How could a Arleigh Burke Flight IIA defend itself from ground forces?

[FancyDarcy]

For reason of ASB, a Arleigh Burke Flight IIA must cross a heavily-defended river which is surrounded by T-72 tanks, artillery guns and other emplacements. How would she go about defending herself from this second-rate military force?

[Darth Tanner]

shes a guided missile destroyer, I'm guessing the answer is she blows them to bits with guided missiles? Its gun also out ranges a T72.

[Jub]

Why are you sending a blue water vessel on a brown water run?
Why aren't you supporting it?
Why does the enemy force still have the ability to sortie such dated vehicles against you in the first place?
What is the Arleigh Burke's mission?

These are more important questions than the one you've asked.

[Patroklos]

It can't and would be destroyed in short order. Its not designed to counter any of those threats, so no matter how advanced it is and countering threats it is designed for those "second rate" military forces might as well be AT-ATs as far as the ship is concerned. I can mission kill a DDG51 with an AK47 from a river shore.

[Khaat]

Sounds like the plot for a Last Ship fanfic?

That's kind of neat, I guess, but there does need to be a good reason to risk the ship against ground forces.

[Jub]

Sounds like the plot for a Last Ship fanfic?

That's kind of neat, I guess, but there does need to be a good reason to risk the ship against ground forces.

Even in that case, you send a team up the river instead of the entire ship. Otherwise, sending the ship without doing due diligence risks it getting stuck even if there are no other threats.

If you had to send your ship up the river unescorted, you'd have to fire what you can spare. Then you have to hope that it discourages enemy activity at likely ambush points for long enough that you can sail through; though this is unlikely. Honestly, in this scenario, your ship is a slow, fat, soft target that can't evade and your foe has the entire length of the river to attack you from. Your weapons aren't designed for anti-tank work and may not even target/arm at the ranges you'll engage at even if you wanted to press them into service.

[Khaat]

Oh, granted; that's why I said "need a good reason to risk the ship." It sounds like a plot from 70's TV on a closer look: "oh, it's a risk!" Then the ship (stock footage) rolls through (a canal), blowing-up guys-with-beards behind crates with minor pyrotechnics and air-rams or springboards and the occasional parked tank obscured by smoke. Wilhelm screams. Soot on the hero's cheek. Flexing.

[Elheru Aran]

The thing about modern naval combat... it's (almost) all at a distance. Very often beyond visual range of the ships involved, actually. Modern ships are only lightly armoured because most weapons used these days are powerful enough to destroy/sink them -anyway-. The max level of armour in most parts of the ship that are armoured at all, IIRC, only really stops something like .50 caliber fire and shrapnel. The command center/bridge tends to have some armour IIRC, but we're talking stuff like bulletproof glass in the windows, not 8-inch plate.

So if a modern combat ship gets in range of hostile ground artillery that knows it's there? It's probably going to be hurting fairly quickly. Up a river? Even worse, it can only go in two directions unless we're talking a crazy-big river like the Amazon.

[FancyDarcy]

It can't and would be destroyed in short order. Its not designed to counter any of those threats, so no matter how advanced it is and countering threats it is designed for those "second rate" military forces might as well be AT-ATs as far as the ship is concerned. I can mission kill a DDG51 with an AK47 from a river shore.

I don't think you can do that. I think the DDG51 could kill you if it wanted to, or just run away if it didn't want to. I doubt all the crew will just stand on the deck having a BBQ while you mow them down inaccurately from hundreds of meters away.

The DDG has three helicopter; 2 in the hanger and 1 on the deck. It can use it's 5 inch gun to blast the primitive armour and men away. The helicopters can shoot the men down with their door mounted machine guns and fire AT rockets at the armour. The DDG could use the laser/GPS tomahawks to blast away the fortifications on the shore.

[Sea Skimmer]

The T-72 should withstand a direct hit from a 5in round though it might be damaged. The probability of such a hit is very low. The only armor on a DDG-51 is some combination of kevlar or ceramic faced fiberglass only meant to stop fragmentation, and only then on a small number of spaces which do not include the 5in gunhouse. What's more the Russians actually make a delay action fuse for the 125mm HE rounds, so the T-72 can utterly riddle the ship, and just two of them fire faster then then a mk45. A

Tanks win in a couple minutes, and a laser Tomahawk doesn't exist. DDG-51 is a fleet escort not a river gunboat. Unless you are talking about the lower Amazon it has no place in combat on a river, the inability to turn around without a tug would be a deal breaker for military operations on most rivers out of hand.

