What the fuck, dude? They’re just another kind of aircraft. They aren’t fucking magic, ok? They’re actually MORE limited than manned aircraft in that they don’t have someone inside them who would have greater visual scanning capability than mounted cameras, they generally aren’t maneuverable or capable of dog-fighting, and they can be taken down simply by being jammed.
The Truman is a Nimitz-class carrier, and we don’t make them anymore. The next US Navy carrier class will be named after Gerald R. Ford.
And I’m not sure there is a UAV that can carry enough missiles to sink a carrier - unless you want to outfit mini-nukes in the warheads. The Nimitz’s can take a lot of damage before they sink. And the ECM and escorts that surround a single carrier would prevent anything from getting close enough to scratch the paint.
China is going to make the same mistakes other countries have made with aircraft and aircraft carriers. They are on some kind of vanity kick as far as I am concerned, but hey it’s their money or is it?
Perhaps we are financing this movement to airpower at sea with our borrowing money that pays the interest on the national debt, uh?
The USN has made a few mistakes with ammunition exploding on carriers on station in the South China Sea during the Vietnam war with disastrous results of lose of life. They also had nuclear weapons on board for the Vigilante aircraft. Thank God we never had to use them.
They will have their accidents too and learn from their mistakes. Right now they just want us to follow them around with our submarines and catch us watching them. It’s an on going cat and mouse routine that never stops.
Did you know that way back in the 1950’s and even the early sixties that Russia did not believe we (meaning the USA and the USN) could launch and retrieve aircraft on aircraft carriers while on duty at sea in the middle of the night?
Russia had their diesel submarines follow our aircraft carriers around the globe to get pictures of our actually launching and retrieving aircraft at night.
I’m sure someone somewhere in some book or another has reported this too, but my information comes from knowing a spook (called a CT) in the USN who told me this.
I think it’s interesting that China bought its first carrier from the Ukraine, which probably happened when Ukraine realized it had no fucking need for a carrier at all. 
They can buy Thailand’s, which also doesn’t need one. It’s termed an “oversized royal yacht.” It eats up a ton of money in maintenance. They take it out once a month or so to help train cadets. Otherwise it sits in port. Thai tourists can board it for photo ops, but foreigners aren’t allowed.
And Ukrains corrupt leaders realized they could skim off a bit of the $20 million+ that Ukraine got paid.
That is a common theme in governments when they do ‘privatization’ of public resources.
As I love someone who just handwaves away an argument with this sort of silly response. Well, if that’s all you have to say then your unsupported assertion is duly noted. I will await breathlessly the obsolescence of our carrier fleet by UAVs any day now. 
A couple thoughts in response to nevadaexile:
Hellfires have a small warhead; less than 20 pounds. Most anti-ship missiles have warheads around 500 pounds. It is not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong, to assert that 2 or 4 Hellfires are a significant anti-ship threat. Missiles of that class have a range of a few miles, maybe 5 at the most: that means that they are a decent weapon against small boats, but terrible against commercial or military ships. Hellfires are underpowered, underarmed, and not stealthy enough to be used against any modern naval target.
Next, the Global Hawk has no capacity to carry such kinds of weapons. They are probably unsuitable to carry any weapons: it flies so high that I frankly doubt that the rocket motors on a Hellfire could withstand the environmental stress of starting at normal surface temperatures, flying around at -40 degrees for 20 hours, and then returning to normal temperatures. I bet you anything that the motors would quickly develop cracks which could result in catastrophic damage if they were to be fired in that condition… in this case, “catastrophic” means “boom.”
Also, the Predator and Global Hawk are simply sitting ducks for any air defense system. They aren’t stealthy, they have no self-defense capabilities, and we probably wouldn’t even know they were being targeted before they erupted in a ball of flame.
You suggested the Guam would be a good place for UAVs to operate from in order to threaten Chinese ships. Well, it isn’t. Not at all. Andersen AFB is a target that doesn’t move at all, and would almost certainly be severely damaged and unusable if hostilities broke out. Plus, it’s about 2,000 miles to go from Guam to Hong Kong, meaning that a Predator would have to fly for about 9 or 10 hours to get into a position to shoot at a ship that’s anywhere near China, meaning that each Predator mission would involve flying to a place for 9 hours, orbiting for maybe 1 or 2 hours, tops, and then turning around and heading back. The Global Hawk would be a little better, but basically we have no UAV that’s suited to what you suggest.
UAVs simply don’t have the capability you think they do. Perhaps many years in the future they will be ideal, but it’s going to be at least 10 years before they are even minimally effective weapons carriers for this type of mission.
