Impossible to game out

USS Gambier Bay under fire from a Japanese cruiser, visible at right

Came across, again, the incredible Battle off Samar while doing some research on another topic.

Military History is full of forlorn hopes, last stands, surprising victories and heroism. But even amidst such legendary company as The Alamo, Thermopylae, Rorke's Drift and Camaron, I think the Battle Off Samar stands alone.

You really can't find a set of naval wargame rules that are going to allow the saga of Taffy 3 to occur.

On the one hand you have Taffy 3. Six CVEs with a couple dozen aircraft each, armed for the most part with GP bombs and depth charges. Three Fletcher class destroyers and four destroyer escorts are the screen. A number of aircraft from neighboring CVE task forces and land bases eventually also help out.

On the other you have a Japanese surface action group with four battleships (including Yamato), six heavy cruisers, two light cruisers and 11 destroyers. Oh, and the Japanese have Kamikazes.

And it's broad daylight. Morning as a matter of fact, so the Japanese have essentially all day.

I mean, really. How can that turn out any other way but a complete massacre?

And yet, not only did Taffy 3 survive, losing just two CVE, 2 DD and a DE, but the Japanese lost 3 CA as well as retreated!

End of the Year! Monitor lost 150 years ago

USS Monitor loss

The last day of 1862 saw the loss of the USS Monitor and 16 crewmen as the ship sank in rough weather. Seaworthiness was always an issue with the type. The same design characteristics which made it a tough target also meant that it couldn't deal with rough seas very well.

Amazingly most of the crew was saved.

More images here: http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/usnsh-m/monitor.htm

Happy New Year!

Interesting graphic on global Cvs

There's been a lot of attention recently about the strength of the Navy, most recently in the third presidential debate as the Republican candidate has made increasing the size of the Navy one of his key campaigning points. Similarly there's been a thread on BoardgameGeek about the USN vs. The Rest of the World., as well, which is where this graphic was lifted from.. I don't know the original source, but it does display rather starkly the differences in capability that we are talking about.

Especially noteworthy is the inclusion of the US navy's amphibious assault ships in the list. Often commenters compare the 11 CVNs to the 11 carriers owned by the ROTW, but this is misleading because many of those 11 other carriers are really much more like the amphibious ships than they're like US carriers. Indeed, NO ONE has a carrier that's truly comparable to an American CVN. The seven British, Thai, Spanish and Italian vessels are basically the same as the nine amphibious ships, although generally smaller.

This leaves just five ships that could possibly be called some sort of "fleet" carrier, one each for Brazil, Russia, China, India and France. Again, all of them are notably smaller than an American CVN.

Hyuga, right, with a US Nimitz-class CVN

Of the 11 foreign carriers of all flavors, seven belong to NATO allies and the US has friendly relations with most of the rest. Only the Russian and Chinese carriers might plausibly be considered in opposition to the USN.

One might give the ROTW a little more than 11 "carriers," though because I think you could fairly consider the Japanese "destroyers Hyuga and Ise as really being light aircraft carriers or amphibious assault ships at least comparable to the smaller Spanish and Italian ships shown in the graphic. They're only called "destroyers" for political reasons having to do with the Japanese constitution and relations with neighboring countries.

Still, even adding those two doesn't change the odds in any meaningful way.

Operation Torch convoys depart for North Africa

On this date 70 years ago the American forces taking part in the invasion of North Africa, called Operation Torch, left their various anchorages, including Maine and Virginia.

Operation Torch was a remarkable endeavor. It was the first major offensive taken by the United States since the beginning of the war, almost a year earlier. It involved an amphibious invasion across the entire Atlantic Ocean, making it among the longest direct invasion voyages ever undertaken. And it did this while most of the amphibious techniques and equipment that would later make over-water operations almost routine for US forces were still being developed. The lessons from Operation Torch would pay dividends for the rest of the war.

By a few days, the USS Massachusetts beat out her sister ship the USS South Dakota and near sister USS Washington for the first shots fired by the 16-inch gun in action and the first battleship duel in US Naval history.

