10 ms·

Why the U.S. carrier group is scrap metal

35 points by bokonist 18y ago

justinsb 18y ago
If this is true, why isn't it classified? I don't think any government is in the habit of exposing the 'single point of failure' of their war systems. As some of the commenters on that article have pointed out, this smells more like a budget-approval game than an actual credible threat...
- bokonist 18y ago
  The comments to the article are excellent and very informative. Whether or not the new Chinese missile exposes a single point of failure, I suspect that the Gary Brecher is still right, and that the U.S. Carriers are completely obsolete. Between submarines, swarms of cruise missiles, swarms of small boats, and ballistic missiles, it's hard to imagine carriers surviving very long in an all out war. Of course this doesn't really matter, because in such a war nukes are the main worry. But this does mean that the money spent on carriers is completely wasted.
  - nostrademons 18y ago
    I think that carriers are completely obsolete in an all-out war, but the article is moronic. They certainly aren't obsolete because of "ships have no defense against ballistic missiles." A ballistic missile is basically a bomb with a different delivery mechanism. Instead of being dropped straight down from a plane (like dive bombers of WW2) or diagonally down (like laser-guided bombs of today), it's boosted to altitude with a rocket motor, and then gravity takes it back to earth. The flight path at the end is basically the same, though. That's what makes it "ballistic". Carriers have never had a defense against bombs - they certainly didn't in WW2. But y'know what - they usually didn't need one, because the bombs would often miss on their own. Or if they hit, they wouldn't cause serious damage, instead being stopped by the carrier's armor plating. The Harpoon doesn't pop-up to avoid CIWS (it's usually easier to hit something coming down at you from above than something skimming just over the waves - there's less radar glare from the water, and the angle of attack changes less as the missile moves in closer.) It pops up so it can hit the more lightly-armored superstructure instead of the armored hull, potentially causing fires and knocking out critical electronic systems. We moved to cruise missiles for a reason: they have a much higher chance of scoring a hit than ballistic weapons. If 80% of your weapons will miss on their own, you don't need to worry about getting through the enemy's defenses, you need to worry about increasing your accuracy. Cruise missiles aren't particularly easy to shoot down either. As for nukes - yeah, they'll take everything out, as the U.S. found out at Bikini Atoll in 1946. The defense against nukes is the knowledge that if you nuke a U.S. carrier battle group, you will have a few hundred incoming SLBMs within a couple minutes, ready to blow up every single major Chinese city. Personally, I think the real threat to carriers is the cruise-missile swarm, coming from dozens of small fishing vessels. Cruise missiles are cheap, they can be mounted on relatively small vessels, and if they come at you from all directions, they'll totally overload all your air defense systems. It's not hard to find a couple hundred private boats and put 1-2 cruise missiles on each of them.
    - ryanwaggoner 18y ago
      It's not hard to find a couple hundred private boats and put 1-2 cruise missiles on each of them. I imagine that it's extremely difficult to do this undetected, which is why we have intel services.
      - nostrademons 18y ago
        Say that the intel services say that every small craft is having missiles loaded onto it. What do you do then? Shoot every boat on sight, civilian or military, on the theory that it might have a cruise missile on board? Many of these boats don't even show up on radar. They're not a big enough target for you to hit with missiles. Even if you could, the missile costs more than the boat. So you'd need to dispatch a destroyer or a bunch of aircraft to strafe it with gunfire. But then you leave your destroyers/aircraft open to counterattack from small boats. At $30k a boat and $500k a cruise missile, how many of them do you have to sink to equal a $100M aircraft or a $1B destroyer? Incidentally, Japan had a similar plan for defense of the home islands in WW2. They produced nearly 6000 Shinyo, suicide motorboats with a crew of one and a massive explosive in the bow. As the American invasion fleet entered home waters, the plan was for these to swarm the fleet and blow up as many vessels as possible. I suspect this is a major reason why we dropped the A-bomb instead of going forward with an invasion of the Japanese home islands.
        stcredzero 18y ago
        There was a proposal to build lots of fast, highly maneuverable catamaran vessels using stealth technology and armed with cruise missiles. If I was China, I'd be building a few squadrons of those things. (You could even have them leave the missile behind in the water, to pop up and launch itself towards the group at a predetermined time, making it much harder to find the launch platform.)
niels_olson 18y ago
Ship-based anti-ballistic missile missile? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-161_Standard_Missile_3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-161_Standard_Missile_3 check. Ability to part 4 acres of sovereign territory 12 miles off your shore with 70 fighter aircraft on board? Priceless. Air supremacy solves all sorts of problems, including striking the the anti-ballistic missiles in their silos/bunkers/trucks/staging areas. Now, the real issue is people taking this bait and all of sudden thinking "maybe those Republicans know what they're talking about one defense." Um, no. Because the real answer is "who the hell cares?" Anyone really think we want to go to war with China? Anyone think China really wants to go to war with us?
