats: PDM Death to Mahanian Cruisers
PIC: A BPB being dropped from a Lancaster bomber of the famous 617 'Damnbusters' sqd. RAF. The boat's pilot is inside it.
http://www.hisutton.com/Explosive_boats.html
Italy’s elite Special Forces unit, Decima MAS (aka X-MAS) Motoscafo da Turismo (‘Tourist Motorboat’, often abbreviated to MT) was an exploding motorboat which rammed its targets like a US Civil War torpedo-ram. It was more affectionately called the Barchino meaning ‘little boat’ by the men who used it. It was first developed in the 1930s and put to use in World War Two.
It was the first ‘modern’ explosive boat, the one to which most subsequent designs can trace their lineage. The concept was incredibly simple; you take a fast motor launch, place a large warhead in the nose and drive it at full speed into an enemy ship. The pilot escapes just before impact.
It was 5.6m (18ft) long and 1.6m (5.2ft) wide, but powered by a 95hp Alfa Romeo AR outboard motor allowing an impressive speed of 33kt at full load. The engine drove a contra-rotating propeller mounted on a double-right-angle joint that hung below and behind the boat, which was steerable and also acted as the rudder. A very interesting feature of the propeller was that it could be swiveled up to starboard (right) so that it no longer protruded below the craft. This allowed the boat to scrape over the top of typical torpedo net defenses. This could be done either at full speed, using the momentum to carry the boat over with barely any decrease in speed whilst the propeller was tucked in, or by slowly and quietly easing over the net to maintain the element of surprise.
It carried a 300kg (660lb) barrel-shaped warhead that was mounted low down inside the hull towards the bow. The bow was rimmed with a fender that was designed to split the boat down the middle from a frontal-aspect impact, thus releasing the warhead which could be set to detonate on impact (i.e. at or above the waterline) or at a depth as it sank below the waterline.
The pilot sat in the extreme rear of the craft overhanging the stern. A short distance from impact, maybe just 50m (164ft) the pilot would be jettisoned off the back of the craft thus avoiding a sudden demise. He was equipped with a life-vest or floatation device which doubled as a backrest.
On 25th March 1941, two Italian destroyers, the Francesco Crispi and Quintino Sella, departed the Italian base on Leros, an island in the Aegean Sea, with three MTs each carried on davits. Their target was British shipping in Souda Bay on the Northwestern coast of Crete, in the eastern Mediterranean. At 0330hrs on 26th the destroyers stopped to launch the MTs about 10 miles (16km) northeast of the harbor entrance. There was a heavy haze providing good cover but this also made visual navigation difficult. Sunrise would occur at 0518hrs giving the MTs less than 1.5 hours to attack their targets.
The boats cruised together in formation towards their unsuspecting prey. Ahead of them were three layers of boom defenses consisting of floating nets. With the swiveling propeller drives, the MTs made it over these without incident, and did not encounter any boom defense vessels. Two boats aimed for the largest warship in sight, the heavy cruiser HMS York. At 0446hrs the first pilot pulled the lever that would set the MT on a collision course with the cruiser, simultaneously jettisoning him off the back of the craft. The MT continued at full throttle into the cruiser, impacting amidships with a massive explosion. The second boat followed shortly afterwards, also impacting amidships. Both boiler rooms and an engine room quickly flooded and the warship started to sink. Another MT hit the oiler Pericles, sinking it quickly.
There are varying accounts of the other three MTs, sometimes suggesting that two more merchant ships were damaged. For sure, at least one MT missed any targets and wound up beached. HMS York was seriously damaged and had to be towed onto the beach to prevent her sinking outright, and she was eventually abandoned. In the confusion of war, the German Luftwaffe claimed to have sunk the cruiser but both the Italians and British knew differently. All six Decima-MAS men were captured, but overall the mission can be regarded as an outright success for Decima-MAS. MTs were subsequently used in several missions.
The German equivalent to the MT explosive boat was the Linse sprengboot (lentil blasting boat) which was slightly smaller and a more basic design. The pilot sat fully exposed amidships between the explosives and the 3.6l car engine which drove a single nonretracting propeller at the rear, meaning that in order to abandon ship he had to stand up and jump over the side.
