Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

It's always seemed very doubtful to me that a layered defense of the type mounted by U.S.N. carrier groups would be effective in a real war against a sophisticated opponent. It's obvious to me that every capital ship would be at the bottom of the ocean in the first hour of a war with China. The useless Russian ship we are discussing was, after all, equipped with a modern anti-missile system and yet it sank. Perhaps their CIWS readiness was not optimal, but that has also happened to the U.S. in the case of the Stark.

Ships are expensive and missiles are almost free by comparison, so this seems like a fundamental problem for naval warfare.

What I'm really wondering is why the Russians even staged this ship into the Black Sea. What possible capabilities could it have been providing that the Russians could not also get from land units?

View on HN

There was a famous exercise in which a Dutch submarine managed to sink over half a carrier group in an exercise (https://defence.pk/pdf/threads/dutch-submarine-sinks-half-of...) and printed a t-shirt to commemorate the occasion. The shirt was very swiftly forbidden by the leadership team, since the Americans were rather unhappy about the whole thing and it was deemed to be not very diplomatic to wear such shirts to the traditional end-of-exercise bbq on the flight deck.

Though reading too much into wargames is also a mistake - they put significant limits on the sonar power as otherwise it would devastate the local ocean ecology, which naturally benefits those who want to remain hidden like submarines in exercises. They're meant to use estimates and an honor system of detection, but I've generally heard it's pretty laughable from people involved.

I don't doubt that such ecological worries will go out the window if there's actual threats involved.

The joke on our submarine was that aircraft carriers should more properly be called "targets." Sweden has a super quiet submarine design using Sterling engines:

A Stirling engine is particularly well suited for a submarine because the engine is nearly silent and can use the surrounding sea water as a heat sink to increase efficiency

In 2005, HSwMS Gotland managed to snap several pictures of USS Ronald Reagan during a wargaming exercise in the Pacific Ocean, effectively "sinking" the aircraft carrier

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotland-class_submarine

My own opinion is that aircraft carriers are very effective in projecting power around the world during peacetime or low intensity conflicts, but military planners recognize (I hope) that they will be quickly sunk in an all out war and have contingency plans.

There is this theory that at least US CVNs have enough power and the correct hull shape to hydroplane in an event of an emergency. It would likely do a lot of damage in the process so it's probably never tested, and it's classified so nobody really knows for sure.

But if informed that an attack is imminent there may be at least one ace up their sleeve.

That seems pretty wild. Torpedos don't strike the side of a ship, rather they are meant to explode underneath for max damage. So even if a CVN could hydroplane, I don't think it would evade a torpedo.

Well an ADCAP can do as much as 55 kts, which is probably the fastest conventional torps go, and you'd definitely buy more time to deploy countermeasures and decoys.

A Shkval can go as fast as a missile, but it can't turn very well so you might be able to dodge it this way.

Sure it's not a good outlook in any case, but it's better than sitting there waiting to be hit.

>But if informed that an attack is imminent there may be at least one ace up their sleeve.

... Traveling a few dozen knots faster is an "ace up the sleeve"?

Submarines can't approach if the Carrier is faster than the Sub.

Its a stupid strategy, but it seems to check out. The faster a submarine tries to go, the easier it would be to detect.

I was under the impression that the consensus is the primary threat to American aircraft carriers is not submarines but supersonic cruise missiles.

It is if you don't expect it.

> Traveling a few dozen knots faster is an "ace up the sleeve"?

Very possibly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_48_torpedo

Maximum speed: 55 knots

Effective firing range: 21-27 nautical miles

If your carrier can do anything near 55 knots away from the torpedo, it's safe.

There is no such theory. You can clearly see from construction pictures that those ships have displacement hulls. A displacement hull won't plane no matter how much power you put into the shafts.

http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-028.php

Well it's more of a conspiracy theory really. Along with the Aurora aircraft, Area 51 aliens and the like. Just slightly more believable than the rest.

> A displacement hull won't plane no matter how much power you put into the shafts.

I wouldn't be so sure, the main difference between the two is that a planing hull has an angle of attack in regards to the water, so it can generate lift. You can achieve the same by increasing stern trim on a displacement hull.

As for it being flat on the bottom, there are also less stable flat planning hulls that work so that doesn't disqualify it either.

Isn't this why aircraft carriers are also escorted in real-world situations to give them the support they need to operate within their means?

They not only have ship escorts, they have submarine escorts. But no fence around a carrier is perfect. An attacking submarine doesn't have to chase a carrier, they can lie in wait in ship lanes. A new development since I was in the sub service is submarine launched cruise missiles in addiction to torpedoes.

To me it feels like an asymmetry between progress in sensors/software vs. progress in hardware/personnel since the last major wars ?

That is, are the warships of today much better than the warships of 1950, if better at all? What about the skill and preparation of the crews?

On the other hand when I watched videos of the Javelin missile I see a lot of sensors and software that probably could have only been created recently.

I don't think such a thing could have existed in 1950 or 1970. Probably by 1990 it was possible, but I bet it's a lot better by 2010 too. Electronics got cheaper and smaller and more mobile. Imaging is way better.

So while I don't know any of the specifics, this seems like a general trend. It's going to be harder for the offensive side to take and hold territory, and maybe the aircraft carrier is obsolete in a big conflict.

We saw some asymmetry in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but it doesn't seem like the same type, since AFAIK the opponents didn't have many smart weapons.

