Incoherency Manifest: Big Gun Goes Bust!

Americans love guns. Americans love BIG guns even more, and their military is no different. For the better part of 100 years, a theory of defending their own homeland which I affectionately call “Big Gun” theory, can be seen through to the very core of the employed defense planning of the continental United states until very suddenly it wasn’t feasible anymore. In this piece, I will examine and explain the one part of the evolution of the American military’s planning for the defense of their homeland through a series of big gun project and implementations designed to intercept and stop enemy attack and slowly evolve in almost solely deterrence alone through the turn of the 20th century and the coastal artillery of old and into my own favourite defunct missile system.

Probably the single greatest strategic strength of the United States is its isolation. It sits thousands of kilometers or freedom meters from the nearest real threat overseas and has been in this position for nearly two centuries now. Any real threat of attack up until modern times would have been from the sea, and relatively speaking there's quite an easy way of retaliating against a landing force by sea, a very large gun. More specifically a coastal artillery piece. You’ve likely seen these before, they're scattered around in most non landlocked countries, meant to sit in a location with a wide open sea before it and with large cannons (Guns) that can shoot at several kilometer distances to stop or slow a coming attack. The region of America as we know it has had these largely since its the first Europeans arrived. The first colonizers, the British, French and Dutch, all built similar crude fortifications around their colonies, such as Fort Amsterdam (later Fort George) that sat right at the entrance to New York City with the ability to take aim at most anything that approached it. While America developed, so did these defenses, evolving from stone or earth work fortifications in cities, to dedicated positions located away from civilians and at more strategic choke points such as Fort Tilden and Fort Slocum, located on Long Island Sound and the island proper respectively. This is where our story really starts, with the established history of American coastal defense up to this point and the approaching 20th century.

In 1901, the United States Army Coast Artillery Corps is cut out of existing elements of the Coast Guard with the express purpose of managing existing infrastructure and fortifications at the most important of America’s industrial waterways, but as was fashion of the time, poorly funded and equipped, on top of generally a lack luster group of soldiers manning it that could have done little on their own. Crewed by either alarmingly young recruits or old men who no longer cared, they were back water positions in a country that had only known outside peace for decades. 

This changed fast. 1917! Bombs! Blood! Trenchfoot! To say that America’s entry into the first world war was a monumental upset to its military internal hegemony is an understatement. Not only were the tactics of the battlefront changing, but the home front too. Yanks saw first hand when they arrived in France in the end of June, 1917, that there was a new angle to be afraid of. One that might soon stretch its hand back to their own shores. An angle a soldier had never possibly thought of doing before, looking up and observing the future. Aircraft. While still alarmingly crude machines, there was fear that advancements in aircraft might soon push their reach further, or that even terror the British experienced under zeppelin raids might one day be able to reach the continental United States. So they started to improvise. The first anti aircraft (AA) guns that were developed by the Americans were crude. The first to be fielded was called the M1917 3 inch gun, a creatively named AA cannon mounted on an impromptu wheel base actually itself originated as the M1903 3 inch gun, a terrible and hated coastal artillery cannon that when the demand for an AA gun was needed, the Coastal Artillery Corps was happy to hand over many to be modified. However, the M1917 was still terribly inadequate. Beyond the new chassis for it to move around on, it was still ill fitted for its role, and was subsequently replaced by a newer version, the M1918 3 inch gun, once again based on the M1903. This gun at least allowed vertical traversal to an angle that would be actually effective at starting an aircraft, but it was still slow and overall just inadequate for the evolving aircraft at the end of the war. If an aircraft could start to finally avoid small arms fire, how on earth is your fielded AA cannon going to position itself in any meaningful way?

After the war, American forces were once again reorganized (the army’s favourite passtime), meaning the Army Coastal Artillery Corps was once again put down a peg in size, with the vast majority of its soldiers being reassigned and leaving the Corps small and insignificant again. By the war end, the actual coastal guns too had fallen behind the times. The Big Guns were more useless than ever, most originating from the 19th century. A positive did come their way in 1922 with the Washington Naval Treaty, which limited the size of standing navies and their ships and led to the cancellation of multiple battleships under construction. Thankfully for our boys in the corps, the main armament of most of these ships had already been designed and built for the South Dakota class battleships and Lexington class battlecruisers before their cancellation, rendering them without a use. The cannons were saved from being melted down, being transferred to the corps formally, with single barrels of the huge planned 3 barrel turrets used to replace most of the aging 1880s cannons in their possession. Places such as Fort Greene in Rhode Island were those notable to get the surplus’d Mark 3 barrels. But the wind was already beginning to change, and their purpose as well. Many of these surplus guns, while significantly more effective against modern targets, were often fielded late (into the late 30s in some cases) and also often times without any shells or charges. This was the beginning of these fortifications to be turned more to a deterrent, a show of force more than anything else.

Around the same time in 1938, the corps again got a well needed boost with both standing army and national guard elements. Even the desperate smaller AA guns got a needed boost in the form of the M3 3 inch gun, which suffered from similar issues of fire rate and accuracy, but was significantly more maneuverable at least. These M3 was soon put to the rear of the corps defenses quite quickly as a genuinely component cannon, the M1 90mm was finally fielded right as the war started to begin. Funnily enough, these M3 which became surplus quite quickly due to the waking giant of American industry and M1’s being pushed in huge numbers, were instead requested for use on the M10 tank destroyer project and selected. With the cannon being a huge success on the M10 platform.

