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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

As I understand it, China has hypersonic missiles and nukes, whereas the US does not.

Should a conflict in the South China sea break out, China could nuke US carrier groups assuming their satellites aren't taken out first. That spells game over for US projection of power if successful.

China could deploy air and submersible drones to get around downed satellites, but these have the potential of being jammed with EMP, other drones, etc. It could become a game of cat and mouse, and if the carriers get close enough, China's land-based missile defenses are toast.

Is the US developing hypersonics for close combat? How does this fit into a South China sea conflict, or does this assume the battle is closer to home? (If China goes blue water, is this meant to combat their carriers?)

If, when, and where will the theater be? What will the outcome be?

Would the conflict be limited to the coastal regions, or would it spill over into nuclear MAD?

Will either side back down?

I'm super curious about all of this, and I'm interested in more sources to follow. I don't know enough to understand military/navy Twitter.

View on HN

Follow Arms Control Wonk. There's a bunch of OSINT folks in the podcast slack channel including friends of mine that have been interviewed by magazines like The Economist.

I'm there more for the cyberwarfare takes, but from what I understand nobody is seriously worried about a power imbalance between China and America regarding missile speed since interceptors aren't accurate enough, but that's just me regurgitating what I see tweeted around and talked about.

Edit: And don't be intimidated by people reverse engineering sidewinders in the Slack. The community is very open to humble, curious newcomers. They'll teach you how to analyze satellite imagery for free, haha.

https://openosint.slack.com/?redir=%2Fmessages%2Fosint%2F

This one?

Should have mentioned, it's a private slack for supporters, mostly to keep the quality high.

https://www.patreon.com/acwpodcast

> Should a conflict in the South China sea break out, China could nuke US carrier groups

If China wants to start a nuclear exchange, sure. The US probably wouldn't go nuclear in response to an invasion of Taiwan, but it absolutely would in response to a nuclear attack on US forces.

And our reality would segue into the storyline of Threads. The 1984 BBC film should be mandatory viewing for all people in positions of power. The bombing is only the start of the horror. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgT4Y30DkaA

The Cuban Missile War Timeline: https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/the-cuban-mis...

> China could nuke US carrier groups assuming their satellites aren't taken out first. That spells game over for US projection of power if successful.

Incorrect, the USA will probably just shrug, and call in the other 11 super-carriers and 9 amphibious assault ships.

At the same time they will invoke NATO article 5 and a few other Asian mutual-defence treaties. 2 UK, 1 Spanish, 1 French, and 2 Italian carriers will arrive soon afterwards.

As will 4 Japanese, 3 French, 2 Australian and 2 South Korean helicopter carriers.

The trick isn't to take out one aircraft carrier: its to to be able to take them all out.

Article 5 only applies to attacks in Europe or North America. The SCS is definitely in neither.

Fair point. 2/3 of the armada (modulo dry dock) is still coming to the fight.

Fair, though in practice they would join in anyway - China would be going for them next. Better to fight with the US than alone.

Presumably the US would find itself in such a situation because it tried to stop the invasion of Taiwan. China will never have the interest or capabilities of going after Europe.

Interesting. Edge case: if French Guyana (off the north side of South America but considered part of France and the European Union) is the victim of an attack by some means, are NATO members obliged to act in its defense?

No. The same is true of New Caledonia (most of overseas France, actually).

Nor the Falkland Islands, which is probably a more likely (although still unlikely) trouble spot.

That’s absolutely right if course. Taking out a carrier group, or even several carrier groups is if course doable, but by itself it isn’t an objective. It’s a means to an end, so without a strategic context it doesn’t mean anything.

> The trick isn't to take out one aircraft carrier: its to to be able to take them all out.

Hypersonic missiles and nukes cost a lot less than a carrier. Assuming their surveillance doesn't get taken out, they can spam missiles.

China will have to have good signals intelligence for this to work, though.

A nuclear attack will ensure proportional response.

What is a proportionate response if most of China's army and navy are on the mainland? Nuclear strikes on the mainland?

Yeah, but would you want to bet on it? You’d have to be either really really stupid, or really really smart, but we’d only find out afterwards.

Yes, is it surprising in any way? Nobody would have raised an eyebrow at this concept back during the Cold War, just shows how comfortable in peace we are now. The concept of unilateral nuclear strike did not exist; all models were of nuclear exchanges and question was only if it could happen in any limited way or escalate into a total one.

