I remember reading many years ago someone describing what would happen if a modern anti-ship missile was launched against a World War 2 battleship: after the explosion, a sailor would have to go out on deck and sweep up all the bits of the missile and dump them overboard and probably slap on another coat of paint. The point was that ships used to be massive floating armored installations, and thus required massively powerful incoming weapons to take them out, but more recent ships are lightly built and rely on active defenses (missiles and CIWS along with ECM) to avoid getting hit in the first place.
The war in Ukraine from time to time demonstrates this. For example, the Russians recently launched a “Lancet” loitering munition against a piece of Ukrainian artillery, an old Soviet-era D-20 howitzer. The advanced modern weapon made a direct impact… and blew out a tire. There is value in being built like an old cannon, it seems. The Lancet seems to use a warhead wrapped with bits of cut-up rebar; this doubtless does wonders against soft targets such as trucks and troops concentrations and playgrounds and hospitals and the like, but seems to do diddly-squat against actual armor. Other variants apparently include shaped charge warheads for use against armor; perhaps this was a failure of proper weapons selection.
2 responses to “Modern weapon vs old”
A modern anti-ship missile would absolutely wreck a WWII ship. Remember that the armor on those ships was capable of resisting impacts only in a very narrow band of impact angles and velocities – the so-called ‘circle of immunity’. If the attacking weapon was too close, the shells would arrive with enough energy to punch through the belt armor. If it was too far, then the shells would arrive at a too-steep trajectory and punch through the deck armor. Something like a BrahMos missile travels faster on impact than a WWII battleship shell at the muzzle, weighs more, flies an order of magnitude farther, strikes with near-guaranteed accuracy, and can be launched from platforms an order of magnitude smaller than a WWII battleship. There is literally no way to armor yourself against something like this; you must shoot it down or die trying, and thus carrying big slabs of armor in just a waste of displacement.
This is a good study of the 1991 attack on the USS Missouri, with the last portion being an analysis of the possible effectiveness of the attack by a “Seersucker” missile an upgraded version of the old SS-N-2 Styx.
“All things considered, the lone “Seersucker” shot at USS Missouri would have neither sunk it outright nor caused its subsequent loss, but in all likelihood the damage would have been severe enough to result in it being pulled out of area.”
https://wwiiafterwwii.wordpress.com/2019/07/21/missile-attack-on-battleship-uss-missouri/