China Builds Its First Aircraft Carrier | Hacker News Reader

China Builds Its First Aircraft Carrier

bbc.co.uk

17 pointsbrudgers30 comments

There's some stuff that this article ought to have covered:

-The ship was bought, relatively cheaply ($20million USD), from Ukraine, 60% completed.

-At the time of purchase, the ship had no engines. To the best of my knowledge, we don't know what types of engines China put into it, but it was never designed to be driven by nuclear reactors. This is a huge gap in comparing capabilities (since US carriers use nuclear reactors(and they may be the only ones, though don't quote me on that)).

-Construction began in 1985.

-In 2015, the USS Gerald R. Ford is expected to enter service. This is a new class of carrier (the Gerald R. Ford class) which will slowly take over the Nimitz class. One way to look at this is that the US is a generation ahead. If you are going to compare a yet-operational ship, it wouldn't be a horrible idea to compare it to another yet-optional ship,

Finally, as others have mentioned, carriers are only good at projecting power against inferior forces. They represent a target of opportunity otherwise. They can be destroyed for a fraction of the cost it takes to build them. Russia's approach during the cold war was to build supersonic cruise missiles. Now countries are developing hypersonic cruise missiles.

They certainly serve a purpose, but only to a point. If ever the US has to leverage all of its 11 carriers at once, than we should all run for the hill (and the least safe place to be probably is on those carriers).

While I agree with your points, I believe that the reference framework is incorrectly rooted in the past rather than the future. China does not need to match the USN carrier for carrier to effectively modify US naval policy in East Asia.

A relevant analog might be the effectiveness of diesel submarines in local waters. In anything short of a shooting war with the US, China's carrier will allow it to project massive influence over critical shipping lanes. If nothing else, the carrier's presence will create significant planning and tactical considerations for US forces in the region.

In addition, a Chinese carrier will allow it to project influence in distant parts of the world where they have moderate national interests. One needs only look at the impact a single less capable carrier, HMS Invincible with an undergunned air wing was capable of achieving in the Falklands/Malvinas conflict.

There are 2 types of naval vessels: submarines and targets.

China has been working on the former, as well.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_class_submarine#Possible_i...]

Nowhere in the article does it seem to be mentioned where they actually got the carrier that's pictured in the article.

The Varyag is an abandoned Russian carrier that was transferred to the Ukrainians after the breakup of the USSR, and finally bought at auction by the Chinese after almost becoming a floating casino.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_aircraft_carrier_Varyag

She's hardly a homebuilt Chinese carrier.

How would you defend a carrier from missiles?

For example, this one carrier took years to build. Could it not be sunk simply by swarming it with ICBMs?

How many of those missiles do we have? How quickly could we produce them?

How would you defend a carrier from missiles? Any new ideas?

(I realize the carrier is likely a political statement, not a practical asset. I'm just wondering about the answers to my silly questions. Bored and daydreaming.)

I'm pretty sure you are basically right. An aircraft carrier is more a floating base that allows you to project power in a part of the globe that you would not otherwise have access to. Presumably you are projecting power against a power that does not have the military capability to sink your aircraft carrier at a distance (e.g. Libya, Iraq, Iran). China could, for instance, use the aircraft carrier to help its interests in Africa, just as the US has been doing (in the eyes of some skeptics) in the Middle East.

Another related fact is that military build-ups are very fuzzy these days given the amorphous nature of modern warfare. Sponsorship of private corporate armies in contested countries (a la cold war) is more likely than open conflict, because no one wants to risk destablizing everything (and if one were to go that way, nuclear weapons would suddenly be on the table). If a country and associated military can provide some logistical support without overt action, they can maintain plausible deniability (the sort of thing we are doing in Libya, for example, or our highly successful Bay of Pigs operation).

Ah, yes, you're correct.

Also, "(and if one were to go that way, nuclear weapons would suddenly be on the table)." --- Do we have any practical defense against nukes?

I guess the answer is no. I was just reading The War Nerd (link posted further down by Bokonist). In the article, the US Naval Institute says "Ships currently have no defense against a ballistic missile attack." Since ships are essentially floating cities, that implies that cities have no defense against a ballistic missile attack. Therefore, neither side would use nuclear weapons.

