Chinese sub pops up in middle of U.S. Navy exercise
Chinese submarine stalks US carrier
Hard, but certainly not impossible, even with old diesel technology. The Russians have had their share of overflying our carriers, too.
And there is certainly a dedicated effort to find a way to effectively counter the carrier battle group threat.
IIRC, diesel subs are actually quieter than nuclear subs. Nuclear reactors have pumps for the cooling system and whatnot that make noise and can’t be turned off. Diesel/electric subs run on their batteries and electric motors when submerged which is quieter.
I don’t believe that’s true anymore. That was true if you compare early nuclear sub technology with modern diesel/electric, but at the tie that wasn’t the comparison, and it probably isn’t today, either.
To be fair, we are not in a shooting war with Russia or China. If a Russian TU-95 recce aircraft wanted to overfly a battlegroup, we are not gonna shoot it down.
The event with the Chinese sub, however, IMO, was embarrassing.
Yeah, I bet the US sailor that ordered the General’s Chicken with extra egg roll regretted it.
I think some folks OVER estimate the power of a nuke. Naval war vessels are built pretty tough.
If you dont have pretty good targeting and timing (or are just lucky), you’ll just scare the shit out of a lot of people, blind a few looking in the wrong direction at the wrong time, and mildly irradiate everyone. IMO technically speaking.
Upon further reflectin this applies to the Chinese sub as well. IF we had dectected it, we probably wouldnt have sunk it either. And we may actually HAVE detected it and let the Chinese think we didnt for good reasons.
A nuke attack on a Carrier group will work only once IMO. After THAT happens, the US will most likely adopt a “we will kill anything that gets close enough that we happen to detect and won’t even apologize for it” with “close enough” being pretty damn far away.
I think that if the battlegroup had detected the sub, the COMCARGRU commander would have parked one of the ASW ships over it to shadow it, and vectored the battlegroup off on a different course (unless they couldn’t, for flight Ops purposes, for example).
Commence to active pinging the sub to let them know we know they are there.
In Operation Crossroads, the (larger) ship hulls themselves held up relatively OK to nearby (within a mile) Hiroshima sized blasts, but anything on the exposed weatherdecks, and fragile stuff (like radar masts) took damage. The underwater blast was far more effective in sinking ships.
IMO, a Nuc would obtain a “sift kill”. That is, the effects on the crew itself (both from actual injuries and, just as importantly, the hit to their morale) would render a ship combat-inneffective if a Nuc exploded within a certain radius (a few miles?), depending on warhead size. Closer to the ship, of course, will still cause significant damage. On a carrier, I would expect a lot of secondary fires… from the planes and aircraft refueling equipment, for example, that would endanger the ship. (Imagine another Forrestal fire.)
I thought about this from an adversary’s perspective and figured, how hard would it be to make the US think I’m a Russian bomber? A couple pieces of transmitting gear unique to a Bear or any Soviet large aircraft, a dark, cloudy night to negate the vis ID from an intercept… all you’d need then is the location of the battle group, and the Chinese seem to have proven they can either track or figure out where our battlegroup will be.
This may seem like an unconventional way to attack, but that’s the name of the game nowadays.
OT: A False Flag operation forms the basis for the latest (conspiracy) theory behind the loss of the K-129. Soviet submarine K-129 (1960) - Wikipedia (Heh)
China, India, and now (at least potentially) Iran all have the capability to both pop up tactical surveillance satellites as well as field low detectability UAVs. And carrier groups are an EMCON nightmare; it doesn’t take very sophisticated signals detection and tracking capability to find a carrier.
On what basis would you make that argument? Carriers would last only as long as they were kept sufficiently far away from the field of engagement to be effectively out of range of enemy weapons, which would limit their utility. Post-Falklands, USN/RN doctrine in the North Atlantic region was limited to keeping carriers as far south as possible to provide coverage for merchant convoys but avoiding direct contact with RBNF or providing air coverage for coastal operations. On the Soviet Fleet side, surface sub killers would have been prosecuting US attack subs in the Baltic, Barrents, and North Atlantic while their attack subs would be running the SOSUS line and attempting to disrupt shipping.
Technically speaking, you have no idea what you are talking about. A 20 kT weapon (medium size “simple” boosted fission tactical small enough to fit in the payload envelope of a large tactical ballistic missile or cruise missile) in air burst mode (~10000 ft AGL) will have a 15 psi overpressure wave range of about 1/2 miles, 5 psi OPWR of 3/4 miles, and a 2 psi OPWR of about a mile and a half. To give this a legend, 15 psi would destroy marine craft and structures, 5 psi would severely damage any superstructure or exposed components, and 2 psi would severely injure or kill any exposed personnel. A larger thermonuclear “tactical” weapon like the W80 used in the AGM-86 ALCM and BGM-109 ‘Tomahawk’ with a maximum yield of around ~150 kT has OPWR of about 0.8, 1.5, and 2.6 miles respectively. This just considers blast effects, and doesn’t even account for thermal pulse and EM effects that may add substantially to damage in a near-miss detonation. Bear in mind as well that you don’t need to sink a carrier in order to disable it; an aircraft carrier that can’t conduct launch operations because of flight deck damage or inability to maintain speed is no longer a useful asset; it is a multi-billion dollar Christmas ornament bobbing around in mid-ocean.
