In the future, I think you will see more of ships like the ambhibious assault ship USS America (LHA-6) . The disadvantage of a Nimitz class supercarier is that it is large, expensive, vulnurable without its battlegroup and can only be in one place at any time. As with most things military, the trend is towards smaller, more compact, more flexible platforms. The USS America is less than half the displacement of a Nimitz carrier and have a capacity to launch helicopters, Ospreys and VTOL aircraft like the Harrier and the F-35B Joint Strike Fighter.
That said, there are benefits to having a huge platform for deploying an entire air wing, even if it is an air wing of drones.
Kinda curious how a ASBM finds a carrier. Seems to me something needs to be close enough to the carrier to give the ASBM initial guidance. Otherwise what do they do? Fling them out at random and hope it spots a carrier (not to mention being able to discern a carrier from other ships including freighters that might be quite large)?
Now, getting close enough to a carrier to do that could be problematic. They could probably get a couple in a surprise attack but after that the carriers will be on guard.
Carriers remain serious threats and as a show of force nothing else comes close. They can stabilize an area just by being there. Anyone willing to sink even one is essentially embarking on a full-blown shooting war with the US as we will freak if someone sinks one. Anyone willing to start with the US at that level of fighting means we have a whole slew of problems.
I doubt a drone ship could have the same effect of power projection.
Well, it will come down to whether or not you want your drones flying about (and killing) in autonomous mode, or whether you will be controlling them via transmission. If an emerging country like China, say, opts for the former, then that’s going to take some pretty good software and hardware to achieve…and even then, odds are that the things will still fuck up, or be less capable than a piloted aircraft with a real human at the stick. If they go for the latter, then you have to assume that the enemy is going to be working on ways to jam your transmissions or even hack your systems. Thus far, the US has pretty much had the field of unmanned combat drones all to ourselves. We have a human in the loop, but there is really not much chance that some scruffy Taliban or Iraqi insurgent is going to figure out how to jam or hack our drones. But if we were fighting against, say, the Europeans or Japan, well…that’s a whole 'nother ball game. And if China is trying to build these things with the intent of possibly using them against the US, then they have to figure we might just be able to do something about that as well.
So, I don’t think that drones are the clear choice to REPLACE manned combat vehicles (ground, air or sea)…they are more an enhancement and fulfil a niche role, and probably will for a long time to come, unless some new technology that allows for real time remote control and is unjammable (or new AI’s that are much more capable) come along.
Is this really true? Current drones are weak but that’s largely by design.
Can’t a theoretical air-superiority drone turn at g-forces no human pilot could survive? Wouldn’t hyper-maneuverable, high-acceleration drones make formidable fighters, especially if equipped with fire-and-forget missiles?
Furthermore, wouldn’t drones make fighter pilots “immortal?” It’s said that a certain amount of recklessness and aggression makes the best fighter pilots. Wouldn’t an aggressive drone pilot prove to be a good asset, and if he or she blundered and was shot down, the pilot lives unharmed to take that aggression and newfound experience to another drone?
It seems to me the biggest theoretical weakness of drones is having their control frequency jammed, or being controlled by remote hackers – not that they’re currently small, weak, slow aircraft. That part seems fixable.
Curiously, aircraft carriers themselves are a good example of how swiftly cultural resistance can be swept away and new technology and tactics embraced in a real emergency.
“Fire and forget” missiles are not nearly as reliable as portrayed in the media. They are vulnerable to a number of countermeasures and malfunctions. G-forces are nice, but a guy flying by computer screen doesn’t have the field of vision a pilot would have, and some amount of lag-time between control input and execution seems inevitable.
Sure, a drone can take a lot more G than a human can. But who is controlling the drone? Is it flying itself (and making all the decisions) or is it being controlled remotely?
I suppose that’s true, though I’m not sure that more aggression is necessarily a good thing. The drones are still going to cost a lot, even if less than a manned air craft, so you aren’t going to want to throw them away like water, regardless (plus, once they are gone, there goes your combat power). But if you are going to have your pilots remotely control these combat drones, how close to the theater are they going to be? How vulnerable will the be? If they are all the way back home, how much lag is that going to inject into the system? So you have a drone that can preform better than a human, but you have a 2 second lag that makes it dead meat for a human pilot…what have you gained? And then, there is the issue of jamming.
