Readers of this blog who know me know that I travel – a lot. If schedule permits on these trips, I try to take in a bit of the local military history – be it ships, museums, or what-not. Over the last year or so, my travels have taken me to several locations where coastal artillery emplacements were employed, or at least emplaced for various wartime contingencies. Some of these batteries were used to protect narrows, but others were set in prominent positions facing the open ocean. From the early history of the United States through the late 1940s, batteries with guns up to 16” dotted the east and west coasts. At Fort Hunt and Fort Washington along the Potomac, I saw coastal fortifications where 10 and 12-inch guns and submarine mines were used to protect the Capital from hostile fleets. These guns were never employed and removed as obsolete in 1917. In Hawaii, the batteries I visited around Diamond Head crater were never fired, even during the attack on Pearl Harbor. And at Battery Point Loma in San Diego, the giant 16″ unused guns were removed after World War II.
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| Blücher sinking in the the Drøbak Sound. |
In other cases, coastal guns achieved more strategic effects. In Oslo, I learned that during the invasion of Norway, on 9 April, 1940 two old 11” guns assisted by land-based torpedo batteries sank the German heavy cruiser Blücher. The loss of this ship stalled Germany’s advance to Oslo allowing Norway’s royal family to flee to the United Kingdom, where they ran resistance forces in exile for the remainder of the war.
But could current trends become the impetus for a resurgence in coastal “artillery” for the world’s navies? To some extent this has already happened, as relatively low cost and mobile surface to surface anti-ship missiles have proliferated to both state and non-state forces. Lebanese Hezbollah set the precedence for their use against Israel’s Hanit in 2006. China and Russia have held a monopoly on producing and selling these systems, but Western powers are starting to take notice. Kongsberg’s Naval Strike Missile is ground, air, or sea launched and has been acquired by Poland for coastal defense. Another possibility for future coastal batteries are rail guns. The U.S. Navy has been working for years to develop this capability for surface combatants, but one of the main challenges with their implementation at sea is the significant electrical requirement. Might a mobile ground rail gun be viable, taking advantage of more readily available power sources?
Coastal urbanization is an unstoppable demographic trend. Future wars of both the state-on-state and irregular flavor will likely be fought near or in megacities that dot coastlines from West Africa to East Asia. Whereas fixed coastal defenses arrayed near cities were vulnerable to air attack, the survivability of new anti-ship batteries is based on their ability to shoot and scoot. Mobile launchers can also be camouflaged from air attack or hide in plain sight, taking advantage of placement inside population centers where counter-targeting would risk undesirable and highly visible collateral damage. Depending on what force is employing them, modern coastal batteries can be cued by large or small combatants, UAVs, or simply friendly fishing boats with a radio and GPS.
The shrinking U.S. Army is hunting for relevancy in a defense establishment fixated on Air Sea Battle and a bad COIN hangover. Large-scale ground force deployments are unlikely until our collective memory fades over the next couple of decades and we unlearn painful lessons from Afghanistan and Iraq. Perhaps the Army should examine rapidly deployable and mobile coastal missile and rail gun batteries. The precedence for this type of system exists. Patriot air defense batteries have been high demand assets during the past twenty years. Their small footprint makes them discretely deployable to countries where large army formations are simply not welcome. HIMARs is another modern mobile artillery system that has seen successful use in recent conflicts. While providing fire support missions to special operations forces, the army has gradually succumbed to its aversion to deploying individual missile systems without bringing along the whole enchilada (brigade).
Improved anti-surface weapons systems can play both offensive and defensive naval roles. The tactical use of these weapons would vary between denying chokepoints, defending against amphibious raids, and harassing enemy merchant shipping. They could be collocated with Patriot batteries to defend against enemy air attack or hidden in dense urban terrain. Inevitably, future adversaries of western navies will employ these weapons. The exchange ratio between a relatively low cost mobile ASCM and a multi-billion dollar combatant is just too economically favorable to ignore. So in an environment of shrinking defense resources might we also consider going on the asymmetric offensive?
The opinions in this post are those of the author’s alone, presented in his personal capacity.
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