Is there any plausible scenario in which American carriers aren't all at the bottom of the ocean after the first five minutes of a conflict with China?
US wargaming had repeatedly found that escalation to nuclear exchanges is all but a given if serious attempts are made by either side to destroy naval and air base capability, and it's safe to assume their PLA counterparts reached similar conclusions.
As an example, in a Chinese move against Taiwan or Japan, anything that crossed into attack range would get destroyed, but there would be no counter-attacks against Chinese facilities and bases. Does that play out in reality? Let's hope we don't find out.
I think this is the key asymmetry in a US-China war, and whether US aircraft carriers can be sunk or not is irrelevant. At the end of the day, a carrier is a floating air base, and both China and the US need aircraft to provide targeting data for their munitions. In a sense Chinese airstrips are even more vulnerable to missile strikes as they can't move or hide, yet they can't be attacked because that could invite nuclear escalation. If sinking a US aircraft carrier posed the same risk of nuclear escalation would we even be worrying about their vulnerability to missile strikes?
This seems more like a strategic problem than a tactical problem regarding carrier defense. If China is more committed and willing to escalate than the US, then sooner or later there'll be a line where China's willing to cross but the US won't.
China or whomever attacking a carrier to destroy it with anything other than 1945 style surface warfare tactics leads to nuclear war, even if it's not the final decision point. The response to such an attack leads to nuclear war in enough projections.
In the same way, the US should keep strikes on Chinese military facilities on the table. But escalation is much likelier because those facilities are located in civilian areas and near nuclear missile sites. That's a perfect analogue of the strategic asymmetry. China and it's civilian population actually lives in the area. The US is just visiting with military assets, and losing a civilian is a tragedy but losing a member of the military is the job they signed up for.
It's a pretty hard problem to hit a carrier in the middle of the ocean.
1. It's difficult to locate a carrier group in the vast ocean, even with the help of satellites. The earth's curvature make surface level radars ineffective.
2. A carrier is not a sitting target. The carrier battle group is armed to the teeth to neutralize any threat from air, sea, and underwater within its defense perimeter. Its AWACS can detect objects upto several hundreds miles away.
3. Ships getting close need to overcome the barrage of fire power from the CBG's fighters, missiles, destroyers, and submarines.
4. Aircrafts getting close need to overcome the CBG's air defense - fighters and destroyer's AEGIS system.
5. Submarines are a realistic threat, but USN has lots of experience countering that.
6. Long range cruise missiles fired from outside of the defense perimeter could be a threat, but cruise missiles are slow and can be shot down. Also see 1 for guiding the cruise missiles thousands miles away toward a moving carrier.
7. Hyper sonic cruise missiles are a bigger threat but they have much shorter range. Their firing platforms would be destroyed trying to get close.
8. Ballistic missiles are the new threat but they have their own problems. Target location (see 1). Their terminal radar has a very short time window to locate and lock on the carrier after exiting the descent EM blackout. It takes time to fly to the general area. A 5000 miles/hour missile would take half hour to travel 2500 miles. Meanwhile the carrier is moving away, could be up to dozens of miles away.
U.S. have ballistic missile launching detection mechanism (radars and satellites) that can detect the missile at the moment of the launch.
The SM-3 test adds a new arsenal of defense against the ballistic missiles. It's certain that the laser based defense system probably is being tested or may be have already been deployed.
Edit: realistically drones will be a bigger problem for a CBG going forward.
- You don't need to sink an aircraft carrier to mission kill it. Even one hit to the deck will probably neutralize it's ability to launch/recover aircraft.
- Submarines and satellites are/will be enough to locate surface naval fleets.
- Once you've located your target, you can simply overwhelm it's defenses with massive missile barrage. Whether the missiles are ballistic, hypersonic, or traditional sea skimming AShm doesn't matter. The economics are in the attackers favor. Defenders must target each incoming with multiple anti missiles, and can only carry so many. The enemy will simply win by sheer numbers as they have no practical carrying capacity.
It seems pretty clear that carriers would need to be far, far away from any near peer adversary in a shooting war. At least until enemy subs and satellites are out of the picture. Even then you risk ballistic missile attack from the Chinese interior if your location is somehow discovered.
Satellites are very good at focusing at narrow strips of area. Searching over a wide angle of field of vision still is a hard problem.
You have to get close to the CBG to start the overwhelming campaign. The delivery platforms are likely to be destroyed long before they get close enough.
The CBG itself has a massive arsenal. It can deliver its own overwhelming firing. Besides carrying planes the carrier is a huge missile firing platform.
Not anymore, see ballistic anti ship missiles (range ~ 1800 miles), long range bombers equipped with long range missiles, and long range hypersonic missiles likely spotted on their long range bombers:
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/37662/chinese-long-ran...
https://twitter.com/tshugart3/status/991832711013728256/phot...
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/37465/new-images-of-ch...
> The CBG itself has a massive arsenal. It can deliver its own overwhelming firing. Besides carrying planes the carrier is a huge missile firing platform.
You can fit more missiles on the continent than you can on ships. That's really the end of the argument.
2.) All reconnaissance satellites are in much lower orbits. GEO is 35,786km. Huanjing, PRC's military radar sats, are at 650km. USA-234 is at 1,107km.
Seems wasteful, better to have root access (like via X-37b) to them now ahead of time and reroute attacks en route in real time if/when the time comes. Using enemy infrastructure to take out their own seems most efficient.
The whole "Hack A Satellite"[0] partnered with USAF and DDS seems like its leaning operationally in that direction more and more for at least recruitment.