While reading about the Bismark, I ran across this article. Unsinkable Sam - Wikipedia
Whether true or not, it’s still a fun story.
Maybe / maybe not. One issue is that these are very much currently not “cheap” at all. it is certainly possible that they will take over; we can’t say for sure how Navies will develop.
But right now such a swarm would be prohibitively expensive even for the United States. Such vehicles don’t have the range on their own - which is what carriers are meant to provide. Even if we eventually create more capable drones, they are likely to end up not that far from current fightable planes in cost and capability (current drones are nowhere near either).
The main purpose of a modern carrier group is deterrence and the projection of power. When China is threatening Taiwan, the Americans can float an extra carrier group into the region and calm things down by raising the stakes for an attack on Taiwan. The same goes for other trouble spots in the world.
This cannot be done with missiles, satellites, or even B2s launched from America, because they don’t have the same ‘tripwire’ effect as havinga carrier group near your adversaries. Missiles and bombers are useful for responding after hostilities have started, but carriers are great for making sure hostilities don’t start in the first place.
The same goes for ‘small, cheap vehicles’. They may be good tactical options in a shooting war, but they aren’t of much use as a strategic deterrent.
It may be that the carriers will all be at the bottom of the ocean soon after a war starts with a peer nation. But they’re great for force projection in peacetime, and therefore at maintaining the peace. Nothing else quite does the job.
Sorta.
You propose that the reason a CVN in the e.g. Taiwan Strait has more influence than a Carnival cruise ship is because it can project power.
But what if it can’t actually project power? What if the Chinese know full well it’ll be on the bottom before 2 planes get airborne?
Carriers are great weapons to threaten weaker powers with. Peers or superior powers? Not so much.
If indeed the CVN tries to open hostilities it’s dead before it succeeds beyond inflicting a pinprick. Therefore from the Chinese POV, it’s no more influential than the Carnival cruise ship. They know not to attack it, but they also know it cannot attack effectively. From a foreign policy pressure POV it has zero peacetime influence. Though it does drive the scheduling and targeting of a bunch of Chinese assets to ensure the CVN can be neutralized promptly if/when needed.
To be sure, sinking the carrier would be an act of war. But equally would be the carrier launching strikes at the Chinese Navy or territory.
The USN is fully aware of this calculus. The CVN is highly influential when/where it has impunity. It’s simply an expensive sacrificial tripwire with little influence when/where it does not have impunity.
30 years ago carrier aircraft and the carriers’ protective screen (including subs) could out-range and outclass all the opposition. It had impunity always and everywhere. 30 years from now, not even remotely against near peer competitors; they’ll simply be sitting ducks. IMO today is somewhere (classifed) in the middle.
A carrier group raises the stakes. If the Chinese threaten Taiwan and a carrier group steams into the area and threatens to support Taiwan in a shooting war, China’s choices become much more constrained unless it wants to wind up in a full scale war with the U.S.
The same principle is behind the U.S. forces in North Korea, and the shift of U.S. forces from Germany to Poland.
The main reason carriers are unsinkable is because sinking one would invite massive retaliation.
In an actual war that ship has sailed, so to speak, and carriers would just be targets.
Agree. Again sort of.
If China hasn’t figured out by now what the US will or won’t accept vs. Taiwan putting a CVN in there isn’t going to change their opinion much.
Said another way, if the US says “we will fully support Taiwan in a shooting war” the presence or absence of the carrier is small change compared to the overall enormity of the implied threat against any Chinese aggression.
And if the US waffles and says “Now now China; please play nice” the presence or absence of the carrier is small change compared to the overall message that the US and all its weapons will sit idly by as events unfold.
I would say the current Chinese carriers are the real problem.
Their job in a war would be to confront the USN groups. Preferably away from the straits. They will lose, unless, they get a lucky shot like with HMS Hood , but doing so will give the PLA/PLAN/PLAAF time to overwhelm the Taiwanese defences and establish themselves on the island.
At which point the strategic and tactical calculus changes.
That’s somewhat true, but the physical presence of troops just makes it likelier. Nations have used the “tripwire” theory for a long time; it significantly raises the level of commitment. It’s why the US put troops in places in South Korea and Germany.
Yeah, it’s one thing to say, ‘We will attack you if you do X’, but it’s quite another to position your forces so that an enemy attack must go through your people, absoluteky triggering conflict.
This removes all confusion, opportunities for mixed messages, or just outright rejection of the threat by the enemy, believing you don’t have the stones to follow through. But everyone knows the U.S. would never tolerate the loss of 10,000 seamen and billions of dollars in ships (or thousands of soldiers in South Korea, Poland or Germany) without at least a proportional response.