- tesseract 18y ago
  China doesn't want to, but a bunch of pirates/guerillas/terrorists/etc. with speedboats, motorcycles, and Cessnas might. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/aug/21/usa.julianborger http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/aug/21/usa.julianborger
  - DenisM 18y ago
    Pirates attacking an AC? Where's the profit in this? Seems like a bunch of red ink all around.
- DanielBMarkham 18y ago
  I'm sorry -- Republicans? How did Republicans get into a discussion of the missile capabilities of China and/or defensive mechanisms carrier battle groups might or might not have? Come on, guys. Take the politics somewhere else. People of both parties have lots of differing opinions as to various threats posed by various entities. Until it gets to funding, it's a professional judgment thing, not a partisan thing. And we're not discussing funding. I don't think we're in danger right now of unlimited war with anybody, but then again nobody is paying me to worry about it. I think the point of strategic surprise is to maneuver your country into such a position that it could launch a surprise attack and get away with it -- your opponent has no time to build a counter-measure. Of course, believing that a dominant weapon system from the 1940s is still viable today might be completely crazy. History tells us that things change dramatically in warfare. On the other hand, if it is not total war, then who cares what systems exist that are not going to be used? There's a very interesting discussion about military theory and history here. Let's take the politics out of it if we can please.
nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
I thought the whole point of the latest CIWS and last-option missile batteries on carriers was to protect against missile attacks, ballistic or not? Granted, stealth and/or mach 10 is hard to defeat, but in general, the whole point of having a carrier is to keep the carrier in a "safe" spot, and use its vast array of aircraft to project power towards the arena of hostility...
- rjurney 18y ago
  That is true. But the idea is that anti-ship missiles are now so easy to produce that you can deploy 100 or 1000 of them on small vessels and launch them all at once in a surprise attack to totally overwhelm the carrier group's defenses.
  - nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
    That makes more sense; thank you.
jasonkester 18y ago
This doesn't seem particularly newsworthy. The general thrust is that any nation willing to declare war on the United States could potentially sink its aircraft carriers. OK, we'll stipulate to that, but really does that reduce their value today?
- rjurney 18y ago
  I have to say that it does. Consider the carrier group nearest Iran. If the theory is true, all Iran needs is a fleet of civilian boats equipped with anti-ship missiles to defeat the US carrier group. That is exactly what happened in at least one war game that tested the scenario. In other words: Pearl Harbor 2.0 is coming soon, the next time we project power from a carrier group against anyone with an organized defense. Thats newsworthy. I don't know if its true, but it parallels the fall of the battleship so much that it sounds plausible.
  - neilc 18y ago
    Pearl Harbor 2.0 is coming soon, the next time we project power from a carrier group against anyone with an organized defense. Why didn't this happen in the first Gulf War? Ballistic missiles and small boats aren't exactly new technologies.
    - rjurney 18y ago
      The idea is that anti-ship missile technology has become more widely distributed since the gulf war. Is it crazy to think that Iran can match Argentine technology from the 80s?
skwiddor 18y ago
Hardly news ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE writes in 1912 ! http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/22357 http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/22357 "It is an amazing thing that the English, who have the reputation of being a practical nation, never saw the danger to which they were exposed. For many years they had been spending nearly a hundred millions a year upon their army and their fleet. Squadrons of Dreadnoughts costing two millions each had been launched. They had spent enormous sums upon cruisers, and both their torpedo and their submarine squadrons were exceptionally strong. They were also by no means weak in their aerial power, especially in the matter of seaplanes. Besides all this, their army was very efficient, in spite of its limited numbers, and it was the most expensive in Europe. Yet when the day of trial came, all this imposing force was of no use whatever, and might as well have not existed. Their ruin could not have been more complete or more rapid if they had not possessed an ironclad or a regiment. And all this was accomplished by me, Captain John Sirius, belonging to the navy of one of the smallest Powers in Europe, and having under my command a flotilla of eight vessels, the collective cost of which was eighteen hundred thousand pounds. No one has a better right to tell the story than I." Captain John Sirius is, of course, a submarine captain. and as submariners say : "There are only two types of naval vessels: Submarines....... and Targets!"
Rod 18y ago
