Japan had them during WWII. Never heard that the US was seriously developing the things except maybe in a Popular Mechanics magazine.
-XT
You probably mean this 2002 war game, as discussed in Malcolm Gladwell’s very interesting book Blink: Millennium Challenge 2002 - Wikipedia
I suspect that the days of the big, Nimitz-sized supercarrier are indeed numbered. They’re so big and labor-intensive that it will increasingly not be cost-effective. In an era when many second-tier nations can put up their own satellites, or just go on the Internet and look at pictures others have made available, it will grow increasingly difficult to keep them out of harm’s way at the very time that potential enemies such as the PRC are developing very powerful weapons against them. (Don’t assume we can invariably keep enemy warships at arm’s length, either: The uninvited guest: Chinese sub pops up in middle of U.S. Navy exercise, leaving military chiefs red-faced | Daily Mail Online).
We could have several LHD-sized carriers for the price of one supercarrier, and that will become a more appealing option, with time. There are very strong institutional forces in the USN that favor supercarriers, though, so I’m afraid it will take the catastrophic loss of one or more of them before we actually change policy. Future drones will be more and more flexible and capable, and for both budgetary and political reasons (i.e. not risking U.S. military personnel’s lives) I’ll bet we’ll use them more and more. There will always be a place for manned aircraft, though.
[quote=“Elendil_s_Heir, post:82, topic:535954”]
You probably mean this 2002 war game, as discussed in Malcolm Gladwell’s very interesting book Blink: Millennium Challenge 2002 - Wikipedia
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quote]
Yes, thanks a lot, my memory does not extend to google-fu. We, the US military, did not fare very well. Refloating the ships was the only way to go however. Run scenarios for another 13 days and hopefully learn some things about an asymetric attack. General Ripper and COL Jack T. Ripper. That’ll be my memory jogger from now on.
Just one “p,” Van Riper, actually.
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Too many friendlies, too much collateral damage, and shit. It’s a fuckin’ refugee camp and shit! Hold your fire!
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Target is dude on a Harley with hot signature side-car and shit.
The kind you drop by air. A few years back, the USN was stunned to discover that its carriers had no defense against these. Mines are cheap and effective-one can sink a carrier.
As for the future, why don’t we chuck the hardware and go for total cyber warefare (that’s what the Chinese do). The USAF has a cyber warfare command-that is the future-not building all this expensive crap.
Heck, if the Chinese really want to hurt us, they will just stop buying US Treasury bonds!
I mostly came in to post the link to the War Nerd article, but I’ll add my opinions to the fray:
Aircraft carriers for the CAP role:
Ironically, half the role of CAP is keeping the carrier itself safe from attacking aircraft. This threat is far dated, since an attacker doesn’t have to come anywhere near the carrier anymore. Also, as proven by the War Nerd article, a carrier’s CAP and point defense can easily be defeated by redundancy. China won’t fire one ASM at a carrier, they’ll fire off 200 in one shot.
The other side of the coin is air superiority, which is in essence protecting ground attack aircraft for attack and support operations. With use of drones (which do both roles far better than aircraft, being able to stay on station far longer and take larger risks), the need to protect them is diminished. Again, a UAV air force can set more attackers at a target than a defender can reasonably defend against.
This is what’s in security called a class break: overcoming an obstacle by changing the rules.
Aircraft Carriers as power projection:
Overrated. Gunboat diplomacy went out of fashion at the end of the 19th century. Name one ongoing conflict where power projection has had any political impact? Would China be phased if the US move a couple of carrier groups into the Taiwan strait? Are the Iranians scared of carriers in the Persian Gulf? Are insurgents in Iraq even remotely aware of the fact that the aircraft interdicting their operations launched off a boat? Do they care? The US isn’t handling two bit sheiks off the east coast of Africa and south american banana dictators any more. It should have learnt as much in Vietnam.
Are the Carriers worth the risk, time and money?
The risk, time and money involved in producing massive amounts of ASMs say no. The political impact of loosing an aircraft carrier shouldn’t be underestimated, disregarding how many drone aircraft and launching platforms the US could be deploying for the same cost and manpower, and without the risk.
So why is the US still building carriers?
For the same reason the US was still building battleships up until Pearl Harbor.
A final platitude:
Seriously, you don’t win wars by playing by the rules. You win by changing them.
I thought most Vietnam sorties were flown from land bases.
