9 ms·

France planning new aircraft carrier

33 points by dmmalam 6y ago

credit_guy 6y ago
At 83000 metric tons, this will be second only to the American supercarriers (Nimitz class and Ford class at 110000 tons). Even the British Queen Elizabeth class is smaller at just 72000 tons.
1996 6y ago
> "Building nuclear propulsion for our next aircraft carrier is crucial for France to maintain the unique skills of its nuclear industry." Meaning that's a pork project for their nuclear industry. Also, I fail to see what they hope to accomplish with just one carrier.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  > Also, I fail to see what they hope to accomplish with just one carrier. Collaboration with other EU/NATO countries? Their current nuclear powered carrier has participated in quite a few conflicts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_aircraft_carrier_Charles_de_Gaulle#Operational_service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_aircraft_carrier_Charle...
- sudenmorsian 6y ago
  > We are acting in the long term: over the next few years we will build the nuclear propulsion systems for our SSBNs and SSNs. If our engineers did not design on-board nuclear boilers for decades, we would weaken this know-how and our sovereignty. At the very least, they are relying on that nuclear knowledge when the French submarine fleet needs replacing in the future.
- ardit33 6y ago
  They kind of got embarrassed by the Turkish navy, as they got 'checked', while trying to blockade the Turkish aid to one of the Lybian factions. The Lybian civil war is a war were there are no good vs bad guys, just different factions. The French backed one is losing. France realized their navy is not up to par. It is like a lap dog that is all bark, but doesn't have any power to bite: After Turkish incident, France suspends role in NATO naval mission https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-security-france-nato/after-turkish-incident-france-suspends-role-in-nato-naval-mission-idUSKBN2425IY https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-security-france-nat... France blasts ‘extremely aggressive’ Turkish intervention against NATO mission targeting Libyan arms https://www.france24.com/en/20200617-france-blasts-extremely-aggressive-turkish-intervention-against-nato-mission-targeting-libyan-arms https://www.france24.com/en/20200617-france-blasts-extremely... Turkey beats the french in Libya’s war // The U.N. dithers and Russia withers while Erdoğan flexes his Islamic muscle https://www.amimagazine.org/2020/07/15/turkey-beats-the-french-in-libyas-war/ https://www.amimagazine.org/2020/07/15/turkey-beats-the-fren...
  - sveme 6y ago
    This decision has been years in the making, seriously doubt that a single incident is more than a small building block for making that decision.
    - csomar 6y ago
      Erdogan interference in North Africa began shortly after the Arab spring. That's almost 10 years ago.
  - gregoriol 6y ago
    This is a short-term analysis, but the project is a long-term: it will not be ready during Macron's presidency anyway.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  > Meaning that's a pork project for their nuclear industry. France has a dependency on nuclear for it's civilian power generation as well. So it's a strategic industry to maintain just so that they can keep a market for engineers. Especially since the military ramifications make it hard to cross borders with that type of knowledge, even among allied countries.
somedude895 6y ago
There are only 22 aircraft carriers in service worldwide. Safe for the US, no country has more than two of them at the moment. A single aircraft carrier can do a lot for military power and power projection.
- akmarinov 6y ago
  They’re huge, slow targets though. If war breaks out they’ll be the second thing to go after satellites. Great for these times when there isn’t open conflict between major powers, though. You can easily park it next to some middle east country and bomb the crap out of them.
  - njarboe 6y ago
    If nuclear (major) powers are blowing up each others carriers, avoiding a nuclear exchange is going to be difficult. Conventional weapon systems have been just for power projection and using on countries without nuclear weapons since WWII.
    - Udik 6y ago
      I thought about that sometimes. It's funny how the size and cost (and size of the crew) of an aircraft carrier can work as a deterrent from sinking it. As in "this weapon is so expensive that, even if you can destroy it, you'd better not because that would bring an inevitable escalation". I wonder if major powers have devised plans to disable aircraft carriers without completely destroying them and killing the crews. It would make a lot of sense.
      - ceejayoz 6y ago
        Interesting idea. Similar to US troops stationed in South Korea; a "if you kill this smallish contingent of us, a lot more of us will come".
        lazylizard 6y ago
BayAreaEscapee 6y ago
This seems like an odd decision given recent developments in the area of supersonic missiles. China and Russia seem to have to technology to easily sink carriers from quite a distance. Aircraft carriers are almost obsolete.
- sgregnt 6y ago
  The goal might be to deter and project power on lesser military capable nations than Russia or China (e.g. nations in Africa)
  - mytailorisrich 6y ago
    Indeed. The defense against Russia and China is the nuclear deterrent. There is not going to be any direct war between France (or the West for that matter) and Russia/China.
- jandrewrogers 6y ago
  I don't know about the French Navy but the US Navy has long had mature and adequate defenses against supersonic missiles. The US has been iterating on that kind of defense tech since the 1980s and has been a regular part of their planning.
  - dirtyid 6y ago
    OP probably meant hypersonics, of which USN / everyone else has no current defenses against. TLDR of a recent panel on state of anti-hypersonics is Pentagon hopes to have a "workable" defense against hypersonics by mid-2020s.
    - ISL 6y ago
      How many rods from god can SpaceX loft at a time?
- EliRivers 6y ago
  They allow you to project power, as the saying goes, anywhere in the world, for extended durations, without needing the permission or assistance of any friendly nation (i.e. airstrips in a nearby country) [0]. If you're going up against any nation that doesn't have the ability to sink an aircraft carrier (which is almost every nation in the world) they are very far indeed from obsolete. [0] So long as you have a serious logistics chain and serious support vessels including protective warships; if all you actually have is one aircraft carrier, you're going to find it pretty useless for long-term power projection.
