Cruiser
In military terminology, a cruiser is a large warship capable of engaging multiple targets simultaneously. Historically they were generally considered the smallest ships capable of independent operations -- destroyers usually requiring outside support such as tenders -- but in modern parlance this difference has disappeared.The term "cruiser" was a mid 19th century invention. During the age of sail, frigates were small, fast, long range, lightly armed (single gun-deck) ships used for scouting and carrying dispatches. The majority of the fleet would be made up of much larger and slower ships of the line, which were expected to deal with fleet combat that the frigates would avoid. The first ironclads also had only a single gun-deck because of the weight of armor, even though they were bigger ships with bigger guns. They were nevertheless referred to as frigates although they were used as ships of the line. Thus the definition of a frigate changed, the smaller ships originally using this term were now referred to as "cruising ships", which was rapidly abbreviated to cruiser.
For many years cruisers filled a sweet spot between very light craft such as the torpedo boat, and the ships intended to take part in fleet combat, later generally referred to as battleships. Cruisers were large enough to fend off attacks from smaller ships and "ad hoc" military craft, but light enough to do so at very long ranges from their home bases. Battleships are more powerful in combat, but are so slow and (after the introduction of engine power) fuel hungry that long-range operations would be difficult to support. For much of 19th century and the first half of the 20th, the cruiser was a navy's long-range "force projection" weapon, while the larger ships stayed nearer to home.
The evolution of the cruiser follows that of their larger cousins, generally growing in size and capability. The conversion from sail to steam resulted in the armored cruiser, essentially a small battleship. This occurred so rapidly during the late 1800s that battleships only a few years old could be outperformed by cruisers of the next building run. The US's Great White Fleet was rendered obsolete in this fashion only a few years after it sailed. During this time it was not uncommon for fleets to contain the very latest of an older generation as well as the latest designs, which were generally much larger. For this reason the terms heavy cruiser and light cruiser started to be used. After World War I these terms were codifed during the various naval arms limitation treaties, light cruisers were armed with 6" guns or less, heavy cruisers with larger calibres, 8" being particularly common. 8" was the largest treaty-allowed gun on heavy cruisers of the major treaty signatory nations, and became the de facto international standard for heavy cruisers, only two cruisers would be eventually built with larger guns: the US Navy's World War II-era Alaska-class large cruisers.
Early in the evolution smaller ships with considerably less capability were built as protected cruisers, although the original "frigate" naming would be much more accurate in these cases. An even more limited class was the auxiliary cruisers, converted merchant marine ships with no armor and very poor performance. Auxiliary cruisers were used in order to fill gaps in their long-range lines or provide escort for other cargo ships, although they generally proved to be useless in this role. Ships from both England and Germany were also used in disguise in order to lure smaller combat ships into attacking them, U-Boats in the case of British ships, and corvettess and other auxiliary cruisers for the Germans.
One "rule of thumb" for combat ship design is that they should be able to withstand hits from guns of a similar ship. In the period just prior to the opening of World War I, a new sweet spot opened that changed this equation. The new battlecruiser role was filled by a ship with much larger guns than would normally be carried, trading off that extra weight by carrying less armor. The result was a ship that could outfight anything up to cruiser size, but outrun anything that posed a real threat. The battlecruiser concept was put to the test in WWI, but were asked to form into the main lines with battleships, where they were badly mauled. The Royal Navy quickly converted theirs to normal battleships after the war with the application of much more armor. The German Navy was the last to use this class, their post-war "pocket battleships" being used in the long distance raiding role they had originally been intended for.
The rise of air power during World War II dramatically changed the nature of naval combat. Even the fastest cruisers could not outrun an airplane, which were increasingly able to attack at longer distances over the ocean. This change led to the end of independant operations by single ships or very small task groups, and for the second half of ther 20th century naval operations were based around very large fleets able to fend off all but the largest air attacks. This has led most navies to change to fleets designed around ships dedicated to a single role, anti-submarine or anti-aircraft typically, and the large "generallist" ship has disappeared from most forces. The United States Navy and the Russian Navy are the only remaining navies which operate cruisers.
In the Soviet fleet, cruisers formed the basis of their combat groups. In the immediate post-war era they built a fleet of large-gun ships, but replaced these fairly quickly with very large ships carrying huge numbers of guided missiles. The latest ships of this class, the Kirovs, were built in the 1970s and 80s, and are in very poor repair today. The last working ship of the Kirov fleet, the Petr Velikiy, was recently recalled to port with severe reactor problems.
The US fleet has centered on the aircraft carrier since WWII. The current Aegis cruisers were originally designed and designated as a class of destroyer, intended to provide a very powerful air-defense in these carrier-centered fleets. The ships were later "mis-named" largely as a public relations move, in order to highlight the capability of the Aegis combat system the ships were designed around. In the years since the launch of the Ticonderoga the class has received a number of upgrades that have dramatically improved their capabilities for anti-submarine and land attack (using the Tomahawk missile), and today the name is not mis-applied at all. Like their Soviet counterparts, the modern Ticonderoga's can also be used as the basis for an entire battle group.
Prior to the introduction of the Ticonderogas, the US Navy used odd naming that left its fleet seemingly without many cruisers, although a number of their ships were cruisers in all but name. In the late 1960s, the US government perceived a "cruiser gap" --at the time, the US Navy possessed six ships designated as "cruisers," compared to 19 for the Soviet Union (even though the USN possessed at the time 21 "frigates" with equal or superior capabilities to the Soviet cruisers)-- because of this, in 1975 the Navy performed a massive redesignation of its forces:
- CVA/CVAN were redesignated CV/CVN (although CV-41 Midway and CV-43 Coral Sea never embarked antisubmarine squadrons)
- DLG/DLGN (Frigate/Nuclear-powered Frigate) were redesignated CG/CGN (Guided Missile Cruiser/Nuclear-powered Guided Missile Cruiser)
- Farragut-class guided missile frigates (DLG), being smaller and less capable than the others, were redesignated to DDGs (DLG 9 USS Coontz was the first ship of this class to be re-numbered; because of this the class is sometimes called the Coontz class);
- DE/DEG (Ocean Escort/Guided Missile Ocean Escort) were redesignated to FF/FFG (Guided Missile Frigates), bringing the US "Frigate" designation into line with the rest of the world.
- See also: List of cruisers