7 ms·

Are ships even defendable in the age of hypersonic missiles? It seems like, should a large-scale war happen again, it will look entirely different from the wars

by hippo22 10mo ago

Are ships even defendable in the age of hypersonic missiles? It seems like, should a large-scale war happen again, it will look entirely different from the wars in the 20th century.

nickff 10mo ago
Ships are the only way to transport and deploy certain weapons across theaters; as such, there is no simple way to replace them. Your argument could be made in the era of Soviet anti-ship cruise missiles (and that argument was made), yet navies have continued to develop and deploy warships.
- hermitcrab 10mo ago
  Yes, but in an age of guided missiles, surely better to have 3x10k ton warship than 1x30k ton warship.
  - nickff 10mo ago
    That is unfortunately a complicated trade off, involving initial construction costs, total capability, maintainability, and crewing costs. Simply put, two amphibious assault ships do not equal or supersede one super-carrier.
JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
> Are ships even defendable in the age of hypersonic missiles? Given 90s-era NATO air defences are shooting down Russia’s newest hypersonic missiles [1], I’m continuing to treat the category as more hype than utility. [1] https://www.globaldefensecorp.com/2024/11/20/ukraines-patriot-missile-shot-down-140-hypersonic-kinzhal-and-zirkon-missiles-embarrassing-putin-unstoppable-missiles/ https://www.globaldefensecorp.com/2024/11/20/ukraines-patrio...
- AnimalMuppet 10mo ago
  China's hypersonics may work better than Russia's. May. Or maybe the whole thing is just hype.
  - XorNot 10mo ago
    That presumes no future innovation or improvement in defense systems. Which with the way the US is being managed might be true, but generally there's no evidence that China has a missile which cannot be intercepted by refined means we already know.
  - JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
    > China's hypersonics may work better than Russia's They probably do. But absent positive profiling, it doesn’t make sense to design against a hypothetical super weapon.
    - jasonwatkinspdx 10mo ago
      You are quite confused. Anticipating the future and developing counters/mitigations is at the very core of what pentagon planners do.
      - lostlogin 10mo ago
        > Anticipating the future and developing counters/mitigations is at the very core of what pentagon planners do. Is this when they aren’t making pretty boats with pictures on the back? Signs of excellent decision making are limited at this time.
Havoc 10mo ago
>Are ships even defendable in the age of hypersonic missiles? Well China has been building aircraft carrier mockups on train rails in the desert to test something on them while they're in motion...so I'd say unclear
- turtletontine 10mo ago
  Source?
  - Havoc 10mo ago
    You can Google it easily. Showed up on satellite photos
    - rc5150 10mo ago
      Dang even Hacker News is now rife with people making claims without providing contextual evidence. Back in my day, the onus was on the person making the claim to provide evidence. Anything else is just lazy.
      - Havoc 10mo ago
        It’s social media not an academic paper. Demanding people include evidence for stuff that is literally a simple google away is absurd. „China aircraft carrier Desert“. > Anything else is just lazy. As is expecting to be spoonfed trivial stuff
maxglute 10mo ago
Pretty much. 25% interception rate on shit tier Kinzhals last year, which allegedly required salvoing all 32 interceptors from patriot battery, a patriot pac3 mse, aka the most advanced operational variant from 10 years ago. It's dropped to 6% now after RU improvement. Math basically saying ~10 kinzhals can overwhelm typical carrier group with couple flight3 Burkes assuming all Burke VLS was dedicated to ABM, which it's not. Extrapolate to a more performant PRC hypersonic, and interception rate might approach 0. There's nothing in US missile defense tests (staged ballistic trajectories / simple decoys) that remotely suggest they have capable interceptors or the magazine depth to survive even moderate amount of high end hypersonics. Which is going to proliferate, see PRC building $100k commodity hypersonics for potential floor. Bundle that with space ISR and expeditionary navy model is even more dead in 10-15 years. Hence IMO it's rational USnavy modernization/recapitalization is such a shit show. US legislatively locked in 11 carrier navy with all the supporting surface fleet that entails. Shit needs to be built, by law, but there's nothing competent to build in face of AShM math, so keep grafting and fucking around. It's not like USN acquisitions wasn't shit fucked before Trump. All of US MIC acquisition behavior makes sense if one accepts that navy is probably fucked (including subsurface), the only thing US really needs for hegemony (excluding PRC containment, which US functionally can't), is 100-200 B21s (naval tacair/rip f/a-xx likely also fucked) to bomb whatever mid sized countries they want with impunity without putting surface fleet at risk (imagine Houthis with hypersonics). Any legacy naval hulls, tacair frames with some modernization will still black magic overmatch vs everyone except PRC for peacetime dick measuring. TLDR USN can't do anything against PRC, but doesn't have to do anything VS everyone else. So USN does whatever it wants, which includes a lot of flailing because it doesn't really know what to do at all.
- r00f 10mo ago
  I don't think that taking interception rate as the only metric is fair. RU missiles have shown pretty low precision - and hitting a moving ship is much harder than hitting a stationary building, at least in my imagination.
  - maxglute 10mo ago
    Yes, hence RU missile shit tier, they can hit point targets at least, which is step above IR missile that is dog shit tier, area spam. Maybe IR high end stuff RU tier if we can disambiguate the recent UAE hit that is statistically suggest low CEP point target capability. For PRC missiles, see tandem missile demonstration a few years ago, two missiles launched from different launch sites coordinated to hit moving ship at sea. AKA PRC already have the ISR / kill chain to hit moving ships synced to time and space. Something basically no one else has demonstrated. Now extrapolate that out 10 years, while they (and US) are proliferating spaced based C4ISR = basically any surface fleet anywhere is dead, and even if we downgrade to only static targets, that means all US logistics, i.e. unrep are dead which leaves surface fleet single deployment assets. DDG barely has enough endurance for a few days of high tempo operations (fuel and weapons), carriers has endurance but without replenishment, no ammo, and without DDG escorts no protection.
jjk166 10mo ago
A ship close enough to hit anything has always been close enough to be hit. Hypersonics are not revolutionary, countermeasures will evolve to address them the same way they have for every preceding weapon system. But ultimately, fleets need to be able to take a hit as they always have.