I am not a weapons expert, but some questions pop in my mind: How do you hit a moving target from 2000 Km away? Using satellite images? UAVs serving as spotters? Well, worst-case scenario the U.S. carriers could release collosal amounts of smoke and create such a thick smoke-screen that no light or IR radiation would penetrate. The Chinese could try to guide the missile remotely with a human operator being fed with "real-time" video, but good luck steering a missile at Mach 10 with a joystick, LOL. Moreover, at Mach 10 the transmission delay could be a serious problem. After all, electromagnetic radiation takes some time to travel 2000 Km -- approx. 7 ms (to which one must add the processing delay) -- and controlling a missile with super-fast dynamics with a 10 ms delay is not trivial. A thought experiment: try driving your car on the highway at 200MPH, with your windshields covered and with no sensing other any "real-time" video of the road ahead which has a delay of 100 ms. Good luck! If the enemy missiles use radar, they're giving away their position. Advanced high-speed anti-radiation missiles (HARM) could perhaps try to intercept them. A desperate counter-measure could be to release immense ammounts of metal strips to fool the missiles' radars. If I remember right, the U.S. Navy had plans to equip carriers with super-mean machine guns capable of shooting 1 million bullets per minute, thus creating such a thick cloud of lead that no enemy missile would be able to pass through. Sounds low-tech, but it could work, right?
- DanielBMarkham 18y ago
  We think alike. A carrier group is moving at 20 knots. Taking 10 minutes to reach the target, the group has moved 3 or 4 nautical miles in any direction. And it's not like you can have a radar lock on the target from the instant you launch. Launching has its own perils. Assuming your launch system survived a first strike, or you start a sneak attack, satellites, airplanes, and ground support personnel can watch a missile being launched. There exists an intercept for ballistic missiles in early boost phase from several platforms: laser and anti-missile-missile come to mind. But let's say you reach apogee and you have radar lock -- after all, a carrier is nothing if it isn't a big hunk of flat metal in an otherwise noisy ocean. So you're 100 miles or so up at mach 10 and you're heading straight down at the carrier. At this point the Aegis system kicks in with the RIM-161 system. It's another proven system designed to do what -- that's right, take out ballistic missiles. Assuming you make it through that, then you've got the phalanx system, a system which uses radar to throw up a hailstorm of lead at a missile headed for the carrier. Now I've said nothing of Electronic Counter-Measures. You can be assured, however, if you're using radar that radars can be jammed, fooled, and made to spit out confusing data. There are all sorts of other fun games you can play with ECM, but I'll leave that for another day. I think there's a real danger, no doubt. But the end of carriers? All carriers are rotting scrap heaps? Please. That's a lot of yelling and attention-seeking blogging, not serious analysis. (Not that I know anything, but I do know a few things)
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
nir 18y ago
It's not a good day when the #2 story on HN is a War Nerd piece. This "scrap metal" BS is typical of the kind of hyperbole nonsense Redditors get off on. Just because there exists a weapon that can destroy a certain target, doesn't make this target worthless - if that was true, everything is "scrap metal" since the first nuclear bomb.
- bokonist 18y ago
  War Nerd certainly has a shtick that can be off putting. But in terms of providing no BS commentary on military and war issues, he is one of the best sources out there. The vulnerability of the American fleet is a very real issue.
  - nir 18y ago
    I've read War Nerd's analysis on regions and conflicts I personally know all too well. The last thing I would say about him is that he's "no BS". WN stitches together real facts, out-of-contexts facts and completely made up "facts" in about equal proportions, and comes out with "analysis" that has zero value - but since it does contain some truths and is written in an authoritative and original tone, manages to create the illusion of "no BS".
    - bokonist 18y ago
      So what are your favorite sources of information about global affairs? War Nerd has been consistently more right than sources such as the NYTimes or CNN. But if there are sources much better than War Nerd, I'd love to know about them.
      - nir 18y ago
        Foreign Policy's blog is a good resource: http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/ http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/ - you can sign up to get a daily brief. I try to follow John Robb's Global Guerilla blog (http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/ http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/). He discusses a lot of interesting topics that influence modern military thought, like systems & network theory, emergence, open source warfare etc. But to be honest I'm not a great fan of the subject. I think this whole theme of death-porn (because war is first and foremost about killing other humans) in our society is repulsive. I can respect people like Robb dealing with this because ultimately this is a subject that should be understood well, but I've seen families tear to pieces when one member died in a war so the idea of some "War Nerd" drooling over a new missile that can kill a 1000 people is sickening. As for War Nerd being "consistently more right", I'm not sure what you mean. I don't believe anyone can truly predict anything (except the obvious) and I can't say I see War Nerd accomplishing this. Same goes for CNN and NYT, but at least they make a conscious effort to base their reporting on actual facts.
skmurphy 18y ago
Another view http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htintel/articles/20090403.aspx http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htintel/articles/20090403.a... as the "annual magic missile announcement"

