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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

"The weapons could even suddenly pierce the steel decks of one of America's 11 multibillion-dollar aircraft carriers, instantly stopping flight operations, a vulnerability that might eventually render the floating behemoths obsolete."

Aren't they already obsolete?

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Define obsolete.

You could make the case that ICBMs make conventional armies obsolete, and I would guess many people in the 50s/60s did.

In a similar vein, videoconferencing, email, telephones should make international business travel obsolete. That shows no sign of happening either. I guess because humans react differently to things that are right in front of them, rather than remote and hypothetical.

Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

That's a remarkable story. Wiki says there's a 2004 documentary about it called The Perfect War. Unfortunately the relevant reference (6) is dead, and I can't find even a mention of this documentary outside the wiki article. I'd love to see it.

I think its 'Der perfekte Krieg', here's a link to the point where they interview Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper: https://youtu.be/nCff-S1WazY?t=2105

Good find, but I don't understand German.

No. The Millennium Challenge is typically cited as an example of a badly botched exercise rather than a real world defeat scenario.

It had:

Navy ships constrained to small areas to prevent disruption to commercial craft which would never be the case in an actual war

Small boats firing simulated cruise missiles weighing significantly more than the entire boats supposedly carrying them.

Motorcycle based messengers "simulated" by just using radios except no one bothered to add any kind of message delay or any other kind of constraint a motorcycle messenger might have compared to radio communication.

USN ships in the simulation teleporting into the center of a massive armada of simulated small boats due to a modeling error

All ship defenses being turned off during the engagement resulting from said error because everything was in the wrong place.

None of the USN ships even knowing that they were supposedly under attack until the "battle" was over.

Ships being "re-floated" as a result of the above screw up

It's generally unwise to try to draw any conclusions at all, positive or negative, based on its results. Also, there's a reason countries all over the world continue to build aircraft carriers. It's because they're useful. A carrier group essentially controls a moving sphere of territory with a radius of around 500nmi. Being able to launch dedicated AWACS[1] allows for far superior battlefield awareness compared to any other naval asset and air launched anti-ship missiles allow for striking range far greater than any other naval asset. Carrier groups are also a lot harder to find than you might think. Nuclear powered carriers are fast, faster than almost any other ships, and don't stay in one place. Keeping tabs on them is difficult, even if you have satellites. In the open ocean they're very difficult to confront because they will almost know more about the locations of opposing forces than the opposing forces know about their location thanks to real time aerial recon. The horizon is as far as radars can usually see and if you're in a plane that horizon is much further away. Carriers are not going away any time soon. They provide far too much utility which is not offered by any other kind of ship.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_E-2_Hawkeye

You are probably right, but the battlegroups seems vulnerable to quiet subs though:

https://web.archive.org/web/20071116120858/http://www.knbc.c...

Quiet subs are essentially mobile minefields. If the battlegroup runs over it, yeah, it's going to have a bad day. But it's unlikely to do so unless you have some chokepoint to make the battlegroup run over it. And that's the thing with the exercises where it's been useful: it's been in relatively small areas, so they can just sit and wait for the carrier to come by.

Not at all. They enable the USA to have an almost unparalleled naval capability.

In a real shooting war they are very vulnerable high value targets which exist more for the egos of the upper ranks than for usefulness in combat. They work to intimidate adversaries and defeat much less capable opponents, but are too easily destroyed when coming up against a competent military.

You need to control the airspace to be successful in war and in order to do that you need to be able to project your power across seas so that the fight is on their doorstep not ours. The carriers are there to make sure that if someone wants to cross the ocean with ill intent, they can deny them the airspace far out at sea making them struggle to even get to the country they seek to attack. The US always prefers to play an away game.

Also, don't forget carriers are never alone and surrounded by multiple aegis guided missile cruisers which are the most accurate missile defense systems in existence.

I think against China or Russia the carriers will be destroyed quite quickly. Against an inferior army like Iran, they will be okay.

The purpose of aircraft carriers are more often to launch attacks against inferior nations or highly inferior subnational entities so they are useful there.

They would have to find them first. That's still non-trivial, even with satellites.

Yea, a lot of people underestimate the speed at which a carrier can move. So much so that it would be outside the blast radius of any ICMB targeted at the carriers last known position when the missile is launched. Most ICBMs cant change trajectory mid-flight.

Not a MIRV blanket though.

/me points to SM-3

Probably need THAAD or GMD for MIRV because of the altitude and speeds

Actually yea it can because the more re-entry vehicles you use the smaller the blast radius of each will be. the fireball radius of the largest current US-made warhead is only .71km at 455kt on the Trident missile (W-88). It carries 12 re-entry vehicles which could blanket approximately a 3sq km zone. An aircraft carrier can move at approximately 1km per minute. so you have approximately 90 seconds to launch and hit the target with one of the US's best weapons.