The entire force was organized as Task Force 34, otherwise known as the Western Task Force.

The sub groups were:

Task Group 34.1 Covering Group with the new battleship USS Massachusetts, heavy cruisers Wichita and Tuscaloosa, four destroyers and an oiler,
TG 34.8 Northern Attack Group with the old battleship USS Texas, the light cruiser Savannah, two escort carriers, nine DD, eight transports, five support ships and a submarine.
TG 34.9 Center Attack Group with the heavy cruiser Augusta and light cruiser Brooklyn, 10 DD, 15 transports and six minecraft.
TG 34.2 Air Group with the fleet carrier USS Ranger and the escort carrier Suwannee, the light cruiser Cleveland, five DD, an oiler and two submarines,
TG 34.10 Southern Attack Group with the old battleship USS New York, light cruiser Philadelphia, escort carrier Santee, eight DD, six transports, three minecraft, two oilers, a tug and a submarine.

When time stood still -- Cuban Missile Crisis at 50

Destroyer USS JOSEPH P KENNEDY JR sends a boarding party over to freighter Marucla during the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962. NHHC photo USN 711187.

You don't go through life without a close call or two. I think most of us can think of at least one occasion where, if things had gone a little differently, we might not be here. But for anyone over the age of 50, there was a collective moment when it could all of come to an end -- late October 1962.

The Kennedy today at Battleship Cove

I was too young at the time to understand what was going on. I was seven years old in 1962, and I can't even recall from this distance any particular feeling of dread during the crisis. I remember knowing that something bad was going on -- and like most members of that duck-and-cover generation, there was a certain low-level terror that never really went away. I remember being under covers and hearing the engines of passing aircraft overhead and wondering if that plane, THAT noise, was the ONE.

I, for one, felt an enormous sense of relief after 1989, that I hadn't even really understood was there until it was no longer there. Notwithstanding 9/11, which brought its own kind of terror, things have been different since 1989. There's still danger in the world, and dangers in life, but instant  annihilation is not one of them.

But in October, 1962 it was  a very real possibility. We know now that the danger was even greater than we knew at the time. And I'm no great fan of John F. Kennedy, as his poorly conducted foreign policy played a not inconsiderable role in causing the crisis in the first place.

Scene from the movie Thirteen Days

The military reality was that the Soviets were not well placed to come out on top of a 1962 nuclear exchange -- even by the horrific metrics that the concept of coming out on top would entail. Evidently well aware of the unfavorable "correlation of forces" (to use the Soviet term), Khrushchev found away out of the crisis that preserved the Soviet state -- if not his job. 

Still, there's no way that "winning" a nuclear war is still not an enormous tragedy for any country, let alone a democratic one. The scarring of the national psyche by 9/11 provides a hint of what a nuclear exchange might have meant for America. It's not a world any of us would want to live in. And, of course, many of us wouldn't have lived in it. How many might have died is impossible to say. A figure of 100 million Americans and 100 million Soviets has been bandied about. I'm very skeptical that it would have been THAT high (that represents more than half of all the people in the country -- 179 million -- in 1962) but even a tenth of that amount would have been an unthinkable loss -- dwarfing the toll of all American wars.

In 1962 the Soviets had about 3,000 warheads, the United States maybe 10 times that number. The Soviets only had a couple dozen ICBMs in 1962 (which is why the MRBMs in Cuba were so attractive) and therefore would have had to rely on bombers to get through. There can be little doubt that some would have made it, but it's fruitless to even guess how many and which ones. Would even one bomb going off in just one major city have not been a disaster?

Fortunately it didn't come to that, but for the next quarter century there was a pretty complacent view in many quarters about the possibility of "surviving" or even "winning" a nuclear exchange. In my opinion, it wasn't until the disaster at Chernobyl in 1986 that I think it dawned on even the most hard-headed and cold-hearted that the consequences of a nuclear exchange made concepts of winning and losing laughable. Chernobyl, as massive of a disaster as it was, was merely a fraction of the fallout of a nuclear exchange.