Both game-theoretic calculus and political pressure at home would make nuclear retaliation unavoidable, and with the perspective of escalation China is firmly on the losing end.

It's not surprising, it just isn't exactly proportionate (well it is by one definition of the word I suppose). That strike would cause China to retaliate against the US homeland, wouldn't it? And the retaliation for that would aim to dismantle China's military and industrial base.

If that's the case then I can't see how isolated tactical nukes against carriers makes sense for China. They might as well throw everything they have to begin with.

I mean, sure: that's what my original point was, it's not just nuking the carrier group. China knows the dynamic, the likely escalation route from that and it knows at the end of it, it lays in radioactive ruin. Nuking is just not an option; even a conventional attack (with much less guarantee of success) is already a pathway to full scale war, just not immediately nuclear.

Well that's really what I was getting at with my question, so if that's also what you were suggesting then we're both questioning the previous poster's idea that they can just happily "spam" nuclear missiles at all of America's carriers around the globe, let alone even a single one operating near China's waters.

> not just nuking the carrier group

US/USSR were prepared for theatre level nuclear engagements, as long as not on USSR or US soil. I would not dismiss trading tactical nukes on third party soil if things get desperate. PRC SCS islands, US indo-pac bases, carrier groups are no brainers. Up to US bases in Japan and Australia. I think we dismiss low level nuke engagement at peril, any competent war planner will keep it in the repertoire.

> PRC SCS islands, US indo-pac bases, carrier groups are no brainers.

PRC SCS islands are sand piles with a couple of barracks and a landing strip, that would not be an equal trade for a carrier group.

> US/USSR were prepared for theatre level nuclear engagements, as long as not on USSR or US soil.

I dunno what America was prepared for, but I was in USSR at the time and the public message was any nuclear confrontation will end up being a total one.

It's not an equal trade, but it's as close to proportional tactical/theatre level nuclear retaliation as US can get, PRC simply doesn't have many overseas bases / vunerabilities for US to target. Vast majority of PRC forces are on the mainland which is... basically the top of the escalation ladder, and opens up CONUS + territories for proportional retaliation.

Otherwise, SCS bases are substantial forward deployment positions for PRC. Conventionally neutralizing SCS bases would require 100s of ordnance from naval platforms in a mostly secondary theatre - substantial amount of what US can concentrate in region. The bases serve missile sinks by design. So in a sense, taking them out via tactical nuke versus expending significant in theater munitions is an appropriate trade.

>public message

There's a lot of (declassified) literature on nonstrategic nuclear weapons and scenarios, war plans for theatre level use in Europe and Asia. Here's a report from this July.

https://sgp.fas.org/crs/nuke/RL32572.pdf

Public messaging is going to play up MAD, but nonstrategic nukes has never been off the table. PRC has no first use, but one never knows. Especially since the engagements are likely maritime over empty waters, which has different escalatory potential than scenarios of nuking NATO/USSR buffer countries during cold war. It's not that I think it's likely, just the chances are less non-zero than what's publically presented, i.e. the 2021 report exists in the first place because US wonks are at least discussing tactical nukes which are not subject to arms control agreements.

  > China knows the dynamic, the likely escalation route

There is no likely escalation route. To escalate to full nuclear war requires what we would today call "a crazy man" in power. The US has had exactly one of those in the past 30+ years, and he's no longer in office.

Oh, that must be why the US famously retaliated to 9/11 by also destroying 3 buildings in Tora-Borah.

If China nukes several thousand U.S. servicemen, your family (and probably you) would be on the streets demanding blood.

I've never even heard of Tora-Borah, so maybe I'm ignorant.

But for one thing, I wouldn't say that an authority that authorizes the destruction of three buildings would authorize a nuclear strike. For another, destroying three buildings in some village in Afghanistan does not sound like and "escalation" in response to the half dozen or so buildings destroyed in New York on the date you specify, and the damage to the Pentagon, and the loss of four aircraft and all souls on board, and I don't know how many more on the ground.

Sorry that was irony. My point was precisely that American vengeance knew no bounds. There is zero chance that a nuclear strike on an American asset will not be met in kind.

Nobody except Japan maybe UK and Australia is likely to do anything.

