Its a debate that’s been raging since the early 1990s one that pits American Sailors against their Marine brethren.
As the last of the Navys battleships was put into mothballs in 1992, the Corps increased its plea for a replacement of the venerable 16-inch guns that, since WWII, had softened the enemy before storming ashore. But the Navy has spent billions on aircraft carriers and cruise missile ships, largely ignoring a combat capability it sees as a relic of a bygone era.
These days, the Marines have the puny 5 guns of the Navys destroyer and cruiser fleet to guard their backs and soften up targets a gun that at 13 nautical miles range, barely touches the lethality of the retired battleships arsenal.
But soon there could be hope. After years of back and forth, the Navy now seems serious about developing — and paying for an advanced cannon round that can support Marines ashore with volume fires from their 5 gun-equipped ships.
Built with guidance fins, a GPS-enabled seeker head and a rocket motor to launch the round higher, the Extended Range Guided Munition can hit targets farther away from shore more accurately than todays 5 ammo.
Using the Raytheon-developed ERGM, the Navy hopes to reach out and touch bad guys from at least 43 miles. Thats nearly double the range of a battleships guns, which put warheads on foreheads at 24 miles.
But dont get your hopes up Devil Dog. This has been a constant tug-of-war between the Marines and Navy since the decommissioning of the battleships in the early 1990s. The Navy loves its planes and long-range missile firing ships. Why isnt that enough fire support for Marines who rarely assault beaches these days?
But the Marines still want dependable volume fires in any weather. Cruise missiles and F-18s arent going to cut it when the sky turns into soup or a ships captain has to justify firing a $750,000 Tomahawk missile for covering fire to Marines in contact. Aint gonna happen.
The Navy may be stalling for the next-gen gun an electromagnetic rail gun to replace the 5-incher. But Marines need this support now, and its good to see the Navys starting to take this requirement seriously.
Christian,
First, it’s the F/A-18, not F-18. It’s a strike fighter that can perform as either an attack or fighter aircraft with (literally)a flick of the switch.
Second, the Marines have not asked specifically for guns for fire support during the past decade. There are several guided rocket as well as lower-cost missile systems that could provide the required support, but the range is the problem… at least 75 miles and, in some scenarios, much farther. In Afghanistan we put Marines “ashore” some 600 miles from the nearesyt major body of water. Look at the distance of Baghdad from the Persian Gulf.…
Norman
The USMC lacks the heavy mortar and artillery firepower (they invest in M777 lightweight howitzers with still mediocre firepower and research rifled 120mm autoloader mortars “DragonFire II”) to support themselves like 90% of the world’s armies do.
They can also not depend on aviation support because the possibility of B-52 and F/A-18 overhead is neither assured in the face of adapted air defense and difficult to have in many places on earth anyway. Carriar aviation hasn’t many sorties per plane and day and few of these sorties are actual strike sorties, many being for support and CVBG security or air superiority. If there’s a good air defense, it would need half the CVBGs of the USN to offer decent air support for a brigade-sized USMC force.
I believe they should add some organic fire support (120mm mortars with modern ammo — 2R2M of TDA with some of the off-the-shelf laser quided or with GPS-guided bombs, for example).
Furthermore, they could leave the American way of warfighting and join the European or even Eastern way, which rests much more on tanks, infantry and much less on air support and also a bit less on artillery support.
The corps is an expeditionary force, it should slim down the logistical requirements concerning the ammo and combat support.
Fielding a field howitzer that can quickly train by 360
Norman,
Yeah, Christian knows it’s the F/A-18, check out Ward’s article and our extended discussion on the 18 from 4/4 here: http://www.defensetech.org/archives/003407.html
You hit on an important point tho… Marines are Littoral Assault Troops they are not suited for the roles they have been given in Iraq or Afganistan.
Before any Devil Dogs jump on my ass, Yes I am sure you can do any mission you are given. BUT this is not what they are equipped and trained for, walking patrols 600 miles from the nearest salt water, hence the lack of heavy gear the Army uses.
One last point on the Battlewagons. I, for one, slept better know those grey giants with guns the size of redwoods were prowling the seas.
Back when ERGM was called the ‘Competent Munition’ (It’s not a Smart Bomb, it’s not a Dumb Bomb, it’s a Competent Bomb!) I recall writing a couple of papers on it and its potential uses, especially in reference to the then-just-released report on Naval Surface Fire Support and its demise. The CM (and, AFAIK, the ERGM) are essentially 5″/52 rounds with base boost or base burn for range. Since increasing the range decreases accuracy, they have a fuze which contains a full guidance system — but (again, AFAIK) *not* a seeker! This is what makes them ‘competent’ — they’re not seeking a target, they’re navigating to an aimpoint.