From the IAEA FAQ on Chernobyl:
12. How does Chernobyl’s effect measure up to the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
The accident at Chernobyl was approximately 400 times more potent than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. However, the atomic bomb testing conducted by several countries around the world during the 1960s and 1970s contributed 100 to 1,000 times more radioactive material to the environment than Chernobyl.

Note that the Hiroshima bomb was  about 16 kilotons yield, making it a tactical weapon by later Cold War standards.

From a gaming standpoint, there haven't been too many that looked expressly at the Cuban Missile Crisis alone, although it does figure as an important event card in the very popular Twilight Struggle game about the Cold war.  Maybe the most on-topic game legacy of the Cuban Missile Crisis is the darkly comic card game Nuclear War, which first appeared in 1965 -- less than two years later.

From the larger standpoint of the human race, it's worth noting that the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred just a little over 17 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Maybe the scare was worth it, after all, because we've already gone half a century more without another nuke being used. That's a better track record than I think anyone could have hoped in 1962.

Strategy Page describes wargaming by Mexican Navy

An interesting, if general, article in Strategy Page describes some recent interest in naval wargaming by the Mexican Navy, inspired by exposure to USN naval wargaming, presumably at the Naval War College.

While US wargames rely heavily on computers, the article indicates a larger role for manual wargaming in the Mexican case. Given the kinds of threats the Mexicans have to cope with -- mostly drug cartels -- this seems appropriate. It's not like the Mexicans ned to track the activity of large fleets of ships, armed with clouds of missiles and backed by squadrons of aircraft like some NATO-Warsaw Pact confrontation might  involve.

A more hands-on, creative and intimate approach by manual wargames would seem much more useful, I think.

The article doesn't mention any specific, but it does make me wonder if some version of the commercial Harpoon4 rules has found its way into the Mexican Navy's toolkit.

A little commemoration of the Battle of Cape Esperance -- War at Sea style

The USS West Virginia advances under the steady hand of Admiral Owen in War at Sea

Andy R. and I played a doubleheader of War at Sea Thursday in commemoration of the Battle of Cape Esperance from the naval campaign around Guadalcanal. He reports on the event with one of his fantastic write ups as always.

Is China making the Kaiser's blunder?

Reading a  good book like Castles of Steel is a good way to get the intellectual juices flowing.

It's shallow reading of history to find "lessons" in it. Cases differ and fact sets are never precisely the same, so you can't simply transfer directly from one case to another. But experience is valuable, and it's certainly profit from the experience of others after making allowance for what is different and what is similar.

Former Varyag

There's certainly reason to think that Germany's naval expansion at the turn of the Twentieth Century played a role in bringing World War I and even led Germany;s defeat. Castles of Steel repeatedly points out that German naval officers were shocked that Britain joined the war. And it's clear that Britain's entry into the war was hardly a forgone conclusion. It broke with long-standing British practice of playing balance of power politics and avoiding the commitment of major land forces on the continent. It brought the British and French into an alliance -- pretty amazing considering those two nations had spent the bulk of the last five or six centuries as rivals.

Germany was -- and is -- the dominant nation in continental Europe. As a continental  power it necessarily had to give primacy of place to the army.  Resources are always finite and a navy could never get more than the leftovers after the army was taken care of.

Britain, of course, was a naval power. Its army would necessarily take second place in the defense of the island nation. Indeed, it's a truism that an island can only be defended off shore. There are very few cases of a successful island defense if an enemy manages to land on it.

So when the Germans started their naval buildup in the early 1900s it ended up being worse than a waste of resources. Not only did all the treasure sunk into the navy come at the expense of land forces, but it antagonized Britain and drove it into alliance against Germany.

Geography made any attempt at naval superiority for Germany impossible. Britain controlled access to the sea approaches of Germany. British national interests precluded allowing Germany to ever achieve parity in naval power.