For modern commercially available inertial guidance systems 1/2 mile would be a huge error, and at 10,000 feet is out of range of conventional shipboard close-in terminal-phase protection systems (CIWS). The RIM-161 Standard Missile 3, which is intended for shipboard defense against ballistic missile attacks, is a fairly well-tested and effective boost/mid-course phase interceptor but like any interception system it could potentially be overwhelmed by launching multiple weapons and/or decoys, and would not be effective against sea-skimming supercruise missiles or submersible mines and torpedoes.
In a real shooting war against a capable navy with standoff and submarine attack capability, an aircraft carrier is vulnerable and requires significant protection and distance. Against an opponent armed with and willing to use nuclear weapons and one or more effective delivery means (ballistic missile, supercruise missile, modern self-guiding long range torpedo, supercavitating torpedo) an aircraft carrier would be a sitting duck.
Stranger
I beg to differ, because my semi educated WAG was exactly that (without looking anything up), a few miles for the bigger nukes. A couple of miles range is just a few minutes traveling time for a carrier group.
If you are talking about first world nations with high powered THERMO nukes (or heaven forbid a bunch of em), good missiles or torpedo’s, good intel and targeting, and all out WW3. Hello Davy Jones.
A turd world nation that hopes they can get a 10kt nuke close enough to actually wipe out a Carrier with a high probablity of success? Much more of crap shoot IMO. Though, if they are aiming for the group, there is a high probablility they will “get” one ship or another. Thats the scenario more in my mind.
I used to work in the blow shit up biz ya know (actually more with those folks than for those folks, but I did absorb some info).
Thats gonna cost ya.
Declan
That would probably depend more on the combat spread of the taskforce, with a separation of several miles or more, you only really need to hit the carrier, but your not gonna get them all.
Except for the Japanese attacking with KamiKazis , all information regarding attacking a carrier is fiction, some more educated than others. But your average techno thriller writer, its not something that you could write a thousand page yarn , more like two pages.
Either it fails because our maguffin works, or it succeeds but misses that epic drama of launching spreads of anti ship missiles and alpha strikes off the carriers.
Sure , one of them is. But to get all current battlegroups at the same time ?
This
The rest of the navy gets a flash warning to go condition one , what ever the nuke code is and head for safer waters, or what ever pre war op plan they have for this contingency.
Declan
I haven’t seen anything indicating China has a decent UAV capability, much less a stealth-like version. I see a lot of interest by China in UAVs, and they do possess them, and are developing them, but I’m by no means convinced they regularly practice with them and are capable of efficiently/tactically using them in an offensive targeting role. I haven’t looked at China in a while, so I may well be behind the times. Any more info you have on that will be welcome.
And how is Iran getting lumped into this? Haven’t seen any info on that, either (again, I’m way behind the times).
Yes, this is why they’ll last a while. You may kill one, or two if your attacks are well coordinated and spot on with execution and intel. I doubt that would happen, but on a good day and a lot of blundering on our part, who knows. Maybe they get lucky.
But that still leaves a bunch of other carriers out there that are going to start making their way over to the area, and along the way, they’re going to come up with tactics to counter the threat. EMCON? Not a problem. If the shit really hits the fan, the beeps and squeaks will cease. Pop-up surveillance satellites? Even if they do have them, we have the capability to find the nearest cloud layer to hide under, if there is one around. Even if they have IR, they’re going to have to know where to point the camera to start looking for us. Even if they know that, you’re going to need real-time coordination from the satellite through the intel centers, to the battlefield commanders, and there are plenty of comms links, centers, etc. in that structure which will be targeted (probably already has been) by us and hit by TLAMs. The bottom line is that you make it sound rather easy, and I don’t think it’s going to be anything of the kind.
I do agree that against a capable navy, with nukes, it’s going to be tough. One big advantage we have is our carriers have a very long range. UAVs and satellites only do so much good if you don’t know where to look or your UAVs don’t have much range. We can stand off a very long distance, tank our strike groups, and hit targets from well beyond their threat range.
No way. Nuclear weapons detonate something line a mile above sea-level and cause destruction for miles around. You dont even need to get close to the target. Heck, even if you miss badly the radiation will kill most of the sailors and the EMP burst will destroy all the electronics.
Theres no defense against nuclear weapons. None. The US anti-missile shield is a decades long research project with no tangible results. We are barely able to shoot down a satellite with a predictable path, let alone an ICBM.
Well, after that wild statement, I was going to ask what your background is to see if there was any actual depth to that assertion, but then I looked at your threads and noted the one about whether we could actually hit superman with a missile. Now I don’t need to ask.
Whoa, this kittens got claws.
Bahhh
We hit one Japanese man with two nukes and still didnt kill him !
Maybe we just need our last layer of armor to be Japanese business men.
About the China sub thing. How do we know we didn’t know it was there? I mean what is better then letting China think they can get close when we actually saw that thing quite a ways away?
Well, we don’t. Heck, I’m in the Navy, and I have no clue. And anyone coming on here claiming to have knowledge that we did would either be lying or comitting a very large crime, so we’ll never really know.
It would be a shrewd and strategically sound (IMO, anyway) decision, which is why my guess is that there’s no way we’d allow it to actually happen. We’re all about the kneejerk response. I think mlees had it right: