Comments on the 2016 Defence Investment Plan (?)

The BBC item on the DIP:

£63bn for nuclear deterrent

Money is being earmarked for the UK's continuous-at-sea nuclear deterrent, and the warheads and infrastructure that supports it. 

The plan includes buying F35A combat aircraft modified to carry relatively small nuclear bombs to allow Britain to play a part in Nato's European Nuclear Plan. But these aircraft will not be delivered during this decade. 

Russia already possesses large numbers of smaller, tactical nuclear weapons while Britain has none. 

 

These will be US supplied aircraft, and US nuclear weapons. It will constitute a system not under UK sovereign control. US nuclear weapons allocated to NATO cannot be used without US permission and given the current US administrations ambivalence to responding to article 5 requests for NATO support, by a member state. Even if the next US administration favours observing its treaty obligations we cannot rely on the US electorate installing another rogue  administration down the line.

If the UK is to retain nuclear weapons they must be under full UK control (much like the French weapons). This implies replacing Trident with missiles serviced (and preferably manufactured) in the UK, and warheads not burdened under ITAR restrictions.

Also the "strategic goal": "Use investment in defence to drive growth, creating jobs and driving investment across the country" is not served by procuring F35A's or US tactical nuclear weapons.

Just a reminder to write about the SeaHake Mod4 ER and/or Poseidon.

 The SeaHake Mod4 ER (DM2A4 ER) seems to have fallen out of the worlds awareness in the last few years (since I retired). The Russian Poseidon nuclear powered UWW has been in the news more recently but seems more a propaganda exercise than a viable weapon.

 Must write something about v-long range underwater weapons when I get the chance.

Zero Sum Games & Nuclear War?

 In a recent article in the Guardian on a wargame conducted recently to investigate tension between Russia and Finland a reference  was given to a paper by Roger Mason [1]. This paper was all pretty standard stuff on the history of wargaming, but we have this at the start of the section covering the Cold War:

The cold war offered strategists, political leaders, and wargamers a new set of  problems. The challenge was the new age of nuclear weapons where strategic warfare might truly be a global zero-sum game.

This left me wondering exactly what did the author think or intend this "zero-sum game" phrase to mean in this context?

Lets look at the definition of a Zero Sum Game, here from Wikipedia:

Zero-sum game is a mathematical representation in game theory and economic theory of a situation that involves two sides, where the result is an advantage for one side and an equivalent loss for the other.^[1] In other words, player one's gain is equivalent to player two's loss, with the result that the net improvement in benefit of the game is zero.^[2]

 What would a zero-sum pay-off matrix for strategic nuclear war look like!? There seems to be a couple (or more) possiblities behind this quote: 

1. I don't understand what the author is getting at,

 or (more likely)
2. The author does not know what a zero-sum gave is, and is using the phrase because it makes him sound smart.

References

Mason, Roger, Wargaming: Its  history and  future, The International Journal of Intelligence, Security, and Public Affairs, V20, 2 pp 77-101, 2018.

Kinematics Countermeasures to Anti-Torpedo Torpedoes.

Back in 2019 at the Undersea Defence Technology (UDT)  conference (in Stockholm) I attended a talk on the Netherlands' navy introduction of Anti-Torpedo Torpedoes (ATTs), and asked a question "Have you considered the effect of Counter Countermeasures (CCM) on the effectiveness of the ATT". The presenter, knowing who I was (as I had just delivered a paper on using machine learning to optimise torpedo homing algorithms, the day before), replied that he would leave that to me.

On returning home I put together a paper on kinematic CCMs to ATTs, based entirely on open source material, and in my own time, in a week or so for the 2020 UDT conference.

Unfortunately, I developed medical problem (Oct 2019) that led to me giving notice of my retirement, and would have made me reluctant to travel for the next UDT conference, and the conference was cancelled anyway (early 2020?) due to the outbreak of a pandemic. So the paper was never delivered.

I have now posted it to my research gate account: PDF of paper is here.