The fuze, which screws into the front of a normal 5″/52 naval gun shell, is split into two parts. The front part is set in a socket so that it can rotate independent of the part screwed into the shell. The joint that connects them is a collar containing a motor generator — essentially paired electromagnets. As the shell is fired from the rifled gun (naval guns are rifled), the front part of the fuze stabilizes itself while the rear spins with the shell. The rotation across this collar generates power for the system. The front has aerosurfaces to enable it to stabilize itself — originally it was specced for fins, I recall them moving to a bent ogive design to avoid the chances of a fin getting dinged during storage/transit, but I’m not sure. Navigation is performed by varying the resistance in the collar, causing the ‘level’ plane of the guidance component to swivel left and right by raising or lowering resistance to the spin.
The CM had three modes of guidance — inertial, GPS and Differential GPS, all fitting in a chip the size of a US quarter, and of varying expense. The main attraction of the CM was that the thing was contained entirely in the fuze units and in (high)volume, it was estimated that the GPS/Inertial units could be built for around $2k-$5k per fuze (note that the cost of a regular shell and fuze was around $2k, IIRC, only a couple hundred of which was fuze and the rest was steel and explosives for the shell).
The problem with using it for fire support, we determined, was that the 5″/52 shell was really designed for use as an anti-aircraft weapon. It’s a fragmenting shell. It’s not really big enough to cause anywhere near the kind of hurt even the 8″ cruiser guns did, much less the VW beetle-weight 16″ guns could. So in order to do anything meaningful with it, you had to actually *hit* the target on the forehead, and if that target was, say, a tank, even that wasn’t a guarantee it would do lethal damage given that the warhead would fragment on the glacis plate.
The other problem using it for fire support is that it took time to set up a barrage and then fly the 43 miles the navy was talking about — and the need to hit things on the forehead without a target seeker meant that you had to pop off really insane numbers of the things to cover areas your target might have walked/driven into during the delay, and you swiftly ran into ammo constraints unless you were talking about putting the guns on entirely new platforms.
If you’re talking about hitting fixed targets (bunkers, intersections, etc.) for fire support at 40–60 miles, then suddenly tactical tomahawk and ATACMS start making much more sense. If you’re talking about responding to a fluid set of threats (enemy air or vehicles which are moving around), then *navigating* weapons with a flight delay of 43–60 miles aren’t your best bet — having those close air guys or organic mortar/arty light enough to hump along is.
I’ll be interested to see how this is addressed.
Quick addenda: Davids — the problem with the 155s is that they’re not rifled, and you need rifling to spin the shell for both power and guidance inputs to the front component.
Also, re: lethality — the ERGM appears to be a unitary blast warhead, fuzed for airburst, meaning it won’t do all that much good against armor. There had been discussions about using it as a submunitions carrier, but it didn’t have the payload.
I note that current ERGM propaganda shows it having fins and onboard power (battery) so the bent-ogive and motor generator apparently is no longer en vogue.
Norman,
Thanks for the comment. Yes, I know it’s the F/A-18 (C,D,E,F,G…whatever)…Just wanted to keep it simple.
As I stated, the Marine Corps views naval surface fire support as a key element of its doctrinal “fire support triad.” That need has not gone away from the perspective of Corps planners at MCCDC. Rocket systems, etc. are a part of their organic land-based fires plan. But as long as I’ve been reporting on this issue, Marines have been asking for a naval gun that can provide volume fires in the littoral.
“.…American Sailors against their Marine brethren“
hey. distant relatives, maybe. At best. The only “brother” I’ve got that’s a sailor, is my corpsman!
heh heh!
SEMPER FI!
what about wt of fire you still would have to lob a whole lot of 5 inch shells to equal jut one turret from the old battleships…and i know about precision fire being an equalizer but you can’t beat mass —what does the Corps say about that
>If you’re talking about hitting fixed targets
>(bunkers, intersections, etc.) for fire support
>at 40–60 miles, then suddenly tactical tomahawk
>and ATACMS start making much more sense.
ERGM will still be the option in that case, as long as ERGM would be cheaper than using missiles. That’s probably why why the Asernal Ship never made itself to enter service.