by hippo22 10mo ago

Are ships even defendable in the age of hypersonic missiles? It seems like, should a large-scale war happen again, it will look entirely different from the wars in the 20th century.

nickff 10mo ago

Ships are the only way to transport and deploy certain weapons across theaters; as such, there is no simple way to replace them. Your argument could be made in the era of Soviet anti-ship cruise missiles (and that argument was made), yet navies have continued to develop and deploy warships.

hermitcrab 10mo ago
Yes, but in an age of guided missiles, surely better to have 3x10k ton warship than 1x30k ton warship.
- nickff 10mo ago
  That is unfortunately a complicated trade off, involving initial construction costs, total capability, maintainability, and crewing costs. Simply put, two amphibious assault ships do not equal or supersede one super-carrier.

JumpCrisscross 10mo ago

> Are ships even defendable in the age of hypersonic missiles? Given 90s-era NATO air defences are shooting down Russia’s newest hypersonic missiles [1], I’m continuing to treat the category as more hype than utility. [1] https://www.globaldefensecorp.com/2024/11/20/ukraines-patriot-missile-shot-down-140-hypersonic-kinzhal-and-zirkon-missiles-embarrassing-putin-unstoppable-missiles/ https://www.globaldefensecorp.com/2024/11/20/ukraines-patrio...

AnimalMuppet 10mo ago
China's hypersonics may work better than Russia's. May. Or maybe the whole thing is just hype.
- XorNot 10mo ago
  That presumes no future innovation or improvement in defense systems. Which with the way the US is being managed might be true, but generally there's no evidence that China has a missile which cannot be intercepted by refined means we already know.
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
  > China's hypersonics may work better than Russia's They probably do. But absent positive profiling, it doesn’t make sense to design against a hypothetical super weapon.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 10mo ago
    You are quite confused. Anticipating the future and developing counters/mitigations is at the very core of what pentagon planners do.
    - lostlogin 10mo ago
      > Anticipating the future and developing counters/mitigations is at the very core of what pentagon planners do. Is this when they aren’t making pretty boats with pictures on the back? Signs of excellent decision making are limited at this time.