Beyond a few limited encounters, the war passed the corps over in peace. Even by 42 the writing was on the wall of the beginning of the ineffectiveness of large shore guns with most of the younger recruits manning them being repositioned to front line service. It came as no surprise that even with another set of upgrades near the end of the war (in the form of the M1 120mm AA gun), that all coastal artillery cannons were ordered to be scrapped by 1948, with some emplacements remaining active for only AA guns. The battlefield had taken off and the large guns of yore were of no use. No one of sane mind is going to sail an aircraft carrier group into spitting distance of a coastal defense emplacement after all. They’ll just hit them with aircraft. The scrapping of the larger canons was the nail in the coffin for the Coastal Artillery Corps, and by 1950 it was retired and a new command, the Army Anti Aircraft Command replaced it, with an update in 1957 giving its most familiar name, the Army Air Defense Command.

Just because the Corps was dying by 1950 doesn’t mean they weren’t busy and planning for the future. Everyone and their commanding officer knew that the future of large scale strategic attack would come in the form of large bomber groups coming from the other side of the world. For those in the know this presented a serious issue, because even the M1 120mm was ill equipped for a doomsday defense scenario. Conventional AA guns were slow firing, typically manually operated and incapable of landing a significant number of hits at the altitudes of late war, or early cold war bombers such as the B29 and its counterpart the Tu4 flying at roughly 36 thousand feet, with early jet powered craft such as the B47 and Tu16 flying at 40 and 42 thousand respectively. You simply can not put enough rounds down (or up in this case) range fast enough with even the slightest bit of accuracy required to land enough hits to stop an attack without the use of fighter interception. This clear lack in defense led to the rise of the next generation of big guns, Nike.

The Nike program is objectively one of my favourite pieces of the cold war. Fielded everywhere and to everyone, the little missile that could (10 metres tall by the way), was conceived in 1945 to be a line of sight conventionally armed surface to air missile, meant to intercept theoretical bomber groups. By 46, testing had started and after years it was finally pressed into service at Fort Meade on May 30th, 1954 as Nike Ajax, the first of its kind. Ajax ended up replacing near to every former AA site in the country, with a few small exceptions for limited numbers of radar tracking Skysweeper gun platforms, the Ajax was the machine that was going to finally deliver on promising sure found peace for the American continent once again. But by the time it even entered service, it was already showing its age. As mentioned before, the jump between end of war and post war bombers in their service ceiling was high enough that it no longer matched the design requirements set out for the first generation of the Nike family. This meant that it was not a guarantee that not only if the missile could accurately track its target, but even reach the height needed to damage it. On top of this, the relatively small size of the missile meant that it was only given a small conventional explosive, and with the nature of radar tracking at the time, it would often position itself in the very center of the bomber group it was approaching and detonate in regions between aircraft rendering little to no damage to aircraft, leaving them free to continue flying to their targets. As a stop gap, Nike Ajax was given a crude 15 kt WX-9 nuclear warhead, small enough it could fit within the nose cone of the missile, but large enough of a yield where it could destroy or at least cripple the majority of the bomber formation (provided they did not break formation at any point).

These glaring flaws in continental defense once again left military officials worried, and turning back to the age old American ethos, they designed a bigger gun. The next generation of Nike, Nike Hercules.

Hercules was fielded only 4 years after Ajax in 1958 and was a significant improvement. With an increased first stage and larger payload capacity, it could more accurately reach and damage its targets, and was subsequently slowly used to replace Ajax. While this missile had finally bridged the gap of continental defense so surely, it had arrived too much and too late. One year earlier the first launch of the SM65 Atlas missile had occurred, the same rocket platform that would one day be used for the American’s first orbital space flight. In less than 3 short years, Atlas missiles were already being fielded into small squadrons across America’s heartlands as its first operational ICBMs. To say that the rapid adoption of ICBMs spelled an end to Nike, and to a greater extent, continental defense programs, is an understatement. By 65 the Cuban Missile Crisis had come to pass and the need for standing SAM missile sites was quickly dropping, and an order was given to begin phasing them out. 9 years later only sites in Alaska and Florida remained, to protect key Strategic Air Command infrastructure and space launch sites respectively. 5 years after that, there were no more Nike missiles left in the continental US.

Nike continued to live on in a non-strategic role, serving as a tactical missile platform in case of Soviet attack in western Europe, finally breathing its last breath in 2006 in a sad retirement ceremony in northern Italy. Big gun theory was dead and gone, and along with it, the military concept of continental defense. 

The deterrence of old, physically protecting the homeland with an absurdly large gun or gun like system (sue me, a missile is just a big gun) has gone to pasture. While interceptor missiles have started to crawl back into service, the big gun has gone bust and been surely replaced. Continental defense and the deterrence of interdiction at sea or by air has been replaced by the arguably more stable deterrence of mutually assured destruction. It’s up to personal beliefs if the current world, where a stand off is unseeable and instant, or if the old of seeing missile’s pointed towards the sky at all hours and in every corner of America is truly the lesser evil. Which would you live along side? Silence or presence? Both mean certain death for us all.

Thanks for reading this article! I know this was a bit of a long winded ramble that probably could’ve been edited down significantly, but its my article! If you enjoyed this piece, feel free to check out my other writings at https://incoherencymanifest.beehiiv.com/ and subscribe!