LCS would be much much more realistic if you wanted river operations, though its much flimsier, DDG-51 isn't remotely armored against tank or artillery fire but it is well protected by modern warship standards. A lot of its protection is blast hardening, not armor though. The bridge windows aren't armor that I'm aware of, but they should withstand a 10psi air blast which is the kind of blast that would flatten most buildings.

[Patroklos]

Before we get too far down the rabbit hole on this I want you to know that:

1.) I am a career naval officer who has done both a division officer tour and a department head tour on Burke destroyers.

2.) During that tour I served in in various topside bridge watches and combat watches, to include OOD and TAO.

think you can do that. I think the DDG51 could kill you if it wanted to, or just run away if it didn't want to. I doubt all the crew will just stand on the deck having a BBQ while you mow them down inaccurately from hundreds of meters away.

Your question predicated crossing a river, inside artillery and tank gun range and presumably any small arms present since crossing a river sort of means going from one shore to another. You also said surrounded, so that means BOTH shores are hostile.

Given your scenario, there is no option for long range strike. Even in there were, you could expend the ships entire 5" mag and assuming every VLS cell has a Tomahawk loaded (this is never the case) shoot all of those too and still not be able to counter what you said.

My point about the AK-47 is that modern warship are fragile. A good sniper with a normal assault weapon could destroy every fire control, satellite uplink, optical sight and phased array on a Burke at 200 yards with a single AK magazine. NONE of these things are armored, they rely on active defense to survive. In its designed environment active defense means shooting down enemy ASMs with SM-2s and CIWS before they hit you and killing submarines at range with preferably helicopters but also VLAs before they can shoot at you, not absorbing hits via something like armor or redundancy. In your scenario the ship has no designed defenses against the weapons arrayed against it, hence something as insignificant as an AK47 can do major damage.

Your scenario is similar to asking how an F-15 would do against a squadron of P-51. With the F-15 restricted to taxing a tarmac.

The DDG has three helicopter; 2 in the hanger and 1 on the deck.

SOME DDGs have TWO helicopters. No US CRUDES ship drives around with a helicopter on deck unless they are actually operating it. They deploy with two birds at most.

It can use it's 5 inch gun to blast the primitive armour and men away.

If they can spot it, and then they can hit it. The problem here is they are crossing a river, so we are talking about ranges where they have to shoo directly at things at a flat trajectory which means they can only shoot at what they see. Because of that flat trajectory air bursts will be less effective. Unless its a DDG with something like scan eagle they have no spotting capabilities against land targets whatsoever so they can't shoot at enemy artillery perhaps miles away from the river proper.

But lets assume you have magitek spotting. We are talking about one gun tube versus likely hundreds of gun tubes for the enemy forces. There is nothing about your scenario that would allow the DDG to say fire from safety and then cross the river. They would be shooting at each other at the same time, which means after a few minutes the DDG will have fired a couple dozen shots, the enemy will have fired several thousand, and the DDG is dead while taking out a few tanks with it at best.

And Tomahawks are even more worthless. A DDG is essentially just a remote storage location for Tomahawk. It has no organic way to plan a Tomahawk strike because 1.) It has no way to discover where enemy positions are that are not in line of sight and 2.) most of the guidance options packages for that weapon are provided to the DDG from shore HQ sites, not created onboard the missile shooter itself. We are talking about sending Tomahawks to grid coordinates with GPS at best. The reality is those missiles will go down in their tubes with the ship.

The helicopters can shoot the men down with their door mounted machine guns and fire AT rockets at the armour. The DDG could use the laser/GPS tomahawks to blast away the fortifications on the shore.

1.) DDGs don't carry any weapons for their helicopters other than torpedoes. Because their helicopters are for shooting at submarines and or being cargo/passenger transfer platforms. Its possible for some models to carry things like hellfires and I am sure some DDG somewhere had some onboard at some point but its not anywhere near normal.