By mid-1943 the British copy of the Italian MT was entering testing. Like many things involved in British Special Forces at the time it was deliberately deceptively named, hence ‘Boom Patrol Boat’. The RAF termed it the Skylark. It was operated by the ‘Royal Marines Boom Patrol Detachment’ who can be thought of as the main father unit of today’s Special Boat Service (SBS).
Although different in every detail, the connection to the Italian design was unmistakable. The RMBPD’s thinking evolved into a combined attack force using canoes to covertly make a route through the nets, and then a full speed approach by the explosive boat. The canoe would then be used to recover the BPB pilot.
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Remote Control or directed drone SFBs--jet ski for pilot to escape!
Yet more COMBAT VICTORIES PROOF that the U.S. Navy had best put-to-sea SFB swarms from Aircraft Battle Cruiser Mother Ships--or be out-numbered & sunk in the next naval war.
James Bond is REAL.
NOTES
https://news.usni.org/2020/06/04/navy-lacks-clear-theory-of-victory-needed-to-build-new-fleet-experts-tell-house-panel
Navy Lacks ‘Clear Theory of Victory’ Needed to Build New Fleet, Experts Tell House Panel
By: Sam LaGrone
June 4, 2020 7:41 PM • Updated: June 5, 2020 12:39 PM
PIC: A MH-60S Sea Hawk assigned to the Eightballers of Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron (HSC) 8 flies next to the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) and the amphibious assault ship USS America (LHA-6) while they transit the Pacific Ocean, Feb. 15, 2020. US Navy photo.
The Navy and the Department of Defense haven’t finished their homework needed to inform how the Navy builds its future fleet, a panel of naval experts told a House panel on Thursday.
The debate in Congress and in the Pentagon on naval power has been pegged on the last assessment of the number of hulls the Navy needs to meet the future requirements – 355. However, the underlying mission of what a newly structured fleet would do is unclear, said the panel addressing the House Armed Service subcommittee on seapower and projection forces.
The Navy never released an unclassified maritime strategy in conjunction with the 2018 National Defense Strategy, nor has it given a public version of its distributed maritime operations (DMO) operational doctrine.
“I was part of the National Defense Strategy Commission, and we were very blunt about the fact that there were not operating concepts. … There were piecemeal parts,” former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead told the subcommittee.
But even for those on the inside who are familiar with the strategic pushes, there are major institutional questions as to what role the Navy would have in a world of great power competition, said Bryan Clark, a naval analyst and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who helped craft the 2017 fleet architecture for the Navy.
“We don’t really have that clear theory of victory or operational concept today,” Clark told the House panel.
That work is ongoing. Inside the Pentagon, the Office of the Secretary of Defense is developing new joint warfighting concepts and refining DMO and other emerging warfighting plans.
“Those concepts are all driving in a good direction to try to come up with a new way of fighting that doesn’t involve strictly attrition-based warfare, which is sort of the approach we took largely after the Cold War ended,” Clark said.
The focus now for the Pentagon is maneuverer warfare, “where we plan on using our forces to create dilemmas for adversaries that prevent them from being successful more than us being able to project power and take over locations of our own choosing. So, this decision-centric move in warfare is going to require us to have a fleet design that reflects some new characteristics different than the characteristics of our previous fleet,” he said.
In large strokes, that means moving the Navy away from the massed formations centered on aircraft carriers and amphibious warships and into smaller groups that will make it harder for adversaries like China and Iran to target.
For example, the Chinese DF-21D and DF-26 missiles are designed to hold U.S. capital ships at risk from hundreds of miles away.
“We have to guard against things like the DF-21, DF-26 and the whole plethora of Chinese missiles that can reach out and strike a surface fleet or territory out as far as Guam,” Alan Shaffer, deputy undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, said last year.
That thought process would also emphasize building smaller warships like well-armed frigates rather than the large multi-mission Arleigh Burke destroyers, as well as a new class of corvettes, according to an outline of a 2045 fleet Clark included in his written testimony to the HASC panel.
The testimony comes as the Navy’s own plans for its next fleet are on hold after Secretary of Defense Mark Esper prevented the release of the Navy’s latest Force Structure Assessment and 30-year shipbuilding plan.