If the Germans had restricted themselves to a naval force sufficient to guard their coasts against French and Russian naval forces there's every reason to think the British would have stayed out of the war. With no naval blockade or just the limited blockade the French could have mounted, the widespread suffering inflicted on the German economy. No British entry in the war means no BEF and probably victory for the Germans in 1914 or 1915 at the latest.. And, of course, with no unrestricted submarine warfare against Britain, there would have been no reason for an American entry into the war,.

It seems to me that China's situation a century later resembles Germany's in some ways. Its a rising economic power that is also tempted to expand its clout in international affairs and boost its military. Like Germany, however, China is a continental power with rival major powers that share borders with it. The army always will come first.

Like Germany, as well, the naval geography works against China. All the sea approaches to China are controlled by other countries -- who all have historical beefs with China. And like Germany, a hundred years ago, China's main rival is the world's biggest Navy. Except, of course, China's situation is even more dire. While the British were forced to be satisfied with a Navy as large as the next two combined, the U.S. Navy is nearly larger than all the other navies in the world, combined.

Germany, at least in theory, could over strain the British by building a large enough navy that some other navy would be able to take advantage and strike. The British negated this strategy through diplomacy. It made allies of the other significant navies, including  some it had fought against like France and the United States. By the time war came, the Germans stood almost alone at sea.

In China's case the ground is even harder to make up. The US Navy is far stronger than the Royal Navy ever was --and nearly every other significant navy in the world is already an ally. Among the few that are not formal allies, namely India and Russia, there's little reason to think they'd be inclined to side against the US on China's behalf and every reason to expect the opposite.

The bottom line is that any money spent on a blue-water navy is a complete waste as far as China is concerned. The geography, politics and military technology are hopelessly against them. They can't possibly spend enough money to make their naval forces militarily relevant -- but they can easily spend enough to annoy, alarm and drive into alliance their neighbors. There's been a lot of talk in the news lately about China's new aircraft carrier, submarine construction and other naval improvements. While obviously bearing watching, anything China does in this sphere seems like a trip down the road of folly.

Wargaming a US-China War

This post looks at the possibility, via Larry Bond on FaceBook.

From a wargamer's perspective, this sort of speculation has some interest, if only because China is about the only power that could, theoretically, be considered anything like a "peer competitor." That is, it's about the only potential foe that would pose any sort of challenge involving conventional warfare. A war with Iran, in contrast, while more likely, would mostly pose unconventional warfare challenges for the US, much less fertile ground for wargamers, especially those interested in naval affairs.

On the other hand, from a political standpoint a war between China and the United States seems highly unlikely, but also would probably be an unmitigated disaster should it occur.

As Edward Carr noted here:

"The tripwire for outright conflict might be trivial: a scrap between China and one of its neighbours over some islands, or a miscalculation as American warships sail up to the 12-mile limit that defines Chinese territorial waters. But when the dominant male and the pretender square up, everything about them is at stake. Just as two conflagrations burnt the heart out of the 20th century, so a war between the leading powers of the 21st could set off an orgy of destruction.

The shadow of nuclear devastation is one reason to be fearful. But even if we avoided that last, hideous step, the cost would be immense. That is partly
because today’s conventional weapons are so potent, but also because China and America depend on each other in ways that Russia and America never did. The flow of goods to our shops would dry up, as globalisation failed. The financial system might collapse, because America could not borrow from China, and China would have nowhere to put its savings. Cyber-warriors might wreck communications and infrastructure. Collaboration on trade, science and action on climate change would be swept aside. Global economic depression would drag billions back into poverty."