2.) You think a helicopter operating as to allow door gunners to shoot anything at all would not be instantly shot out of the sky in your scenario? That is just silly. This whole scenario is silly.

EDIT: @ SeaSkimmer

A DDG can turn around in a circle the diameter of its length. It has variable pitch propellers so you can spin in place all day long. Not that it matters, and of course this doesn't account for any strong currents which most rivers have. DDGs are, however, pretty damn maneuverable.

[Jub]

Skimmer or Patroklos, what kind of minimum range does the 5" gun on the Burke have? I'd imagine that it doesn't exactly have much in the way of depression. Assuming that this is the case, anything within a few hundred meters of the ship would face nothing worse than 20mm or RAM fire; assuming that these systems can target something like a tank in the first place.

[Lord Revan]

Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't modern warships so weakly armored as you couldn't make armor that could stop anti-ship missiles and still be practical, so it's desided that speed and operating range is more important then trying to armor the ships against weapons that would be rarely used anyway (aka the ship guns).

to give some perspective the Finnish Defense Force uses either 105mm-150mm guns on turrets (the weaker guns are actually surpluss tank turrets mounted on bunkers) and 150mm field guns or howitzers (I can't recall which one atm) as the primary means of anti-ship defense and russian navy does have fairly modern ships as it is. Sorry for the rather vague description I was in the logistical section of the costal defense regiment not the gunnery section so I never had to learn the details.

[Simon_Jester]

The flip side is, any ship in the world that COULD conceivably handle this situation, would in turn be utterly destroyed and blown to bits by an Arleigh Burke in a naval fight.

It's a bit like asking how a great white shark would do in a fight with a lion. Lions are much smaller than sharks, and in the water, the shark wins easily. But if you strand the shark on a beach somewhere the lion can just walk up to it and bite pieces out of it, and the shark can't fight back, because it's helpless out of the water.

...

Also, if FancyDarcy is secretly Archinist, I'm going to feel vindicated.

[Lord Revan]

he certainly has similarities with that poster.

In modern militaries units have roles, the role of a guided missible destroyer is not close in ground support, but rather it's fleet escort and maybe long range fire support.

Most militaries don't really care about defending against threats that unit would face going outside its intended role (like using a destroyer as a riverboat) as it would be at best a waste of resources better used elsewhere and at worst it's a detriment to the intended role. Kind of how most militaries won't worry how regular rifleman would fare in a dogfight since a rifleman ending in dogfight in a way that he can do anything about is so rare as to be practically impossible.

How would an Arleigh Burke (or any destroyer for that matter) defend itself against ground forces, that's simple to anwser they would defend themselves by not getting into range of the ground forces in the first place. If a destroyer got into situation where it would have to engage ground forces directly, things would be so bad that how the ship defends itself would be irrelevant at that point.

[Marko Dash]

if you want a big warship to get in a close quarters fight with a bunch of army units, use a battleship.

[FancyDarcy]

While not penetrating the armor, the top of the Abrams has thin armor, so a HE shell from the 5-inch might be able to do serious damage.

If it did not penetrate, it would strip away all of the useful crap, (optics, treads, radio antennae, concussed/dead crew...) so basically mission-killing the tank. If the tomahawks could be GPS guided to the battlefield, the explosive shock wave and shrapnel would instantly wipe most standing infantry, light vehicles, and usefulness of tanks. Exposed ammunition could also add to the chaos..

25mm autocannons and .50 cals could add fuel to the fire, help blind the artillery and tanks as well. The artillery units are unarmoured, bare free-standing guns, they would not survive 25mm autocannon fire, and the crew wouldn't want to stick their heads up either, I don't think,

[Jub]

While not penetrating the armor, the top of the Abrams has thin armor, so a HE shell from the 5-inch might be able to do serious damage.

If it did not penetrate, it would strip away all of the useful crap, (optics, treads, radio antennae, concussed/dead crew...) so basically mission-killing the tank. If the tomahawks could be GPS guided to the battlefield, the explosive shock wave and shrapnel would instantly wipe most standing infantry, light vehicles, and usefulness of tanks. Exposed ammunition could also add to the chaos..

