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Hypersonic missiles (and possibly anti-ship ballistic missiles) are making surface ships like this obsolete, similar to how carriers made battleships obsolete i

Hypersonic missiles (and possibly anti-ship ballistic missiles) are making surface ships like this obsolete, similar to how carriers made battleships obsolete in WWII. Hypersonic missiles, submarines, and satellites (sensors, C&C, directed energy weapons, EMP, rods from god, etc) I think will be the critical force components of this century. If any war breaks out, those components working in concert will take out surface ships and stationary bases first. The US Navy has a history of being slow to recognize and adapt to these inflection points. Prior to WWII a few forward-looking admirals were warning about, and demonstrating the efficacy and game-changing nature of, carrier warfare. At least one wargame ~10yrs prior to WWII showed Pearl Harbor was vulnerable to a simulated carrier-based attack. But Navy leadership wasn't convinced until actual Pearl Harbor. Part of the problem is that to maintain the ability to manufacture mega-projects like aircraft carriers, at least one needs to always be in production. Once you repurpose those production lines, it's difficult to restart them. But I hope they start figuring this out soon, and planning to fight the next war, not the last one, or the US won't have enough credible deterrent to prevent another war.

nradov 5y ago
I doubt that satellites will be survivable in any future high-end conflict. They can't really be hidden or protected and have very limited maneuverability. Anti-satellite weapons are improving rapidly. Militaries will probably have to shift to large numbers of smaller, cheaper satellites along with a prompt launch system that can quickly replace attrition losses.
dragontamer 5y ago
> Hypersonic missiles, submarines, and satellites (sensors, C&C, directed energy weapons, EMP, rods from god, etc) I think will be the critical force components of this century. If any war breaks out, those components working in concert will take out surface ships and stationary bases first. I argue the opposite. All those satellites will be obliterated the minute war starts. Satellites are on obvious, stable paths with almost no means of propulsion. We know where all of China's satellites are, and China knows where all of our satellites are. Once Satellites are down, the question comes down to whose navy has more Radar than the other. Big ships with bigger radar units is a big advantage. Eyes in the sky (aka: F35 or E2 Hawkeye) is another advantage, especially if those eyes have a degree of stealth (aka: F35).
- rdtsc 5y ago
  Once satellites are started to be taken out, it’s probably when the nukes will start launching too. Now it is interesting to think is somehow a rogue breakaway country can get their hands on a satellite killing or disabling tech. I would have said it’s science fiction some years ago but after flight MH17 I don’t know anymore.
  - nradov 5y ago
    In principle any country that can build a satellite launcher or ICBM has the core technology necessary to build an anti-satellite weapon. I expect that countries like Iran and North Korea will have a limited capability to hit LEO satellites within 10 years.
greedo 5y ago
So the PLAN, which is deploying roughly 16 major combat vessels per year is following this terrible plan? They seem to value surface vessels. Hypersonic missiles (as do ASBMs) require targeting. Breaking the "kill chain" is something both sides will be attempting to do in a conflict, but for now the USN has far more experience as a modern Navy than any other nation (sorry Brits...). But hypersonic missiles aren't anything special and really just hyped a lot. Fast is often good, but not always necessary, or even desired if the corresponding tradeoffs make them either more expensive, or limit how many you can carry. Subs? Subs will always be one of the most lethal combatants. But they have limits. Satellites? They can be jammed, blinded, or destroyed. Sensors? Jammed, blinded or destroyed. EMP? That would be the initiation of nuclear war. Don't want to go there. But making your ships etc survivable to some degree is smart. Better to just outright deter it. Directed Energy weapons? This ship will have that. Modern navies have been experimenting with DE for decades. Whether it's a microwave system or laser, they'll be on this ship and retrofitted where possible to others. They actually help by increasing the volume and depth of your "magazine." Rods from god will be the game changer once launch costs drop. The guidance tech is already good enough, just need to make it cheap to send up a lot of tungsten into space.
- nradov 5y ago
  Basic orbital dynamics make the "rods from god" concept unworkable. It's just a silly scifi fantasy. In order to achieve sufficient global coverage to hit time sensitive targets would take a huge and ruinously expensive satellite constellation. And the satellites themselves would be quite vulnerable. Any mission for such a system could be accomplished faster and cheaper with ground or submarine launched missiles.
- dirtyid 5y ago
  >following this terrible plan Same reason PLAN is building aircraft carriers which may very well be obsolete against peer adversaries but still useful to overmatch less capable powers aka basically everyone except US and PRC. Of course also a side of big dick energy prestige. Realistically current PLA strategy for US surface combatants and capital assets is a fuck of load missiles from land and plane, of which hypersonics is just one type. That said recent developments posted on SCMP, i.e. info PLA wants world to know suggest sufficient development in IR sensors that optical/terminal guidance without complex kill chain is possible. Combined with claim: >“With effective hypersonic precision strike weapons, the critical value of ‘strategic depth’ in traditional warfare will no longer exist. All the critical political, economic and military assets of a country will be at risk.” And another recent PRC reveal of AI assistance calibration to produce magnitude improvement in accuracy and I think PRC (as well as US) are pushing hard on prompt global strike capabilities which IMO is much more significant capability than anything proposed for force on force combat in future air and naval platforms. A fleet of conventional hypersonic ICBMs with accuracy/CEP measured in meters is basically conventional MAD. It guarantees PRC (or US) can sink each others expensive Navy's or other assets as long as they spend more than 30 minutes stationary, which is everything that needs maintenance. Stockpile of PGS hypersonics is potentially an end military hegemony capability. One that could also proliferate to smaller powers with time.
ranger207 5y ago