Why? They are massive objects that has zero camouflage against the ocean. How hard could it be?

You can't use regular photons to detect one because that requires getting in a plane and going out to find them. You're an even bigger sitting duck in a plane in the air than the carrier is sitting on the water. Radar will find you and interceptors will destroy you before you get close enough to see their exact position. You using a plane and radar runs into the same issue.

If you sit on the shore and use active radar tracking then you're leaving yourself open to decoy ops and EM countermeasures.

Satellites don't loiter over the area long enough to get a tracking lock. Ships can take evasive maneuvers and US Navy ships move very fast.

It is still pretty difficult [1]. The sheer scale of the oceans is not appreciated by many. We can accept that space is vast beyond normal comprehension, but finding ships or even carrier strike fleets in the oceans is still a non-trivial challenge. Even at hypersonic speeds, traversing the range of a missile is measured in above ten minutes ranges. Tracking all commercial traffic shows how vast the oceans are [2], as each of those dots on a map cover a territory far vaster than the ship itself. It is a sufficiently non-trivial problem that commercial tracking relies upon AIS transponders instead of imaging, even in dense commercial traffic areas like the Straits of Malacca or the Bosphorus.

Whoever solves the problem will first become very rich from defense contracts.

[1] http://theconversation.com/hundreds-of-ships-go-missing-each...

[2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/11/this-map-shows-every-...

Russia has no blue water Navy. How do they destroy the carriers?

Long range hypersonic/cruise missiles with micronucleaer warheads. They have them demoing right now, they'll eventually work out the bugs.

That said, it's all armchair because a) We don't know what they really have b) we don't know what kind of amazing gear the US has hidden away or c) how any of it will really hold up in a war.

None of it has been tested.

So maybe the Russians launch a bunch of newfangled missiles and they basically don't find their target. Maybe they all do.

Maybe the Russian s300's totally wipe out F22s, or maybe it's a mirage and they are irrelevant. So many factors: training, conditions, countermeasures, sabotage, overwhelming force etc. etc..

Maybe the vast number of crappy Chinese subs overwhelm the US navy over there. Maybe the US has a combination of tech+procedure that makes all of those little diesel subs pointless. Or maybe they only need 1 or 2 to 'get through'.

My bet is that the Carriers are vulnerable, that Russia and China don't really have the ability to project much outside their nations (though Taiwan and HK are close), that the Americans will move around the world with impunity in a hot situation, except right in the vicinity of Russia/China where it would be a mess because they are both smart nations with 'good enough' gear, and China has a zillion bodies to throw at any problem.

This comment is being downvoted to grey, but it seems completely in line with TFA. If we acknowledge that “unstoppable” missiles exist, and that aircraft carriers are high value, doesn’t that imply they will be the first to go in an actual war?

You're assuming that finding the handful of "high-value" aircraft carriers you want to target is easy, whilst it very much isn't. If that becomes the bottleneck, there are lots of possible defenses.

Great Powers can hit while they still have their satellites. But in a real hot war, there will be a race to take those satellites all out as well.

In a real hot war between Great Powers, the ability to destroy will be quite huge, especially against strategic targets, compared to defense abilities.

Just because they are vulnerable in an all out war doesn't mean they are not useful. After all something like 12 USN carriers were sunk in WWII but every military historians would agree they were pivotal in winning the war in the pacific.

It is widely acknowledged in war-fighting circles that America's aircraft careers are only useful in policing actions - i.e. to be used as a threat of war, and not actually of any use in conditions of total war, since they are big, fat, slow moving high-value targets that can easily be taken out with widely deployed missiles designed for the job - i.e. the P-270 MOSKIT (SS-N-22 Sunburn) missiles, which Russia developed specifically to counter the threat.

Americans don't like to be told this, nor will they work to understand it beyond a glib "America, Fuck yeah!" style response, but the American naval surface fleet is probably one of the first casualties in an all-out war. The MOSKIT is deployed specifically to target these carriers, and there is - so far - no defence against them. Laser-based defences are being developed to defend against the threat, but are not widely deployed across the fleet.

America will lose its carriers in the first minutes of all-out war.

http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carrier...

The RAM and CWIS systems are designed to deal with the threat. Also you assume the launch platforms can't be targeted. They can be.

Of course, all platforms can be targeted, that is the point of open warfare.

>RAM and CWIS

Yeah, jury is still out on the MOSKVIT survivability, but hey .. lets hope we never find out.

How proven and tested is the phalanx and similar against "real" Carrier killers? Hell, even the iron dome isn't super reliable. Compare the price of one carrier to 100 ship killing missiles.

Everything is obsolete in the face of nuclear weapons.

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