Battleship Stealth and the Lack Thereof

Galrahn begins his article at the USNI blog on scouting and the sea, then goes into a scathing indictment of the Navy’s faulty stealth warships:

The United States Navy has spent a fortune in hull forms toward the development of stealth technology for surface vessels, but I question whether the Navy truly understands what stealth on the sea means. Under the sea a submarine achieves stealth by using water as a means of cover to avoid visual and physical detection, and leverages silence as a way to avoid detection by electronic detection means. In both sky and space our stealth aviation platforms are dark to the night sky and conceal contrails to avoid visual and physical detection, while using special materials and platform design to avoid electronic detection.

The Navy has attempted to design a ship incorporating silence, special materials, and special platform design characteristics as a way of avoiding electronic detection. The Navy paints the platform a special color to imply concealment in darkness against visual detection. At 14,500 tons and with a hull form straight out of a science fiction movie, I have no idea how the Navy believes they will achieve physical or visual detection avoidance with the DDG-1000 regardless of paint color, so clearly the concept of stealth was only applied to electronic detection only, and being that Captain Hughes defines stealth as cover, it raises the question why the concept of stealth is applied to the DDG-1000 at all.

Good point. Yours truly considers the reasoning as the Pentagon’s attempt to keep platforms they are use to building long past their usefulness in warfare (which is why a 14,500 ton warship is called a “destroyer” by them and a battleship by me!). Galrahn explains the fallout of this mistake:

Without a single dime spent on research and development, it turns out that blending into the environment that makes up the populated littorals is how stealth is achieved on the surface of the sea. US Navy warships and aircraft utilize the most advanced electronic and visual detection capabilities in the world off the coast of Somalia, and yet our naval forces are being flanked. By blending in with the local population in plain view of both electronic and visual detection, both of which represent the long range scouting capabilities the US Navy emphasizes with development, resourcing, and implementation, the US Navy finds itself absent the necessary physical manpower centric scouting capabilities in any credible number to exercise the physical scouting requirements necessary to counter the enemies stealth advantage of achieving cover by blending into the populated littorals.

This is the new type of warfare which the military has consistently ignored, and the insurgents have taken advantage of, over the past century. Still they insist that the force should be focused toward conventional threats, the kind of warfare which has been so rare in the West since World War 2. Is this because the most prosperous conventional powers possess nuclear weapons? But the Third World has found a weakness in our high tech superiority, using our aversion toward civilian casualties, the Left leaning media, and our own laws against us. As far as the naval side of counter-insurgency, the writer offers some solutions:

I believe the only way to effectively counter the exploitation of stealth in the littoral is to increase the US Navy’s physical scouting capabilities to better identify enemy forces that blend in with the local population. That means the US Navy needs more manpower distributed in the complex littoral environment. To counter this weakness in the US Navy’s force structure in an affordable way, the US Navy needs to invest in more smaller ships in larger numbers, rather than the larger ships in smaller numbers approach the Navy has demonstrated repeatedly to favor since the end of the cold war.

In other words, COIN at sea. The Army in Iraq has utilized effective tactics to defeat an insurgency. Also, as we noted in studying the Sri Lankan Civil War, the federal government there has exploited similar techniques which the US has also used successfully in a naval environment as recently as the Vietnam War, dating back to the Civil War. As Galrahn points out, we can and must do so again.