35 points by bokonist 18y ago

If this is true, why isn't it classified? I don't think any government is in the habit of exposing the 'single point of failure' of their war systems. As some of the commenters on that article have pointed out, this smells more like a budget-approval game than an actual credible threat...

bokonist 18y ago
The comments to the article are excellent and very informative. Whether or not the new Chinese missile exposes a single point of failure, I suspect that the Gary Brecher is still right, and that the U.S. Carriers are completely obsolete. Between submarines, swarms of cruise missiles, swarms of small boats, and ballistic missiles, it's hard to imagine carriers surviving very long in an all out war. Of course this doesn't really matter, because in such a war nukes are the main worry. But this does mean that the money spent on carriers is completely wasted.
- nostrademons 18y ago
  I think that carriers are completely obsolete in an all-out war, but the article is moronic. They certainly aren't obsolete because of "ships have no defense against ballistic missiles." A ballistic missile is basically a bomb with a different delivery mechanism. Instead of being dropped straight down from a plane (like dive bombers of WW2) or diagonally down (like laser-guided bombs of today), it's boosted to altitude with a rocket motor, and then gravity takes it back to earth. The flight path at the end is basically the same, though. That's what makes it "ballistic". Carriers have never had a defense against bombs - they certainly didn't in WW2. But y'know what - they usually didn't need one, because the bombs would often miss on their own. Or if they hit, they wouldn't cause serious damage, instead being stopped by the carrier's armor plating. The Harpoon doesn't pop-up to avoid CIWS (it's usually easier to hit something coming down at you from above than something skimming just over the waves - there's less radar glare from the water, and the angle of attack changes less as the missile moves in closer.) It pops up so it can hit the more lightly-armored superstructure instead of the armored hull, potentially causing fires and knocking out critical electronic systems. We moved to cruise missiles for a reason: they have a much higher chance of scoring a hit than ballistic weapons. If 80% of your weapons will miss on their own, you don't need to worry about getting through the enemy's defenses, you need to worry about increasing your accuracy. Cruise missiles aren't particularly easy to shoot down either. As for nukes - yeah, they'll take everything out, as the U.S. found out at Bikini Atoll in 1946. The defense against nukes is the knowledge that if you nuke a U.S. carrier battle group, you will have a few hundred incoming SLBMs within a couple minutes, ready to blow up every single major Chinese city. Personally, I think the real threat to carriers is the cruise-missile swarm, coming from dozens of small fishing vessels. Cruise missiles are cheap, they can be mounted on relatively small vessels, and if they come at you from all directions, they'll totally overload all your air defense systems. It's not hard to find a couple hundred private boats and put 1-2 cruise missiles on each of them.
  - ryanwaggoner 18y ago
    It's not hard to find a couple hundred private boats and put 1-2 cruise missiles on each of them. I imagine that it's extremely difficult to do this undetected, which is why we have intel services.
    - nostrademons 18y ago