Now, clearly the fact that a war would be a colossal bad idea is no guarantee that it won't happen after all. One only needs to remember the summer of 1914 to know that it can happen anyway.  But neither country seems very interested in stoking tensions at this point and I'd rate the chances as being rather low at this point. What the situation would look like in 20 years, or even 10 years, is hard to say. A lot can happen in that amount of time in politics. In 1923 Hitler was in jail for the Beer Hall Putsch, a decade later he was chancellor of Germany and a decade after that was embroiled in a global war. Clearly few prophets in 1923 would have foreseen 1943. So caution is warranted. Still, wars between global powers usually turn on identifiable clashes of interests and its hard to discern what those might be in the case of China and the US. Much of the great power rivalry of the 20th Century turned on ideology -- one sees no great ideological rivalry between the US and China. There are always possible geopolitical clashes of interest, as seen in the first half of the 20th Century, but it's hard to see much of that in the US-China relationship. China' disputes and concerns are very local. Even the Taiwan situation doesn't really represent a clash of interests, really. In large part it's a dispute left over from the Cold War. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan now would not have the same implications that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would have had in 1980.

New session report for War at Sea

B-25s attack two Japanese cruisers while P-40s engage Zeros

Another nice session report at Andy's blog.

Operation Sutton -- 1982

 

HMS Ardent after being hit

Operation Sutton

30 years ago today the British commenced Operation Sutton, the landing of troops to retake the Falkland Islands, seized by Argentina seven weeks earlier. That the British were able to organize and execute such an operation over such an enormous distance and on such short notice is a testimony to the professionalism of their military. It’s probable that the only other country capable of doing something like this is the United States – and possibly France.

The British plan was to land a brigade’s worth of troops in the protected anchorage of San Carlos Bay, which lies between West and East Falkland Islands. After securing a beached the British would move across East Falkland Island to capture Port Stanley and end the war.

While the Argentinean Navy had been neutralized in the wake of the Belgrano sinking and the Argentine Army had little ability to interfere with the British landings, their air force and naval aviation were a significant threat and wasted no time in reacting vigorously to the British landing. The first British troops came ashore about 4 a.m. and by dawn the landing ships were already being attacked by light aircraft based in the Falklands.

The most significant air attacks, however, came from the mainland, arriving in three waves.

The first wave, eight Daggers and six A-4 Skyhawks arriving around 10:30 a.m., damaged the frigates Argonaut and Antrim. In both cases the ships were hit by bombs which did not explode, but still caused important damage to the ships. Apparently the Argentine planes attacked at such a low altitude that the bombs didn’t have time to arm properly. The frigates Brilliant and Broadsword were also damaged less seriously by cannon fire.

The second wave of 14 Skyhawks, which came in around 1 p.m., didn’t actually succeed in making it to the anchorage. Eight of the planes aborted due to weather or mechanical problems and the other six were intercepted by Sea Harriers which shot down two and damaged a third.

The third wave, 11 daggers and six Skyhawks, succeed in landing several hits on the frigate HMS Ardent, sinking her.

While the Argentine airmen were valorous and did significant damage to the British force, including sinking one ship, the cost was heavy, with five Daggers and five Skyhawks from the mainland shot down. Four of the Daggers were brought down by Sidewinder missiles from Sea Harriers, while the fifth was shot down by a missile from one of the frigates. All five of the Skyhawks lost were downed by Sea Harriers as well. The Argentines also lost four other aircraft that day, and the British two.

As I recall, the intensity of the air-naval battle caught the world by surprise and was a sobering lesson in how bloody modern warfare can be when waged full-out between first-class opponents. Most warfare in the last five decades and been either between third world combatants or between a first world military and third world or non-state actors. In either case, the public in first world countries is not prepared for the kinds of losses that are likely if there’s a future high-intensity conflict between capable modern militaries. It’s quite possible that the casualty toll for a United States war with China over a Taiwan, for example, would exceed the total losses of both Iraq Wars and Afghanistan within hours.

By the evening of May 21st, both sides knew they were in for a tough and costly fight, although the most important fact was that the British were firmly established ashore and the Argentine air attacks, while damaging, had not been severe enough to threaten the landing. At a 10 to one ratio of bombers lost to warships sunk, the Argentineans would run out of planes before the British ran out of ships. Tactics would need to be adjusted.

The Other Shoe drops -- Lexington sunk 70 years ago

USS Lexington afire after being hit during the Battle of Coral Sea on May 8, 1942.