Relying on satellite tracking to blindly find the exact location of a carrier fleet in the Pacific is like me relying on google maps to go find a specific red-bricked house somewhere in New Jersey.
I don’t think I have a fair understanding of aircraft nor the history of modern warfare, and I fail to see how China’s history comes into play but I can say that even in my limited layman’s opinion that you’re overlooking a TON of stuff in your assertion that carriers are obsolete.
Some of which are:
- There are uses for having carriers other than to engage the US in war
- Drones with missiles, or even a fleet of drones with missiles from a land base cannot replicate those uses.
- You’re setting the definition of carrier to be singular and static when in actuality carriers don’t exist in a vacuum but rather with a support fleet around them, and the technology of which is advancing along with UAV tech.
- You’re insulting posters rather than addressing the issues. It’s not about WHO is right but WHAT is right.
Just a thought, not a sermon.
A couple of thoughts:
Neither cruise missiles nor UAVs are new concepts. UAVs saw use in the Vietnam War and World War II. Cruise missiles were infamously used in World War II but somewhat less known is that they have been around in some form since World War I.
Also, on the topic of countries that have carriers which don’t need them, I like to bring up Argentina, a country that has no carrier but which does have a carrier aviation program. They used to have one, but had to sell it due to expense. Other countries let them use their carriers to train on from time to time. The idea is that if they are able to afford one later, they won’t have to rebuild their entire program from scratch.
As mentioned above, Hellfires simply lack the capabilities and payload to inflict significant damage on a major warship, assuming they managed to land a hit, or even get off the launch rails before the aircraft they are mounted on gets swatted by Anti-Air or CAP. Any missile that hopes to threaten an aircraft carrier has to have a range measured in the hundreds of miles, or be protected by it’s own escorting force to deal with the carrier’s aircraft (you know, the entire reason the carrier is there to begin with).
You’d want at least a Harpoon missile, but then that thing weighs about 10 or 15 times as much as a Hellfire. That will penalize the aircraft’s range, meaning you need a more capable aircraft to carry it. Everything that flies, be it plane, blimp, or swallow, has a maximum payload of all it can carry. Equipment, crew, payload, and fuel all count against this weight limit. 1500 lbs of missile is 1500 lbs of fuel you will not be bringing along with you today, and that means the area this aircraft can be a threat in is reduced by that much.
An idle thought I had: Why don’t they just take old manned planes and set them up as combat UAVs? I know they can rig them as remote-piloted drones (QF-4 Phantoms and QF-16 Fighting Falcons get used in such a setup for target practice and other testing purposes). They already have the range and payload figured out, and if you don’t have to worry about getting the pilot back (and assuming the plane is already too old to have much long-term use) you could just make it a one-way trip and use the planes to soak up the enemy’s munitions.
Sensors, mainly. Any current manned aircraft would have to be outfitted with a ton (probably literally a ton) of sensors to maintain awareness of what’s happening around it in order for its capabilities to be at all useful.
Think about it: a Predator sees through a single soda straw, but it carries just enough equipment to be useful… but it carries that equipment in the air for a very long time.
A UCAV version of an F-16 starts off seeing less than a Pred does, carries a lot of equipment, but for an irrelevantly short period of time. Couple hours, max. It can’t mid-air refuel autonomously, so forget all those long CAPs that pilots fly over Afghanistan that require refueling. Plus, it would probably cost a lot of money to create a new combat system from scratch that would allow remote use of its weapons, and those dollars (in the aggregate) could either be used to buy more Predators or F-35s. It’s probably not a great use of funds to squeeze a little more life out of those airframes rather than just buy new stuff that actually does what you want it to do.
Another out-of-left-field idea; why not turn a surplus VTOL (or larger) carrier into the mother of all missile cruisers? Retrofit the decks and hangers with vertical launch missile tubes, line the decks with CWIS and medium- to -long-range anti-aircraft missile launchers, make arrangements for 6 to 10 ASW choppers, and set out to sea with a hundred tomahawk-equivalent missiles, maybe half as many anti-ship missiles, a screen of half a dozen destroyers, and there you go. No expensive individual fighters, no need for highly trained pilots, just a deep-water missile platform that can threaten anything within a few hundred miles of international waters. Sure, it’d be a big target, but not much more so than an aircraft carrier with an attendant battle group. If you want to get real froggy, include a half-dozen tubes to launch you new hypersonic carrier-killer missiles. Sure, subs can and do fill that role as well, but without nearly as much firepower, and visibility is a big part of gunboat diplomacy, so being easy to spot could be as useful to China as a U.S. supercarrier group is to us.