      Say that the intel services say that every small craft is having missiles loaded onto it. What do you do then? Shoot every boat on sight, civilian or military, on the theory that it might have a cruise missile on board? Many of these boats don't even show up on radar. They're not a big enough target for you to hit with missiles. Even if you could, the missile costs more than the boat. So you'd need to dispatch a destroyer or a bunch of aircraft to strafe it with gunfire. But then you leave your destroyers/aircraft open to counterattack from small boats. At $30k a boat and $500k a cruise missile, how many of them do you have to sink to equal a $100M aircraft or a $1B destroyer? Incidentally, Japan had a similar plan for defense of the home islands in WW2. They produced nearly 6000 Shinyo, suicide motorboats with a crew of one and a massive explosive in the bow. As the American invasion fleet entered home waters, the plan was for these to swarm the fleet and blow up as many vessels as possible. I suspect this is a major reason why we dropped the A-bomb instead of going forward with an invasion of the Japanese home islands.
      - stcredzero 18y ago
        There was a proposal to build lots of fast, highly maneuverable catamaran vessels using stealth technology and armed with cruise missiles. If I was China, I'd be building a few squadrons of those things. (You could even have them leave the missile behind in the water, to pop up and launch itself towards the group at a predetermined time, making it much harder to find the launch platform.)

niels_olson 18y ago

Ship-based anti-ballistic missile missile? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-161_Standard_Missile_3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-161_Standard_Missile_3 check. Ability to part 4 acres of sovereign territory 12 miles off your shore with 70 fighter aircraft on board? Priceless. Air supremacy solves all sorts of problems, including striking the the anti-ballistic missiles in their silos/bunkers/trucks/staging areas. Now, the real issue is people taking this bait and all of sudden thinking "maybe those Republicans know what they're talking about one defense." Um, no. Because the real answer is "who the hell cares?" Anyone really think we want to go to war with China? Anyone think China really wants to go to war with us?

tesseract 18y ago
China doesn't want to, but a bunch of pirates/guerillas/terrorists/etc. with speedboats, motorcycles, and Cessnas might. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/aug/21/usa.julianborger http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/aug/21/usa.julianborger
- DenisM 18y ago
  Pirates attacking an AC? Where's the profit in this? Seems like a bunch of red ink all around.
DanielBMarkham 18y ago
I'm sorry -- Republicans? How did Republicans get into a discussion of the missile capabilities of China and/or defensive mechanisms carrier battle groups might or might not have? Come on, guys. Take the politics somewhere else. People of both parties have lots of differing opinions as to various threats posed by various entities. Until it gets to funding, it's a professional judgment thing, not a partisan thing. And we're not discussing funding. I don't think we're in danger right now of unlimited war with anybody, but then again nobody is paying me to worry about it. I think the point of strategic surprise is to maneuver your country into such a position that it could launch a surprise attack and get away with it -- your opponent has no time to build a counter-measure. Of course, believing that a dominant weapon system from the 1940s is still viable today might be completely crazy. History tells us that things change dramatically in warfare. On the other hand, if it is not total war, then who cares what systems exist that are not going to be used? There's a very interesting discussion about military theory and history here. Let's take the politics out of it if we can please.