I am not saying drones won’t advance, or that we and others won’t continue to develop them…or that any of this is a bad thing. I just think that people are jumping the gun here in thinking that drones are inevitably going to replace manned aircraft (or make ACs obsolete). It was like someone looking at the balloon and saying that manned aircraft were going to make battleships obsolete (before even the Wright Brothers airplane). In the end, battleships did become obsolete, but it was less due to the airplane and more due to their staggering cost, manpower requirements and maintenance. Sure, airplanes made them vulnerable, but they were supposed to be weapons of war. Doctrine and tactics and changes in warfare (such as the introduction of the AC ;)) COULD have made battleships viable weapons, if not in their previous war. And, in the US at least, we actually were still using the things periodically decades after they were supposedly obsolete. In the end though they just cost to damn much, so everyone got rid of the things.
Maybe. There is the lag issue as well, plus the potential for other communications failures and possible vulnerabilities of remote controllers if you put them closer to the action. As for it being fixable, it might be…but I highly doubt that it’s going to be an easy fix, or that this kind of technology will be available any time soon even to the US.
The US doesnt NEED hyper-maneuverable craft UNTIL somebody ELSE is making them (and who’s making them so far?). And even then, only if the hyper ability/advantage due to it being a drone isnt offset by some other disadvantage due to it being a drone.
Drones may well one day rule the skies, but IMO barring some real AI / secure communications / other deal breaker breakthrough, well made and well piloted human piloted aircraft arent going away anytime soon.
Terminal guidance is all fine and good but you need something to direct the missile into the immediate area. So, something needs to be there to get the ball rolling and in a shooting war the US will not be keen on letting anything near the carriers.
Yes this is true so even if drone end up being better you would want some redundancy and still have some piloted aircraft. However I suspect that major powers would have sufficiently good encryption and frequency-hopping technologies to make drones the best option in their actual wars which are probably not going to be against each other.
Well, it costs the US $2.6 million to train a fighter pilot. Not even counting the value of human life there is a savings there. Sure there will be cost to train drone pilots but it will be less.
But all that high tech robotics stuff that replaces the pilot aint free either. And, as you said, you’d still have to train the crap out of your remote pilots if you dont want them destroying your drones willy nilly.
Drones MAY be cheaper, but unless they arent built for reliability, it certainly aint going to be a 10 for 1 sorta savings.
And if they are hyper performance because they don’t have to worry about the G forces on the pilot, that extra performance is going to cost you as well. A 30 G capable plane is gonna be a bit harder to build than a meat pilot 10 G model (and have some other performance downsides as well).
I worked at a place that did robotics not so long ago. It was amazing how much work/cost was required to do even the simplest thing remotely (and this was slow simple shit, not moment by moment stuff like airborne combat). Everyday, I half expected to have to run from our building in terror while some outa control robotic bulldozer flattened our building.
And, I’ll say it again. UNTIL sombody ELSE is making these supper 30G drones, the USA doesnt have much to worry about IMO.
We may not have to worry about it, but I know that ARPA is developing unmanned combat vehicles, including unmanned fighters and fighter/bombers. I agree that full scale and fully combat ready versions are going to be quite expensive. These things aren’t just going to be Predator drones with some missiles strapped on…
Sure…but they still have to get there, and considering the amount of combat power a carrier task force has, it’s still going to be a matter of them getting lucky at this point.
I’m sure they could use any number of things (ship killers would probably be a better bet than cluster warheads)…again, dependent on them actually being able to survive to get into effective range. Well, and assuming the US and China ever did go head to head, of course.
I am talking about 20-50 years out. The same principle still applies: even though small drones will be much more capable, medium and large drones will be more capable still.
If we were sitting in 1945, we could project a day when a fighter aircraft would be faster, more agile, have longer range, and carry more payload than a bomber of our day. And that has happened. An F-18 beats a B-24 in every way possible.
But just because we have very capable F-18s that are very capable, doesn’t mean we don’t also have B-1s, B-52s, B-2s, and other aircraft that fill important roles – roles that fighter aircraft just can’t handle. My earlier point about helos and aircraft wasn’t comparing an H-60 to an F-18, it is a comment on the relationship between size and capability.
So larger drones will always have inherent capabilities that smaller drones just can’t match. We will continue to need/want drones and aircraft that are larger than the smallest available.
Again, a destroyer just doesn’t have the space to allow drones of any significant size to land, and there’s just not enough space to maintain more than a couple aircraft, whether they are helicopters, drones, or whatever.
Besides all that - how hard is it really to ‘hide’ a carrier battle group? I would have thought that players like the US, Russia, China, Britain, France etc. have at least a rough location plotted for any foreign carrier group getting anywhere close to striking distance.