 
On the morning of May 8 both carrier forces spotted each other and launched strikes, and while both strikes found their opponents the more experienced Japanese aviators got the better of the exchange.  Both the USS Yorktown and the USS Lexington were hit, while only the Shokaku was hit in return.

While the Shokaku and the Yorktown ended up surviving their hits, the Lexington was hit by at least two bombs and, more critically, by two torpedoes. As it turned out in the Pacific war, torpedoes were the bane  of American aircraft carriers. Every US fleet carrier that was lost was lost after receiving torpedo hits.

While the Japanese got the better of the tactical exchange, however, from a strategic standpoint things were quite different. The Americans hurriedly repaired the Yorktown and it was available for the Battle of Midway less than a month later. Meanwhile the Shokaku's damage took much longer to repair and the Zuikaku, while undamaged, had taken such heavy losses in its air group that it also missed out the key Battle of Midway. Overall, the Japanese would have been much better served by skipping the whole affair. Having all six fleet carriers for Midway would have been a big advantage, even if the Americans retained the Lexington. The US Navy in mid-1942 had not developed doctrine or experience in operating carriers together (indeed, the pairing of the Enterprise and Hornet at Midway was an innovation for the Americans) so having four carriers would have been an awkward situation. In contrast, the Japanese had highly honed their capability to operate all six fleet carriers as a unified force. A 6-4 edge in carriers would have been much better than the 4-3 advantage they had in the actual event.

In June a new Essex-class carrier being built in Massachusetts was renamed the Lexington (CV-16) in honor of the lost ship. The other three fleet carriers lost later in 1942 -- the Yorktown, Hornet and Wasp -- would likewise be memorialized by new Essex class ships (CV-10, CV-12 and CV-18, respectively).

More losses for Argentina in the Falklands War 30 years ago

The damage to the Alferez Sobral bridge area

 The first few days of serious fighting were costly for the Argentinian military, especially the Navy. Besides losing more than 300 men when the ARA general Belgrano went down on May 2, a small Argentinian warship called the Alferez Sobral suffered disproportionate casualties from some non-fatal hits from Sea Skua air-to0surface missiles fired by Btitsh helicopters when it was spotted while searching for downed aircrew from earlier fighting.

A total of four Sea Skua were fired and it appears three of the hit. One did not serious damage, as it hit the Sobral's lifeboat and blew it to bits. But two of the missiles hit near the bridge and killed 8 men, including the captain, and wounded at least 8 more -- for a loss rate of nearly 20%.

One thing this episode points out is the limitations of a wargame, even a very detailed one such as Harpoon4. According to the Harpoon4 rules, each Sea Skua should do 6 damage points so three hits should have left the 24-damage point Sobral nearly crippled with 75% damage before considering the effects of any critical hits.

In fact, though, one of the "hits" destroyed an accessory of the ship, its lifeboat, and did no structural damage at all. The effect of the two hits on the bridge also seems to be less than expected, as well. This reminds me of a discussion in a Harpoon Sitrep a few years back where Larry Bond discussed the surface-to-surface missile hit by Palestinian militants on the Israeli patrol boat INS Hanit in 2006. According to the Harpoon4 models the ship should have been devastated by a hit from the powerful missile used. While four crew were killed and there was a fire, the ship seemed to have escaped serious  structural damage.  Bond's analysis of open source photos led him to believe that the missile struck an exposed crane on the deck, which was missing in post-attack photos. He admitted that this sort of fluke hit  was hard to model in Harpoon4 and said that he basically just ignored that sort of thing in the game -- a not entirely satisfactory answer.

When I've run Harpoon4 scenarios I've experimented with various random reductions in effectiveness (While a better-than-expected result is also possible, I assume that is generally accounted for by the critical hit rules and in my opinion most weapons perform worse than expected and that's the bias I introduce into the game.)

Based on the photographic evidence and the lack of any apparent reduction in the ship;s speed, it appears that the actual damage done to the Sobral was less than 6 damage points in Harpoon4 terms. This implies that the Sea Skua's did less than half the expected amount of damage, even discounting entirely the lifeboat "hit" which might have been a "miss" in game terms.

