What are classes of ships and submarines and why are they pigeonholed like that, even accross different countries?
In: 1
Ship classes are not very well defined, even if the same term is used between different countries and different navies. Japan, for example, has no aircraft carriers. Yet they have the F-35B deployed on “helicopter destroyers”. In the US, they would be referred to as amphibious assault ships. For pretty much every other country, they are aircraft carriers.
What doesn’t help is that the ship roles have changed over time as technology and naval tactics changed. Destroyers are called destroyers because they were small and fast boats that just had torpedoes. Initially they were basically speed boats with torpedoes strapped to them. They were designed to swarm and destroy capital ships like battleships. Later, destroyers took on the role of hunting submarines. Today in the US navy they’re used for everything from carrying missiles, acting as an anti air/missile screen for carriers, and hunting subs. And they’ve grown in size, basically looking like the cruisers from WWI/WWII.
In general though, the various ship/sub classes tend to have similar roles. A destroyer in the US navy and in the Chinese navy will have analogous roles. It’s basically what naval doctrine/technology mandates. They’re designed to counter certain types of threats which both sides have. Like aircraft, subs, and anti-ship missiles. You don’t want big/expensive ships filling that role because you need a lot of them to cover your fleet. They also need to be big enough to carry all the missiles/ammo/radars to find and intercept incoming threats.
You also have treaties. The US and Russia for example limit the number of nuclear armed subs each can have deployed. The US modified some of their boomers to be non-nuclear armed cruise missile carriers to adhere to the treaty. Imperial Japan converted some of their battleships to carriers to adhere to the restrictions pre-WWII on battleships. Nazi Germany built some of borderline “cruisers” that were basically just slightly smaller battleships with massive guns.
Latest Answers