11235813213455 6y ago
Why spending money in army? Even if it's nuclear powered, it involves a lot of pollution for maintaining this kind of huge ship. I'm French and sad that our taxes go in this and not useful things
- akmarinov 6y ago
  > Building nuclear propulsion for our next aircraft carrier is crucial for France to maintain the unique skills of its nuclear industry. > If our engineers did not design on-board nuclear boilers for decades, we would weaken this know-how and our sovereignty.
  - 11235813213455 6y ago
    Ok it's a side-effect benefit, but there has to be different ways to keep working on nuclear energy in more useful ways (useful for people, for the environment, by useful I mean at least not destructive, why not creating a cargo ship rather, or hybrid wind and nuclear powered cargo ships, ...)
- ardit33 6y ago
  Macron got humiliated by Erdogan, so he wants a bigger toy now. Also, envy, as the British will have two more modern carriers. That's why.... In more sophisticated words: France's naval forces are kinda weak and don't have power projection capabilities. You can't pretend to be a world power, if you don't have the force to back it up with.
  - sofixa 6y ago
    > France's naval forces are kinda weak and don't have power projection capabilities What do you think the Charles de Gaulle, Mistrals and FREMMs are for?
  - mytailorisrich 6y ago
    Currently the French Navy is the largest in Europe.
  - 6y ago
pydry 6y ago
I thought that missile tech like the DF-21 had effectively rendered carriers obsolete against equiv-tech adversaries. & I would expect many non equivalent adversaries to be able to catch up by 2038, rendering these things sitting ducks even when being used for force projection against people in caves.
- cameronh90 6y ago
  Even if they're not much use against China, we haven't had a symmetrical war in 80 years now. I suspect if these hypersonic ballistic ship killer missiles are more widely available in 20 years, countermeasures will also exist by then.
  - pydry 6y ago
    Nope, but we've had plenty of asymmetrical wars where larger powers have supplied missiles. It seems rash to bet the farm on that not happening with something that can take out an aircraft carrier given that the tech already exists.
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    > we haven't had a symmetrical war in 80 years now. The First Gulf War is pretty much a symmetrical war in tactics and strategy, even if one side roflstomped the other. Arguably the Russia-Georgia and more recent Armenia-Azerbaijan conflicts would also qualify quite well.
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      > The First Gulf War is pretty much a symmetrical war in tactics and strategy... Ruling out technology (and the 35v1 nature of the conflict) seems a little silly. This is like claiming I'm evenly matched with Dwayne Johnson in a fight because we're of fairly similar heights.
      - jcranmer 6y ago
        The term "asymmetrical warfare" has a specific meaning in military circles--it specifically refers to guerilla and insurgency tactics (or countermeasures to such tactics). By analogy, I'm interpreting "symmetrical war" to refer to a lack of such tactics. The First Gulf War was fought as a tank, air, and infantry warfare model, much akin to World War II-style tactics. And actually, the numbers were a lot closer than you might expect; the Gulf Coalition was made up of ~1 million men (the majority of them US), with Iraq having about ~600-700k defenders arrayed against them. Actually, it was remarked at the time that it seemed a risky strategy, since conventional military theory generally has you wanting about a 2-3× manpower advantage to be able to overcome a defending force. The Iraqis were arguably not particularly inferior in terms of technology--they were a petrostate after all, and able to buy the fancy modern weapons on offer from both sides of the Cold War ideological divide. However, their organizational capabilities were decidedly inferior. It's not entirely clear to me why their anti-air capabilities were completely ineffective, but the US was able to achieve total air superiority and it used this decisive advantage to completely eviscerate Iraqi command-and-control. In the actual field, the losses that the Iraqis sustained quickly turned to utter routs.
ardit33 6y ago
Making this a top comment, on why: They kind of got embarrassed by the Turkish navy, as they got 'checked', while trying to blockade the Turkish aid to one of the Lybian factions. The Lybian civil war is a war were there are no good vs bad guys, just different factions. The French backed one is losing. Also with the Turkish vs. Greece conflict, France sided with the Greeks, yet they realized they couldn't help much as if a conflict was to happen near Turkish shores they would lose, and Turkey would be able to inflict massive loses. TLDR: France doesn't have real power projection capabilities. France realized their navy is not up to par. It is like a lap dog that is all bark, but doesn't have any power to bite, and they would lose political soft power as well: After Turkish incident, France suspends role in NATO naval mission https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-security-france-nato/after-turkish-incident-france-suspends-role-in-nato-naval-mission-idUSKBN2425IY https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-security-france-nat... France blasts ‘extremely aggressive’ Turkish intervention against NATO mission targeting Libyan arms https://www.france24.com/en/20200617-france-blasts-extremely-aggressive-turkish-intervention-against-nato-mission-targeting-libyan-arms https://www.france24.com/en/20200617-france-blasts-extremely... Turkey beats the french in Libya’s war // The U.N. dithers and Russia withers while Erdoğan flexes his Islamic muscle https://www.amimagazine.org/2020/07/15/turkey-beats-the-french-in-libyas-war/ https://www.amimagazine.org/2020/07/15/turkey-beats-the-fren...
- akmarinov 6y ago
  Why not bring in their current carrier to project power? It’s not like Turkey has better stuff and their economy is in the toilet, so they can’t afford better stuff.
  - ardit33 6y ago
    If the war/battle were to happen in an open sea/ocea, turkey would lose. But the current disputes are all near shore, and turkey does have major home advantage as they can field missiles anywhere near shore. The french would lose. It is like open pitch battle vs. storming a castle. You need at least 3x the men of the defenders, to be able to defeat a well defended castle.
- 6y ago
URfejk 6y ago
France is very indebted country and kind of can't afford making stuff like that at the moment.
barnaclejive 6y ago
In service by 2038 huh? Let's hope all the software is 64-bit