In any case, a lesson worth bearing in mind when considering the likely effectiveness of any new weapons is that the most likely outcome is disappointment.

Today is the 10th anniversary of the USS Cole attack

Ten years ago today a small suicide craft nearly sank the USS Cole, by any measure a major warship. Like the earlier atatck on the USS Stark, the fact that the ship wasn't lost is a testimony to the skill and training of the US Navy in damage control and no reflection of the devastating nature of the damage done.

It's worth noting that similar damage during active comabt operations would definitely result in a "mission kill."

17 sailors were killed in the attack.

Special conditions required for fleet warfare

Russian Cruiser Aurora

Looking at the broad sweep of history one constant is that there are few extensive eras of general peace. Armies are fighting somewhere just about all the time. It's hard to find a decade without major wars and battles, virtually impossible to find a peaceful century.

At least on land.

But major naval actions involving fleets are far less common than battles involving armies. And those eras when naval fleet actions occur are concentrated far more in time. It appears that there are special conditions required for there to be contending navies.

Naval fleet actions in history seem to be largely confined to two half-millennial periods of time, with those two eras separated by nearly a thousand years.

Now, I am not arguing that there were no navies at other times, and I'm not arguing that there were no naval battles at all. But outside the eras of contending navies naval fleet actions were very rare and isolated events, while during the eras of contending navies they formed an interrelated strategic narrative. And the two eras showed some remarkable parallels.

The natural state of affairs for most of history is what could be called open seas. Navigation is largely free, with what state control there is being confined to local waters. Military expeditions across the sea are episodic and generally unopposed due to a lack of capability to oppose them.

The first era of contending navies lasted from roughly 500 B.C. to 31 B.C. During this era the dominant form of warship was the oared ramming vessel. The era started with the maritime-Greek states led by Athens facing the powerful continental power Persia. Naval powers rose and fell over the ensuing five centuries but at the end of day Rome, the intellectual and cultural heir to Greece emerged with total naval supremacy. A supremacy that lasted for centuries before slowly evaporating into another era of free navigation and uncontrolled seas. But during the era of Roman naval hegemony military expeditions across the sea were not possible for non-Roman powers and the Roman state controlled navigation throughout the known world.

During the first era of contending navies, however, many states attempted to float fleets. Naval campaigns and battles were relatively common and there were even wars that were primarily naval affairs.

USS Olympia

The second era of contending navies started around 1450 and also lasted about 500 years, until the mid-20th Century. Naval battles again became relatively common and many powers attempted to create navies and exercise control over large parts of the ocean. Again an early leading naval power in that era, England, eventually saw its intellectual and cultural heir, the United States, emerge with naval supremacy.

Naval supremacy, once won, seems impossible to have wrested away, although it can be lost through decadence and neglect. While effective armies can be raised in short order, creating a strong navy requires enormous resources and time, and cannot be done against the opposition of a hegemonic naval power. At the height of its naval power the Royal Navy sought to be as strong as the next two potential rivals combined, a margin of superiority it calculated could not be overcome. The contemporary U.S. Navy is stronger than all the other navies of the world combined, and most of those other navies are its formal allies.

Ships from five nations

There's a bit of talk circulating about China's rising naval power, but the stark reality is that China is generations away from being able to challenge U.S. Naval power, and will only succeed if the U.S. leadership is negligent. The best the Chinese can hope for in the case of a war with the U.S. is to seize temporary control of its local waters. This is much less ambitious than what England faced in its challenges from the Dutch, Spanish, French and Germans or the U.S. faced from the Japanese or Soviets.

From a wargamer's perspective, what all this means is that we may be generations away from seeing fleet-on-fleet naval actions again. Indeed, there may never be that sort of warfare on Earth again, although whether something similar might happen in space is an open question.

Nearly all naval wargames are set in one of those two eras of contending navies. There are a few wargames placed in the era or classical oared warfare from roughly Salamis in 480 B.C. to Actium in 31 B.C.