Sure, the 5" gun could hurt tanks and Tomahawks will create 50-100m kill zones. The issue is that the tanks can hurt the ship more easily and faster than the ship can hurt them. The other issue is that the ship really can't guide its own missiles in an active firefight. She could pre-saturate an area scouted with her choppers and hope to get lucky, but that's her only real use for her missiles.

Targeting issues aside, the ship won't know where the enemy attack will come from. Unlike a massive ship, a ground force can hide under things like trees and camo nets. You only have two pairs of eyes in the form of your helicopters and they have no support. Unsupported helicopters are targets for even something like a MANPAD, let alone any actual AA that a force operating T-7's should have access to. So you may not even get your helicopters back after sending them on a scouting mission which itself may not find anything. All of this adds up to the enemy having the element of surprise.

So even if they could defeat said attack if they knew when and where it was coming from, they likely won't know at least one or the other against a competent foe. Even against an incompetent foe, they only have to miss a few artillery pieces or a couple of tanks and the ship is in trouble.

The other issue is that said enemy force may not even have to engage conventionally. An army could physically drag/push dirt/cement blocks/etc. into the river making it so the ship can reach their goal. Then, depending on river width, the ship may not have many options in terms of retreating.

25mm autocannons and .50 cals could add fuel to the fire, help blind the artillery and tanks as well. The artillery units are unarmoured, bare free-standing guns, they would not survive 25mm autocannon fire, and the crew wouldn't want to stick their heads up either, I don't think,

Why is artillery going to stay anywhere near the effective range of machine guns and 25mm cannons? Even something as dated as a 1919 model howitzer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cou ... _Schneider) has a range of nearly 8 kilometers. Something like the M198 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M198_howitzer) can reach out and touch you at a range of over 20km, where the ship can't really see it or do much to disrupt it.

-----

Now, let's say that everything goes as well as it can for the ship. They find the enemy's main base of operations, they send in some 5" shells and 30 tomahawks, all without losing a Helicopter. The enemy base is ruined, the main ambush site is flattened, the river looks clear. You still can't know if you missed anything.

All it takes is a few tanks opening up from cover and things are over. Those tanks aren't going to miss a target the size of a ship and even if the helos are in the air, and each carrying a full load of 8 Hellfires, the tanks are going to get a shell or two each off before they go down. Even if that's only a group of survivors from the main attack in say, a dozen tanks, that's 24-36 shell hits from what are, essentially 5" guns. You may have also eaten some anti-tank missiles if the enemy has those deployed to their tanks. Your ship is now crippled.

Keep in mind, this is with things going well.

[Lord Revan]

if you want a big warship to get in a close quarters fight with a bunch of army units, use a battleship.

hell no, you'd get all the problems of a destroyer only with a ship that's more then twice the size, those 16in guns don't depress low enough to be useful in close quaters against ground units IIRC not mention that recoil from those mosters will probably get you stuck in the river bed.

[stardust]

I'd think, assuming you can find a reason to risk the ship in that manner to begin with, that it would clear a path for itself outside the effective engagement range of any ground-based force with its missiles and gun battery, but that's just my humble opinion.

[Jub]

I'd think, assuming you can find a reason to risk the ship in that manner to begin with, that it would clear a path for itself outside the effective engagement range of any ground-based force with its missiles and gun battery, but that's just my humble opinion.

Why would you assume that it has the munitions to do that? This ship carries 90 Tomahawks and then a magazine of 5" shells for ground attack, plus whatever Hellfire missiles it has (likely none unless the ship was configured for this mission, though if it was it makes me wonder why it is unsupported). They can plaster everything they can find with their two helicopters and still not hit enough to stop an enemy counter attack, especially if the enemy doesn't just have their forces parked up at a depot waiting to die. This gets worse once the helicopters come under fire and can no longer hover around guiding fire. This also assumes that the ship can even self-guide Tomahawks.

[Sea Skimmer]

Skimmer or Patroklos, what kind of minimum range does the 5" gun on the Burke have? I'd imagine that it doesn't exactly have much in the way of depression. Assuming that this is the case, anything within a few hundred meters of the ship would face nothing worse than 20mm or RAM fire; assuming that these systems can target something like a tank in the first place.

As a dedicated destroyer weapon the Mk45 gun mount actually can fire with signifcant depression to cope with a fast rolling deck. You will find probably zero heavier caliber naval guns though that can fire below 0 degrees, though most can depress further to make the barrels easier to clean.