You're basically paraphrasing the doctrine of mutual assured destruction.

Ballistic missiles v. Aircraft Carriers seems like overkill, especially when it is fairly trivial to outfit submarines with nuclear torpedos (I can't find any that are listed as active in the U.S. arsenal, but we've had them before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_45_torpedo ).

EDIT: What was I thinking? A nuclear-tipped cruise missile is even better.

I believe there are two basic parameters here: (1) range (2) expense. The basic principles (as est. in Taiwan related war games, as in other places) is that if you send enough missiles (e.g. spamming) no matter how good your missile defense system is, some will get through. Which is to say, when it comes to missiles defense has not kept up with offense and "mutually assured destruction" remains a policy even with relatively incapable nuclear powers.

There are a variety of missiles which could potentially sink an aircraft carrier. ICBM has the longest range with the largest expense. Torpedoes (not really a missile) have a much shorter range so presumably the old principle applies -- if you can keep subs at a distance your carrier will be safe.

In other words, what you want to hit a carrier is the cheapest missiles where the launching platform (which could be a sub) are outside the range of the enemy, to present the largest quantity of missiles in order to overwhelm the defenses of the carrier.

ICBMs are most likely not the best way to do this, given their expense, but are worth bringing up since the basic principle is the same as in the cold war (shoot lots of ICBMS at a city/country to assure that some will get through).

Also, I believe whether or not any of the armaments are nuclear is fairly irrelevant since a non-nuclear missile (or two or three) can sink a carrier easily enough. That said, sooner or later someone (e.g. N. Korea) will use a nuke, and then all bets are off.

>"I can't find any that are listed as active in the U.S. arsenal"

Nuclear torpedoes usually sink two ships - one of them is the target.

I think the War Nerd makes a pretty convincing case that air carriers are basically obsolete. In the next major war, they will be WWII equivalent of the battleship. http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carrier...

It is the same case made by the Air Force during the 1950's. It relies on using ICBM to target carrier groups. I would direct your attention to the nuclear tests done after WWII on the use of nuclear weapons against fleet battle groups and the amount of missile defense a modern battle group has. Also, those spy satellites that you need to target those ICBMs are not exactly totally immune to attack.

I think the original article the report was in support of more funding for advances to the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System.

A conventionally tipped ICBM is indistinguishable from a nuclear tipped ICBM in all stages of flight except perhaps the last, and thus the launch thereof at a CVG could provoke nuclear retaliation. There are many, many better ways to sink a capital ship; swarms of regular antiship missiles, of which the Russians have many fine models, are probably the most popular. This is very difficult to defend against; between the SM-2s/SM-3s fired at the swarm at long range and the rolling airframe missiles fired at medium/short range by the CRUDES screen, you'll likely take out most of the inbound missiles, but not nearly all of them, and the CVN's own CIWS is unlikely to do anything productive if it works at all and is turned on, leaving a bunch of holes in your carrier and about 5000 men drowned along with about a hundred aircraft in the drink.

Hitting an aircraft carrier with an non nuclear ICBM would be vary difficult. The primary advantage of an ICBM is speed, but they easy to direct so the aircraft carrier has plenty of time to move around. As to missiles a single impact above the water line on a modern US carrier is unlikely to do all that much damage unless it's a ridiculously over-sized thus making swarms an expensive proposition. Torpedo's are a much better option, but they trade range for utility.

PS: For reference: USS SARATOGA (CV-3) - The "Sara" was struck by 2 bombs and 5 Kamikazi's while supporting the Iwo Jima invasion on February 21, 1945. She lost 123 dead with approximately 300 injured. But this attack did not sink her. She survived the war but did not survive the atomic bomb tests off of Bikini Atoll. She went under after undergoing her second nuclear explosion on July 25, 1946. She was a tough old girl. http://ffhiker.tripod.com/index-7.html

Edit: The US is also using much larger aircraft carriers now they they did in WWII. Picture a 100,000 ton boat with 2 × nuclear reactors AND 4 × steam turbines, vs the 36,000 ton Saratoga (CV-3). There are many reasons the US has not lost a carrier since 1945, suggesting they are an easy target is ignoring a lot of navel history.