Oh, another thing came to mind. The Swedish navy loaned out the Sterling engined HMS Gotland to the US Navy (under a Swedish crew) for adversarial practice in 2005. She managed to sneak into a battle group (during the exercise, so no cheating), snap several pictures of the USS Ronald Reagan through her periscope and then leave undetected.
Let me repeat this once again for emphasis:
Sweden can sink a US aircraft carrier.
You do raise valid issues, but this is just absolute nonsense. Pure fiction.
US carriers are the premier means of force projection in the world at this time by a very, very large margin. What do you think even comes close?
And of COURSE China is interested when carriers are around. They are buying several aircraft carriers for the same damn reason we have them.
As far as naming one “ongoing” conflict in which power projection has had any impact, carriers have been tremendously engaged in Afghanistan right up until the last year or so, when airpower has been a lesser and lesser piece of the counterinsurgency strategy. Link. The initial attack on Afghanistan would have been impossible without carriers. Carriers were a decisive measure in the 1996 Taiwan Straits crisis. Carriers have been invaluable in humanitarian relief missions such as Haiti and the 2005 tsunami.
It’s ridiculous to attempt to describe aircraft carriers as being of not much use – as in, their power projection capabilities are “overrated.” Their power is incredible. The valid question is to what degree this incredible power is vulnerable, like whether a super-heavyweight boxer has a glass jaw. Glass jaw or not, the punch is going to hurt. A lot.
This is irrelevant to the thread. The question is not whether they are useful currently or in the recent past (they obviously have been); the thread is about whether they will continue to be in the forseeable future, and by extension whether it is a prudent investment to keep building a new one every 4 years at $15 billion each as is planned.
As has been noted, battleships were the premier means of force projection, right up until the time when they weren’t. We’re trying to think about the next war.
Also, note that China (and everyone else) are only building smaller VSTOL carriers. The 100,000-ton, 80-plane Supercarrier is a US-only item.
I thought the French had or were planning to build a full sized carrier. Not sure if they ever got it done, but I seem to recall that they were looking into it.
The bottom line is that only the US can really afford full sized supercarriers. Since that’s the case, I suppose they won’t be found or considered to be ‘obsolete’ until and unless the US gets into a major war with some country that actually has the means to get at and cripple or destroy one of our carriers. Until that happens, the carrier won’t be obsolete, because it will still be the main part of the US’s force projection capability. We already have planes that can fly from the US and hit targets on the other side of the world. But nothing we have is like moving a carrier task group into an area where we want the locals to get the message that the US cared enough to send the very best…
-XT
Depending on the outcome of the British general election next month, the Royal Navy may still stay in the game: Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carrier - Wikipedia
And xtisme is right - the French are thinking hard about it, too: Future French aircraft carrier - Wikipedia
It is relevant to the thread to the extent that another poster claimed that carriers have been irrelevant for more than a century. (!)
My question about what IS the premier means of force projection is also relevant, since the general trend of opinion in this thread is that UAVs will fill that bill instead of carriers.
The risk with this view is that I would bet dollars to donuts if we asked the same cohort about the future of war in 1991, there would be a strong view that air power is the future of warfare, and that the days of ground warfare is waning. Twenty years later, we can scoff at that notion.
UAVs can do a great many things, and they will become more and more capable over time. But the idea that they are going to in any way take on the mantle of the weapons system for projecting power over the next 100 years just is not realistic in any way for me. UAVs can sense, they can loiter, they can attack, but they just don’t appear to be very good in terms of denying access to the enemy.
The heart of power projection is the ability to deny the enemy the ability to control movement and access to critical areas. Battleships did that, and carriers now did that – they were masters of whatever territory they held, and could reach out and touch the bad guys from there.
Despite the vulnerabilities of carriers, I just can’t figure out how UAVs are ever going to control territory (whether ground, sea, sky or space), in the way a carrier battle group does the sea it is in. It just doesn’t add up.
So, once again, if not the carrier, then what is going to replace it for force projection?
No, I said that gunboat diplomacy is irrelevant. This in my mind is not equivalent with force projection. To clarify, my definition of gunboat diplomacy is the act of moving a large capital ship into foreign harbor in order to make a veiled threat. If I was China, and I had a couple of hundred ASMs trained at your gunboat, I’d mostly be thankful that you just gave me a nice juicy target to hit.
UAVs, in conjunction cruise missiles (and possibly kinetic energy weapons, if they become feasable) will have in my opinion far better force projection capabilities than manned aircraft in general and carrier based aircraft in particular, without the risk.
Soooo… carriers have never sailed into a harbor to make a threat, so they are irrelevant?
Does the fact that carriers were never meant to sail into a harbor to threaten a country make any difference to you?
Honestly, it’s like saying that cars are irrelevant because we haven’t used buggy whips for 100 years. There’s serious leaps in logic there.
And yet, when things periodically heat up between China and Taiwan, we move a carrier task group into the area and China takes note of that and acts accordingly. So…perhaps they know something you don’t? Just a thought.
No…they don’t actually project force at all. If they did, then we wouldn’t have needed or used carriers for the last 50 odd years, since our air force and ballistic missiles have been quite capable of hitting targets anywhere in the world during that period. For more precision, we’ve had subs with the ability to launch Tomahawks for decades now, and bombers that could drop smart bombs on a target the size of a window for about the same period.
None of these things project American power like a carrier task group. Until you have something ELSE that can actually PROJECT US military power (presuming this is something you actually wish to continue to do), UAV’s simply won’t replace carriers.
-XT
Of course carriers weren’t meant to be sailed into harbor, it was a figure of speech in reference to the classic idiom of gunboat diplomacy. And if you read my original statement, I never called carriers toothless, as little as I’d say that of a battleship. But battleships are, like carriers, dated designs whose expense, manpower and risk to he same manpower don’t justify the jobs they’re meant to do. So indeed, with modern evolution in ASM and naval tactics, carriers and other capital ships don’t represent the political force they once were.
So explain to me how having a huge vessel with 6000 souls and 90 manned fixed wing aircraft and helicopters, that is enough of a sitting duck that a Swedish submarine could sink it and get away, is superior to a multitude of dirt cheap barges launching unmanned UAVs capable of making the same presence and laying far more and accurate firepower?
If it comes to blows though, that carrier and most of the people on it are dead in the water. It’s not the carrier the Chinese respond to, it’s the intent shown by moving it. I think you’d reach the same result with an armed rowboat. The Chinese know full and well where the hurt would be coming from, and any opponent which didn’t probably wont respond to force projection anyway (such as Iraqi insurgents).
You do realize that you might as well be arguing for keeping battleships around a while longer?
I stand (kind of) corrected. The Frog boat is 3/4, and the Limey tub 2/3 the displacement of a Nimitz.
Of course, it’s a moot point; everyone was building battleships in 1939, too.
So, we use them because they’re not obsolete, and they’re not obsolete because we stillin use them? :dubious:
Again; this is NOT about NOW. It is about anticipating near-future trends. It is about whether we ought to be laying down hulls tomorrow for ships to be completed in 2025.
Barely. That kind of very-long-range strike capacity is new, and it is only now just becoming practically worthwhile. But because it is a new technology, we can expect great improvements in it in the near future. That is the reality we’re dealing with, that at some point in the very future we will be able to launch drones, have them fly anywhere, and hover more or less indefinitely, with none of the risks or expense of sending 20 ships and crew on a six-month cruise.
Cause a few dozen drones flying overhead 24/7 won’t bother them at all. :dubious:
- I don’t know how ground and space got in here; nobody said a word about them.
- The continued ability of carriers to efficiently control a given section of sea or sky against 21st century technology is exactly what is at issue here.
In the near future, China is going to have the resources to send 100 ASMs as well as a half-dozen nuclear submarines at that carrier, all at once. If they get just one hit, it’s severely damaged. Multiple hits and she might sink.
You’re blurring all kinds of distinctions here. Having a B-52 that can fly 3000 miles, bomb and return, or having an ICBM, or having a million-dollar-each-shot Tomahawk is not the same as a small, cheap drone that can fly 4000 miles, sit on station for hours or even days at a time undetected, get eyes on target, and deliver a precision payload.
And to belabor the metaphor, … there were Aircraft Carriers in the 1920s, but people were still building Battleships until 1943.
Perhaps this thread would be well-served by banning the term “force projection.” Since it seems different people define that term differently, and speak in terms of specific missions. What, exactly, is it that only a carrier will be able to do (or best do) against the threats of 2025-2050?
Then why did we just spend $800 million to rehab the USS Enterprise, the only ship with 8 nuclear reactors?