From the links I put up earlier my impression is China is quite close making the ASBM operational. And of course there are other technologies that could potentially threaten carriers, a massed attack of regular anti-ship cruise missiles, supercavitating torpedoes etc. Russia has advanced capabilities in both these areas and I am sure the Chinese could develop the technology too if they wished. And certainly over a twenty year horizon you can't rule out the technology proliferating to medium-sized countries like Iran which are anyways making serious efforts with missile technology.
If you are Russia or China, selling anti-carrier technology is a good way to contain the country with the biggest carrier fleet by far. Honestly I don’t think the future of carriers is bright. Defending a large,slow-moving, immensely valuable target against lots of cheap, expendable, fast-moving missiles coming from different directions is a losing proposition in the long run.
It’s 80 kg for the ejection seat alone, and then there’s canopy, helmet, flightsuit, oxygen tanks, and all that. And, as has been pointed out, the UAVs will not have human limitations on G-force or endurance. Given the increasing tend toward computer miniaturization, it is inevitable that UAVs will replace manned fighters.
Jamming will be a problem, but jamming inevitably discloses the jammers’ position and makes them vulnerable. It would be no trick at all to program a UAV to fire a radio-tracking missile at the source of jamming if its communication link were interrupted.
Whether the advent of UAVs will mean the end of carriers, I’m not sure. There is a lot to be said for having a mobile base that can park a couple of hours away from the UAV to slap new weapons on it when it returns from the target, rather than forcing it to fly all the way back to some remote base like Diego Garcia. Another advantage of carriers is that they make us independent of allies (although whether this is a good thing is debatable). Britain could deny us the use of Diego Garcia any time it wanted. Japan doesn’t have to let us use Okinawa. But we can always use the high seas.
Still, suppose that a carrier can mount 88 UAVs, the same as the number of combat aircraft it now holds. If we didn’t build the carrier and its battle group, and were able to get 500 land-based UAVs instead, well, that’s probably just as good as having a carrier parked off the enemy’s shoreline. Having 6 UAVs in sequence en route to the target from a base 12 hours away is as good as having one UAV en route to the target from a base 2 hours away. Plus the remote island base can’t be sunk, and you wouldn’t have to devote a quarter of the air power to ASW to protect the surface ships, as carrier air wings have to. On the other hand, if by scrapping the carrier battle group you were only able to purchase 100 extra UAVs, then maybe the carrier battle group would still make sense. It all depends on the cost ratio of the UAVs to the carrier battle group.
Pretty well. They’ve already developed one that weighs 00.5 lbs, so you could have one of over 175 times that size for the weight of the ejection seat alone.
There’s already been a battle in which large numbers of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or remote pilotless vehicles (RPVs) were exposed to attack as bait. I don’t know how many were sacrificed, but the overall battle, Operation Mole Cricket, was a stunningly lopsided success: 17 of 19 antiaircraft missile batteries and scores of missiles destroyed, 29 jet fighters shot down, all without losing a single manned aircraft.
where did you come up with 20,000 men? The carrier is 5000 to 6000 and all the escorts together add up to less, even including the replenishment ships. 10,000 would be the number tops. This could be made more efficient as time goes on.
I do think the Op is at least partially right. I think the cuts in Carriers and especially the Air Force are on the way. The Air Force appears to me to have even less of a mission foing forward.
And for all the nervousness at the vulnerability of aircraft carriers to ballistic missiles, let’s not fool ourselves that conventional airbases don’t deal with the same thing.
Both sea- and land-based airfields have some sort of anti-missile defenses, but ships have the advantage of moving around a big ocean. Land-based airfields tend to move very, very slowly, like 1 to 10 centimeters per year. If they move any faster than that, it’s a very bad sign.
I was thinking this, too. You know where the island is 24/7/365. You don’t even have to keep an eye on it. Better to use Arizona or Nevada, since the airbase won’t stick out as much, or use a carrier, where it can move all over the ocean, stay under the cover of storms while moving, etc.
If you did have a carrier designed around UAV’s, you could either make it smaller, or carry many more of them. They are much smaller because of the lack of a pilot and their support systems. I don’t think the carrier is going to stop being made, but it may lose its importance and attached liability.
Now, with all that in mind, I am not sold on the UAV’s ability to take air superiority against a technologically similar foe. The lag inherent in a remote connection makes the UAV primarily a missile platform. Our allies and future enemies develop better stealth daily, which will make missiles hard to use, and guns may become a necessary weapon for aircraft again. Putting the UAV pilots on a ship close to the action will lessen the lag, but they will still be at a disadvantage against a pilot that is in the aircraft. Winning air superiority might be dependent on if we could win with numbers, tactics or training at that point. It is also possible that the increased maneuverability of the UAV could overcome the advantages of actually being in the plane in a dogfight. Or, that the UAV pilot’s lack of having to fear death would allow them to “dare and win” more easily. I don’t know enough to be sure of that, but I think even saying manned aircraft are dead could be premature.