Havoc 10mo ago

>Are ships even defendable in the age of hypersonic missiles? Well China has been building aircraft carrier mockups on train rails in the desert to test something on them while they're in motion...so I'd say unclear

turtletontine 10mo ago
Source?
- Havoc 10mo ago
  You can Google it easily. Showed up on satellite photos
  - rc5150 10mo ago
    Dang even Hacker News is now rife with people making claims without providing contextual evidence. Back in my day, the onus was on the person making the claim to provide evidence. Anything else is just lazy.
    - Havoc 10mo ago
      It’s social media not an academic paper. Demanding people include evidence for stuff that is literally a simple google away is absurd. „China aircraft carrier Desert“. > Anything else is just lazy. As is expecting to be spoonfed trivial stuff

maxglute 10mo ago

Pretty much. 25% interception rate on shit tier Kinzhals last year, which allegedly required salvoing all 32 interceptors from patriot battery, a patriot pac3 mse, aka the most advanced operational variant from 10 years ago. It's dropped to 6% now after RU improvement. Math basically saying ~10 kinzhals can overwhelm typical carrier group with couple flight3 Burkes assuming all Burke VLS was dedicated to ABM, which it's not. Extrapolate to a more performant PRC hypersonic, and interception rate might approach 0. There's nothing in US missile defense tests (staged ballistic trajectories / simple decoys) that remotely suggest they have capable interceptors or the magazine depth to survive even moderate amount of high end hypersonics. Which is going to proliferate, see PRC building $100k commodity hypersonics for potential floor. Bundle that with space ISR and expeditionary navy model is even more dead in 10-15 years. Hence IMO it's rational USnavy modernization/recapitalization is such a shit show. US legislatively locked in 11 carrier navy with all the supporting surface fleet that entails. Shit needs to be built, by law, but there's nothing competent to build in face of AShM math, so keep grafting and fucking around. It's not like USN acquisitions wasn't shit fucked before Trump. All of US MIC acquisition behavior makes sense if one accepts that navy is probably fucked (including subsurface), the only thing US really needs for hegemony (excluding PRC containment, which US functionally can't), is 100-200 B21s (naval tacair/rip f/a-xx likely also fucked) to bomb whatever mid sized countries they want with impunity without putting surface fleet at risk (imagine Houthis with hypersonics). Any legacy naval hulls, tacair frames with some modernization will still black magic overmatch vs everyone except PRC for peacetime dick measuring. TLDR USN can't do anything against PRC, but doesn't have to do anything VS everyone else. So USN does whatever it wants, which includes a lot of flailing because it doesn't really know what to do at all.

r00f 10mo ago
I don't think that taking interception rate as the only metric is fair. RU missiles have shown pretty low precision - and hitting a moving ship is much harder than hitting a stationary building, at least in my imagination.
- maxglute 10mo ago
  Yes, hence RU missile shit tier, they can hit point targets at least, which is step above IR missile that is dog shit tier, area spam. Maybe IR high end stuff RU tier if we can disambiguate the recent UAE hit that is statistically suggest low CEP point target capability. For PRC missiles, see tandem missile demonstration a few years ago, two missiles launched from different launch sites coordinated to hit moving ship at sea. AKA PRC already have the ISR / kill chain to hit moving ships synced to time and space. Something basically no one else has demonstrated. Now extrapolate that out 10 years, while they (and US) are proliferating spaced based C4ISR = basically any surface fleet anywhere is dead, and even if we downgrade to only static targets, that means all US logistics, i.e. unrep are dead which leaves surface fleet single deployment assets. DDG barely has enough endurance for a few days of high tempo operations (fuel and weapons), carriers has endurance but without replenishment, no ammo, and without DDG escorts no protection.

jjk166 10mo ago

A ship close enough to hit anything has always been close enough to be hit. Hypersonics are not revolutionary, countermeasures will evolve to address them the same way they have for every preceding weapon system. But ultimately, fleets need to be able to take a hit as they always have.