nuclear_eclipse 18y ago

I thought the whole point of the latest CIWS and last-option missile batteries on carriers was to protect against missile attacks, ballistic or not? Granted, stealth and/or mach 10 is hard to defeat, but in general, the whole point of having a carrier is to keep the carrier in a "safe" spot, and use its vast array of aircraft to project power towards the arena of hostility...

rjurney 18y ago
That is true. But the idea is that anti-ship missiles are now so easy to produce that you can deploy 100 or 1000 of them on small vessels and launch them all at once in a surprise attack to totally overwhelm the carrier group's defenses.
- nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
  That makes more sense; thank you.

jasonkester 18y ago

This doesn't seem particularly newsworthy. The general thrust is that any nation willing to declare war on the United States could potentially sink its aircraft carriers. OK, we'll stipulate to that, but really does that reduce their value today?

rjurney 18y ago
I have to say that it does. Consider the carrier group nearest Iran. If the theory is true, all Iran needs is a fleet of civilian boats equipped with anti-ship missiles to defeat the US carrier group. That is exactly what happened in at least one war game that tested the scenario. In other words: Pearl Harbor 2.0 is coming soon, the next time we project power from a carrier group against anyone with an organized defense. Thats newsworthy. I don't know if its true, but it parallels the fall of the battleship so much that it sounds plausible.
- neilc 18y ago
  Pearl Harbor 2.0 is coming soon, the next time we project power from a carrier group against anyone with an organized defense. Why didn't this happen in the first Gulf War? Ballistic missiles and small boats aren't exactly new technologies.
  - rjurney 18y ago
    The idea is that anti-ship missile technology has become more widely distributed since the gulf war. Is it crazy to think that Iran can match Argentine technology from the 80s?

skwiddor 18y ago

Hardly news ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE writes in 1912 ! http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/22357 http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/22357 "It is an amazing thing that the English, who have the reputation of being a practical nation, never saw the danger to which they were exposed. For many years they had been spending nearly a hundred millions a year upon their army and their fleet. Squadrons of Dreadnoughts costing two millions each had been launched. They had spent enormous sums upon cruisers, and both their torpedo and their submarine squadrons were exceptionally strong. They were also by no means weak in their aerial power, especially in the matter of seaplanes. Besides all this, their army was very efficient, in spite of its limited numbers, and it was the most expensive in Europe. Yet when the day of trial came, all this imposing force was of no use whatever, and might as well have not existed. Their ruin could not have been more complete or more rapid if they had not possessed an ironclad or a regiment. And all this was accomplished by me, Captain John Sirius, belonging to the navy of one of the smallest Powers in Europe, and having under my command a flotilla of eight vessels, the collective cost of which was eighteen hundred thousand pounds. No one has a better right to tell the story than I." Captain John Sirius is, of course, a submarine captain. and as submariners say : "There are only two types of naval vessels: Submarines....... and Targets!"

Rod 18y ago

I am not a weapons expert, but some questions pop in my mind: How do you hit a moving target from 2000 Km away? Using satellite images? UAVs serving as spotters? Well, worst-case scenario the U.S. carriers could release collosal amounts of smoke and create such a thick smoke-screen that no light or IR radiation would penetrate. The Chinese could try to guide the missile remotely with a human operator being fed with "real-time" video, but good luck steering a missile at Mach 10 with a joystick, LOL. Moreover, at Mach 10 the transmission delay could be a serious problem. After all, electromagnetic radiation takes some time to travel 2000 Km -- approx. 7 ms (to which one must add the processing delay) -- and controlling a missile with super-fast dynamics with a 10 ms delay is not trivial. A thought experiment: try driving your car on the highway at 200MPH, with your windshields covered and with no sensing other any "real-time" video of the road ahead which has a delay of 100 ms. Good luck! If the enemy missiles use radar, they're giving away their position. Advanced high-speed anti-radiation missiles (HARM) could perhaps try to intercept them. A desperate counter-measure could be to release immense ammounts of metal strips to fool the missiles' radars. If I remember right, the U.S. Navy had plans to equip carriers with super-mean machine guns capable of shooting 1 million bullets per minute, thus creating such a thick cloud of lead that no enemy missile would be able to pass through. Sounds low-tech, but it could work, right?