33 points by dmmalam 6y ago

At 83000 metric tons, this will be second only to the American supercarriers (Nimitz class and Ford class at 110000 tons). Even the British Queen Elizabeth class is smaller at just 72000 tons.

1996 6y ago

> "Building nuclear propulsion for our next aircraft carrier is crucial for France to maintain the unique skills of its nuclear industry." Meaning that's a pork project for their nuclear industry. Also, I fail to see what they hope to accomplish with just one carrier.

ceejayoz 6y ago
> Also, I fail to see what they hope to accomplish with just one carrier. Collaboration with other EU/NATO countries? Their current nuclear powered carrier has participated in quite a few conflicts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_aircraft_carrier_Charles_de_Gaulle#Operational_service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_aircraft_carrier_Charle...
sudenmorsian 6y ago
> We are acting in the long term: over the next few years we will build the nuclear propulsion systems for our SSBNs and SSNs. If our engineers did not design on-board nuclear boilers for decades, we would weaken this know-how and our sovereignty. At the very least, they are relying on that nuclear knowledge when the French submarine fleet needs replacing in the future.
ardit33 6y ago
They kind of got embarrassed by the Turkish navy, as they got 'checked', while trying to blockade the Turkish aid to one of the Lybian factions. The Lybian civil war is a war were there are no good vs bad guys, just different factions. The French backed one is losing. France realized their navy is not up to par. It is like a lap dog that is all bark, but doesn't have any power to bite: After Turkish incident, France suspends role in NATO naval mission https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-security-france-nato/after-turkish-incident-france-suspends-role-in-nato-naval-mission-idUSKBN2425IY https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-security-france-nat... France blasts ‘extremely aggressive’ Turkish intervention against NATO mission targeting Libyan arms https://www.france24.com/en/20200617-france-blasts-extremely-aggressive-turkish-intervention-against-nato-mission-targeting-libyan-arms https://www.france24.com/en/20200617-france-blasts-extremely... Turkey beats the french in Libya’s war // The U.N. dithers and Russia withers while Erdoğan flexes his Islamic muscle https://www.amimagazine.org/2020/07/15/turkey-beats-the-french-in-libyas-war/ https://www.amimagazine.org/2020/07/15/turkey-beats-the-fren...
- sveme 6y ago
  This decision has been years in the making, seriously doubt that a single incident is more than a small building block for making that decision.
  - csomar 6y ago
    Erdogan interference in North Africa began shortly after the Arab spring. That's almost 10 years ago.
- gregoriol 6y ago
  This is a short-term analysis, but the project is a long-term: it will not be ready during Macron's presidency anyway.
908B64B197 6y ago
> Meaning that's a pork project for their nuclear industry. France has a dependency on nuclear for it's civilian power generation as well. So it's a strategic industry to maintain just so that they can keep a market for engineers. Especially since the military ramifications make it hard to cross borders with that type of knowledge, even among allied countries.

