Mods:I believe there should be a factual answer to this question.
Given what we know about North Korea’s ability to attack ships, at least on paper, how likely is it that NK could sink a US aircraft carrier? In other words, how vulnerable is a aircraft carrier to an air attack by a country like North Korea. I realize that aircraft carries don’t typically travel alone, so factor in other ships that would be available to defend the carrier from an all out attack.
The approach some of us would take would be disguise: a civilian boat or civilian airplane/airliner–and it is known there are lots of children aboard–but which happens to carry a nuclear bomb. How fast would the U.S. military destroy such a vehicle?
I’m sure a civilian boat could not deliver a nuclear bomb and get out of range. I’m not even sure how a civilian boat delivers a nuclear bomb except by simply getting close or colliding and exploding it. So the children on board are dead in any case. Now it may well be bad for publicity to destroy the boat first.
I suspect the same is true for a civilian plane. Could it just “roll” a bomb out of the plane and get far enough away from the blast? I think probably not.
I don’t see how a boat could work. It would be picked up a long way out, and if they didn’t want to sink it surely they could just move away from it.
And with the precedent of 9/11, I do think a civilian airliner would be shot down without much compunction. Even armed with a nuke, it would need to get within a few miles. From a carrier’s point of view, I think a nuke is probably less of a threat than a missile launch?
I assume we’re talking about suicide missions here, these are North Koreans.
A few vectors of attack:
Traditional Naval Surface ships - Very low chance a NK surface ship would be able to get in range of the carrier, if it was showing hostile intent and piercing the outer “ring” of the carrier battle group it’d likely be sunk before it ever had a chance.
Anti-Ship Missiles - Probably NK’s best chance. The aircraft carrier saw the end, more or less, of battleships and the concept of big, powerful surface ships as “ship killers” ruling the waves. A carrier’s planes could have any battleship disabled long before those big guns ever got in range. But many naval theorists are saying we’re coming to the end of the era of the carrier as a dominant force against “equivalently powerful” naval technology. The theory goes that a major war between us and a genuine power like Russia or China, is that they just have too many and too highly advanced anti-ship missiles for carriers to last long in such a war. That doesn’t mean in the wars we’ve fought post-Cold War and continue to fight now that carriers are worthless, they are still amazing force projection in “asynchronous” warfare (i.e. us vs countries with smaller and much less technologically advanced military forces.)
Is NK a country that, like Russia or China, could likely take U.S. carriers out of the battle after the first few hours? I don’t think so, yet. So any carrier is going to have some AEGIS equipped ships in its carrier battle group. AEGIS systems have a few methods for going after incoming anti-ship missiles. They have a pretty old system that basically shoots traditional projectiles (i.e. inert rounds) at high velocity at a missile when it’s not very far away. Basically it’s like "we know the vector of this missile, when it’s around x point, we create a ‘wall of lead’ that the missile will fly through in a few seconds, when it does, it will be destroyed. They also have newer “anti-ballistic” systems similar to the sort of missile defense systems like Patriot II we’ve used to some level of success in OIF.
My belief is right now NK doesn’t have enough of these anti-ship missiles, that have sufficient speed/reliability/range that they could reliably sink a U.S. carrier in their first salvo. And it’s unlikely they get a lot of repeat shots. It’s also to the U.S. advantage that the carriers we deploy near North Korea are never “that close”, they’re usually hundreds of miles out. Which puts pressure on the anti-ship missile’s range/reliability metrics. But I think there’s at least a chance a few North Korean anti-ship missiles hit a carrier, and while carriers are big a few large holes in one and you’re in bad shape.
Aerial Attack - I think NK has almost no chance of this. Their air force isn’t particularly impressive, they’ve more or less correctly allocated resources to fuck tons of infantry and artillery, that they believe creates very high “costs” for any invasion (and can be used to put a hurt on South Korea in the early hours of a conflict), and ever-advancing missile technology they believe can scare off their enemies in the region. It’s highly unlikely the ill-trained and ill equipped North Korean pilots would survive a bombing run on a carrier, and not likely they’d be able to successfully bomb one before being taken out of the skies.