This paper did not go through the full BAE (my employer at the time) vetting procedure (which it would have needed, as if I had delivered it at UDT I would do so as a representative of BAE), but as it was written on my time, and using open sources and I no longer represent BAE in any capacity, it should be OK to release it now. But note this does not necessarily reflect the views of BAE systems, doubly so as I don't know what their current view of ATT CCM are.

Errors in naval history books

I have recently been working on a talk about the Western Approaches Tactical Unit (WATU). The two main books that talk about WATU are references 1 and 2. Both of these contain errors which one would have expected the research for these to have caught.

Examples are calling HMS Prince of Wales, which Gilbert Rodgers, the head of WATU visited while it was fitting out, as a battle cruiser, giving the gun calibre of Spitfire guns a value that never existed. Possibly worse is not mentioning operation Drum Beat as the cause of the second U-boat Happy Time.

 As a result of a question when I was presenting this talk, I had to consult reference 3. Here the author failed to convert between metres per second, knots and mph. Having piqued my curiosity I looked at other parts that i know about (ATTs) and found errors there. Also I am left with a feeling that research for (3) was largely confined to Wikipedia.

All this leaves with the impression that these books are written by "journalists" with no real background interest in naval history. Just as well these books were all borrowed rather than purchased.

References

1. Mark Williams, Captain Gilbert Roberts, and the Anti-U-Boat School, Cassell, 1979

2. Simon Parkin, A Game of Birds and Wolves, Sceptre, 2020
3. Roger Branfill-Cook, Torpedo, Seaforth Publishing, 2014

Initial thoughts on ATTs for use against Russia's super torpedo Poseidon/Status-6/Kanyon

Poseidon[1] allegedly has practically unlimited endurance, a maximum speed ~70kts and a maximum operating depth of ~1000m. Some scaling arguments indicate that a maximum speed closer to 55kts may be likely.

I have addressed the speed requirements for ATTs against conventional torpedoes before, a few posts ago [2], which do not apply if the target is Russia's new "super" torpedo.

Presumably an ATT for use against Poseidon will have to be deployed from an aircraft. Now while at high speed Poseidon should be easily detectable and trackable there is no guarantee of being able to deploy the ATT for a near head-on attack. In which case a higher speed will be needed and so the $3/2$ rule may well be appropriate in this case. As the quoted maximum speed and in H.I. Sutton's article  is 70kts the 3/2-rule  puts the ATT maximum speed requirement up at 105kts which will present some interesting engineering challenges.. This may well raise issues about detectability of the target using sonar from the ATT. 

What other options are there for hard-kill counters to Poseidon are depth charges, mines, ...?

Some further thoughts: 
1. What endurance would be required of an ATT for this role? This would be determined by how close to Poseidon's position and track axis the ATT could be deployed. being dropped at ~1000m from the threat and close to the track would require a relatively modest endurance, while being dropped at greater distance might require a prohibitive endurance from a high speed weapon. Maybe a multi-speed  ATT would be useful?
2. What speed profile would Poseidon employ? How long would it operate close to its maximum speed?     Could it be attacked while at a lower speed?
3. Would it be better to attack/eliminate its launch vessel?
4. In the case of an airdropped ATT there would be no restriction on the ATT heading back towards the launch vessel, so if we have a high enough speed and sufficient endurance, tail chases are acceptable.

References:

1. Sutton, H. I., Russia’s New ‘Poseidon’ Super-Weapon: What You Need To Know, Naval News, 2022
   https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2022/03/russias-new-poseidon-super-weapon-what-you-need-to-know/
2. Larham, R., Maximum Design Speed of Homing Torpedoes. Naval Wargames and related stuff, Blog.
   https://navalwargames.blogspot.com/2021/09/maximum-design-speed-of-homing-torpedoes.html

HMS Queen Elizabeth nammed after the late Queen, after all!

 In the First Sea Lord's tribute to the late Queen, he admits (2:40 in the twitter video) that the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth was named after her (previous claims seem to have said she did not want a ship named after her, and that the QE was named after QE1 like the previous QE)

https://twitter.com/i/status/1568879644786442241