US itself is likely to turn tail and run if attack in not nuclear. Nuclear attack might inject some spine into response.

I've read its actually very hard to find an aircraft carrier in the open ocean, and even if you have found it, difficult to target because it will be be moving at 30 knots in a zigzag pattern?

That's true for subsonic low altitude missiles yes.

For a missile going Mach 7 at 25km altitude, the carrier has no hope of moving enough in the 9 minutes it has to evade the missile.

So you only have to find the carrier once briefly, which is not so hard.

Let us assume that at launch the missile had the location of the carrier as provided by satellite one hour ago.

How is the final phase of flight and targeting going to work? How far away can on-board sensors detect the carrier, and does the missile have the maneuverability to steer towards the target in that timeframe?

Somewhat related to a China tech angle, I submitted this article about what Chinese stealth boats look like to the newest commercial radar satellites: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28686121

Is that a big deal? Internet told me the reason why ships go only halfway YF-117 is because surface radar expects sea clutters, and an awkward black patch created by stealth features gives out its position and nature.

... From the top. That is, the exact angle from which stealth doesn't matter.

Generally, I'd say that anti-carrier strike group tactics involve simply (well, maybe not so simple) overwhelming the defenses. Quantity can work as well as quality.

You might look into Russian missile work. Of course, as a land power (and not as invested in trade as China), their answers are different.

The answers of China and Russia are pretty similar. Use air power or submarines to locate the carrier, fire hypersonic missiles.

Is the premise here that carrier groups would be survivable in the absence of hypersonic missiles? They... aren't at all, are they?

Carrier groups are supposedly survivable except for the stealth subs and hypersonic missiles but noone has tested that theory.

I wonder if the future will be just a cheap ship with a large number of single-use missile launchers.

How are the hypersonic missiles guided and what is their range?

They are guided by active radar, passive radar, and optical sensors. Their range is anywhere from 5000-700km, but many can be air-launched.

If they are hypersonic in the atmosphere then they have radio opaque plasma around them. How do they transmit and receive radar pulses? How do they see with optical sensors?

That is not how plasma stealth works. The temperature of the plasma determines the minimum frequency of RF that gets through.

So you have to use a higher frequency radar and make sure the temperature of the plasma is not too high in front of the radar. You don't have to put the radar on the nose.

For optical sensors you would be imaging off-axis. So you can put the sensors pointing, say, 30 degrees below forwards relatively far back and there will not be much plasma in front of the sensors as it comes from compression and not friction.

There's a NASA PDF floating around that cites ~7000 K as the temperature of a plasma in front of hypersonic aircraft and concludes that radar is feasible then.

Yes, no, maybe?

As far as I know, with existing known technology and defenses, there's probably a number n, such that if you launch more than n simultaneous non-hypersonic cruise missiles, an aircraft carrier is going to be unable to deal with them all. This of course assumes you can launch that many missiles, in range of the carrier, simultaneously, without advanced warning.

Now, the navy also isn't dumb, so I'd venture to guess they avoid parking their carriers within that range when possible, and that they probably have some other defenses like C-130's and other ships mounted with directed energy weapons and other missile defense and whatnot. I imagine they also aggressively pursue and maintain intelligence on the location, number, and readiness state of those missiles. This starts to get complicated because there's a complicated interplay of strategy and tactics related to the off-ship capabilities, and defenses have counter-strategies (such as launching a bunch of Surface-to-air missiles at those C-130's immediately prior to launching the cruise missles) and those counter-strategies have counter-strategies, etc. etc.

I also have no idea what that number n is. It could be infeasibly high.

The Navy isn't dumb, and that's why they build submarines.

Carrier Groups still have an important role to play in lower-intensity conflicts, but in a Pacific war with China they'll be about as useful as Battleships were in WWII.

I would think a conservative estimate for n is roughly (number of surface-to-air missiles ready to fire in the battle group) + (number of hits needed to sink a carrier) / (probability of hitting). I suspect the first term will dominate.

If the battle group has one Gerald R. Ford class carrier, two Ticonderoga class cruisers, and three Arleigh Burke class destroyers, then it has up to 2 * 8 + 122 * 4 + 96 * 4 = 888 RIM-162 ESSM missiles and 2 * 21 = 42 RIM-116 RAM missiles, for 930 missiles total.

