The Influence of History

After having examined the incredible effectiveness of even an early guided missile ship in surface warfare  a few days ago, I became interested in creating a chart of the growth of the US Navy's guided missile force to compare with the decline of the US Navy's battleship and gun cruiser fleet that I made last month. The USN Guided Missile Fleet Before comparing the two, let's look at the missile chart as it has some interesting information. For some additional detail I broke the ships down by launcher - the Terrier and Tartar categories also include Standard ER and Standard MR, respectively, while the Standard category only covers VLS ships (which, it should be remembered, didn't have an ER missile until 1999). Unfortunately, I don't have good information on the exact dates the Perry's lost their Mk 13 launchers so the final 3 years of Tarter are merely a best guess based on available information. Chart of all commissioned US Navy guided missile ships (195...

Cannon were first used at sea sometime in the 15th century. While various siege engines had been employed by navies for thousands of years, they never had a profound effect on war at sea. Instead, naval combat was dominated by ramming and boarding actions. While these ancient tactics remain in use today, guns fundamentally transformed naval warfare as they allowed a ship to disable or even sink its enemies from a distance. Guns developed over time from the small manually aimed muzzle loaders of the early days to the massive computer controlled weapons of the World Wars. Range, rate of fire, throw weight, and accuracy all made tremendous strides but the basic principals remained the same for the five centuries when guns dominated naval combat. The 19th century saw this dominance shaken by the introduction of various forms of mines and torpedoes, but it was not until the introduction of aircraft in the 20th century that the gun was finally replaced as the primary naval weapon. Althou...