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> A naval carrier group is pretty much invulnerable to any single weapon that exists today.

I’m unconvinced. When I worked in the field, they were persistent rumours that modern submarines did sink aircraft carriers in actual exercises which I’m ready to believe. A diesel submarine with its motor shut-off resting on the bottom is near impossible to detect.

Not entirely comparable but see how Ukraine seemingly easily neutralised the Russian Black Sea fleet. Modern Navy are not really built for symmetrical conflicts. My personal belief is that progress in space tracking, missiles, subsea warfare and autonomous weapons have made surface ships mostly obsolete.

They have their use but open war is a modern enemy is not one of them anymore.

Yeah the Russia-Ukraine war is basically the Russo-Japanese war in terms of being a grim preview of what happens when industrial nations fight an all out war. I worry that whatever happens next will make WWI and WWII look like child's play even without the use of nuclear weapons.

The diesel submarine threat is exactly why carrier strike group tactics have evolved to remain further offshore in deep water while relying on long-range stand-off weapons. SSKs are relatively slow and short ranged so it's easier to avoid them than to detect them.

>When I worked in the field, they were persistent rumours that modern submarines did sink aircraft carriers in actual exercises which I’m ready to believe.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/navy-freaked-out-how-...

This one was pretty widely reported (from 2005)

A diesel on the bottom in rough terrain is an extreme threat but generally easily avoided by not going into areas shallow enough for a diesel to be on the bottom.

> firing hundreds of anti-ship missiles

The War Nerd stated it clearly: https://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carrie...

Don’t think that article from 2009 is still true. The USA and Israel easily shot down over a thousand missiles from Iran.

https://open.substack.com/pub/noahpinion/p/why-so-many-of-us...

About 300.

and over a long distance. After all, Iran isn't actually all that close to Israel.

It was 'easy' because Iran designed the attack to deplete the expensive iron dome stocks with ultra-cheap drones, not actually demolish any Israeli infrastructure.

The supersonic missiles that Iran intended to get through, got through. All else was theatre.

The point was very clearly made: iron dome can be defeated with cheap drones, leaving the path clear for the supersonic missiles to land on target. Which is precisely what happened.

It was precisely the same message delivered in Irans' response to the assassination of Soleimani.

What got through? My understanding is there were no meaningful hits--some of the ballistic stuff wasn't intercepted but came down where it didn't matter. And you don't know if that means a miss or means they didn't fire--Israel has gotten quite good at plotting where a ballistic weapon is going to come down and deciding whether it's worth expending an interceptor on it.

The only casualties I'm aware of were from the debris of a successful intercept. It's not like a war game, when you kill something it doesn't just turn into a boom and disappear.

Irans' hypersonic ballistic missiles, for which there is no effective defense, all got through and hit their targeted positions, frighteningly close to the heart of Israels defense HQ.

The 300+ drones were there to exhaust the iron dome, which is what happened, and the hypersonic ballistic missiles were there, to demonstrate that there is no effective defense against them (because there isn't, in spite of propaganda stated otherwise). Iran made the very important point that they could launch these hypersonic missiles with impunity, but instead exercised 'restraint'. The world military communities took very specific note that these missiles are impervious to existing defense technologies, and it was not the first time Iran made this point - they also demonstrated this capability in their response to the assassination of Solemeini, placing the missiles on the berths of the people involved in the assassination...

Huh? Iron Dome wouldn't have been capable against a hypersonic anyway, there's nothing to be gained from bleeding it. They did engage the fast stuff with Arrow.

>nothing to be gained from bleeding it

They proved they can do it and that it is defeatable. That's a big gain, especially for those who have suffered under the repression that the iron dome protects and prolongs.

Dismissive arguments such as yours allows that suffering to continue. It can be defeated, also. Do you not observe the daily murder with earnest humanity?

> designed the attack to deplete the expensive iron dome stocks with ultra-cheap drones

This! As war is more and more about attrition who wins when a system costing 1000 to build + 1 per hour to maintain is saturated by another one costing 1 + .001 per hour, even if this last one causes no damage?

At least 9 got through.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Iranian_strikes_against_I...

A very credible author, clearly.

Sorry, I much prefer an argument about the point made than an unsubstantiated ad hominem attack.

> A naval carrier group is pretty much invulnerable to any single weapon that exists today.

I like your patriotic spirit, but the U.S. Navy doesn't seem to agree.

The Eisenhower retreated at the slightest hint of Houthi missiles.

What do you mean? I saw the videos online. The mighty Houthi missiles ravaged the Eisenhower, leaving it barely more than a series of smoking craters born aloft for PR purposes by support crafted AI-edited out of any of the video footage US-ians are allowed to see.

That plus spamming small sea based submarine kamikaze drones will eventually penetrate.

I wonder if there will be some large scale autonomous mini torpedo or mine systems that works against small highly mobile drone ships. Similar to how the old WW2 systems shot out mines from the ship but not putting the wider carrier group at risk of blue on blue.

Edit: also +1 grim reapers YT channel. It really demonstrates the capability of Chinese anti air (on paper) and advanced long range missiles. Would be a very very scary conflict for pilots and navy sailors.

I’ve been thinking: drone subs that could sit at the bottom of the ocean and then surface to fire anti-ship missiles. Essentially this https://youtu.be/hMBICD5rgY0?si=IXalKjfvs0pSL5B6

Imagine launching hundreds of these from the US or Japan and then they just camp at the bottom of the East China Sea. If tensions escalate, they can migrate towards the Taiwan Strait. And then, emerge potentially just hundreds of meters away from corvettes and landing vessels, fire off their missiles and then submerge.