DanielBMarkham 18y ago
We think alike. A carrier group is moving at 20 knots. Taking 10 minutes to reach the target, the group has moved 3 or 4 nautical miles in any direction. And it's not like you can have a radar lock on the target from the instant you launch. Launching has its own perils. Assuming your launch system survived a first strike, or you start a sneak attack, satellites, airplanes, and ground support personnel can watch a missile being launched. There exists an intercept for ballistic missiles in early boost phase from several platforms: laser and anti-missile-missile come to mind. But let's say you reach apogee and you have radar lock -- after all, a carrier is nothing if it isn't a big hunk of flat metal in an otherwise noisy ocean. So you're 100 miles or so up at mach 10 and you're heading straight down at the carrier. At this point the Aegis system kicks in with the RIM-161 system. It's another proven system designed to do what -- that's right, take out ballistic missiles. Assuming you make it through that, then you've got the phalanx system, a system which uses radar to throw up a hailstorm of lead at a missile headed for the carrier. Now I've said nothing of Electronic Counter-Measures. You can be assured, however, if you're using radar that radars can be jammed, fooled, and made to spit out confusing data. There are all sorts of other fun games you can play with ECM, but I'll leave that for another day. I think there's a real danger, no doubt. But the end of carriers? All carriers are rotting scrap heaps? Please. That's a lot of yelling and attention-seeking blogging, not serious analysis. (Not that I know anything, but I do know a few things)

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

nir 18y ago

It's not a good day when the #2 story on HN is a War Nerd piece. This "scrap metal" BS is typical of the kind of hyperbole nonsense Redditors get off on. Just because there exists a weapon that can destroy a certain target, doesn't make this target worthless - if that was true, everything is "scrap metal" since the first nuclear bomb.

bokonist 18y ago
War Nerd certainly has a shtick that can be off putting. But in terms of providing no BS commentary on military and war issues, he is one of the best sources out there. The vulnerability of the American fleet is a very real issue.
- nir 18y ago
  I've read War Nerd's analysis on regions and conflicts I personally know all too well. The last thing I would say about him is that he's "no BS". WN stitches together real facts, out-of-contexts facts and completely made up "facts" in about equal proportions, and comes out with "analysis" that has zero value - but since it does contain some truths and is written in an authoritative and original tone, manages to create the illusion of "no BS".
  - bokonist 18y ago
    So what are your favorite sources of information about global affairs? War Nerd has been consistently more right than sources such as the NYTimes or CNN. But if there are sources much better than War Nerd, I'd love to know about them.
    - nir 18y ago
      Foreign Policy's blog is a good resource: http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/ http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/ - you can sign up to get a daily brief. I try to follow John Robb's Global Guerilla blog (http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/ http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/). He discusses a lot of interesting topics that influence modern military thought, like systems & network theory, emergence, open source warfare etc. But to be honest I'm not a great fan of the subject. I think this whole theme of death-porn (because war is first and foremost about killing other humans) in our society is repulsive. I can respect people like Robb dealing with this because ultimately this is a subject that should be understood well, but I've seen families tear to pieces when one member died in a war so the idea of some "War Nerd" drooling over a new missile that can kill a 1000 people is sickening. As for War Nerd being "consistently more right", I'm not sure what you mean. I don't believe anyone can truly predict anything (except the obvious) and I can't say I see War Nerd accomplishing this. Same goes for CNN and NYT, but at least they make a conscious effort to base their reporting on actual facts.

skmurphy 18y ago

Another view http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htintel/articles/20090403.aspx http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htintel/articles/20090403.a... as the "annual magic missile announcement"