“the missile system” is plural. They have land, sea and air missiles capable of standoff and delivery. A submarine can be hundreds of miles away. Land base systems have their limits due to distance.
Worrying about the accuracy of GPS and guided missiles misses the point of a few fronts. A Nimitz class carrier at full speed travels its own length in about 22 seconds. A 3000 knot missile targeted at the dead centre of the carrier fired from 15nm away will miss if it does not track the movement of the carrier. This isn’t a new problem. In the days of big guns and battleships it was necessary to predict the path of the target to cope with the flight time of the shell. The point being that active tracking of the target is required, it is simply not enough to imagine that a satellite photo and GPS coordinates is enough. It isn’t.
So we get back to the points made in the cite made by brasil84. A missile must update its target information whilst in flight. This is open to jamming and spoofing. As an Aussie I am duty bound to reference the Nulka decoy missile. So that gets us to the point Little Nemo makes. It doesn’t matter how many decoys or how much jamming, if you can overwhelm the defences. Heck, with enough missiles the targeting eventually becomes moot - you just carpet the area you last saw the carrier in. That gets you past the moving target problem in the most brute force way possible. OTOH, the missile system considered only has about 60 missiles total, so you would want to be pretty careful.
I doubt success of a strike is a given, but I also doubt that there is any assurance of a successful defence. It probably depends how lucky you feel. Given the astronomical value of a carrier, and the relatively low cost of the missile systems, the asymmetry is probably enough to seriously limit the reach of carrier based actions.
It’s not very productive when an anonymous person shows up and starts making assertions based primarily on his own authority.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn that the US Navy had a very good idea of where that Chinese submarine was. If I were in charge of the US Navy, I might very well pretend to have been blindsided by the incident to instill overconfidence in the Chinese.
But still, posters here have no way of verifying that you are in the military or that you work in a sonar unit. I’m sure that as a military man, you know that a lot of people pretend to be in the military for various reasons.
But here’s the question: If the missile has a nuclear warhead, how close does it need to explode to disable the carrier, or at least foul up all of the aircraft sitting on the deck? I would think you could miss by a pretty wide margin and still do quite a lot of damage. In fact, such a missile might very well be programmed to explode a few hundred feet in the air like the bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I think there’s some middle ground between the two of you. On one hand, just because the US Navy leased the HMS Gotland, it doesn’t necessarily follow that we’re terrified of diesel-electric/AIP subs, and conversely, just because we know that diesel electric/AIP subs exist, it doesn’t mean that it’s not a good idea to practice against them, hence the lease.
Put a littley differently, just because we have some MIGs and Sukhois out in the desert for our pilots to fly against, doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re something we’re afraid of or unaware of, or that their capabilities are anything special. Their capabilities are just DIFFERENT, and that’s why we keep them around (or lease the Gotland), so we can figure out how to best counter that.
As for the distance for a nuke, it depends on a lot of things, but for a Hiroshima/Nagasaki size bomb (15-25 kt) and a modern carrier, we’re probably talking somewhere about 1000-2000 meters, which sounds like a lot, but on a carrier steaming fast enough for flight operations, might not be as much as it sounds.
Plus, that’s assuming the escorts’ Aegis Anti Ballistic Missile systems don’t work as designed, and that the Chinese are willing to go nuclear in the first place (which is the biggest fantasy point here).
But modern nuclear bombs are a lot more powerful than those used in 1945, right?
According to Wikipedia, the Trident missile had as many as 12 475Kt warheads. So if a 1945 bomb needs to hit within a mile, one of these warheads ought to be good to at least 3 miles. I would think the Chinese ought to be able to develop warheads in that range of yield too.
So it seems to me it would not take many missiles to have a very large saturation zone. Just one missile with 10 warheads could saturate an area 10 miles square.
At 30 miles per hour, it would take perhaps 10 or 15 minutes for a carrier to escape – not enough time. And that’s only one missile with multiple warheads.
Seems to me the problem with the ABM systems is that they would have to work perfectly.
Well the problem I see is that the Chinese don’t actually have to nuke an American carrier to get a strategic advantage. If they have the ability to do it and subtly threaten to do so, there will be a lot of pressure on the US to stop defending Taiwain. After all, it’s just a civil war.
I have to say that d1a1s1’s credibility has taken a major hit. He was denying that the USN had rented a Swedish submarine even past the point when Magiver had provided a cite from the Navy itself.
This debate always blows my mind. Some people will say no Patriot ever intercepted a Scud, others will say they were highly successful, and I’ve met people who claim they watched successful interceptions with their own eyes. I’m stunned that there is so much confusion over what should be a matter of fact.
So Navy Times, (a Gannett newspaper, USA Today, also owner of a group of NBC affiliates)
is so completely wrong. That must be really embarrassing for them.
Have you considered writing a letter to the editor?
The problem with this is that Chinese can’t do anything subtly. That word doesn’t exist in Mandarin.
Are we talking about nuclear antiship ballistic missiles, or conventional ones?