I've always felt like I was missing something obvious for why there weren't submarine-launched SAMs or ASMs.

Seems like a really good way to target AWACS/tankers and valuable softer shipping, provided you have missiles with active guidance and can deploy launch pods under the sea, scoot, and then they launch when you've left the area.

Granted, much harder to do before networked unified sensors, but not nowadays.

ASMs would not be very useful. First submarines have piss poor detection capability outside of their sonar which severely limits the range at which they could launch them. Then they already have torpedoes which are effective against ships and can be guided from the range at which a submarine would be likely to want to fire.

SAMs have been considered mostly to fight against their natural enemy: the helicopters but I don’t think it has ever been actually fielded.

The issue remains the same in both case. Submarines are slow and firing is loud and basically broadcast your position to everyone.

There's exploration of integrating hypersonics with antiship strike capability on subs. But the TLDR is until PLA's massive A2D2 expansion to 1IC and beyond (1500km+), there aren't any adversaries that can prevent carrier groups from operating permissively - USN CSG airwing had standoff advantage against everyone. Hence (IMO) little reason (without consider technical stuff like extending kill chain to underwater - subs would need to get target queuing from above water sensors) to integrate SAMs/ASMs into subs, because as expensive as carriers are, subs are even more expensive per unit of fire/tube/vls. Extrapolate from Zumwalt hypersonic retrofit projections current 80 cells for TLAM (tomahawks) whittles down to ~12 CGHBs (common hypersonic glide bodies) to a SSN (~20 shots) and all of a sudden it costs 100-200m+ per shot on a 2-4B Ohio class. Extrapolate to SSNX @6-8B and cost ratio per shot gets even more ridiculous.

> deploy launch pods under the sea, scoot, and then they launch when you've left the area

There are multiple dealbreaker for this: a) the launch pods need to be quite large in order to contain missiles and the surrounding infrastructure, probably including buoyancy control etc, b) submarines are veery slow so they need a long time to leave the area, c) the pods need to hang out near the surface to receive signals and to launch missiles, so they have a high risk of being detected before they can be used

It's probably more feasible to consider unmanned "disposable" submarines that can fire missiles. Still you have the problem of low speed and tricky communications though.

> the pods need to hang out near the surface to receive signals and to launch missiles, so they have a high risk of being detected before they can be used

You can now send encoded sonar pulses. With good microphones on pods, you can communicate over many many kilometers and those commands can be pretty short, no need to "real time fpv", just "target a ship currently at {X,Y}".

> the pods need to hang out near the surface to receive signals and to launch missiles

I'd think you could do some variation on attaching a long fiber optic filament to a fishing bob that has just enough electronics.

If you want to launch a SAM from a sub you first need to find whatever it is you want to shoot at. And if you radiate you're dead, you're limited to passive detection. And you have to stick something up to do that with--and the AWACS can see you from much farther away than you can see it.

The one thing that strikes me as a realistic threat would be to put up only a tiny antenna that can detect the radar of the AWACS. If you think it's in range you fire something like the AIM-120 on the line of bearing, radiation-seeking and then switch to it's active seeker when the target goes dark (as it almost certainly will if it thinks there's a radiation-homer out there.) They are slow, lumbering beasts that probably can't get out of acquisition range before the seeker goes active.

You still have the problem that you just left a flaming streak pointed right at you, a suicide move if you're anywhere near the fleet. It would make deploying an AWACS far from the fleet a bad idea, though. (Back with the old Harpoon wargame I found by far the best strategy was to station an AWACS a few hundred miles from the fleet in the general direction of the enemy. Russia had nothing with air-to-air weapons and the legs to engage it. It wouldn't be as effective against a competent enemy but it would still take a big bite out of maximum range by forcing the attackers to take a big detour around it.)

I also wonder how well an AWACS might be able to defend itself with it's radar. What happens to the seeker if the AWACS focuses it's radar on the missile?

Locate AWACS from ground/air/space sensors. (they're radiating like hell)

Communicate target location to sub via low-freq.

Sub transits to location. (realistically, would already need to be nearby)

Sub deploys canister. (have ICBM-dimensions to work with)

Canister hangs out just under surface, with surface communications buoy. Registers itself onto the fires network with LPI comms. ("I'm at XY cords w/ Z weapon", ACK)

Other assets then send order to fire when appropriate, w/ sufficient track. (since weapon is active, it just needs navigational track before it goes active)

Ideally, it's IR-guided, so AWACS doesn't get any lock warning.

Given SLBMs can toss a nuclear warhead at range, I expect they'd at least be able to loft several LREW / AIM-174 / AIM-260 class weapons to engagement altitude/speed. (~130,000 lbs vs 2,000 lbs)

Why do you want to fire missiles if you have the technology to basically manufacture hundred of autonomous torpedos?

Would be much more efficient to just detect the ship from the bottom and then go explode under it. Torpedos do much more damage than missiles.

Navy thought the same thing. And they already have this (e.g., mine that has a torpedo).

A version of this already exists (for awhile). It is a mine that sits at the bottom of the ocean and then launches a torpedo.

The state where naval carrier group is invulnerable to surface attacks is also when it's at it's weakest, since at that point is when it's CIWS's IFF is short-circuited to maximize response time. At that point your defenses are shooting down everything in close proximity to the ships, including any of your own planes/missiles you are attempting to launch. Your only option at that point is to wait out the missile wave, while your opponent is still free to maneuver around and do things like attempt to engage with cannons/torpedos.

CIWS is already being phased out.