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Comment by scarmig | Hacker News Reader

Key phrase here is kill chain. Finding a moving carrier on the open ocean is hard, even with modern satellite technology. And getting a missile launched from hundreds or thousands of miles away to hit it once you do know its position (10 minutes ago) is harder.

Not to say that's impossible, just that it's currently an unsolved problem.

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Bringing a carrier anywhere near a hostile shore is now iffy. There are too many truck-mounted ship killers now, as the Russian Black Sea fleet found out the hard way.[1] Sailing US carriers up the Taiwan Strait as a show of force is over. The US last did that in 2007.

Something else that's probably over - parking an amphibious assault ship offshore and using it as a base for USMC operations. The USMC and USN invested huge resources in that concept, and it's been very useful in small wars. Those ships are now vulnerable.

A LTJG writes in Naval Institute Proceeding on this.[2] If a carrier is close enough to do anything useful, it's vulnerable to shore-based attack. A Coast Guard officer worries about attacks by drone swarms launched from fishing boats.[3] China has a large fleet of small coastal vessels, the "People's Armed Maritime Militia", which are used for observation and other tasks.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61141118

[2] https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/december/eye...

[3] https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/december/res...

I was limiting my scope to hypersonics, which are hyped compared to more conventional threats.

I agree that in a US-China war, the US will stay very far away from Chinese land-based platforms. The surface fleet would mostly remain outside the first island chain and fly sorties to take advantage of US air superiority.

The Chinese land-based platforms now have more range than the US carrier based platforms. See the first article I linked from U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings. If a carrier is close enough to do anything useful, it's close enough to be hit.

Doubt that it is hard. A carrier must send out an emense amount of RF. There are satellites that have large antennas (probably when deployed bigger than football fields. “Think something like a large net made of thin wires”) listening in to the things that happen here down on the ground.

If you read the investigative story [1] about how Russia's missile team's operate it explains they have to program their missiles with USB thumbdrives, targeting data comes from a small team in Moscow, then it gets sent to remote airbases/submarines, and targeting information is often 24hrs old by the time the missile is in flight.

It's much harder than it sounds.

A ballistic hypersonic missile isn't like a TV-guided cruise missile that can track a moving target or a HARM that will seek out RF signatures. You'd basically have to wait until the carrier is parked somewhere for an expended period (multiple hours at a minimum), otherwise you'll waste a $100M hypersonic missile.

[1] https://theins.ru/en/politics/256339

The challenge is that targets look smaller the faster you go. Small errors quickly produce deltas larger than the target. Hypersonic missiles, at least the ones we know about, are not like aircraft that can miss, turn around, and try again. They’re more like bullets, and it’s pretty well understood how hard it is to hit an erratically moving target with a rifle round.

Even if satellites did have exact, continuous data on the location of a target (they don't, and in wartime there would be aggressive countermeasures being used against them), the targeting data has to be relayed to the launch facility/missile itself and the human components of the chain. Then, once launched, it takes at least minutes for the missile to reach its target. You can imagine the satellites automatically sending data to the missile in flight, but hypersonics aren't particularly maneuverable. If you're ten seconds from reaching the target and it's a mile away from where you thought, it's not trivial to reroute. And your $100M missile just explodes in the open ocean, a very expensive tea kettle.

That all said, none of this is impossible, and first tier militaries are putting a whole lot of effort into this problem; in a sense, "it's just engineering." But so far no first tier military has actually seen how their system would work in the field, and the results remain to be seen.

Particularly, if China were sure that it could sink American carriers at will, it would already be invading Taiwan.

>>>A carrier must send out an emense amount of RF.

The US Navy is actually pretty good at avoiding that.

https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/navy/...

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