I think that’s exactly what we’re debating.
What on earth makes you think that we can build UAVs that will travel for thousands of miles, be stealthy, loiter for a long time, have a large payload, be small, be stealthy, have a lot of them, and have them be cheap? The closest thing we currently have to what you’re talking about is a Global Hawk, and that’s rather slow, not stealthy, has little payload, and costs about $120 million each, or the F-22, which is manned, but has no loiter, and costs about the same amount.
Even if we look out 20, 30, or 50 years, the axiom (I forget exactly how it goes) will still remain: we can make things cheap, sturdy, or quickly, but you can only choose one of those attributes. There is no doubt we are going to see great technological improvements, but if you want something to fly a long ways, it’s going to be slow; if you want it to carry a lot of stuff, it can’t fly a long way; if you want to build something with tons of technology on it, it can’t be cheap.
It’s also still puzzling that for all the threats you talk about to a carrier, that you do not seem to acknowledge that the threats to UAVs are much, much greater. Even today against an unsophisticated enemy, we still lose Predator drones occasionally. And we’re not even talking about an enemy with a sophisticated integrated air defense system! And keep in mind that IADS are much more mature and much more proliferated technology than anti-ship ballistic missiles.
A carrier will probably carry a mixed wing of manned aircraft for air-to-air and some strike missions, and a handful of unmanned combat aerial vehicles (sorta like this) for other strike and electronic attack missions. A carrier battle group will continue to provide persistent, robust, and comprehensive intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance through sea- and air-based sensors. A battle group will have good and increasing levels of ballistic missile defense. A battle group will continue to own the surface and air within several hundred miles of it in lesser-contested areas, although the risks will increase in more contested areas. A carrier battle group will continue to be a show of political force and resolve for the United States during political crises before any shooting starts. It’s forward presence will enable missions that include but are not limited to expeditionary warfare, amphibious warfare, humanitarian relief, securing sea lines of communication, and so on. A carrier battle group will continue to be a forward nerve center for command and control of significant numbers of ships and aircraft. It will be a platform for special operations forces for mission on land, and on and under the sea.
Is that enough?
One thing: all this stuff about how drones will make awesome air-to-air platforms because there won’t be human pilots in them being crushed is going to be increasingly irrelevant.
With high-degree off-boresight targeting, and, more importantly, beyond-visual-range weapons and stealth, maneuverability is less and less important. All those exercises where two F-22s defeat 10 F-15s? It’s not because they’re outmaneuvering them. It’s because they’ve launched their weapons before any of the F-15 pilots know they’re there.
In reference to the Swedish diesel-electric sinking a carrier in a wargame - The British carrier Ark Royal was sunk in actual war by a German diesel-electric sub during WWII. The carrier remained very effective during that war.
The incident in question really illustrates the effectiveness of those cheap little boats even to this day. I would say it’s a good argument that we need sub hunting tools to counter this threat. But, most diesel electrics are slow, opportunistic boats. They can’t pursue underwater for long, although they can linger in your path for a great while if they are in the right position first. If this weren’t true, then they would blunt the effectiveness of every surface ship, not just carriers.
Some of the newer d-e subs are quoting 2 weeks submerged and 700km ranges underwater, so their threat is presumably increasing a bit and in 50 years who knows? Its not like only aircraft might improve in drone capability after all.
But the real issue isn’t sinking one carrier as you said, its being able to credibly threaten multiple carriers, and thats more about a large increase in the military capability of an opponent of the US than carrier defeating technology alone Id have thought.
Otara
No, I don’t believe that’s the case. If it comes to combat, then I think that a carrier task group will probably be able to hold it’s own, actually. And I also disagree with your other assertion…it certainly IS the carriers that the Chinese respond to. Oh, to be sure, it’s also the rest of the body behind the fist that is the carrier task group, but they certainly are thinking about the fist part as well. It’s one of the things they would have to think about if they were going to make a play for Taiwan, after all.