The standard response to "hypersonic missiles are making surface ships like this obsolete" is that kill chains [0] are long and difficult. Of course, submarines, distribute sensors (like radars on man-made islands), and satellites help a lot, but they're also all vulnerable: subs are slow and might not be in the right position, and islands and satellites are relatively easy to target. Regardless of whether or not the kill chain is vulnerable, you still have to actually launch the missile or plane carrying the bomb. Ships are still the best way to do this, so it's going to take extremely effective antiship systems to make it not worth it. [0] A kill chain is the processes and systems a weapon needs to actually hit a target. It includes detecting a target in the first place, making sure you actually have a launcher within range, tracking the target while the missile is on the way, and actually impacting the target at the end.
trcarney 5y ago
This may the the case in a war but you have to recognize the other missions of the Navy, force projection and ensuring "freedom"(this is the stated mission but the navy stops ships to search them all the time) of the seas. You can't do force projection with a submarine or satellite. This part of the Navy's mission hasn't changed much since the Great White Fleet. Surface ships will be a part of the Navy until Shields hover carriers come online. Also the Navy does do quite a bit of good with their carrier fleet as it makes a great base to run humanitarian mission during times when other infrastructure is down.
credit_guy 5y ago
> Hypersonic missiles are making surface ships are obsolete, similar to how carriers made battleships obsolete in WWII. Not quite. Hypersonic missiles are expensive. Aircraft carriers solve the following problem: the easiest way to drop massive amounts of ordnance over the enemy from a large distance is via aerial bombardment. A "smart bomb" dropped from an airplane costs a few tens of thousands of dollars (the guidance kit is the expensive part), while a Tomahawk cruise missile is about 2 million. If you want to project power over distances of thousands of miles, you need air bases in friendly nations, or aircraft carriers (or both). Hypersonic missiles are fine as a defensive weapon. They do represent a thread to the American carriers, but the US can change its doctrine to account for that. Now ask yourself this: if aircraft carriers are becoming obsolete, why is China building them? Especially since they already have hypersonic missiles?
- mbrodersen 5y ago
  The cost of dropping a single smart bomb from an aircraft launched from an aircraft carriers needs to include the cost of everything needed to make it possible. Including the total build and operational cost of the carrier fleet itself. You might be surprised how insanely expensive it is compared with almost any other weapon system out there.
  - credit_guy 5y ago
    It's not even close. Here's an example: Gulf War 1 [1]. The Coalition flew over 100000 sorties, dropping 88500 tons of bombs. The US Navy spent 288 Tomahawk missiles. Each such cruise missile has a 450kg warhead, so that's about 1300 tons, or 0.15% of the ordnance dropped from the air. Now here's the stunning part: that 0.15% of the contribution cost about 1/3 of the total bill: $0.9 BN out of $2.7 BN (GAO report [2] page 178). Let's look at it differently. The daily operating cost of an entire aircraft carrier strike group is about $6.5 MM ([3] p 5). That's the cost of 3 Tomahawk missiles. For this you can launch more than 100 sorties, and drop many, many bombs. There's simply no comparison between the bang for the buck of aircraft dropped bombs vs cruise missiles. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_air_campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_air_campaign [2] https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-97-134.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-97-134.pdf [3] https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA575866.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA575866.pdf
dogma1138 5y ago
Carriers didn’t make battleships obsolete, missiles did. Missiles are the only reason big guns aren’t a thing any more. Your assessment of the impact of hypersonic missiles is also extremely simplistic they would not make surface vessels obsolete anymore than submarines have. Or even a better example how SAMs haven’t made combat aircraft obsolete… Hypersonic missiles are extremely expensive and have poor terminal guidance, they are effective against carriers not because they can easily hit them but because they can easily hit them when they are performing air operations. They are a deterrence and capability denial weapon. And you can develop CONOPS around them just like we have developed CONOPS for denied airspace’s. Anti ship missiles hypersonic or not were always already a huge threat to surface vessels only recently has anti missile technology actually progressed sufficiently to marginalize the threat from conventional anti ship missiles and even that is purely theoretical. The idea that somehow faster or better missiles would devolve surface or air warfare back to what essentially is castles and trench warfare without any force projection is ludicrous. You will always need and be able to project force even against peer and near peer enemies the cost of that force projection would increase. The idea that China somehow can take out the entire US navy is simply silly, you assume that the tactics will not change and you buy into propaganda and misinformation way too much.
- SkyMarshal 5y ago
  > Carriers didn’t make battleships obsolete, missiles did. > Missiles are the only reason big guns aren’t a thing any more. Missiles were the final nail in the coffin for battleships, sure, but missiles reliable enough to hit another ship or land target from over-the-horizon didn't come about till over a decade after carriers obsoleted battleships. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Dec 1941 took out the entire US surface fleet except its carriers. Then half a year later in June 1942, those 3 carriers destroyed the 4 lead carriers of the Japanese combined task force heading for Midway. The remaining Japanese fleet was faced with a decision to continue the attack on Midway and the US carriers with only battleships/cruisers/frigates/destroyers and no carriers of their own, or to cut their losses and retreat. They retreated, because there was a real risk they could lose all the rest of their fleet even against three weakened US carriers and Midway base's decimated air wing. That was the moment when carriers proved they were just next level compared to other surface combatants, obsoleted battleships forever, and Naval doctrine began re-orienting around battlegroups with a carrier at the center and surrounding ships providing anti-sub and later anti-missile defense.
boppo1 5y ago
> rods from god These are neat as a sci-fi idea, but not really in practice. Weapons have to be on-demand; RFG is like "we'll get 'em on the next orbital pass"