somedude895 6y ago

There are only 22 aircraft carriers in service worldwide. Safe for the US, no country has more than two of them at the moment. A single aircraft carrier can do a lot for military power and power projection.

akmarinov 6y ago
They’re huge, slow targets though. If war breaks out they’ll be the second thing to go after satellites. Great for these times when there isn’t open conflict between major powers, though. You can easily park it next to some middle east country and bomb the crap out of them.
- njarboe 6y ago
  If nuclear (major) powers are blowing up each others carriers, avoiding a nuclear exchange is going to be difficult. Conventional weapon systems have been just for power projection and using on countries without nuclear weapons since WWII.
  - Udik 6y ago
    I thought about that sometimes. It's funny how the size and cost (and size of the crew) of an aircraft carrier can work as a deterrent from sinking it. As in "this weapon is so expensive that, even if you can destroy it, you'd better not because that would bring an inevitable escalation". I wonder if major powers have devised plans to disable aircraft carriers without completely destroying them and killing the crews. It would make a lot of sense.
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      Interesting idea. Similar to US troops stationed in South Korea; a "if you kill this smallish contingent of us, a lot more of us will come".
      - lazylizard 6y ago

BayAreaEscapee 6y ago

This seems like an odd decision given recent developments in the area of supersonic missiles. China and Russia seem to have to technology to easily sink carriers from quite a distance. Aircraft carriers are almost obsolete.

sgregnt 6y ago
The goal might be to deter and project power on lesser military capable nations than Russia or China (e.g. nations in Africa)
- mytailorisrich 6y ago
  Indeed. The defense against Russia and China is the nuclear deterrent. There is not going to be any direct war between France (or the West for that matter) and Russia/China.
jandrewrogers 6y ago
I don't know about the French Navy but the US Navy has long had mature and adequate defenses against supersonic missiles. The US has been iterating on that kind of defense tech since the 1980s and has been a regular part of their planning.
- dirtyid 6y ago
  OP probably meant hypersonics, of which USN / everyone else has no current defenses against. TLDR of a recent panel on state of anti-hypersonics is Pentagon hopes to have a "workable" defense against hypersonics by mid-2020s.
  - ISL 6y ago
    How many rods from god can SpaceX loft at a time?
EliRivers 6y ago
They allow you to project power, as the saying goes, anywhere in the world, for extended durations, without needing the permission or assistance of any friendly nation (i.e. airstrips in a nearby country) [0]. If you're going up against any nation that doesn't have the ability to sink an aircraft carrier (which is almost every nation in the world) they are very far indeed from obsolete. [0] So long as you have a serious logistics chain and serious support vessels including protective warships; if all you actually have is one aircraft carrier, you're going to find it pretty useless for long-term power projection.

11235813213455 6y ago

Why spending money in army? Even if it's nuclear powered, it involves a lot of pollution for maintaining this kind of huge ship. I'm French and sad that our taxes go in this and not useful things

akmarinov 6y ago
> Building nuclear propulsion for our next aircraft carrier is crucial for France to maintain the unique skills of its nuclear industry. > If our engineers did not design on-board nuclear boilers for decades, we would weaken this know-how and our sovereignty.
- 11235813213455 6y ago
  Ok it's a side-effect benefit, but there has to be different ways to keep working on nuclear energy in more useful ways (useful for people, for the environment, by useful I mean at least not destructive, why not creating a cargo ship rather, or hybrid wind and nuclear powered cargo ships, ...)
ardit33 6y ago
Macron got humiliated by Erdogan, so he wants a bigger toy now. Also, envy, as the British will have two more modern carriers. That's why.... In more sophisticated words: France's naval forces are kinda weak and don't have power projection capabilities. You can't pretend to be a world power, if you don't have the force to back it up with.
- sofixa 6y ago
  > France's naval forces are kinda weak and don't have power projection capabilities What do you think the Charles de Gaulle, Mistrals and FREMMs are for?
- mytailorisrich 6y ago
  Currently the French Navy is the largest in Europe.
- 6y ago

pydry 6y ago

I thought that missile tech like the DF-21 had effectively rendered carriers obsolete against equiv-tech adversaries. & I would expect many non equivalent adversaries to be able to catch up by 2038, rendering these things sitting ducks even when being used for force projection against people in caves.

