Could terrorists get a bunch of mini-subs like these rig them up with high explosives & take out a US carrier group in port with Kamikaze with attacks from below?
While not impossible, I would think it unlikely. Minisubs are nothing new; they were used extensively in WW2. Along with torpedo boats, they were experiments to see if a lot of small cheap vessels could inflict disproportionate losses on large expensive vessels. Short answer: no. Their range is more limited than larger vessels, and carrier groups today have extensive antisubmarine screening. A more worrisome prospect would be terrorists hiding antiship missiles on a bunch of fishing boats.
This is the significant point. I’ve heard it said that a carrier group typically includes a nuclear attack sub to deal with underwater threats. In the face of that, a “toy” submarine isn’t likely to avail much.
A sub like that might get thrown around in the prop wash of the carrier, but other than placing a limpet mine or two on the carrier hull , probably not. The better way is the japanese suicide torpedo from world war two.
Declan
I’m sure a carrier would be protected from mini-sub attack. Carriers are the best-defended ships that ever sailed. I’ll bet you couldn’t get a minisub within a mile of one.
I think most people are skipping the words “in port” in the OP.
When I was in San Diego last year I saw two carriers come & go. Once the ship was against the dock, a protective barrier made of large bouys (sausages 75’ long & 20’ high linked end-to-end) was pulled around the ship a couple hundred yards out from the pier. I couldn’t tell if it had a sub net hanging from it, but it wouldn’t be hard to do.
Patrol boats zipped back & forth constantly both inside & outside the barrier. Whether they had active sonar running or not I don’t know. But they could have. Divers & trained dolphins are also used, at least in some circumstances.
So is such an attack attempt possible? Sure. But is it likely, and likely to succeed? Nope.
If nothing else, a terrorist is gonna get a lot more bang for his buck blowing up part of shopping mall & killing 100 soccer moms & precious children than he will blowing up part of a ship & killing 100 swabbies. And the mall is a MUCH softer target.
Had Al Qaeda had its crap together after 9/11, a bunch of suburban shopping malls would have had bombs go off during the 2001 shopping frenzy on Thanksgiving weekend. We’d still be trying to recover from the ensuing economic depression.
Let’s not get into the ‘How I would have done 9-11.’ I think we did it once here and people are much, much too smart. Some real easy scary stuff.
(Still mine was the most scary.)
I reckon a full on strike with a two or three torpedos is very unlikely to sink one of these carriers.
When you think of the damage that carriers took during WWII and they stayed afloat, and fighting, and then imagine something with up to three times the tonnage.
As a one hit weapon, I can’t imagine anything much short of a nuke would take one out.
And that’s after you have found some way to actually detect the carrier and find a delivery system.
A mini sub wont cut it.
The execrably bad Nimitz Class by a truly awful author who will thank me for not naming him has the destruction of a US aircraft carrier by a sub-launched nuke.
You are right - I somehow missed that.
And I think you dealt accurately with the in-port threat.
Not me , I just outright ignored it for the reasons that you mentioned. Tagging a Carrier has probably been done to death in the naval academy alone to warrant preventative steps such as the ones you mentioned.
Open water is a different kettle of fish and having a flotilla of these things bobbing around in the path of a carrier is possible but not likely, same with boghammmers flitting about trying to put a stinger into an open elevator bay , and having it detect a heat sig.
Declan
I’m no expert, but the lethality of torpedoes has gone up a lot more in the last 60 years than the survivabliity of ships.
The submarine folks are quite confident they can destroy carrier-sizd enemy vessels with one or two shots. And if their employment doctrine is anything like air-to-air missile doctrine, with which I AM familiar, the second shot is almost entirely to cover for a clean miss or malfunction by the first round. It’s not there to add more destruction to that caused by a valid hit by the first weapon.
Now whether a minisub can carry a suitable weapon depends on your defenition of a minisub. I’ve seen them range from 120 foot North Korean machines manned by (IIRC) 4 crewmen down to things little larger than bathtubs which are more like underwater tugs for one man in scuba gear & one mine than subs.
There is also the question of what constitutes “destroy”. If by destroy you mean “shred into thousands of small parts”, yes, then only a nuke will do.
If at the other extreme you mean “stop them from fighting for a couple hours so you can pull off something else without their interference”, anything that starts a good fire or cases listing beyond, say, 10 degrees will prevent air operations for a cople of hours until the crew regains control of the situation aboard. In milspeak this is a “mission kill” or M-Kill.
In between there are many other flavors of kill. The USS Cole was not destroyed as a physical artifact, but it was certainly destroyed as a weapon. It couldn’t move or shoot until X hundred million dollars & Y thousand man-hours were expended on repairs after it was dry-docked back to the US. 3 years later it went on its next operational patrol.
What if “destroy” means to sink one in open water?
I read in wikipedia that the Mark-48 torpedo used by the USN works by detonating under the keel of the ship (refer to quote).
This would seem to suggest that, if a single torpedo isn’t enough to create the desired effect underneath a carrier, then not only would several be needed but several all timed to explode at the same time.
I have no special knowledge about torpedoes or anti-carrier warfare, I was just deducing from the text in wiki. Please set me straight if I’m off the mark with this.
From what I understand regarding the matter, and this is speaking as a layman rather than one of those knowledgable folks, is that the torpedo detonates beneath the keel as described at a certain depth , this for example could be a hundred feet under the keel of the ship and this creates a displacement of water.
Since the target ship is designed to support its weight by displacing water , then the effect is that the ship has gone from displacing water , to displacing air and the ship litterally breaks in half.
Hopefully i said that right
Declan
That is the way I understood it as well. So does my reasoning that, if one torpedo can’t displace enough water to break a carrier in half then several would be required (with them all ‘displacing’ at the same time) hold any (ahem) water?
I dont think so based on believing that the torpedos would be fired in a sequence thats balanced against the target doing evasive maneuvers as well as not causing fraticide among the follow on torps.
Declan
So are you saying that one torpedo CAN sink a carrier alone or that a succession of them would be required?
It doesn’t seem like a succession of torpedoes would work if a single one can’t.
Bear in mind that the only people who would probably know are not saying, every time there has been whats called a sinkex or a sink exercise envolving an aircraft carrier , it has always been classified.
Had this occured in the cold war , the soviets probably would have used a nuclear tipped torpedo , instead of conventional ones. But had the sub only had conventional torpedos then they probably would have fired all tubes and hoped for the best.
Another factor is that the carrier could possibly out run a torpedo since the top speed has also been classified. Most torpedos I imagine can do up to 70 knots in a sprint, but the majority being older is probably in the range of 50 to 60 knots.
So its not out of the question that the firing points of the torpedo spread will vary.
So in ansewer to your question, I believe that it would take a sucession of torpedos but I have no credentials that would back that up.
Declan