How can an aircraft carrier launch and recover planes if it's being rocked by waves?
How can a destroyer launch missiles from vertical launch cells if waves are constantly crashing on the deck?
I wonder how a Navy made up entirely of nuclear submarines would fare against a more diverse force with an equal number of hulls.
For fixed wing jets that need to land on deck… even if you ignored the wind that goes along with these conditions, I think recovering aircraft would be too great a risk. That does bring up the wind and visibility that (almost always) goes along with these extreme sea states, which would be probably just as hazardous as the deck pitching about to flight ops.
For basically everything else, I think the naval systems work just fine in bad weather.
In regards to rogue waves, an 85 foot wave would put green water on the flight deck of the carrier I was on, something that would be difficult to imagine for me. Aircraft on the flight deck are chained down with multiple chains, each of the chains having the strength to hold the entire aircraft down, so I can’t imagine losing aircraft, but flooding the planes with sea water probably wouldn’t be good for them.
The ocean is bigger.
It is only a matter of time until one is lost
The ocean is the boss of sailors, a loving but harsh mistress.
3 destroyers sank, with almost 1000 lives lost, and virtually every ship in the fleet took enough damage to at least force a port visit, if not a major repair/refit.
Virtually every aircraft in the fleet either tossed into the sea or damaged beyond even wartime economic repair
Submarine-launched missiles, in a diverse navy, can launch from underwater. That's great for stealth. It's terrible for budget. A submarine-only fleet would need to surface to economically attempt coastal bombardment and air defence.
That said, I'm not sure what fraction of e.g. the U.S. Navy's submarine missiles are capable of subsurface dispatchment.
Plus, I bet somebody would work out who did it if a country used a nuke to create a wave, there are only a couple candidates for who could do this sort of thing, after all. I bet it would have pretty significant diplomatic ramifications to… inconvenience a carrier group for a couple minutes.
Not very effective.
Tsunami waves move huge volumes of water, but in the open ocean they are also very long waves. Their travel speed is about the same as the "linear long wave speed", or about sqrt(g*D) where D is the depth of the water.
As these waves approach the shore, however, the ocean becomes more shallow. Waves slow down. The tsunami effectively "piles up" on itself, and a wave that was a little high and a lot long becomes a wave that's a lot high and a little long.
A carrier operating away from shore would see the tsunami in its more benign state. Coastal cities, however, would be in trouble.
I know very little more than that, but it was in the news here some years ago.
I do know it was a failure, quite a comprehensive failure