cameronh90 6y ago
Even if they're not much use against China, we haven't had a symmetrical war in 80 years now. I suspect if these hypersonic ballistic ship killer missiles are more widely available in 20 years, countermeasures will also exist by then.
- pydry 6y ago
  Nope, but we've had plenty of asymmetrical wars where larger powers have supplied missiles. It seems rash to bet the farm on that not happening with something that can take out an aircraft carrier given that the tech already exists.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  > we haven't had a symmetrical war in 80 years now. The First Gulf War is pretty much a symmetrical war in tactics and strategy, even if one side roflstomped the other. Arguably the Russia-Georgia and more recent Armenia-Azerbaijan conflicts would also qualify quite well.
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    > The First Gulf War is pretty much a symmetrical war in tactics and strategy... Ruling out technology (and the 35v1 nature of the conflict) seems a little silly. This is like claiming I'm evenly matched with Dwayne Johnson in a fight because we're of fairly similar heights.
    - jcranmer 6y ago
      The term "asymmetrical warfare" has a specific meaning in military circles--it specifically refers to guerilla and insurgency tactics (or countermeasures to such tactics). By analogy, I'm interpreting "symmetrical war" to refer to a lack of such tactics. The First Gulf War was fought as a tank, air, and infantry warfare model, much akin to World War II-style tactics. And actually, the numbers were a lot closer than you might expect; the Gulf Coalition was made up of ~1 million men (the majority of them US), with Iraq having about ~600-700k defenders arrayed against them. Actually, it was remarked at the time that it seemed a risky strategy, since conventional military theory generally has you wanting about a 2-3× manpower advantage to be able to overcome a defending force. The Iraqis were arguably not particularly inferior in terms of technology--they were a petrostate after all, and able to buy the fancy modern weapons on offer from both sides of the Cold War ideological divide. However, their organizational capabilities were decidedly inferior. It's not entirely clear to me why their anti-air capabilities were completely ineffective, but the US was able to achieve total air superiority and it used this decisive advantage to completely eviscerate Iraqi command-and-control. In the actual field, the losses that the Iraqis sustained quickly turned to utter routs.

ardit33 6y ago

Making this a top comment, on why: They kind of got embarrassed by the Turkish navy, as they got 'checked', while trying to blockade the Turkish aid to one of the Lybian factions. The Lybian civil war is a war were there are no good vs bad guys, just different factions. The French backed one is losing. Also with the Turkish vs. Greece conflict, France sided with the Greeks, yet they realized they couldn't help much as if a conflict was to happen near Turkish shores they would lose, and Turkey would be able to inflict massive loses. TLDR: France doesn't have real power projection capabilities. France realized their navy is not up to par. It is like a lap dog that is all bark, but doesn't have any power to bite, and they would lose political soft power as well: After Turkish incident, France suspends role in NATO naval mission https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-security-france-nato/after-turkish-incident-france-suspends-role-in-nato-naval-mission-idUSKBN2425IY https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-security-france-nat... France blasts ‘extremely aggressive’ Turkish intervention against NATO mission targeting Libyan arms https://www.france24.com/en/20200617-france-blasts-extremely-aggressive-turkish-intervention-against-nato-mission-targeting-libyan-arms https://www.france24.com/en/20200617-france-blasts-extremely... Turkey beats the french in Libya’s war // The U.N. dithers and Russia withers while Erdoğan flexes his Islamic muscle https://www.amimagazine.org/2020/07/15/turkey-beats-the-french-in-libyas-war/ https://www.amimagazine.org/2020/07/15/turkey-beats-the-fren...

akmarinov 6y ago
Why not bring in their current carrier to project power? It’s not like Turkey has better stuff and their economy is in the toilet, so they can’t afford better stuff.
- ardit33 6y ago
  If the war/battle were to happen in an open sea/ocea, turkey would lose. But the current disputes are all near shore, and turkey does have major home advantage as they can field missiles anywhere near shore. The french would lose. It is like open pitch battle vs. storming a castle. You need at least 3x the men of the defenders, to be able to defeat a well defended castle.
6y ago

URfejk 6y ago

France is very indebted country and kind of can't afford making stuff like that at the moment.

barnaclejive 6y ago

In service by 2038 huh? Let's hope all the software is 64-bit