Look, if the Chinese are nuking our carrier groups, then we’re in a scenario where hundreds of millions of people are going to die. Maybe not from being nuked, but the collapse of the global economy due to the collapse of international trade will lead to massive famine all over the world.
So yeah, it certainly is true that our navy doesn’t have much protection against nuclear weapons. We’ve had the exact same vulnerability since the 1950s. But what’s the scenario where the Chinese are nuking our carrier groups, but not the continental United States? You can’t nuke the US Navy and not expect a nuclear response from the US navy. So the scenario is that China is invading Taiwan, the US sends a couple carrier groups, and China nukes them, and we sit there crying, and do nothing because our precious toys are gone?
China can’t nuke a US carrier group without expecting the high likelihood of American nuclear strikes on every Chinese military site that we can target.
I agree that in a full-out shooting war between China and America, even if no nuclear weapons are used, a lot of our navy is going to end up on the bottom of the sea. Deploying the navy to the theater of operations makes them vulnerable, keeping them at home makes them useless. We aren’t going to be able to park carriers off the coast of China and run regular bombing runs against them, like we could against a third world country. No real world naval battle is going to feature the US navy going up against a similar navy, WWII style. It’s going to feature the US navy going up against an asymmetrical force of submarines, mines, suicide boats, land based aircraft and land based missiles. Sea based forces are always going to be more vulnerable than land based forces. As the saying goes, a ship in the harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are for.
Barring an attack out of the blue-- or even with one-- in the run-up to such momentous military/political events, the US military will unveil publicly and in secret a shitload of scary/effective technologies we, and any enemy, are not aware of.
Call me naive and chauvinist, but this is what military forces do, if they’re good.
Well as I said up-thread, it’s arguably a problem if we (meaning the US) are relying on nuclear deterrence to protect our military vessels.
Let’s suppose China starts gearing up to invade Taiwan. The US sends a carrier group or two to defend Taiwan. There are some shooting incidents, and eventually China threatens (either subtly or not-so-subtly) to use nuclear weapons against American aircraft carriers. We know that (1) we have no defense against such an attack; and (2) if we engage in nuclear retaliation, we look like the bad guy since China’s attack killed only military personnel who had inserted themselves into a civil war whereas our retaliation will kill lots and lots of civilians.
In such a situation, there will be considerable pressure on the US to just let China have Taiwan, i.e. not to get involved in a civil war.
How difficult / possible would it be for the US to neutralize China’s satellites?
Would that be a sufficient means of defending against this threat?
Anti-satellite technology is all Galactic Utter Top Secret. The problem is that since the US has more satellites than any conceivable opponent, we’re much more vulnerable to anti-satellite strikes than anyone else. So nobody in the US military likes to talk about it, either how vulnerable we are or what technologies we have.
So we have all sorts of fancy toys to take out satellites, jam communications, and on and on, but in a real world scenario there’s no telling how well any of it will work. It hasn’t got much of a workout in the last decade of conflict. If Chinese troops do a lot of hiding out in tents in the middle of the desert, we’ll be ready for them. But they probably won’t do that. The biggest thing we won’t be prepared for is how vulnerable our civilian computer infrastructure is.
This is an open Internet forum. The comments that d1a1s1 are making, if true, seem like they would be in violation of the contract s/he signed when obtaining his/her security clearance. To the best of my knowledge, it is not publicly known, definitively, whether or not the USN was tracking that SSK all the way until its surfacing near USS Kitty Hawk. Wouldn’t confirmation of that sound like the sorts of thing that would at least be classified Confidential if not even higher? Further, contrast his/her comments with the circumlocutions that other ex-military Dopers, especially ex-submariners such as robby, use when they discuss subjects like these on the Dope. IIRC, robby has written more than once that, even if the item in question is now public knowledge, his contract prohibits him from discussing that item in this sort of forum. (Re-reading this, there are a lot of “seems” and “IIRCs” for GQ. I’d like it if definitive statements can be added to either bolster or contradict the above)
In short, I agree with you Little Nemo.
As to the OP, I have stated before that I do not think weapons such as the DF-21 make the modern CVBG obsolete. There are already stated problems with acquiring the CVBG with sufficient accuracy to enable the seeker on the missile to acquire the carrier. A lot depends on the warhead sensor’s power and field of view, and the maneuverability of the warhead. MaRV’s can have surprising cross-range capability (google the AMaRV: this lengthy paper also goes into some of a MaRV’s capabilities: “[The Common Aero Vehicle] travels at speeds up to Mach 30, has a cross range capability of 2400 nautical miles from its reentry point..” [At Page 24 of the cite]), but this also increases the available time a SAM system can intercept them. Not that it will have an easy time, if the RV can pull the 200g accelerations that AMaRV could. Much of AMaRVs capabilities stemmed from the very high potential energy from being launched by an ICBM; an IRBM like the DF-21 won’t have the same amount of energy. Still, the basket might be extremely large. For those further interested in the subject, William Yengst’s book, “Lightning Bolts: First Maneuvering Reentry Vehicles,” goes into much greater detail, and is searchable on Google Books. (It’s how I found it.)
