Well, I can tell you what will likely be the first target(s) for a few dozen cruise missiles.
Point being in war there is a lot of complexity. The Chinese ASBM is a worry and needs to be considered but I reject that the carriers are now just scrap metal that doesn’t know to sink yet.
For instance the radar tracks up to 100 items. Well, I bet up to 3000 kilometers away in that area there is enough shipping to account for 100 items not to mention civilian jetliners and so on. Add to that the navy could toss up simple drones with radar reflectors in substantial quantities. The radar picture at the other end can get very complex, very fast.
To be accurate, the reason that British Royal Navy carriers were of such limited effect was because they weren’t true carriers, but rather “Through-Deck Command Cruisers”, a combination capital flagship and VTOL platform with a very limited area of air superiority coverage. Had the RN had a real aircraft carrier the air superiority, reconnaissance, and naval force suppression capability would have been decisive. The vulnerability of not having good air superiority/reconnaissance capability and dependence upon capital ships highlighted a significant weakness in Cold War USN/RN strategy and tactics in protecting Atlantic shipping.
Aircraft carriers are indeed vulnerable, not only because they are very large, but by the nature of their operations, which is why they travel in the middle of a protective battle group. Their utility in naval warfare today is questionable; most of their surveillance roles can be performed by land-based craft, UAVs, and satellite coverage, and their role in naval surface group warfare is essentially limited to being bomb trucks, a role for which cruise missiles like the Harpoon and Tomahawk, and ballistic missiles such as the Standard-2 and -6 missile are superior. However, they do perform an unrivaled power projection role over land that is far more adaptable than land-based air power. Long range bombing missions and proposed conventionally-armed intercontinental ballistic missile allow such coverage as well, but the range and logistics causes these solutions to be of questionable use in any kind of sustained campaign as the number of sorties you can effectively deploy in a reasonable period is extremely limited (due to flight hours and maintenance demands, or in the case of CICBMs, the outrageous flyaway cost per unit), whereas a mobile marine platform allows flying many sorties a day. Vietnam would have been utterly unsustainable without naval aircraft carriers.
Armed UAVs may someday take over all attack roles for air attack and air superiority, but we’re not there yet, and even when we are, UAVs for strategic ground attack and air superiority roles will not be that much smaller than conventional manned aircraft as they’ll still have to carry adequate bomb/missile load to carry out their missions. Of course, this assumes that saturation bombing (versus targeted “surgical” strikes) will still be a viable tactic in future warfare. The political fallout for such strikes is increasingly not worth the gains achieved, especially since the force suppression role that presages a large combined arms land invasion is becoming archaic (the invasion of Iraq notwithstanding). So, for the foreseeable future we’ll still need large air coverage support platforms, whether we call them aircraft carriers or UAV cruisers if we want to maintain the ability to effectively project military power around the globe.
The question of whether that is a desirable and worthwhile objective is a topic for another thread.
Lag is an issue, but I don’t think it’s actually all that relevant for air superiority. In a dogfight, ultimately all you should need the human for is target verification. Let the drone know that that other aircraft is an enemy to be shot down, and then let the drone’s own AI do the actual maneuvering and firing. I don’t know if current AI is up to this yet, but it will be soon.
This wouldn’t work as well for air-to-ground combat, since conditions on the ground can change a lot more, and it’s harder to distinguish civilians from military on the ground. In the air, you don’t have targets ducking into populated buildings, and a wedding party isn’t going to be in a fighter jet.
Well like the article says the radar would be combined with satellite and signals surveillance. It would be hard to destroy all of that. Plus I would imagine it would use sophisticated software to combine all this information and also filter out commercial vessels, decoys etc. Obviously we don’t really know if all this would work but ultimately the Chinese can play the numbers game and keep lobbing missiles till one of them hits. Carriers are so valuable that this would act as a serious deterrent to the US.
Anyway I agree carriers aren’t obsolete in the near and medium future. The relevant question is whether this type of ballistic technology could be mastered by a medium-sized power like Iran say 20 years from now.
Drones will have to be remote-controlled for air-to-air combat. Look at it this way: has anyone ever designed a bot that can beat a really hardcore gamer without cheating? There’s a reason people find PvP more challenging.
No, you’ll need a controller. And where there’s a controller, ther’s a radio link, and where there’s a radio link it can and will be jammed. The advantage of manned fighter jets is that they’re self-contained.
Not a chance in hell. Iran will be lucky if they can develop a sufficiently capable ballistic missile technology to hit anything smaller than a good sized city in the next 20 years…let alone hit a carrier task group (and leaving aside that said task group can shoot back at ballistic missiles in any case).
The best way to kill a carrier is either a ship killer, or, if you are an Iran, go for a low tech rubber powerboat solution (going to be hard on the snuffies in the zodiacs, mind) of a mass attack and hope to get lucky.
20 years is a long time and Iran already has ballistic missiles which are accurate up to a few km. And they wouldn’t have to develop the technology themselves; perhaps the Chinese or Russians might find it convenient to sell them the technology.
I don’t believe that either the Chinese or the Russian’s have this level of technology either, at least not right now, so they are unlikely to sell it to the Iranian’s in the next 20 years. A ground/air/sea launched ship killer missile? Yeah, we all have those…but a ballistic missile?
I know the US is working on developing self forging and smart targeting warheads that can attach to ballistic missiles and hit mobile targets, but I seriously doubt Russia or China has anything even close to being in the pipeline for production along these lines right now…nor for years to come (probably never for Russia, though who knows?).