Small / covert bomb / torpedo boat - This is the favored internet theory for various reasons, dating back to a controversial war game involving the U.S. Navy and a simulated naval war against Iran in the Persian Gulf. I think there’s a low likelihood of this working to take out a U.S. carrier by North Korea. The Persian Gulf is small and very heavily trafficked, meaning any naval forces there are constantly pretty close to all kinds of vessels, from large commercial oil tankers to tiny fishing boats, and it’d be hard to easily protect against it all, in theory. (I think even in the Persian Gulf this technique is harder to pull off than expected.) In the Pacific, we’re again, typically hundreds of miles away from North Korea in huge open waters, meaning this vector of attack is a lot less possible. A tiny little shipping boat steaming directly toward a carrier, hundreds of miles from typical shipping lanes and etc is going to raise a lot of red flags.
Overall, I think North Korea “has a chance” to sink a carrier with anti-ship missiles, and as they get better and better at missile technology their chances will increase.
I am not a military expert, but I would hazard a guess to say that if NK launched everything it had at one of our carrier groups, if they got really really lucky, they might scratch the paint.
FWIW I notice the thread went into the nuclear discussion pretty quickly. I don’t think Kim would “waste” one of his small arsenal of nuclear devices on trying to hit a carrier in the open seas.
The point of a carrier strike group is to project force from the carrier and it’s air wing. It has a very strong defensive capability against both air, surface and submarine attack.
Given the aging strike aircraft in the NK air force, an airborne attack will fail. They would be engaged so far out that no air-launched antiship missiles would reach the carrier, and the Phalanx CIWS would deal with any that might.
The recent high failure rate of their ballistic missile tests suggests that a ballistic launch would not succeed either. It is still unclear whether they have miniaturized a reliable nuclear device sufficiently to fit a ballistic missile anyhow, and the Carrier Strike Group will almost certainly have ships equipped with the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System.
I’d suggest that the approach with the highest probability of success is for a nuclear device to be loaded into one of the NK Navy submarines, and for that sub to lay low in the path of the carrier group. It might get lucky enough to evade detection, be in the direct path of the carrier, and detonate the nuke successfully.
I wouldn’t give odds on it, though.
and ninjaed by Martin Hyde
But the USA has nuclear powered submarines and have at least one in near their carrier.
This may be why the carriers sometimes leave duty at a hotspot… not waiting for relief. If the submarine has something to do (eg surface) the carrier leaves the hotspot too ??
NK has special forces troops.
https://www.google.com/amp/taskandpurpose.com/north-korea-special-operations-forces/amp/
Frogmen could attach mines to the anchored Carrier.
Or better yet, a fast rope insertion from helicopters onto the carrier’s flight deck.
Navy crews are unarmed? Weapons locked in the armory? It would be easy pickings.
Pretty sure the ack-ack guns on the carrier and all the other ships in the task group with it will put an end to that plan in short order.
Why make it a suicide mission? Just put the nuke in a remote-controlled plane and set it going. Even better if the plane is on a recognised air corridor. A final dive to optimum altitude over the carrier and detonate.
I didn’t suggest that a NK submarine could penetrate the destroyer defensive screen to get into an attack position - I think there is a very low likelihood of that succeeding.
However, if it was in place and running silent, it might avoid sonar and MAD detection to get within the screen. The issue would be picking the place to hide the sub so the carrier goes over it - it’s a very big ocean and a very small attack profile.
First, no carrier strike group is going to be anywhere near a commercial flight corridor (operational security), and second, no aircraft (commercial or otherwise) is getting within 150 - 200 nautical miles of a carrier without a polite request to change course. Eventually, those polite requests will become somewhat more abrupt, and the course change will become an instruction to rapidly lose altitude (with associated decompression and loss of structural integrity).
Submarine with an atom bomb (no missile) on a suicide mission?
Anchored carrier? The carrier certainly has anchors, but I cannot image they’d drop them and just be sitting around if they’re anywhere near North Korea or other potentially hostile nations. I’m no Navy guy, but from what I understand, they’ll be constantly on the move.
Attaching a device to a vessel at sea is HARD. Exponentially harder, if it’s moving at all. Raise the difficulty a few more exponents if it’s moving at the speed a carrier tends to move at - They DON’T anchor whilst on-station.
This is the least likely scenario, IMO.
Most plausible, IMO. DPRK’s sub boats aren’t fancy, but on electric propulsion can be very quiet. You don’t have to be directly under the target to get a kill with a submerged nuke - even a ‘fair proximity’ detonation can generate a mission-kill. Get the boat in place in advance of where you think the CVBG is headed, and wait…
Yes, I know we have attack boats accompanying the CVBG, and an ASW screen. Doesn’t mean an electric boat running quiet will be detected. American fast boats penetrate CVBG screens with fair regularity, and they’re relatively noisy compared to a boat on electric propulsion simply lying in wait.