Arsenal ship was killed off by the “carrier mafia” if you think the fighter mafia is effective, then you should read how those guys operate. the real problem with extended-precision-naval gunfire is that it begins to encroach on the carrier wings turf. As long as you have entire fleets formed around aircraft carriers i just don’t see this getting off the ground. i hope Christian is right but Ward’s old buddies on deck might keep it from coming to light. take away close air support for embarked Marines and one of the premier missions for naval aviation goes away.
Pedestrian:
The issue isn’t cost, it’s size of payload. If you’re attacking a target that either is relatively hard (a bunker with decent overhead cover, heavy armor, etc.) or a long/wide area in an attempt to kill vehicles, you don’t want unitary frag warheads that can be packed into a 5″ round. In the prior case, you want larger/penetrating munitions, and the in second case you want submunitions for dispersal.
Say you want to hit a crossroads to interdict a column of light armored vehicles which are moving to engage your Marines. You have scouts out who can tell you when, roughly, they’ll hit the crossroads, but not lase them. Say you’re talking about a column of IFVs, moving at around 30kph.
The lethal (mission kill) radius of a 5″/54 round fragmenting warhead against an armored vehicle, even a relatively thin-skinned one like an IFV, isn’t that large. It’s on the close order of ten meters, and that’s being generous. If you have a CEP of 20 meters at 43 miles with the ERGM (which is really good), and you need to get with ten meters, then in order to get a decent damage expectancy vs. that IFV you’re going to have to pop off a *lot* of ERGMs. This doesn’t even address the complications of a navigating weapon vs. a moving target and/or incomplete/bad information.
Even if we assume the ERGM manages to pull off the 2m CEP of the full performance DGPS version, if the target is moving, remember that the shell has to travel 43 miles to get there. An IFV moving at 30kph is moving at 8.3 m/sec, which means that it will travel the lethal radius of that shell in just over *one second*. The muzzle velocity of the 5″/54 mount is such that the shells traverse a mile in approx. 2 seconds. Thus your targets will have 86 seconds of time after launch to get out of position — by 691.7 meters if you’ve aimed at its current location.
Let’s take the road case. If that group of IFVs continues to rumble along at *exactly* the same speed along a road whose course you know, then boxing an IFV with four ERGM (for a 20x20 meter kill zone) isn’t that bad. But let’s say the IFV varies speed? Or pauses? If, over those 83 seconds, the target were to decrease its speed by 10% (maybe they suspect an ambush) then it will end up 69 meters short of its predicted location — far outside your lethal radius. A 10% speed variation isn’t much.
Of course, we can deal with this by firing more rounds to make a bigger grid…but remember, a modern AEGIS combatant only carries around 500 rounds of 5″/54. If we want to cover a 100 meter section of highway, we’re firing ten or twenty rounds (depending on width and accuracy) for a single fire mission. 16 IFVs might take up a half kilometer of road if they’re on the move.
Those 500 shells don’t look so impressive anymore.
The DD(X)‘s AGS system is really a budget excuse. Why build a shore bombardment ship that is stealthy? When you fire your rounds you reveal your position.
Anyone with half a brain knows you can only do so much with a 155mm shell. The EGRM is going to cost too much to be a casual shot round, more over the DD(X) is only going to house no more then 300 rounds in total (used to be 600 but budget cuts ya know).
Rail guns? right. Despite the scifi aspects a rail gun has a lot of problems and will not go live till 2025 at the earliest and even then, will not address the Marine support fire option.
IMO the best option is put about 4 billion into a battle wagon to bring it up to speed. Its the ideal fire support platform.
Why isn’t that enough fire support for Marines who rarely assault beaches these days?
Because if we need the firepower we’re going to need it very very badly.
Ask the Israelis about airpower — they shorted themselves on tubes and bulked up on aircraft after 1967 — just in time for the Russians to give Egypt and Syria the world’s best anti-air systems for the 1973 mess. Oops.
The Marines are not numerous and nobody loves them — if they don’t have fire support they’ll tough it out. But that will cost a bucket of dog tags.
I have spoken with several Iwo Jima vets about battleships at that battle. When I asked, “Would it have helped if your battalion had your own private battleship with an on call delivery time of less than 20 seconds whenever you needed fire?” The result was always the same. The old vet would tremble in silent rage before yelling, yes, YES, YES. If you follow the island campaigns it becomes overwhelmingly obvious. THE MARINES NEVER GOT THE ARTILLERY SUPPORT THEY DESERVED! People have often called me a coward because I have no desire to tough it out and trade the lives of my men for the lives of a deeply dug in enemy. So be it. I will gleefully use technology to defeat numbers and fortification if I have a technological advantage.