The carriers are bigger, true, but the missiles are more powerful as well. A single cruise missile carries the effective payload of 3 or 4 kamikaze aircraft.

There's also the fact that you don't have to kill the carrier to render it ineffective. A single missile hit to something like landing deck or the aircraft hangar can result in damage that takes months or years to repair, effectively removing the carrier from the battlefield.

While I agree mostly, your comment also ignores advances in weaponry. So, sure, they are tough - but the yeild of bombs now as well as the threat of small scale nukes against the ships, even if meant to capsize, is quite different than the equivalant of hurling a ford expidition at them.

Carriers are amazing amazing ships - I eould love a game solely focused on a war where an ultra vast ocean world made it such that all wars were carrier based and had vast submarine based support fleets.

It would be great to have physics sims that allowed us armchair admirals to test carrier strengths against such traps as nuke icbm and cruise missles.

Ignoring navel gazing history, perhaps. We've never had open war with a first world power since WWII, that's why we've never lost a carrier.

I think you really hit in your last statement: It's a soft projection of power. And that's not theoretical if you think about China in relation to Russia, Japan, India and of course the US. It's also important to keep in mind that China has a very active interest in brining back Taiwan and in oil interests near Vietnam or even Indonesia.

Until recently, carriers were apparently able to avoid missile hits simply by moving at full speed - I guess it's still not trivial for a ballistic missile to hit fast, mobile targets (the US missile defense program probably faces similar engineering issues). The Chinese recently shifted the balance of power in the Pacific theater by developing a missile theoretically capable of taking down US carriers from afar. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3e69c85a-1264-11e0-b4c8-00144feabd...

Regarding whether or not this is a practical asset, so much of military power is "soft" (you might say political, but I think that's an oversimplification), I don't think you could fairly call this an impractical asset. China has traditionally focused on maintaining power in there sphere of the world. As others have noted, the power of an aircraft carrier is that it allows you to project power globally. They could send the aircraft carrier to a lot of places that would make other countries unhappy, but not unhappy enough to actually start a military attack over it - thus the carrier would have been an effective tool.

From a more political perspective, there's been a regional arms buildup. India already has a carrier and is building more, and India and some other Asian countries have been buying up submarines.

Questions like this are always posed in a vacuum, which makes no sense, because modern warships do not operate in a vacuum: 1 carrier vs any conceivable technology.

Military defense strategy isn't all that much different than IT defense strategy. It means using layers of security. If your only defense against missiles is a single missile-defence system, you're probably going down.

This ideology is at the core of how how a US Naval Carrier Battle Group works. A carrier battle group (CVBG) is a complex interplay of various types of ships and aircraft with many layers of defense. The idea is to never let your enemy get in a position to execute a fatal attack.

If you want to take it further, think of it in Starcraft terms. No one asks, "Is a Terran Battlecruiser a political statement, not a practical asset?" Any reasonably talented Starcraft player knows that you don't send a Battlecruiser in to battle alone [1].

1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox82uAVdUKM

Is it possible that US doesn't have as great of a manufacturing indusrty as China, thus in a war between the US and China, the US would be at a disadvantage in the long term in terms of the sheer number of aircraft, tanks and war ships produced? Similar to the Japaneese during WWII.

Not when it comes to weapons. The US makes more arms than any other country and is the biggest exporter. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_industry#World.27s_largest...)

One of the reasons the US congress can't cut its military budget is because the US actually produces a lot of arms across the country. The joke is that an ideal defense project will have at least one job in every congressional district.

Don't worry about the disadvantage in manpower and industrial capacity, military technology has advanced a great deal since WWII.

I'm sure the majority of military planners are bright enough to have a nagging suspicion, somewhere in the back of their heads, that an open war between China and the US would be over in a matter of hours.

An open war between China and the US would not happen. Killing your customers is exceedingly bad for business.

Given the prospect of it going nuclear, I vote "killing half the planet is exceedingly bad for business as well"

Brazil has an aircraft carrier?

They bought it from the French: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_aircraft_carrier_S%C3...

What really bugs me about this article is that we get no sense of what ships and technologies China has built to protect this ship. A aircraft carrier without protection and a fleet train is a status symbol.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com