The problem with using a carrier for this purpose is it shows you’re not making a complete commitment. If we wanted to let China know we were setting up a tripwire for Taiwan, we would station troops in Taiwan. Ground troops represent a commitment. A carrier is there this week and may be gone next week. It’s a signal to China and Taiwan that our commitment is only partial.
China is aggressively hostile to anyone being “nice” to Taiwan. They probably won’t start a shooting war but they will certainly get going with economic sanctions. Given the size of their market those sanctions can be serious and most countries don’t care enough about Taiwan to go there.
So, the US tries to maintain a delicate balance here. Troops in Taiwan would infuriate China so, instead, we sail carriers around there because they can’t really say no to that (we’re just “passing through” kinda thing…but somehow always close by…one of those weird diplomatic fictions everyone knows it bullshit but pretends is what is happening).
Personally I do not understand China’s sensitivity to Taiwan. Taiwan does not threaten China in any real sense. I can only think China wants to keep invading Taiwan (someday) as an option.
I think it’s an offshoot of the Mandate of Heaven idea. It’s a part of Chinese political philosophy that goes back three thousand years. A regime is seen to derive its authority from its ability to govern the country and maintain things in their proper order. Failure is seen as a sign that the regime is no longer legitimate and it is morally okay for the people to rise up and replace it.
The current communist regime has clearly set itself the goal of bringing all of China under its control. As long as Taiwan remains outside of communist control, it is a sign that the communist regime is not doing its job. A legitimate regime would unify China; a regime that can’t unify China is not a legitimate regime.
I don’t think that they are so worried about not ruling Taiwan, but they certainly can’t allow it to become independent, as that would encourage others to resist more. China really didn’t mind the status quo, but they are actively pushing back against Taiwan’s moves to become politically independent.
The PRC really does want to control Taiwan, and it essentially playing a waiting game until it can.
As the PRC increases its military capabilities, it seems to be doing the same as the USA; we have this great army,and navy, why don’t we use them? There is also the historical issue that the Chinese felt (and with some justification) that they got kicked around by the Western powers when the latter had a technological and military supremacy. They are working to achieve parity, or better, and will do in the course of time. The shouting match over the South China Sea is part of this.
The problem is, what can and should the USA do in this situation? The territorial claims to the various parts of the South China Sea overlap, and China claims areas that are far closer to another country such as Vietnam or the Philippines. The biggest problem is that there are no established historical claims in most cases, nobody cared much about some remote islands or shoals until the law of the sea was revised.
The US response to support Taiwan has always been to send a carrier to the area and look menacing. Increasingly, the PRC not only knows that this is just a bluff, but also has the means to eliminate the carrier group if it is perceived as a threat. Now what?
What do you think we should do with them?
What do you think we should do with them? <
I am quoting from the past, Reagan-era, I think. From the time when the USN still had battleships on its strength. 
Yes, I saw the exchanges about keeping on battleships. Short answer: nobody needs them, and the museum ships cannot be operated again. In theory one could build a monitor, a small ship with big guns, but bombs and missiles can do what guns did, and at a longer range, and can be made bigger as required.
Battleships should have been used more aggressively by the USN in the Guadalcanal campaign. Here’s my reasons:
- There was a surplus of WW1-era BBs, with little for them to do.
- Far more firepower than a cruiser.
- The USN needed cruisers for screening carriers. The old BBs were too slow for this.
- The battleships had much greater resilience vs IJN torpedoes than a cruiser.
- The primary IJN weapon was their torpedoes. To increase the firepower of a USN task force, they would add cruisers. The confined waters around Guad restricted formations to a single line of ships. So adding cruisers just made the line longer, and easier to hit with a torpedo. A battleship could replace 2 or 3 cruisers, making the battle line thousands of yards shorter.
Did USN have the manpower to staff them, the fuel to operate them, and the appropriate munitions to arm them? I know I don’t know, but I could see that it’d be real easy to decide to prioritize any resource scarcities to the highest best bang-for-buck such that obsolete last-war weapons don’t get used.
Was there a shortage of sailors in WWII? I mean, obviously there is time to get people recruited and trained but I have never heard that the US military had to make decisions based on a lack of people to fill all the roles they needed.
Not so much a lack of people as a ranking of priorities. The twenty-seven hundred men serving on a battleship wouldn’t be available to serve somewhere else. If they could perform more valuable service in that other area, that’s where they should have been.