The thing is, where I think you and the others who are on your ‘side’ of this debate (such as the OP) are wrong is that you are underrating just how powerful a US Navy carrier task group really is. Alone, it’s got the localized power not only to defend itself from anyone out there today, but to project that power anywhere in the world. Where you (and the OP) are quasi-correct is that the things are so damned expensive that it’s hard to risk them, and if we ever DID get into a real shooting war and someone DID manage to hurt or even sink one of the supercarriers, that it would seriously put into question the concept of putting so many eggs in such a big basket. My guess though is that the ROLE of the carrier is simply too important to just do away with it entirely. So, what we might get is smaller, less capable but also less expensive carriers to do the same role but that could be risked more easily. But, IMHO, the role will continue as long as the US remains a military superpower. After we finally go quietly into that good night though? No idea. I guess it will depend on what the next great military superpowers goals are, and whether power projection on a global scale are part of those goals. If it’s China (something I seriously doubt, despite the fact that folks on this board seem to think they are the only contender), then I doubt they will want to project military power outside their borders in the same way the US does, so they probably won’t build a large carrier (or even regular blue water convention) fleet.
No, because battleships were very expensive AND they were less capable. Which is why they were replaced by carriers, which were more capable and could project power more effectively and over greater distances. Battleships were always meant to mainly be used against other nations battlefleets, to essentially be able to dominate the seas, protect shipping while also facilitating commerce raiding against one’s opponents. In the end though, they were simply to expensive (both in terms of money to build, maintain, and in terms of personnel to man) to risk, and they weren’t flexible or powerful enough to fulfill the role that the US needed.
It’s not moot at all, because in 1939 (and even later) battleships still served a purpose. They were far from obsolete, since they still fulfilled several vital roles. It’s only that their primary role had shifted from being the center around which a battlefleet was built, to a more supporting role. That was the case even later on. The only difference was that carriers were flexible enough to take over both the primary and many of the secondary roles a battleship fulfilled, and since battleships were so expensive they were phased out (though we periodically brought our battleships back into service, because some of those secondary roles were still best served by our battleships until fairly recently…and, in fact, if the damn things weren’t so expensive to maintain and weren’t so crew intensive we would probably STILL be using the things even today).
Um…no. We use them because they still fulfill a vital role in our military, and they fulfill that role so we still use them. As long as the US is in the power projection game we will still need to fulfill that role, so we’ll need SOMETHING that does the job. Thus far nothing we have and nothing on the horizon will meet that need like a carrier does.
We have that NOW. So, why don’t we just get rid of the carriers today, ehe? Seriously, we can fly planes out of US air fields today that can strike targets anywhere in the world…and we’ve been able to do that for DECADES now. Ever seen a B-52? Well, since we’ve had that capability, why did we need carriers all that time??
Russia had that capability when they were the old USSR. So what? For one thing, I don’t subscribe to the Magic China theory, where they are going to all be 10 feet tall and covered in dark curly hair. China isn’t even close to what our capabilities were a decade ago…and I don’t see them catching up any time soon. But even if they do catch up, what of it? Carriers will STILL fulfill the role of power projection for the US even if China can demonstrate without question that they can blow a carrier task group out of the water any time they want. Why? Well, because not all countries will attain the near mythic capabilities of our Chinese adversaries, for one thing…just like when it was the US and USSR not everyone could do what the USSR supposedly could. For another thing, the US won’t necessarily BE in an adversarial position with China…in fact, I seriously doubt we well be if China continues down the path they seem to be on right now. Lastly, even if China can demonstrate that they can blow away a carrier task group, and even if they do become adversaries to the US, they would have to be in a nearly overwhelmingly superior military position to actually threaten to actually pull the trigger, since if they weren’t, even if they managed to sink said carrier task group they would still get hammered when the REST of the US military was unleashed on them. We’d be back to the whole MAD thingy, which means that the carriers are still going to be useful on the global game board.
No, I’m not. You are projecting magic technology into the future. You are saying that in 50 years we’ll have small, cheap drones that can do all the stuff that presently takes expensive equipment to do. Here’s the rub. How do you fly a ‘small, cheap drone’ 4000 miles and have it sit on station for hours or days without the enemy detecting it? How do you get those precision munitions to be both accurate enough to matter AND cheap? How do you do this while still presumably keeping humans in the loop? Or do you send said drone out (with it’s magic cheap stealth technology that cloaks it from the enemy) and let it decide if it should fire or not?
And even if you could do this (and I concede that we probably WILL have the technology to make drones that can do everything but the ‘cheap’ part of your scenario), how is this power projection? Like I said, we can do stuff like that NOW, and have been able to do so for literally decades. It’s not power projection…it’s just another way to kill a lot of people if we decide to do so. You seem to think that those two things are the same, but they really aren’t. That’s why we don’t use subs to project power globally, even though presumably everyone knows that we COULD just pop up a sub and wipe out an airfield…or a city…if that’s what we wanted to do.
And to kick that horse when it’s down, that’s because battleships were still fulfilling a vital role in 1943. And for a country that could afford it, they were still fulfilling a role in the '60’s as well. And in the '70’s and '80’s. And we used the things even in the first Gulf War. Why? Because the role they filled was still necessary, and they were still good at filling it.
Until you can come up with something that can actually fulfill the role that a carrier task groups fulfills for the US in our global power projection strategy they will still be around. And I don’t see ANYTHING that is going to change that short of the US going economically tits up and simply not being able to afford to sustain enough military budget to keep the things in service. Granted, that COULD happen, but I doubt it’s going to happen in 50 years.
And if it DOES happen, I think that other countries will probably be forced to build their own carriers if they don’t have the US Navy to hide behind anymore (or in their way anymore). Right now most it doesn’t pay for any country to even try to build up to go head to head with the US (Navy or otherwise), because, frankly, we are in a league of our own. The Soviets briefly tried, but they couldn’t even come close. Anyone who is allied to the US doesn’t NEED a big navy…after all, we have one already, so why not save the money? The China’s and India’s aren’t going to do it (though IIRC, India actually DOES have a few carriers of it’s own) because it would take literally trillions to get into the game on the same level we currently have. But if the US suddenly (or even over time) left a large power vacuum because we couldn’t support our military anymore? I’m pretty sure that while those jockeying to fill that void would build drones galore (as we will), if they REALLY want to get into the power projection game on a global scale, they will be building some kind of carrier based Navy, along with all the other goodies that we currently have and no one else does.
Anyway, sorry for the long, rambling and probably less than coherent rantage above…I’ve been working on a bunch of stuff in my room and occasionally putting down my thoughts on this thread for hours, and I’m to tired (and lazy) to go back and edit my stream of conscious postage, so just going to put it out there as is and then bow out of the thread. What it really boils down to, IMHO, is the role for the US that carriers play in our geo-political strategies. And that role isn’t going to go away as long as the US wants to project power in the way we current do. Nor will drones, regardless of how capable they get, fill that role. More likely, drones will make things like manned bombers/fighters or (perhaps) submarines ‘obsolete’, since they are more suited to filling THOSE roles in our (and other countries) military OOB.
-XT
Even if those air independent diesels are living up to the life support issues, that the quoted two weeks submerged gives, they don’t have the speed advantage of the fast attack nukes.
Otherwise , the AIP sub is still a mobile mine field
Declan
I dont think the Big E has had 8 reactors since the 80’s, last I heard , at least back then was that the 8 powerplants were pulled and two Nimitz class reactors were installed.
The 800 million probably covered the refueling of the reactors and service lifetime extension programs, ala new radars, better software and so forth.
Declan
I’m sceptic. I’m not sure of what mean speed a carrier group keeps at sea, but running with the example of the HMS Gotland, she makes 20 knots submerged and can keep down there for two weeks without raising her snorkel. Naturally she won’t have the endurance or power of a nuke, the difference is that she is simple enough in technology and material to be built by a mostly harmless country of barely nine million people up in the barren wastes of northern Europe (yes, I live there). She is simple enough to run and maintain for any 3rd world country who can afford the diesel fuel, and the Swedes have historically have no trouble whatsoever selling arms to belligerent 3rd world countries.
And let me repeat this. The Gotland ‘sunk’ the USS Ronald Reagan in a war game. Not in a one in a million shot of having run in to her in blue water, but the carrier group was tracked down, penetrated, had embarrassing pictures taken and left none the wiser. What makes you think that a fleet of these subs wouldn’t make short work of US power projection? How much more of a realistic exercise do you require?
This was the first time I’d heard anybody say the Enterprise had had a reactorectomy so I looked and could find no mention of that at these three websites:
the official Enterprise website, Navy.mil and Wikipedia,
none of which mention what would have been an enormous engineering and infrastructure undertaking.
Why yes, I served aboard the Enterprise in the mid-80s and am interested in her. 
Actually, at least for the US Navy, all of the battleships were mothballed shortly after the Korean war in the mid '50s and weren’t re-activated until Reagan’s 600 ship navy idea in the early-80s (with the one exception of the USS New Jersey, an Iowa-class battleship that was re-activated in 1968 and de-activated again in 1969). Per Wiki, when the New Jersey was re-activated in 1968, she was only battleship in the world on active status.