“We have been promised by the Department of the Navy an updated force structure assessment, late in 2019, then early in 2020, then a little later in 2020. And now, again, we to this day still have not received an updated force structure assessment. In addition, we did not get a 30-year shipbuilding plan, which is required by law,” subcommittee chairman Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.) said in his opening statement.
PIC: A Ghost Fleet Overlord test vessel takes part in a capstone demonstration during the conclusion of Phase I of the program in September. Two existing commercial fast supply vessels were converted into unmanned surface vessels (USVs) for Overlord testing, which will play a vital role in informing the Navy’s new classes of USVs. US Navy photo.
The Navy’s internal analysis called for a force that Pentagon officials consider to be too expensive. Esper left the new fleet study to be evaluated by not only the Navy but also outside think tanks and members of the Pentagon’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) to evaluate. Now Congress is set to consider the Navy’s budget for Fiscal Year 2021 with few hints of what the service plans for the future.
“So, there are assumptions I want to go back and have discussions with the Navy,” Esper told the House in February. “There’s other assumptions in there about ships and warfighting that I want to make sure I get right, so when I present you the plan it’s defensible and I feel confident in it and [Joint Chief’s Chairmen Gen. Mark Milley] feels confident in it.”
CAPE and some senior leaders in the Navy have pushed for a major expansion of unmanned vessels in 2019, and there is still a desire to create “attritable” vessels for the future fleet.
In its FY 2020 budget submission, the Navy initially proposed a $2.7-billion program to buy largely untested unmanned surface prototypes. The service has largely not released any justification for the need for unmanned surface ships to Congress or the public, Ron O’Rourke, a naval analyst with the Congressional Research Service, told the panel in response to a question from subcommittee ranking member Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.).
“We need to understand better what the Navy has done to shown analytically that this concept for distributing the Navy in this way not only makes sense but that it’s the best or most promising possible way forward. We’ve had an assertion that this is the way to go, but I’m not sure how much analytical underpinning there has been for it,” O’Rourke said.
“It’s one thing to say, you’re going to do this. It’s another thing to develop the operational concepts to actually figure out how you’re going to operate the ships and not just be a topic of hand-waving and briefing slides with electric bolts on them. The analytical basis and the operational concepts need to be developed if they haven’t already, and that needs to be shared with the Congress so that Congress can look at that and factor it into its assessment and markup of these proposed budgets.”
Roughead agreed that the Navy should develop prototypes of the unmanned surface vehicles but said they shouldn’t move into initial production until the operational concepts were well defined.
He offered a cautionary tale of how the Navy paused aggressive development of unmanned carrier aviation after successful tests of the X-47B unmanned aerial vehicles almost a decade ago.
PIC: A X-47B during a March 2015 test flight. U.S. Navy Photo
“We flew an unmanned aircraft off of an aircraft carrier in 2012. Yeah, 2012, that has not happened again. That’s eight years in my mind of a hiatus, and trying to advance this new technology is not aggressive by any stretch of the imagination,” he said. “I think that there have to be provisions for the Navy to construct some of [unmanned ships], for them to be able to deploy them even before they meet all of the operational wickets so that we can learn.”
Beyond individual platforms, Roughead said there is a need to emphasize the ability for the U.S. to project power on the sea when faced with a rival like the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy.
“I don’t think we should be shy about the fact that it is maritime. … That requires certain types of capabilities to come together, that we can rely on elements of the joint force, but we really need to start thinking more about the maritime domain, because I would argue that PLA– if you look at their writings — they have transitioned,” he said.
“If we do not acknowledge the fact that we have maritime needs, capabilities, and we have to integrate all of it, we’re going to be behind the eight ball.”
Article Keywords: 2019 Force Structure assessment, CNO Adm. Michael Gilday, Congressional research service, CRS, Fiscal Year 2021, Fiscal Year 2022, FY 2021 Budget, Gary Roughead, National Defense Strategy, Thomas Modly
Categories: Budget Industry, Education Legislation, Military Personnel, News & Analysis, Submarine Forces, Surface Forces, U.S. Navy
Sam LaGrone
About Sam LaGrone
Sam LaGrone is the editor of USNI News. He has covered legislation, acquisition and operations for the Sea Services since 2009 and spent time underway with the U.S. Navy, U.S. marine corps and the Canadian Navy.
Follow @samlagrone
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