Defense Focus: Iron Man lessons -- Part 4

WASHINGTON, May 30 (UPI) -- U.S. warship designers for decades have ignored the fundamental lesson of the hit movie "Iron Man" -- armored protection matters.

Audiences watching the spectacular movie starring Robert Downey Jr. are blown away by Iron Man's fantastic strength, his speed and his computer-directed ultra-precision weapons systems. But none of these would matter if Iron Man couldn't take a hit. His invulnerable gold-titanium alloy protects him from almost everything. As Tony Stark, the genius weapons designer played so well by Downey who creates the super-suit and who wears it to wreak havoc on the bad guys and the enemies of his country, points out -- the armor isn't just iron.

However, where Iron Man is incredibly fast, modern surface warships are very slow; 35 to 40 knots -- less than 50 miles an hour -- is high speed for most of them. Iron Man can fly 20, maybe 40, times that fast.

And where Iron Man is tiny and maneuverable, modern surface warships, especially U.S. nuclear-powered super-aircraft carriers, are big. In fact, they are enormous. If you get within firing range, it is hard not to hit a target that size.

Worst of all, where Iron Man is small but fantastically well protected, modern super-carriers really don't carry any armor protection at all. Incredibly, they are far more vulnerable to hits above the surface than those big old World War II battleships were.

Modern surface warships of the U.S. and British navies designed and built over the past 30 years share a common weakness, as we have noted in previous columns. Like so many big, impressive heavyweight boxers throughout history, they can be big, fast, powerful and handsome -- but they can't take a punch.

This was brought home to the British when first the cruiser Sheffield and then other British warships were sunk after suffering only one or two hits from Argentina's French-built Exocet low-flying cruise missiles during the 1982 Falklands war. As respected U.S. defense analyst David Crane pointed out in Defense Review a couple of years ago, U.S. nuclear-powered aircraft carriers today do not carry a fraction of the armor protection that a World War II battleship did.

Yet the threat to surface warships from submarine, air or surface-launched anti-ship missiles is vastly greater today than it was 26 years ago when the Falklands war was fought. Impressed by the impact of the Exocets, weapons designers around the world, especially in Russia and China, have invested big in much faster and more formidable anti-ship missiles than the Exocet. The king of the crop today is the Moskit 3M80 -- NATO designation SS-N-22 Sunburn -- that now figures prominently in the anti-warship inventories of China and Iran. The Russians also have developed the even more advanced SS-N-27 Sizzler.

These weapons fly two and a half times faster than U.S. ones. American cruise missiles are subsonic, but Russian-made ones can fly at well over Mach 2, or more than twice the speed of sound -- with speeds estimated at 1,500 mph to 1,700 mph at close to ground level.

Russia has sold the technology to build the Moskit to China, which manufactures it as the Hai Ying or Sea Eagle HY2. It can carry an almost 500-pound warhead, and it can deliver a tactical nuclear weapon. The threat of the Hai Ying is so great that it has effectively barred operational access to the Taiwan Strait to U.S. aircraft carriers in time of high tension. China has also supplied the Hai Ying to Iran.

And U.S. carriers today are far more vulnerable to shell and missile attack than battleships were 65 years ago in World War II. That is because well-built American, British, German, Italian and Japanese battleships carried thousands of tons of the most low-tech but effective defensive naval weapons system ever devised -- steel armor. That didn't make them invincible. The 80,000-ton Yamato and Musashi, the two biggest, most powerful, most heavily armored and armed dreadnoughts ever built, proved helpless against the blizzard of U.S. attacking aircraft and submarines that made funeral pyres of them both in 1944 and 1945. But it still took a lot of punishment to sink, especially from above surface weapons.

Ironically, as Crane pointed out in an important article in Defense Review in November 2006, U.S. super-carriers are now far more vulnerable to being "ambushed" by hostile submarines or aircraft carrying anti-ship missiles than they were a few years ago, because the U.S. Navy no longer uses its trusty old Lockheed Martin S-3B Viking aircraft in their traditional Anti-Submarine Warfare role to protect the gigantic ships.

That is why the giant super-carrier battle groups of the U.S. Navy that have done so much to maintain global peace and security for generations find themselves increasingly pushed hundreds of miles offshore. Even Tony Stark would be hard-pressed to come up with answers to the weapons systems that threaten America's super-ships in the 21st century.