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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that Russia and China are building hypersonic glide missile so they can penetrate any US missile defense system, which the US doesn't really even have. And neither does Russia or China have an effective missile defense system that the US needs the capability to defeat.

So it seems like an arms race without either side really having advanced to the point of necessitating a further step. Then again, I suppose it makes sense to be one step ahead of where the game is going.

Or is there something more to this?

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> US missile defense system, which the US doesn't really even have

Uh..Missile defense is a massive part of US Navy doctrine and is pretty much the primary purpose of every Destroyer, Cruiser, and soon Frigate in the Navy at this point.

Without a doubt, the Aegis system and THAAD are the direct reason for these developments from China and Russia.

This. We have hundreds of Aegis boats sitting off our coasts waiting for it to rain MIRVs.

> We have hundreds of Aegis boats

113, if you count Japan's, Korea's, and the rest of NATO (with 137 more planned.) These are spread around the world, and only some of them are Aegis BMD. And not all of those will be ready when they're needed. A few dozen Aegis BMD ships off the coast of the US seems plausible.

Besides Aegis, there is THAAD (which only protects a handful of rather small areas) and GMD (which only has a few dozen interceptors.) If China/Russia threw hundreds of missiles at the continental US all at once, it's a good bet that at least some would get through and wreck havoc.

The aegis you are talking about are mainly dedicated to protecting CVNs

Sure, but that doctrine is old. And has it not been partially obsoleted by China's advances in missile technology?

My understanding was that our fleets have sufficient defense for a limited attack but that a full scale missile attack by China would quickly overwhelm them.

Aegis is continually evolving with new sensors, processing, and missiles and far from obsolete. It's no coincidence that China is building similar capabilities into its own Destroyers.

I definitely would't call the scale of missile defense in the fleet limited. Each carrier group would contain and be screened by Destroyers and Cruisers with several hundred interceptors ready to go between them.

This might've been the article that I read, which seems to disagree:

"The inconvenient truth is that our Navy has 12 carrier groups and all are now obsolete. The Chinese have developed an antiship ballistic missile (ASBM), the DF-21D, nicknamed the “carrier killer.” It has a range of 1,200 miles and can fly at speeds higher than Mach 5. During descent to the target, it can fly at Mach 10. That’s like launching one in Chicago and hitting the Statue of Liberty three minutes later.

We have no missile-defense systems that can counter the DF-21D. The Navy has a ballistic-missile-defense system, but the problem is it doesn’t work. Last year the Navy performed a test in which it tried to intercept two ASBMs. It couldn’t hit either one. This was a planned test—the Navy knew when the missiles were coming, from what direction and how many. Imagine a surprise attack on a carrier with 20 missiles incoming at the same time."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/navy-aircraft-carrier-fleet-bat...

Skeptical of anyone who claims "The inconvenient truth is that our Navy has 12 carrier groups and all are now obsolete." China sure is building a lot of carrier groups for a country who supposedly just made carrier groups obsolete,

And the only test I can find from last year was this. https://www.mda.mil/news/21news0012.html

The navy is close to adding lasers to its point defense array

I imagine the use case is more conventional weapons, for example taking out a navy flagship.

Better we try to one up each other with fast cruise missiles than with more nukes.

In fact, nukes are useless now, let's just get rid of all of them. (wink wink)

Nukes simply existing may have saved more lives at this point. That could, of course, change in seconds at any time.

You joke about nukes, but since they're such an "unthinkable" weapon they've become almost useless for most people who have them. You need them so that others with fewer compunctions are not able to steamroll you, but as an actual help to the kinds of conflicts currently going on and likely to happen in the future, they're just not as effective.

Whether that's fast cruise missiles, more powerful drones, more disposable drones, robot warriors, cyber-warfare, etc. militaries are trying to find the technology that breaks the stalemate caused by MADD.

Ask Putin about how useless having nukes is for preventing NATO involvement in the Ukraine...

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