3 ms·

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 Ga

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.)

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.)