As far as effectiveness goes, even against soft targets significant amounts of 5in gunfire are required to have any serious effect. See video blow of a dedicated test of this with a DDG-51 in the 1990s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS5G-NwPlWo

This is why naval fire support programs all became hyperfocused on guided ammunition in that era, the firing range in the video above is only about 18,000 yards at which point the destroyer is still vulnerable even to non artillery weapons like the 125mm gun on the T-72.

Note also that sustained ROF on the Mk45 is only 20 rpm, so it can basically only beat about 1.5 x T-72 for rate of fire until the T-72 autoloaders are empty. By which point the Burke is probably already seriously crippled and on fire. The USN kinda knew what it was doing when it decided to go to a much bigger gun for DDG-1000. Bigger then even the 155mm caliber strictly suggests, as the (abortive) LRLAP round weighed 200lb, making it comparable to the 8in howitzer shells in mass (but not terminal effect, its still a 155mm sized warhead) the Army used to have. In fact they used old 8in howitzer mounts to do the land based tests of the new gun breach and barrel.

[Jub]

As a dedicated destroyer weapon the Mk45 gun mount actually can fire with signifcant depression to cope with a fast rolling deck. You will find probably zero heavier caliber naval guns though that can fire below 0 degrees, though most can depress further to make the barrels easier to clean.

As far as effectiveness goes, even against soft targets significant amounts of 5in gunfire are required to have any serious effect. See video blow of a dedicated test of this with a DDG-51 in the 1990s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS5G-NwPlWo

This is why naval fire support programs all became hyperfocused on guided ammunition in that era, the firing range in the video above is only about 18,000 yards at which point the destroyer is still vulnerable even to non artillery weapons like the 125mm gun on the T-72.

Note also that sustained ROF on the Mk45 is only 20 rpm, so it can basically only beat about 1.5 x T-72 for rate of fire until the T-72 autoloaders are empty. By which point the Burke is probably already seriously crippled and on fire. The USN kinda knew what it was doing when it decided to go to a much bigger gun for DDG-1000. Bigger then even the 155mm caliber strictly suggests, as the (abortive) LRLAP round weighed 200lb, making it comparable to the 8in howitzer shells in mass (but not terminal effect, its still a 155mm sized warhead) the Army used to have. In fact they used old 8in howitzer mounts to do the land based tests of the new gun breach and barrel.

Thanks for the information. It's nice to have knowledgeable people weigh in on these things.

[stardust]

What Jub said. Good to know.

I was more thinking if they could spot tank columns alongside a riverbank, that their missiles and gun system would outrange any tank based weapon. But feel free to prove me wrong!

[Sea Skimmer]

The other issue is that said enemy force may not even have to engage conventionally. An army could physically drag/push dirt/cement blocks/etc. into the river making it so the ship can reach their goal. Then, depending on river width, the ship may not have many options in terms of retreating.

Blockships or maybe shipping containers with spike equipped telephone poles stuck through them could be a serious problem, just throwing in dirt and debris would require an awful lot of dirt. For that kind of trouble people would just build and emplace command detonated mines. Just two or three of them weighing say 2,000lb would easily cover a typical 400ft wide river shipping channel.

For more dynamic situations floating nets are also an old school threat to any screw equipped ships, and you get a steel net wrapped around the screws and nothing short of hours of diver work is ever going to get it off. Even then it could be difficult in murky river water. Waterjet propelled ships are also vulnerable to this, but much less so since the water jet intake is on the bottom of the hull, and the exhaust obviously won't suck in anything.

But an even more fundamental problem is that an enemy will remove all the river channel markers! Oh sure on paper the ship could then navigate using charts and GPS, but while jam resistance GPS exists it's not going to be effective against a competent enemy in this kind of situation, where they can point a jammer at the ship directly at very close range. That's really were my original comment on can't turn was coming from, navigation would be so iffy you wouldn't want to try given how slow you'd have to move to turn anyway.

Also lets never rule out dumping a trainload of 50/50 crude oil and gasoline mixture into the river and setting it on fire! Probably wouldn't set a destroyer ablaze, but it'd sure make it hard to fight.