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I want to play ASROC. With the W44 warheads.
www.thedrive.com
This is a concern of mine as related to Iran and NK they don't need ICBMs if they can launch from a freighter just off our coasts.Cargo Ships As Missile Carriers Is One Of The Navy's Options To Offset Cruiser Retirements
The Navy needs more ships to carry missiles in order to overcome the loss of Ticonderoga cruisers, five of which could be retiring this year.
Yup or send a seemingly normal container ship into one of our ports loaded with drones and missiles in a Pearl Harbor like attack destroying major facilities or coastal areas.
Worth noting though that large area targets take a LOT of firepower to degrade. Historians have done quite a bit of Monday morning quarterbacking over how the Japanese strike at Pearl Harbor could have caused longer-term damage, but the reality of it is that with ~225 bombers (bomb-carrying Kates and Vals, not counting the torpedo bombers and Zeroes) the ability of the Kido Butai to permanently cripple things like fuel tank farms or repair facilities was pretty limited. As for what they did get - Battleship Row - only two of the eight BBs present were total losses; three were repaired within a few months, another before the end of 1942, another in 1943, and another in 1944. Granted we don't have the capacity to regenerate losses that we had in 1941 (the aircraft destroyed at Pearl were effectively replaced with two weeks' of production; in 1944 we could have replaced those losses in 15 minutes), but there's a reason why US strike plans for something like a single airbase often involve upwards of 50-60 cruise missiles.
Hitting the tank farms and infrastructure would have still been a good blow. At the end of the day, our battle fleet and war plan went right out the window for an immediate counterattack/ offensive and worst our morale was shot until midway 6 months later.
The idea of immediately steaming for the Phillipines went out the window before December 1941; the initial Japanese war plans were built on the idea of taking the Philippines and then attriting the US fleet via torpedo and aircraft attacks until their battle line could defeat the USN in an old-school Jutlandesque clash of dreadnoughts. That was already looking kind of shaky as by the late 1930s the Marianas were recognized as a viable air base to hit the Japanese Home Islands; that would require the Japanese to fight their planned "decisive battle" farther from their bases (and face a US fleet with shorter transit and supply lines of its own). Attacking Pearl Harbor was meant to cover the Japanese seizure of territory and resources in the Southwest Pacific and buy time to fortify their island holdings before the USN could build up (as stated previously, the fleet that anchored in Tokyo Bay in September 1945 was largely already on order as of 1940). The most optimistic outcome was that the US would decided a bunch of Pacific islands wasn't worth war over, which proved to be dead wrong.
