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In an infamous 2002 wargame, an American carrier and much of its fleet were destroyed by swarms of speedboats with missiles, simulating potential Iranian tactic
by ef4 12y ago
In an infamous 2002 wargame, an American carrier and much of its fleet were destroyed by swarms of speedboats with missiles, simulating potential Iranian tactics.
Also, anti-ship ballistic missiles keep getting better. It's not clear whether the US Navy could stop the latest generation of Chinese anti-ship missiles.
In both cases, a supercarrier suffers a serious probabilistic problem: the attackers only have to get through once. The defenders need to be 100% effective. That's not realistic in a world where it's economically feasible to field thousands of cheap drones.
- robotresearcher 12y agoCheap drones have small payloads, and one small payload won't do disastrous damage to a carrier. The attackers have to get through once with a serious weapon, or many times with small, cheap weapons. Is there a small, cheap weapon that is nasty enough, without relying on crazy luck? Do carriers have known vulnerabilities to small weapons, as in Star Wars Ep. IV? Edit: Just read up on USS Cole, and a small boat made a 40ft hole in the side, killed 17 and injured 39 sailors. Very serious. Is this enough to disable a carrier? Also, small boats have enormously more payload than a drone. Wikipedia says an attack on USS Sullivan failed when the overloaded attack boat sank, so clearly they are using all that capacity.