The carrier also has Phalanx. Three guns, 1550 rounds each, maybe ~100 rounds per kill, effective range just under 1.5 km - a distance which a missile doing Mach 0.7 will cross in under seven seconds. My vague impression is that these can't be relied on to make much difference to the numbers.

Maybe there are lasers and whatnot around now. Not enough to make a significant difference.

Note that these numbers assume that the escorts' VLSs are loaded entirely with ESSM, and that all the carrier's weapons can be brought to bear on the incoming missiles, neither of which are realistic assumptions. But it's also assuming the carrier's air wing doesn't get to do any air defence, which is probably also not realistic.

Anyway, given all those assumptions, 1000 missiles and you have a very strong chance of a kill. 2000 and the carrier is toast.

If cruise missiles cost 1.5 million dollars each (roughly what Harpoon and Tomahawk cost, although what things cost in defence budgeting is a bit of a metaphysical question), the toast option is 3 billion in ammunition, plus there will be costs for launchers and various other sundries. The carrier alone is 10+ billion, so that looks like decent value.

In reality the CSG will be unable to fire 930 missiles at a single salvo because of time and targeting constraints, as the incoming missiles will be detected simulataneously.

Also, you don't need to sink the carrier. Just prevent it from launching aircraft. Once that's done it's defenceless.

Every time the navy is asked about the survivability of the carrier groups they seem to start talking about the “whole kill-chain” of the enemy weapons. It sounds like they plan to knock out the targeting satelites before they could target them instead of trying to catch the missiles. Or at least thats how I read the tea leaves.

They're not going to target one link. They're going to target the whole kill chain. Satellites, sure, and the satellite ground stations, and the missile launch sites, and the update path from the satellite ground stations to the missile launch sites, and jamming radio reception for the missiles in flight, and optical chaff or some other kind of confusion, and radar chaff, and probably some I haven't thought of.

> They're going to target the whole kill chain. Satellites, sure,

So, their plan in the event of war is to make space inaccessible for all of humanity, by filling it with debris from killed satellites?

Yes that is exactly the plan. In any major conflict the satellites will be the first casualties.

Yes. And a potential Kessler syndrome is the least of our worries when the nuclear missiles starts to fly.

War is hell. A peer level shooting war would suck hard in many painfull different ways to almost everyone. Let’s try to avoid it.

If the satellites don't work, then submarines and sonobuoys will be used. If those don't work, attritable intelligence drones will be used. If those don't work, they will go for the CSG first with whatever works, sinking the AEGIS ships, and then work their way up to the carrier.

The absolute trump card though is that they are preparing hypersonic intelligence drones. If those work out, they're going to be impossible to stop and there's no hiding a carrier from a plane flying past with line of sight.

Eh, you see a headline every so often alleging this but they're pretty far off the mark.

CSGs are defended by the entire system operating in layers. During conflict conditions they'll have airborne early warning radar flying to see threats coming a long way out. There's usually at least 4 AEGIS equipped ships. The carrier air wing will be doing patrols and intercepting threats at great distance. The carrier itself will be practicing emissions control and hiding within the sizable perimeter created by all of the above. And there's a lot of sophisticated EW decoys and such, that we don't know much about from open sources other than they're taken very seriously.

There's plenty of room for debate about just how effective this all is against a nation like China that has a lot of satellite intelligence/surveillance assets, but the simplistic "carriers have no defense" articles are just empty clickbait. These articles usually assert that there's no defense whatsoever against ballistic missiles, which ignores that 2 of those 4 AEGIS ships will be specialized to do exactly that, and have demonstrated it in testing.

One interesting tidbit is a few years back the US Navy submitted a request to do an exercise where they'd demonstrate taking down an inbound salvo of several 100 missiles simultaneously. Congress declined to allocate the budget for it.

Military planners certainly aren't omniscient or infallible, but they're a lot more sophisticated than the content free contrarian takes you see thrown around on the internet a lot. It ends up being a doomsayer about military technology is a pretty easy grift as nationalists on various sides drink it up uncritically and people with authoritative knowledge on the topic are constrained from openly rebutting it. All that said you do see some pretty in depth open info from GAO reports, stuff from CSBA, etc.

Has the belief that these platforms are survivable ever been tested in a meaningful scenario (ie, a conflict between two carrier-group-capable adversaries)? I get that the Navy does a lot of stuff to mitigate this threat, but it's a hell of a threat to mitigate.