A US Navy carrier is sovereign US territory, unlike Guam. Carriers allow us to get close to the target without the political negotiations and fallout that comes from using forward bases.
I think that carriers in some form or another will be necessary long after we make the transition to a fully UAV force if for no other reason than the fact that we’ll still need humans to maintain, re-arm, and refuel the UAVs if we want have high sortie rates.
I also think that we won’t make the transition to a fully UAV force as quickly as many people think. There will be a lot of unforeseen issues encountered, and when you study military history, there are no shortage of examples of similar over-enthusiasm in new technology. The one that comes quickly to mind is the removal of the gun from fighter aircraft like the F-4 Phantom.
It’ll be sad day for me when the last manned combat aircraft is retired. Hell, I don’t even like the F-35. It’s fugly. I know UAV’s save lives, but they sure kill the romance. I feel like a Nelsonian era sailor watching the beautiful ships of the line being replaced with ironclads.
Ha, you’re right. Guam’s not the best example is it? I guess I meant places like Turkey, Japan, etc… where we have bases, but there are a lot of political considerations as to what we can do from them, and who we can do it to.
Yeah, it’s sort of a poor-man’s Exocet, but it packs a lot of punch. I think they’ve replaced it with something better though. I remember they were a serious threat when I was in the Gulf. Both Iran and Iraq had derivatives of them. A carrier battle group can do a pretty good job at intercepting SLCM and ALCM’s when they’re lobbed peicemeal, the problem gets serious when they’re launched in large numbers. The law of probability rules the scenario in that case.
From what I have read aircraft carriers will eventually become submarine, they will be smaller and carry fewer aircraft but more carriers will be built. Capable of surprise attacks almost anywhere.
Air bases have some obvious advantages though. They can be better protected with reinforced/underground hangars. Damage can be more easily repaired. And while they may not be mobile they lack some of the vulnerabilities of carriers which can be attacked from underwater and through surface-skimming missiles. I also wonder whether the advantage of mobility means all that much in this age of satellite and other surveillance. Especially when we are talking about a large carrier group which I don’t think is that difficult to detect.
The nightmare scenario for a carrier would probably be a simultaneous attack of dozens of ballistic missiles, supercavitating torpedoes and surface-skimming supersonic cruise missiles. I seriously doubt that any carrier could be really confident of defending against that kind of threat.
That outcome doesn’t have much to do with the drones, but was more repeating the modern cliche that an immensely higher-tech and better-coordinated air force stomps all over an aged air defense system. The entire bit about using side “sneak” attacks is particularly telling - Sparrows are a semi-active homing missile, which means that the target fighters didn’t even have radiation detection systems, putting them squarely in the early Korean War era as far as tech goes. Of course they got toasted by a group using relatively recent American gear and tactics. A similar scenario sans drones can be seen at the start of Desert Storm, where the US used electronics warfare aircraft for the same purpose, and with hardly any greater risk. The old Soviet surface to air systems in use have barely any chance of hitting a modern fighter that knows they’re coming.
Some misconceptions to this point.
In a war game a few years ago, Iran (using their ancient technology) destroyed an American aircraft carrier in the gulf. Of course, the retired American general, commanding the Iranian forces was roundly critisized and relieved of his position because he (gasp): didn’t play by the rules; started too soon [waaaa! we weren’t ready]; and used tactics that WE knew the Iranians would never use. So the scenario was repeated and WE won so everything turned out for the good. All the fancy point missile defense, speed, sensors, didn’t prevent a sucessful Iranian attack. ISTR a number of other ships were also destroyed/damaged. The initial game was mighty embarassing to the US.
At least one current US drone already has air-to-air capability built in (defensive for now). A second drone could be retrofited easily. Offensive capability is not a big deal. Satellite, ground, or air radar spots a threat; drone fires missile along heading; missile is updated via up/down link as to target position; missile activates active/passive sensors at target location; missile tracks and destroys target. In all this, the drone acted as a truck carrying a payload. The missile contained the smarts and did the engagement. No dogfighting, manuvering required on the part of the drone. This is the scenario for a number of engagements now. For close in fighting, we still need Top Gun pilots but not for any type of long range shooting.
Russians do have a very capable ballistic anti-ship missile along with supersonic cruise surface huggers. China is right behind them. With their technology capabilities/espionage, I would expect the Chinese to surpass the Russian capabilities. A single tactical nuke destroys a carrier. Yes we are more capable in the anti-missile area. No we don’t do any live fire exercises. Some are going to get through. Both countries are quite capable of tracking the whereabouts of US carrier groups.
Silkworm is out-of-date. Big warhead but slow and easy to spot and shoot down. At least two were destroyed by the coalition navy during the gulf war. The missiles were effective against tankers during an earlier dust-up.