nradov 5y ago

I doubt that satellites will be survivable in any future high-end conflict. They can't really be hidden or protected and have very limited maneuverability. Anti-satellite weapons are improving rapidly. Militaries will probably have to shift to large numbers of smaller, cheaper satellites along with a prompt launch system that can quickly replace attrition losses.

dragontamer 5y ago

> Hypersonic missiles, submarines, and satellites (sensors, C&C, directed energy weapons, EMP, rods from god, etc) I think will be the critical force components of this century. If any war breaks out, those components working in concert will take out surface ships and stationary bases first. I argue the opposite. All those satellites will be obliterated the minute war starts. Satellites are on obvious, stable paths with almost no means of propulsion. We know where all of China's satellites are, and China knows where all of our satellites are. Once Satellites are down, the question comes down to whose navy has more Radar than the other. Big ships with bigger radar units is a big advantage. Eyes in the sky (aka: F35 or E2 Hawkeye) is another advantage, especially if those eyes have a degree of stealth (aka: F35).

rdtsc 5y ago
Once satellites are started to be taken out, it’s probably when the nukes will start launching too. Now it is interesting to think is somehow a rogue breakaway country can get their hands on a satellite killing or disabling tech. I would have said it’s science fiction some years ago but after flight MH17 I don’t know anymore.
- nradov 5y ago
  In principle any country that can build a satellite launcher or ICBM has the core technology necessary to build an anti-satellite weapon. I expect that countries like Iran and North Korea will have a limited capability to hit LEO satellites within 10 years.