No. But it hasn’t been looking good for carriers in war games/modeling exercises. China’s ASBMs might work today against a CSG or they might not (they need good targeting and maybe ABM systems can handle); but I’d analogize the US carriers of today to the 68030 and China’s ASBMs to the 386, where 68030 is probably a better chip but one side has a clear route to a Pentium, the other doesn’t, and economies of scale are in play, too.

>>>Has the belief that these platforms are survivable ever been tested in a meaningful scenario (ie, a conflict between two carrier-group-capable adversaries)

Not since WW2.....but the US Navy built up a LOT of invaluable experience on damage control practices and ship design based on the pounding our carriers took fighting the Japanese. Our current Ford and Nimitz CVNs are the refined iterations of a design lineage going back to the very durable Essex class. That said, the recent destruction of the Bonhomme Richard amphibious assault ship, which sustained cost-prohibitive damage in port due to a single arsonist, is disturbing.

There are wargames where we lose carriers against China.....and there are wargames where we don't. They're not invulnerable, but they never have been against a true peer anyway. Often it boils down to the CSG Commander not being overly cocky in terms of how he maneuvers his force.

The USS Bonhomme Richard fire was a worst case scenario. Only a fraction of the crew was onboard to do firefighting. And many of the damage control systems were shut down for yard maintenance.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/34832/veteran-sailor-o...

In terms of actual conflict no. There's been no large scale naval conflict since WW2. The closest is the Falklands war, which did show anti ship cruise missiles can be effective, but is not a good basis for generalization.

The Navy does do large scale wargaming exercises of course, though any of the interesting details aren't going to be public so that doesn't really help shed any light on it.

There have been a few small scale anti-ship cruise missile attacks in recent years near Syria and Yemen.

EW decoys, early warning radar, AWACS and so on is useless against passive sonobuoys, satellites, stealth camera drones, and a missile with dual-mode guidance.

From what I understand, we aren't particularly afraid of hypersonic missiles because nobody even has defenses against conventional ICBMs.

Perhaps hypersonic missiles could play a part in ICBM defense. You need something very fast and maneauverable.

That existed from 1975 to 1976 as:

[/] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile)

Problem was it needed many of these

[\] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safeguard_Program#/media/File:...

for support. (see caption)

DF-17 + DF-ZF & Xingkong-2

https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2021/01/27/chinas-hypersonic-wea...

> What will the outcome be? Judging by what we did in Afghanistan, not good. I hope we don't send thousands to die and/or kill other people. If they invade the US, we fight, otherwise, we shouldn't be policing the world. I don't see the benefits of a war with China, or any other country at all.

What if they decide they want to gobble up Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan, Australia, etc? Should we just sit back and say "it's not us, so this is fine?"

Does Taiwan have nukes? EDIT: google thinks no.

No, but they have been identified as a "nuclear latent state", in that they possess the capabilities to create one. How long that latency is I'm sure no one really knows.

Hasn't the rumor always been that they got a nuke from Israel or South Africa?

Are they going to gobble up Japan, Australia and Vietnam tho? I'd say nope, doesn't makes sense, for them. What's up with the war fetish? Do you enjoy watching people killing each other? I really don't understand.

I think citizens of the most violent nation in recent history should do some introspection before projecting their misdeeds onto others..

How recent is recent history?

Clearly more recent than April 15th, 1989.

or the on-going uyghur concentration camps

Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, coup after coup in South America - you think Tiananmen was more reprehensible than any of these?

I'll also remind you Tiananmen was internal, whereas all of our wars are just that - wars. Directed against other nations.

edit: to clarify, I don't see how Tiananmen suggests China will go to war, but I do see how a sordid history of spurring violence across the globe suggests the US will go to war again.

at least a century?

"What if X happens?"

"Shut up, Y is bad."

Uh.

Okay, then give me the reasons to believe in imminent Chinese military aggression. And why I should take the word of a nation that has been basically ceaselessly at war for decades, off the heels of yet another senseless conflict in Afghanistan.

I think you are projecting the warlike tendencies of the US onto China.

Are you completely oblivious to China's provocations in the South China sea? I know how things are being spun back in China, but I assume you occasionally read non-CCP-approved news, right?

>"but I assume you occasionally read non-CCP-approved news, right?"