Modern warships are far, far better than the ones that we used in the 50s. We have more powerful engines, more redundancy, and better damage control systems. The sensors that we have on the ships are much better, and they are used to control more advanced, accurate, and powerful missiles. The crews are better trained, because they're a fully volunteer force, and more lessons have been learned over the years.

The carrier is not obsolete. They are surrounded by a battle group of the best of these modern ships, in open ocean with mobility unrestrained by the rules of engagement of a pre-planned exercise. On their decks, they carry 50+ aircraft that can investigate anywhere within 500nmi, ensuring that nothing moves on the surface that they don't know about. When a plane lands, it can be turned around for another sortie in an hour with a fresh pilot and more missiles. Each of these missiles have a range of their own of 100nmi+, and can be carried more than 500nmi by the aircraft carrying them. An aircraft carrier at full power can even outrun some smaller surface ships.

Yeah true, I shouldn't have stated in absolute terms ... But I still suspect there is a differential in the progress in tech for offense (holding a territory) vs. defense. And maybe that differential is greater than you consider Russian offense vs. western defense ...

On one hand, this sounds much like military folklore. "If you serve in role X, you have Y seconds/minutes to live once the fighting starts", or something like that.

Real wars are confusing and there is a lot of uncertainty about everything. Maybe China could sink every US Navy capital ship if they fire everything they have at once, but they are not sure about that. There have not been any major naval battles since WW2, and nobody really knows what would happen in one. If they fire everything and it doesn't work, their forces will be spent and vulnerable until they can resupply, and they may not want to risk that.

On the other hand, big high-value targets do sound like a bad idea, given how warfare has evolved in the past 30-40 years.

Ukrainians claim that they took out the ship's anti-missile radar first with an UAV before firing the missile.

Glory to them if true, but this particular ship had 6 independent fire control radars for their close-in weapons systems, which are automatic. The UAV perhaps destroyed the sensor system of the long-range anti-air missile system? Either way, obviously it worked. I am a huge skeptic of anti-missile weapons since they have performed extremely poorly in limited practice.

I'm not sure about the terminology, but yes, it sounded like it was the long-range defense system radar that was taken out, because that was deemed to be the one most likely to shoot the missile down. Their close-range stuff was supposedly operational, it just didn't work as well in practice as it did on paper.

BTW, it should also be noted that the missile that took it down was - again, supposedly - Ukraine's very recently (2020) developed P-360 Neptune; and they have very few of them in service. They haven't been used until this point, so the assumption now is that it was a long-running operation in which Ukrainians bided their time and patiently arranged for all the pieces to be just right before making the move - and it paid off big time.

Ships can now be attacked from shore. That really hadn't been much of a thing since the era of seacoast forts. But that's changing. China has invested heavily in shore-based anti-ship missiles. There are now more things you can launch from a truck that can take out a ship. As seems to be what happened here.

Look at a map of western Russia's sea access. Choke points everywhere, most of them controlled by others.

"Territorial waters" were long defined by the range of guns.

3 mile, 12 mile. 200 is roughly the range that's reasonably patrolable via aircraft.

What you own is defined by what you can defend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_waters

And yes, Russia's sea access is surprisingly limited for a country which nominally has the 4th longest coastline of any --- largely along the Arctic ocean.

In the case of the Stark there were failures, but the incident response was much more coherent than the Russian one. All arms of the Russian forces seem to suffer from similar problems of low morale, poor discipline, poor training, etc.

It's worth looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Gloucester_(D96)#First_Gul... as another example. My understanding is that the Falklands experience resulted in lots of changes and a much higher state of readiness for these situations within the Royal Navy. Budget and tech were much harder to acquire than tactics were to develop. In the case of China, there may be some upgraded weapons which can't be countered with training and tactics.

You are correct on the economics of ships to missiles and that those ships have anti-missile systems but being close to land can put you at a disadvantage due to radar having a certain range it can operate at. Low flying projectiles may be harder to track due to these limitations and the Ukrainians have been very resourceful with the weapons they do have and have used them in ways that even western militaries were surprised with.

I'm guessing here but I think it might have been more a show of force by putting that cruiser there as well as an attempt at dissuading other countries from entering the area.

To be clear I am arm-chairing here and would love to know more on the operational capabilities of radar on ships.

A saying I've heard from current/former sailors is, "Submarines are weapons, surface ships are targets". Surface ships, especially carriers, are very useful during peace time, but that during war time submarines can actually operate whereas surface ships must spend the majority of their time being evasive rather than offensive.

I've heard that actually hitting a carrier group at open sea is pretty tough with a cruise/ballistic missile, where are they? Where are they moving? Layered defenses etc. But what good is a bunch of ships steaming around hiding?

> But what good is a bunch of ships steaming around hiding?

Exactly. A carrier group that's not within 500nm of enemy territory might as well not exist.

Defense-in-depth includes obfuscation of position, signals warfare, first-strike, and strategic deterrents.

If you put a carrier group in a pond and lob missiles at them, I'm not confident in the outcome either.

Reportedly the Moskva's radar system only covers 180 degrees, so the Ukrainians used the drone to distract the radar system, this combined with the high turbulent seas causing artefacts on the radar make it very hard to defend against anti ship missiles.

I presume most more modern ships don't have radars that can only cover 180 degrees so they would be as vulnerable to this attack.

Distance from the shoulder fired missiles?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com