They didn’t really serve much of a purpose in the '80s except as prestige items. The fact that they were outfitted with missiles after being re-activated demonstrated how obsolete they were, particularly since their 16 inch guns were not as accurate as missiles can be and the guns required a lot of parts and maintenance that missiles/launchers do not.
Let me make a comparison. The US now has fielded the F-22, which in some exercises has racked up unbelievable kill ratios like 144 to zero. Cite. Does that mean that other countries should stop fielding fighters because they are too expensive and obsolete?
Nobody is saying that there are not threats to aircraft carriers. The question is to what degree the threats can be mitigated. Anti submarine warfare is a huge focus of the Navy, and I would suspect that the whole reason the wargame was used was to develop new technologies to better detect those submarines. How efficient those technologies are today is probably highly classified, but the idea that the wargame has conclusively and irrefutably demonstrated that a carrier battle group can never deal with submarine threats and are therefore obsolete just isn’t true.
Remember in 1991 when stealth aircraft were basically invincible? Nobody could detect them and they could bomb any target, no matter what the air defenses? Did things stay like that?
No. In 1999 the Serbians shot down a stealth fighter, and there’s been ample news articles that many countries have developed new techniques to detect stealthy aircraft. Just like ASBMs or diesel subs are a threat now because offensive technology currently has an advantage, I have little doubt that the pendulum will swing and defensive technology will be developed to counter those threats. Perhaps not fully, but enough to counter the idea some keep proposing that carriers are “sitting ducks.”
Your cite doesn’t say anything about 144-0 kill ratios. I’ve seen lots of mentions of 12-0 and 20-0 and numbers like that, though.
Fifth graph: "In amassing 144 kills to no losses during the first week of the joint-service Northern Edge exercise in Alaska last summer, only three air-to-air “kills” were in the visual arena–two involving AIM-9 Sidewinders and one the F-22’s cannon. "
Ah, I see it now.
It still remains to be seen whether it could go 144-0 against the various 4th-and-a-half Russian aircraft currently being deployed, and especially the PAK FA aircraft under development, though.
Well, that’s entirely my point. Just because the F-22 is formidable now, doesn’t mean it will always be so. Just because diesel subs and ASBMs are dangerous now, doesn’t mean they will always be a threat that cannot be countered.
Again, nobody has argued that carrier battle groups are forever more going to enjoy the invulnerability they enjoyed for many decades. What I’m saying is that the present existence of a threat does not automatically mean we have to throw the CSG on the ash pile of history, because we will develop countermeasures to those threats. Not 100% will work every time countermeasures, but the equation will change again.
Yes, but the fact that we can react to changing circumstances doesn’t mean the carrier will not be obsolete. Its predecessor, the battleship, is a case in point, as noted above.
I think the real question here is why the Russians are bothering to develop a fifth-generation fighter; the roots of the PAK FA are in a 1980s air superiority fighter requirement, much like those of the F-22.
Most of the cost will probably be borne by India, as has been the case with the last ten years’ worth of Russian fighter development. India gets 250 fighters which can presumably kill Pakistani F-16s as easily as the F-22. But what does Russia get, other than keeping its fighter technology up to date? A navalized version of the aircraft is supposedly going to be built, but they’re only going to have one carrier to put it on. What’s the point?
Yes, the Gotland can do 20 Knots on its batteries. It’s AIP, however, can only do 5. Surfaced, it can do 11. That’s about the equivalent of a type XXI from WWII. I am sure it’s a far more liveable and survivable sub, but it’s not much faster.
I am not sure what speed the Nimitz’s group can travel at, but the ship can do 31 Knots itself. If it knew a Gotland was in the area, and it wanted to run, it could. I have an unnatural love for diesel submarines. If they were really the trump card some would like them to be, I’d be ecstatic. They aren’t, though.
Personally, I’d see if there was an SSN in the neighborhood and just have them take care of the problem.
-XT
The USS Enterprise (CVN-65) still has eight reactors. There are no plans to switch her to a Nimitz-style two-reactor design, which would also require replacement of her eight engine rooms, 32 steam generators, etc., etc.
It’s not going to happen. It would be simpler to just scrap the ship.
Similar concerns were noted when the U.S. Navy recommissioned the old Iowa-class battleships. Their antiquated engineering plants were very manpower-intensive, which made them very expensive to operate. However, it was cost-prohibitive to replace the engineering plants. This was a major factor in decommissioning them again.