Most other wargames are set in the era that began roughly with Lepanto or the Armada in the late 1400s and came to a close, as far as active combat went, in 1945, although the Cold War standoff between the West and the Soviets included a strong naval component.

It seems to me that in order to have fleet actions there need to be particular conditions present. There have to be technological means to exercise naval control. There must be an international system with several great powers with access to the sea, but no one superpower. And there has to be sufficient economic wealth, as navies are extremely expensive propositions.

Because those conditions occur rarely, naval warfare is a very unusual occurrence. While battles on land are spread throughout the last 50-plus centuries, battles at sea are concentrated in about 10 of those centuries, in two consecutive batches.

Harpoon Naval Review 2009

Got the 2009 Harpoon Naval Review today in the mail.

It's filled with a lot of good stuff, including an 11-page article on the current Spanish Navy, scenarios involving fighting between Venezuela and Columbia, an attack on a US Carrier battle group and even one on Somali pirates! Quite topical.

Unfortunately I don't have any local naval miniatures opponents at the moment, so I'm not sure when I'll get to try out any of the battles. On the other hand, Harpoon and indeed all the Admiralty trilogy games are so chock full of information that they are worth having even if never played.

Indeed, they are really more like reference books in game form than games.

As I digest the book over the week I'll try to give capsule reviews of the contents.

This is an interesting development

It would be interesting to account for this capability in Red Dragon Rising.

https://www.usni.org/forthemedia/ChineseKillWeapon.asp

Hornet Leader F/A-18 actual combat use

Most of the campaign cards in Hornet Leader represent what-ifs, and there's nothing wrong with that, as part of the game;s interest is seeing how F/A-18 might fare in future conflicts. The F/A-18 has a few more years service in it, especially with the continuing delays in fielding the Joint Strike Fighter, so any contingency fighting involving the Navy or Marine Corps will see Hornets in action.

But at least some of the campaigns in the game have actually happened, most them after the game was published in 1991, so the game's predictive power was tested and it passed with flying colors.

The main historical scenario included in the Desert Storm module included in the game. Given the game's publication date and the usual lead time needed for a design, it seems likely the game was already being designed before the first Gulf War started. Besides Navy and Marine Corps Hornets, by the way, the Canadians also flew combat missions in Desert Storm with their CF-18 Hornets, which don't differ in game terms from the US versions except perhaps in some of the ordnance available. Two Hornets were shot down and they shot down two Iraqi MiG-21s in the course of 4,551 sorties.


There's also a regular Iraq campaign card, which could be used to depict the use of Navy and Marine Hornets in Operation Iraqi freedom. To be more historically accurate, the Iraqis should have no planes at all, but the player may want to leave them in for the challenge. One Hornet was lost to friendly fire and two were lost in a mid-air crash, but none were shot down by the Iraqis.


The Libya campaign card was meant to represent future action against that country, although there had already been an actual combat use of the Hornet against Libya before the game's publication date. Hornets from the USS Coral Sea (VFA-131) flew some Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses missions in support of Operation El Dorado Canyon in 1986. The Coral Sea and USS Midway operated F/A-18s only because they couldn't handle the larger F-14 Tomcats.

GMT games Insider No. 2 (Oct. 1991) included four new campaign "cards" (actually just black & white copies on the back cover) including one for "Yugoslavia." These could be used to represent missions flown over Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. Again, for maximum historical accuracy the enemy aircraft should never appear, but a player could leave them in to increase the challenge. Besides U.S. aircraft, some Spanish and Canadian Hornets flew some missions during this contingency as well.

Of the remaining campaign cards, some of the most likely to actually occur are the China campaign that appeared in Insider No. 2 and the original game's Iran card. There's always, of course a chance for a new Korean war, but each passing year seems to make that less likely.

The World War III scenarios, Central America and Defense of Israel campaigns in the original game and the Southern Africa and Cuba campaigns from Insider No. 2 range from highly unlikely to impossible in likelihood.