Yup. Here’s a pretty good article discussing the sort of shock testing our ships undergo to test their survivability against near misses:
Navy to Explode Bombs Near New USS Ford Carrier & Finalize Weapons
You’re right. Perhaps navies will increasingly move towards using aircraft carriers and submarines while traditional ships comparatively decrease in importance and mainly used for supply, coastal and low-intensity situations.
Why would chaff not work if you put it between the target and the missile’s onboard radar sensor in terminal phase? OTH radar would not be impeded by chaff but it also wouldn’t give you a weapons-quality track.
A single Arleigh Burke could probably splash the Liaoning’s entire air wing. That’s the best non-allied carrier in operation today. I still see a place for “traditional ships”, and so do most of the world’s navies.
I always wondered about that too; seems to me that an incoming ballistic missile would use radar homing, which would have to scan a 2D grid and plot the differing returns in some kind of resolution high enough to determine what’s a ship, a small island, a bloom of chaff at 9000 feet, or a big-ass mylar reflector floating out in the water. The other option I saw was IR homing, which would make more sense, in that a ship would definitely stand out vs. ocean water, but would be equally spoofable (we’ve been doing it for aircraft for 50 years).
I’m not a radar guy, but I think it’s because these things are coming in on ballistic trajectories at very high speeds. It’s also why traditional interceptor missiles wouldn’t work unless you took these things down in the boost phase. It also has a MIRV warhead (not sure how many independently maneuvering MIRVs one of these things has, but probably 2-4 would be my WAG). Also, it has radar AND optical targeting. It’s a very complex beast.
Of course, that’s probably why it won’t work the way they plan either. In order to even get it in the ballpark it takes constant updates of the carriers position in real time, especially during the boost phase. It needs to get pretty close before it can lock on for it’s final run in. And it’s coming in so fast that it’s got to put all that together for an attack picture extremely quickly. Maybe chaff would be a benefit…I based what I said on something I read years ago about the Russian’s determining that only electronic countermeasures would work against the things, but that might have had more to do with traditional counter missile tech (we also have the new laser systems coming into the fleet in the next few years). They also said the kill chain was way too complex to make this thing a reliable system (at that time).
Where did you read all of this? I’ve read a lot of speculation about what it MIGHT have, but never anything like this confirmed.
Screw China. Their first carrier was supposed to be a floating casino.
Not that anyone believed it when announced in the first place.
I recall Team Spirit taking place in February when I was in. Not sure about Key Resolve, the current exercises.