Re: Dreadnought of the skies - Pre-Dreadnoughts of the Skies
Big US carriers carry 80-100 planes, not 20.
If you’re really all for shooting up a beach, I suppose an Iowa class could do the job. You get there, then you shoot. But 30-40km ranges aren’t super great if your opponents can start hitting you from 500k away, with aircraft. Or 100+ with missiles. And unlike a beach, can move to stay away from your 40k radius. And navies generally don't spend all their time salivating about their next amphibious landing support extravaganza.
The Zumwalt class did investigate having a latest-gen, all-out, 155mm to do precisely what you mean, precision shore support. When the number of ships got whittled down to 3, per-shell cost was nearing the $1M mark, so that got canned.
The Dreadnoughts were no failure in 1906 however. They basically said: if we armor up and make almost all of our capital ship guns big long range ship killers, then we’ll stroll over any ship that doesn’t specialize and has its armament distributed to mostly shorter range, less serious, stuff. Before aircraft, that was an extremely valid choice. The Dreadnoughts are known for rendering entire generations of other ships obsolete immediately, not for being a waste of $.
The real F-35 lesson there is that we don’t know if the fantastically expensive, all-eggs-in-one-basket F-35 program won’t be also be rendered obsolete by some future shift in military tech. That could be autonomous, no-pilot, air to air drones (China is quite good at robotics and has incentives to assymetrize). Better SAMs. Or it could be area denial tech keeping US carriers farther away than the F35s relatively limited combat radius. Or something that defeats the stealth factor, which is its one real advantage. Any hot war with China is also going to show up the F35s short combat radius - China itself is a pretty isolated country in terms of where Western countries can operate from - you’re not talking Fulda Gap garrisoning.
In all this, I’m grudgingly admitting that pilots do generally wax enthusiastic about the F35 lately. It might fulfill its mission competently, for a while. But it seems like a very narrow view of future warfare.
Outside the China factor, nothing justified going all $$$$$$ out on _one_ 5th gen aircraft, right now. With the China factor, doing so basically gambles that the Chinese will try to out-fighter the F35 (and Western pilots) on its own turf rather than accepting they can’t and seek alternatives. Counting on your enemy to play to your strengths rather than your weaknesses isn’t super clever.
It’s a 40 year, 1.5T$ bet. The UK doubled down on it by buying a F35-only carrier.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