For satellite photo or radar reconnaissance assets that have been suggested would be providing the targeting data, I do not foresee many of them, on either side, lasting very long after the start of a Sino-US confrontation. (Even if they’re stealthy.) The US famously has a ship-based ASAT capability, and I would be surprised if the PRC did not have a similar, land-based capability. Replace the solid rocket motors, and perhaps the US could drag the F-15 launched ASATs out of mothballs. (I wonder what the US ended up replacing the program with?) How hard is it really to wreck a satellite if you have sufficient rockets to lift your payload to it, even if it’s not quite as easy as Arthur C. Clarke’s infamous “bucket of nails?” GPS and most of the US nuclear early warning satellites, operate at higher altitudes than do the known US photo reconnaissance satellites (Link is to KH-11; I am assuming the KH-12 and later series of satellites have similar orbits.), so any attempts to wreck each others photo and radar sats would hopefully not also put the eyes out of the satellites making sure that both sides don’t nuke each other.
So, the DF-21 provides to the PRC a missile with greater range than other SSMs in their inventory. It also has higher chances of avoiding interception by SAMs due to its speed and altitude. Only one SAM system within the USN CVBG is known to be able to intercept it. OTOH, we do not publicly know whether the missile can actually be guided onto a moving target, nor the strength of its sensors and their susceptibility to ECM, nor whether the sensors can distinguish between a carrier and any decoys. Plus significant technical hurdles are in the way of its being able to do what is claimed. To sum up, I do not see such a weapon as making the multi-billion dollar investment in carrier aviation obsolete. Rather, it’s just another weapon that the Navy can and will have to account for, assuming it fulfills its impressive press release capabilities.
I share AK84’s position on the effect of introducing any nuclear weapons into a conflict. The DF-21 looks like any other long range ballistic missile when it’s being launched, and so it will have the effect of raising tensions within both sides’ nuclear command and control, and adding uncertainty to either sides’ estimation of what is, and is not, an impending nuclear attack.
(This may be a minority view. In addition to the existence of the ‘conventional Trident’ proposal in the first place, see, as an example of the dissenting view, Strategic Forum, Can Deterrence Be Tailored, M. Elaine Bunn, January 2007, note 23)
Further, while nuclear armed countries have fought each other (Sino-Soviet border clashes of 1967, India/Pakistan’s border clashes), to the best of my knowledge they have never used weapons against each other that also contain nuclear weapons. IOW, at a time where both sides had nukes, they haven’t thrown ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, or other delivery systems that also could contain a nuke, at each other. A Chinese-U.S. confrontation would be unique in this regard.
Finally, while the U.S. has been coy about whether it would respond to a WMD attack with nuclear weapons (Contrast the Clinton era policy of refusing to say whether it would retaliate with nuclear weapons in the event of a WMD strike, with the Obama Administration’s firm refusal to use nuclear weapons first against a signatory of the NNP Treaty, even in the event of a chemical or biological attack.) there has never been any doubt that the U.S. would retaliate with nuclear weapons in the event of a nuclear attack upon its forces, whether or not the U.S. would appear to be the bad guys. See the Nuclear Posture Review and commentary on SIOP and its successor OPPLAN 8010. Now, whether retaliation would extend to cities is an unanswerable question, by me or, realistically, anyone else until the time comes. Hopefully never.
Sure, but it still doesn’t follow that because we have leased a Swedish sub, that we’re terrified or don’t know how to cope with diesel-electric/AIP subs, which is what Magiver is saying.
Ultimately this is silly; when nuclear warheads come into the equation, whether by short range ballistic missile, torpedo, mine, bomb or cruise missile, whatever war we’re talking about becomes entirely different, and whether or not a particular carrier survives or not isn’t really much of a consideration anymore.
Considering that the IOC missiles are conventionally armed, I don’t know that they really do pose that much of a threat to a carrier.
You got my back? Thanks.
My ferret isn’t in this fight, but as everyone knows, or ought to, on the Internet no one knows if you’re a dog, with with or without security clearances. All posters involved of referenced could be as much security- cleared personnel as George Costanza is a marine biologist.
If I told you how I know that I’d have to kill you.
I don’t think it’s as certain as that. An obvious example is if the US did not know the source of the attack.
But even if we were committed to massive nuclear retaliation against any nuclear attack, it’s still a problem to rely on nuclear deterrence to protect American warships.
Let’s suppose China starts gearing up to invade Taiwan. The US sends a carrier group or two to defend Taiwan. There are some shooting incidents, and eventually China threatens (either subtly or not-so-subtly) to use nuclear weapons against American aircraft carriers. We know that (1) we have no defense against such an attack; and (2) if we engage in nuclear retaliation, we look like the bad guy since China’s attack killed only military personnel who had inserted themselves into a civil war whereas our retaliation will kill lots and lots of civilians.
In such a situation, there will be considerable pressure on the US to just let China have Taiwan, i.e. not to get involved in a civil war which might lead to a nuclear exchange. And China knows it.
So the upshot is that if China has the ability to nuke our aircraft carriers, it weakens our position even if we are 99% confident that China wouldn’t actually dare to do to it.