greedo 5y ago

So the PLAN, which is deploying roughly 16 major combat vessels per year is following this terrible plan? They seem to value surface vessels. Hypersonic missiles (as do ASBMs) require targeting. Breaking the "kill chain" is something both sides will be attempting to do in a conflict, but for now the USN has far more experience as a modern Navy than any other nation (sorry Brits...). But hypersonic missiles aren't anything special and really just hyped a lot. Fast is often good, but not always necessary, or even desired if the corresponding tradeoffs make them either more expensive, or limit how many you can carry. Subs? Subs will always be one of the most lethal combatants. But they have limits. Satellites? They can be jammed, blinded, or destroyed. Sensors? Jammed, blinded or destroyed. EMP? That would be the initiation of nuclear war. Don't want to go there. But making your ships etc survivable to some degree is smart. Better to just outright deter it. Directed Energy weapons? This ship will have that. Modern navies have been experimenting with DE for decades. Whether it's a microwave system or laser, they'll be on this ship and retrofitted where possible to others. They actually help by increasing the volume and depth of your "magazine." Rods from god will be the game changer once launch costs drop. The guidance tech is already good enough, just need to make it cheap to send up a lot of tungsten into space.

nradov 5y ago
Basic orbital dynamics make the "rods from god" concept unworkable. It's just a silly scifi fantasy. In order to achieve sufficient global coverage to hit time sensitive targets would take a huge and ruinously expensive satellite constellation. And the satellites themselves would be quite vulnerable. Any mission for such a system could be accomplished faster and cheaper with ground or submarine launched missiles.
dirtyid 5y ago
>following this terrible plan Same reason PLAN is building aircraft carriers which may very well be obsolete against peer adversaries but still useful to overmatch less capable powers aka basically everyone except US and PRC. Of course also a side of big dick energy prestige. Realistically current PLA strategy for US surface combatants and capital assets is a fuck of load missiles from land and plane, of which hypersonics is just one type. That said recent developments posted on SCMP, i.e. info PLA wants world to know suggest sufficient development in IR sensors that optical/terminal guidance without complex kill chain is possible. Combined with claim: >“With effective hypersonic precision strike weapons, the critical value of ‘strategic depth’ in traditional warfare will no longer exist. All the critical political, economic and military assets of a country will be at risk.” And another recent PRC reveal of AI assistance calibration to produce magnitude improvement in accuracy and I think PRC (as well as US) are pushing hard on prompt global strike capabilities which IMO is much more significant capability than anything proposed for force on force combat in future air and naval platforms. A fleet of conventional hypersonic ICBMs with accuracy/CEP measured in meters is basically conventional MAD. It guarantees PRC (or US) can sink each others expensive Navy's or other assets as long as they spend more than 30 minutes stationary, which is everything that needs maintenance. Stockpile of PGS hypersonics is potentially an end military hegemony capability. One that could also proliferate to smaller powers with time.

ranger207 5y ago

The standard response to "hypersonic missiles are making surface ships like this obsolete" is that kill chains [0] are long and difficult. Of course, submarines, distribute sensors (like radars on man-made islands), and satellites help a lot, but they're also all vulnerable: subs are slow and might not be in the right position, and islands and satellites are relatively easy to target. Regardless of whether or not the kill chain is vulnerable, you still have to actually launch the missile or plane carrying the bomb. Ships are still the best way to do this, so it's going to take extremely effective antiship systems to make it not worth it. [0] A kill chain is the processes and systems a weapon needs to actually hit a target. It includes detecting a target in the first place, making sure you actually have a launcher within range, tracking the target while the missile is on the way, and actually impacting the target at the end.

trcarney 5y ago

This may the the case in a war but you have to recognize the other missions of the Navy, force projection and ensuring "freedom"(this is the stated mission but the navy stops ships to search them all the time) of the seas. You can't do force projection with a submarine or satellite. This part of the Navy's mission hasn't changed much since the Great White Fleet. Surface ships will be a part of the Navy until Shields hover carriers come online. Also the Navy does do quite a bit of good with their carrier fleet as it makes a great base to run humanitarian mission during times when other infrastructure is down.