Exocet will not kill a super carrier. Need a lot of Exocets to pull that off. I doubt a single Exocet would even put a US carrier out of action (although depends where it hits I guess). Something they could likely recover from at sea.
The only one-hit kill anti-ship missile (I think) big enough to end a US carrier is the Granit (aka Shipwreck) missile. Thing is huge for this type of missile though and pretty sure only the Russians use it.
ETA: Also, the carrier and its escorts are getting better anti-missile tech all the time. The R2D2 looking Gatling gun thing is being phased out in favor of anti-missile missiles.
Oh, I agree. I used the Exocet because, due to the Falklands Island war, a lot of people have at least heard of it.
The Chinese supposedly have a ship killing big ass missile too, but I don’t remember what it’s called off the top of my head. The US uses a less brute force approach, but we’ve got some fairly capable ship killers as well, though I don’t know if they’d sink a supercarrier in one shot. France, of course, has more modern versions of the Exocet and another ship killing missile who’s name also escapes me right now, and the UK also has their own version (plus they also use the Exocet IIRC).
I think hacking it is less a real worry as jamming it or otherwise breaking the communications loop. Hacking secure, encrypted systems of a major powers drones is probably something that would work best in Hollywood, not reality. What I COULD see, though, is jamming the drone, causing it to go into autonomous flight mode and probably forcing it to have to navigate itself back to it’s rally waypoint…and possibly causing it to be more vulnerable to being shot down, besides not doing what it’s supposed to be doing, i.e. killing bad guys.
Iran has demonstrated the capability to deploy [url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7866357.stm]telecommunications satellites*. While this doesn’t reflect on their ability to design a controllable reentry vehicle, it suggests that they are capable of a vehicle that can inject a satellite into a fairly precise orbit. I would argue that what Iran lacks more is a launch vehicle that can be scaled up beyond regional theater range.
They also have cruise and supercruise missiles purchased from China and the former Soviet Union/Russia.
It’s worth noting that the B-2 Spirit bombers cost 2 billion apiece and their antiradar coatings are supposedly difficult and expensive to maintain. Aircraft are following a trend toward prohibitive cost and maintenance difficulties.
OK, so we cheat. Make the drones capable of 20 gees, and make them cheap enough to deploy them 2 to 1 against the enemy fighters.
As for the threat of hacking them, if the folks designing the security systems on them are even halfway competent, then the easiest way to hack one would be to promise the guy remote-controlling it 72 virgins, or a big pile of cash, or threaten his family, or whatever. Which is already a possibility with human-occupied aircraft, and folks don’t really worry about it much.
Well, yes. That’s why the OP referred to expense as one of the reasons carriers would be obsolete. Just as carriers were a cheaper and more flexible way to project power than what battleships had become, the OP posits that in the forseeable future UAVs will be cheaper and more flexible than what carriers have become now.
Several people have raised the question about whether or not drones could hold their own in air-to-air combat. Three things:
I would imagine the drones 20-40 years hence could, especially if air-to-air combat was run by an onboard computer. (There is no need to choose between human and computer control; you pick the one that is best for different parts of a mission) Bear in mind; the era of pilots dogfighting with guns has been over for 40 years. Air-to-air kills are now done by missile alone, usually from miles away.
I do expect drones to be significantly cheaper than manned aircraft; one of the effects of that is the ability to outnumber the enemy. Even if a piloted interceptor beats a UAV, it may not beat 3 UAVs.
The OP was not claiming that there would be no role whatsoever for manned aircraft, just that the large majority of missions would be unmanned. Straight air-superiority missions are the exception, not the rule. With the significant exception of the Chinese, no US adversary of the next 70 years is likely to even try to challenge our air superiority. To the extent we do need air superiority, if UAVs can’t do it, land-based fighters would be enough. (And the OP also envisoned keeping a few carriers around anyway).
I think the USN/USAF have gone for a more kinder gentler mode of attack, with the standard harpoon being the main anti ship weapon, and the SM2/3 SAM being used in a limited surface to surface role. The reason being that capital ships of the line being sunk may escalate a surface warfare engagement thats limited, into something more global, depending on how many casualties are inflicted on the enemy.
Someone posted that the average American battle group has twenty k sailors, which would cause serious political grief if lost in one engagement. Which has led to the school of thought that its better to mission kill a capital ship , than it is to have some enemy in the future sending 10,000 next of kin letters.
The point is that they would, indeed, be cheating, by eliminating the weaknesses of having a human pilot. Granted, AI is probably not up to the task yet, but it will be.
-It can be designed to pull many more Gs
-All the weight associated with life support, extra armor for the pilot, the ejection seat, the instrumentation, the canopy, etc.
-You can make it stealthier. Notice where the intake and exhaust are on some of the newer drones? Above the aircraft, where the pilot would be sitting. Makes it harder to see with ground radar.
-You aren’t so worried about getting the thing home, as a drone is somewhat readily replaceable, while a pilot is not. It can be made with fewer redundant systems, reducing weight and complexity.
-You also aren’t worried so much about the thing breaking. You can have a higher operational tempo, lower maintenance costs.
-All of these mean it will be a LOT cheaper than a standard aircraft. The eliminated life support systems, pilot instrumentation, the reduced redundancy, all make the thing a lot cheaper and easier to build.
-Which means we can make a lot more of them, and faster
All of which means that we can build them faster, send more out, send them out more often, keep them out longer, and when they get there, they may not be as smart, but they will have superior numbers, and superior performance.
Oh, and they can be sent on suicide missions. Not that this would be normal, as it would be a pricey gambit, but being able to sacrifice a couple drones to act on some hot intelligence would be an important ace up your sleeve.