Too crazy?
Houses don’t move and are surrounded by similar objects; carriers do and aren’t. I suspect the day is not far distant - if it isn’t already here - that a satellite in synchronous orbit can look over a vast region of the ocean, note whatever isn’t water, and identify it. Once a carrier is found and its course and speed noted, there will be a finite area in which you can look for and find it again.
That would largely lose the advantage of a carrier.
If an anti-ship missile has a range of, say, 200NM and an airplane has a combat radius of 1000NM, only using the missile gives you range of 200NM whereas using the airplane carrying the missile gives you 1200NM. Therefore, you can attack ships that can’t attack you.
One of the main advantages of carriers is that instead of risking your ships and their crews, you’re risking airplanes and their pilots, which are much less of a loss.
I gotta call bullshit on this one. I was a Damage Controlman who served on an aircraft carrier.
In theory you could kill an elephant with a .22 rifle, but good luck with that.
For a bomb to reach the magazine hold it would have to go through the flight deck, the O3 level, the hanger bay, main deck, second deck, third deck and into the armor plating covering the fouth deck magazines. A lot of dead air and structure go through. Japanese bombers never managed to do it. Even the catastrophe of the USS Forrestal didn’t cause that much damage so deep.
(The Forrestal was off the coast of Viet Nam with a flight deck full of aircraft loaded for bear. After the initial fire started bombs and missles started to cook off causing multiple cascade explosions. A hole was eventually blown into the hanger bay aft. In no way shape or form was there a danger of the explosions coming any closer to the magazines.
The threat to the ship came when the core group of trained firefighters were blown off the flight deck and the rest were too scattered all over the ship to take charge. Well meaning but untrained guys sprayed too much water where it was unneeded and started to flood the ship. The smoke was a huge factor too. The Forrestal took a tremendous amount of self inflicted damage to prevent it from it’s primary mission of launching offensive aircraft but was never really in danger of sinking.)
As a result of lessons learned from 40 years ago is that carriers today are much better capable of isolation of smoke and AFFF [automated foam systems] to take a lot of the human error away. A huge shift as mentioned way above is that every single sailor aboard is now trained in the rudiments of Damage Control. I’ve done countless hours of that training myself. I’m not just a loyal guy beating the drum and towing the party line, but having lived it I cannot honestly see how a single bomb could take out a carrier.
Even the fuel tanks and compartments along the hull are small and honeycomed enough to absorb an absurd amount of damage without causing catastrophic failure. The idea of one missle or bomb sinking a carrier is a one in a million shot.
That all said I’ll keep on my rant that the phalnix systems on the carrier, let alone the anti missle systems on the escorts in the 100 mile bubble around the carrier make the idea of an airborn bomb getting close enough are laughable.
To be fair submarine based topedos are on the table. One would be a big owie, two in the same place cripiling, three amidships and all bets are off.
Well, yes, but the main threat of the design I posit are the land-attack missiles; the ASMs are simply for closer-in work and self defense. You would lose some of the flexibility of having fighter/bombers of course, but missile cruisers have been in service for a long time, with a mission of anti-shipping work and deep-interior strike TLAM missions, so it might be worth it to have so many missiles on one platform. Also, there’s no rule saying that tomahawk-equivalent missiles can’t be used in anti-ship roles, at extremely long ranges.
Besides, if China were to use it in the more confined spaces of the South China Sea, around Japan, etc. the range issues would essentially be rendered moot, at least against other local navies.
[QUOTE=Mr. Goob]
I gotta call bullshit on this one. I was a Damage Controlman who served on an aircraft carrier.
[/QUOTE]
It’s total bullshit. I never served on a carrier (mostly tin cans) but I doubt a Hell Fire could even take down a WWII carrier (golden BBs aside), let alone a modern super carrier. It’s a ridiculous assertion, despite his or her willingness to stand by it.
The discussion of converting a jeep carrier into a missile cruiser is kind of amusing, considering that aircraft carriers began life as heavily modified battlecruisers. The early attempts were something to behold, with features like a flight deck that only covered the forecastle of the ship, or full-length flight decks with the ship’s superstructure, masts, and smokestacks sticking out of the center of the flight deck.
It took a surprising amount of time for everyone to figure out that the best idea might just be to put a runway on top of a hull, without anything in the way of taking off or landing. You know, more or less how airfields on the ground are set up. 
That’s called an Arsenal ship, & it’s been discussed, & discarded. Too inflexible.
Ah - must have missed that discussion, sorry.