credit_guy 5y ago

> Hypersonic missiles are making surface ships are obsolete, similar to how carriers made battleships obsolete in WWII. Not quite. Hypersonic missiles are expensive. Aircraft carriers solve the following problem: the easiest way to drop massive amounts of ordnance over the enemy from a large distance is via aerial bombardment. A "smart bomb" dropped from an airplane costs a few tens of thousands of dollars (the guidance kit is the expensive part), while a Tomahawk cruise missile is about 2 million. If you want to project power over distances of thousands of miles, you need air bases in friendly nations, or aircraft carriers (or both). Hypersonic missiles are fine as a defensive weapon. They do represent a thread to the American carriers, but the US can change its doctrine to account for that. Now ask yourself this: if aircraft carriers are becoming obsolete, why is China building them? Especially since they already have hypersonic missiles?

mbrodersen 5y ago
The cost of dropping a single smart bomb from an aircraft launched from an aircraft carriers needs to include the cost of everything needed to make it possible. Including the total build and operational cost of the carrier fleet itself. You might be surprised how insanely expensive it is compared with almost any other weapon system out there.
- credit_guy 5y ago
  It's not even close. Here's an example: Gulf War 1 [1]. The Coalition flew over 100000 sorties, dropping 88500 tons of bombs. The US Navy spent 288 Tomahawk missiles. Each such cruise missile has a 450kg warhead, so that's about 1300 tons, or 0.15% of the ordnance dropped from the air. Now here's the stunning part: that 0.15% of the contribution cost about 1/3 of the total bill: $0.9 BN out of $2.7 BN (GAO report [2] page 178). Let's look at it differently. The daily operating cost of an entire aircraft carrier strike group is about $6.5 MM ([3] p 5). That's the cost of 3 Tomahawk missiles. For this you can launch more than 100 sorties, and drop many, many bombs. There's simply no comparison between the bang for the buck of aircraft dropped bombs vs cruise missiles. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_air_campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_air_campaign [2] https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-97-134.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-97-134.pdf [3] https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA575866.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA575866.pdf

dogma1138 5y ago

Carriers didn’t make battleships obsolete, missiles did. Missiles are the only reason big guns aren’t a thing any more. Your assessment of the impact of hypersonic missiles is also extremely simplistic they would not make surface vessels obsolete anymore than submarines have. Or even a better example how SAMs haven’t made combat aircraft obsolete… Hypersonic missiles are extremely expensive and have poor terminal guidance, they are effective against carriers not because they can easily hit them but because they can easily hit them when they are performing air operations. They are a deterrence and capability denial weapon. And you can develop CONOPS around them just like we have developed CONOPS for denied airspace’s. Anti ship missiles hypersonic or not were always already a huge threat to surface vessels only recently has anti missile technology actually progressed sufficiently to marginalize the threat from conventional anti ship missiles and even that is purely theoretical. The idea that somehow faster or better missiles would devolve surface or air warfare back to what essentially is castles and trench warfare without any force projection is ludicrous. You will always need and be able to project force even against peer and near peer enemies the cost of that force projection would increase. The idea that China somehow can take out the entire US navy is simply silly, you assume that the tactics will not change and you buy into propaganda and misinformation way too much.

SkyMarshal 5y ago
> Carriers didn’t make battleships obsolete, missiles did. > Missiles are the only reason big guns aren’t a thing any more. Missiles were the final nail in the coffin for battleships, sure, but missiles reliable enough to hit another ship or land target from over-the-horizon didn't come about till over a decade after carriers obsoleted battleships. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Dec 1941 took out the entire US surface fleet except its carriers. Then half a year later in June 1942, those 3 carriers destroyed the 4 lead carriers of the Japanese combined task force heading for Midway. The remaining Japanese fleet was faced with a decision to continue the attack on Midway and the US carriers with only battleships/cruisers/frigates/destroyers and no carriers of their own, or to cut their losses and retreat. They retreated, because there was a real risk they could lose all the rest of their fleet even against three weakened US carriers and Midway base's decimated air wing. That was the moment when carriers proved they were just next level compared to other surface combatants, obsoleted battleships forever, and Naval doctrine began re-orienting around battlegroups with a carrier at the center and surrounding ships providing anti-sub and later anti-missile defense.

boppo1 5y ago

> rods from god These are neat as a sci-fi idea, but not really in practice. Weapons have to be on-demand; RFG is like "we'll get 'em on the next orbital pass"