I assume your reading list is approved in Langley

That's not even what is being discussed. The question is: what is the proper response to a hyper aggressive China?

No one is saying something like that is likely. We are discussing hypotheticals. There's no need to be so upset.

> what is the proper response to a hyper aggressive China?

I believe that GP is trying to generalize that question to "what is the proper response to any hyper aggressive nation". And the fact that the answer to that question will have more profound effects on responses to the US than to China.

In fact, I think that the question is valid. Limiting the discussion to China is blatant anti-Chinese propaganda. Broadening the discussion to "hyper aggressive nations" is fair and legitimate.

Nope. False premise. US is the best we have.

On the other hand, if China was to adopt the Taiwainese constitution and embrace democracy then yes, they could reunify.

IMHO, the risk of nuclear war is higher than we think. Can you imagine the number of expected casualties of all-out-war with China? We've played this game before. Japan/WW2. The US _will_ nuke China and justify it under number of lives saved.

> . Can you imagine the number of expected casualties of all-out-war with China? We've played this game before. Japan/WW2. The US _will_ nuke China

Japan didn't have a nuclear second-strike capability with the range to hit the US. (Or, literally, any part of that taken independently.)

The US leadership can't even make a remotely plausible argument, after emerging from their bunkers after the exchange is done, to have “saved lives” by nuking China.

Would suck "starting over". Irradiated land, regression in progress with fallout.

China is not going to nuke a carrier group sorry but that is insane. The second that happened say goodbye to entire world. There is reason we have boomer subs. One Ohio class sub could legitimately end the world.

> One Ohio class sub could legitimately end the world.

Not even close. It carries about 200 low yield warheads. Not even enough for 1 each for 1/3rd of the cities in China if you could spread them out that far. There have been over 500 atmospheric tests, many with vastly higher yield and fallout, the biggest tests had yields equivalent to all 200 warheads combined.

One could strike a huge blow to China's capability to carry on war by destroying many of its large ports.

there is no chance a US carrier could be nuked without a proportional response

The hypersonic missle won't carry nuclear war head. The impact is enough to render a CV lose combat capability. The modern weaponry are delicate machines. A 50s computer might withstand an earthquake. The modern one probably won't survive a drop less than 1 meter.

A 50s computer would have been largely glass vacuum tubes and dropping it would cause quite a lot of problems. And a modern computer would be fine in an earthquake if it didn't fall off something or have something heavy fall on it.

Yeah was just thinking that! That analogy may have worked 20 years ago but everything, including notably storage, is solid state now and way more durable.

The US Navy does shock tests, where it detonates large explosives underwater close to its carriers, for exactly this reason. These ships are way more durable than you give them credit for.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/41181/shocking-images-...

Lol, no. The water stops explosions. A direct hit by a 10 ton mass going at Mach 7 will destroy any ship. the Navy won't make tests for that because it's a foregone conclusion.

>>>The modern one probably won't survive a drop less than 1 meter.

That link was more in response to the assertion "The modern one probably won't survive a drop less than 1 meter.", suggesting that warship-grade computer and electronic systems are vulnerable to mild shock damage.

And the Navy has, in fact, done a SINKEX on a carrier: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/22639/this-is-the-only...

The results are classified. Considering how the flight deck and upper works look pretty much intact, they probably hit it with multiple torpedoes rather than anti-ship missiles.

Carriers are not vulnerable to a meter drop, but it's objectively true that ships are not built to the same standards nowadays as they used to be.

In WW2 ships were built to remain operational after multiple direct strikes. Nowadays ships are built to not sink after a single direct strike at the most like carriers, or only mildly though against such a hit because actually dealing with it would make them orders of magnitude more expensive and so heavy they'd be useless.

While a WW2 battleship could survive multiple direct hits and still fulfill its mission, a modern carrier would be lucky not to sink, and definitely won't be launching and recovering aircraft.

If a carrier in a war against a major power can't launch any aircraft anymore it's as good as dead, once it's off the AA ships will be targeted and sunk as they won't have AWACS and fighters to defend them and the carrier itself will be destroyed by enemy air power.

But the commenter is absolutely correct, ships are not expected to remain operable after a direct strike anymore. Weapons have gotten so good that defending credibly against them is not practical, so it's not really worth it to protect them nearly as much as it used to be.

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