The pacific ocean is over 60 million square miles. A full sized carrier group probably takes up like 100 square miles when it's fully spread out, but that's a very, very, small percentage of the available search space.
And beyond that, you need to actually see the carrier with something, a laser sensor, a direct radar hit, even the human eyeball; you can't just fire a bunch of missiles in the general direction you think the carrier is at and expect them to hit anything (for one thing there's a whole bunch of other ships that will distract the targeting sensors).
Like, I cannot stress this enough, even if you knew the exact location of a carrier at a given moment, down to like 4 decimals of lat/long, and you knew which direction it was sailing, if your missile launcher is 1000 miles away you can't just program it in and fire it off and expect it to fly 1000 miles and then hit the carrier. Even with some kind of amazing on board sensors, there's a dozen other ships just existing near by, the carrier itself is moving unpredictably, not to mention the actual decoying/spoofing systems specifically designed to interfere with targeting sensors.
And this is the problem, you now say "oh well just use a platform that's closer to the carrier so it can get accurate targeting data for a weapon to hit the specific carrier", which is technically possible... until the carrier destroys your targeting platform because why wouldn't it? Whatever distance you have to be within to "lock on" to the carrier will be, pretty much by definition, in range of the carrier to shoot back at.
Hell, as far as I know, they could put literal anti-satellite missiles on carrier aircraft and just fly straight up and shoot down targeting satellites. I don't know if that's something they're currently planning/practicing, but I don't know if any reason they couldn't.
All that protection didn't stop the Swedish diesal-electric HSMS Gotland seamlessly torp'ing the Ronald Reagan in 2005.
France pulled a similar score 2015, Canada "got" a UK carrier in 2007, IIRC even Australia's taken out a US ship or two in various fun ways over the years.
But I do wonder what the starting conditions for those exercises were. The sub's underwater range is limited (although Swedish subs seem to be better than others) and the have to come up every once in a while, at which point they're vulnerable. There's plenty of places to hide near coasts, but I can imagine that on the open ocean, it might be a lot harder for a sub to get close enough.
I haven't studied the HSMS Gotland incident in any great detail, but just in general for wargames, ships are required to be in certain locations at certain times, stay inside sea lanes, use transponders, ignore certain other ships and in general not completely mess up the existing sea commerce traffic that is trying to go past the exercise area.
If your carrier group is literally 1000 miles away from any piece of land and you have full authorization to sink anything that looks even slightly suspicious, it probably becomes considerably more difficult to sneak up and torpedo a carrier.
But yes, carriers will get sunk, modern warfare is in large part attritional, but if you send out, dunno, $100m worth of subs and sink a $10b carrier, that's a great return on investment, but doesn't help you in the slightest if you're now out of submarines and the enemy sails two more carriers into range.
I'm geting fairly old now and I have no recollection of ever thinking such a thing ...
> but if you send out, dunno, $100m worth of subs and sink a $10b carrier,
Even better if you can send out $80m worth of torpedoes attached to cheap arse unmanned drone delivery units all embedded within a 10x magnitude swarm of cheap arse drone units that have no torpedoes.
High chance of penetration, good chance there'll be some left over to confound and confuse the next carriers.
Absolutely that keeps the high end gear standing well off from tight spaces.
If we're postulating magical "ai" attack drones loitering off the coast, what's stopping the americans from sending in their own fleet of equally magical ai attack drones to blow up all the defenders and then sail the carriers up?
Also, again, you'd have to know exactly where the carriers even are, right now $80m worth of torpedo drones would cover like .01% of china's coastal waters.
Numbers game, what's the maximum number of targets that can be covered in a window, the cost of dealing with non torpedo launch capable platforms is the same as the cost of taking out an actual torpedo carrying launcher - the overwhelming threshold is something that is tested in games, of course.
> If we're postulating magical "ai" attack drones loitering off the coast
I'm not, I'm looking at a reasonable near term extrapolation of what China already has and tested.
> what's stopping the americans from sending in their own fleet of equally magical ai attack drones to blow up all the defenders
The usual constraints of hunting and finding in vast area
> Also, again, you'd have to know exactly where the carriers even are
Well, approximately .. and that's what China provides to Iran via sat coverage.
> right now $80m worth of torpedo drones would cover like .01% of china's coastal waters.
I thought the carriers were off Iran and staged well back? I can't see them being as far back as China myself, but perhaps you have some curious reason for wanting to spread them out some place far far away from the conflict. I have no knowledge of that, obviously.
So how are you hunting and finding the carriers in the first place? You can't have it both ways.
> I thought the carriers were off Iran and staged well back? I can't see them being as far back as China myself, but perhaps you have some curious reason for wanting to spread them out some place far far away from the conflict. I have no knowledge of that, obviously.
We're talking about a hypothetical US carrier war against china. Is there something interesting to talk about with regards to iran trying to defend against carriers?
It's more or less simple VLS and CVW magazine math to figure out total carrier group saturation numbers. This also assuming prioritizing carrier survival... i.e. CVWs may not even be geometrically recoverable if carriers has to GTFO.
Napkin math hypothetical, if a stacked carrier group with 3DDGs quad packed antiair and CVWs where most tasking dedicated to shooting down drones... PRC needs to launch ~3000 enhanced shaheed136 tier moped munitions to fully deplete magazine and saturate. Considering PRC procurement likely getting them at fraction price of Iran (i.e. 10-20k, remember Iran has sanction tax), this probably actually cheaper than PRC hypersonic salvos. We're talking sub 100m swarms that effectively defeat carriers or at minimum draw billions in interceptors. VS 100m tier1 hypersonic ashm salvos that can do so in 1/20th time.
The TLDR is knowing where carriers are is theoretically a solved problem, and knowing where carriers are enables conemps/ops vs those who do not, i.e. if Iran can somehow launch 10000 drones, simply having shit C4ISR means they can't use same tactic.
No, prop drones don't "geometrically catchup". Shahed's extreme range achieved by flying really slow, the top speed (which they don't sustain constantly to conserve fuel) is about 185kph, for the maximum flight time of about 13 hours. US carriers officially can sustain 60kph indefinitely, and in practice they can go faster. That means on a straight line a Shahed can only gain 1600km in the absolute best scenario. In reality it's much less, because launching takes time and the average speed is slower.
The capabilities that you're describing are a fantasy.
>geometrically catchup
A carrier at 3000km and GTFO sprint opposite direction at max speed, i.e. 30knots / 60km, will have prop drones closing speed/gap at 120km per hour. AKA intercept time distance around ~24 hours at 4500km. Hence why I said ENHANCED shaheeds, i.e. swap propulsion with 30% more efficient heavy fuel engines, increase aspect ratio and improved shaheed basically makes carriers operating within 3000kms unable to reach ~4500km endurance no escape zone. This within the platforms SWAP potential, technically can also just swap payload for fuel but HFE and planform improvements simply more efficient.
3000km also VASTLY optimistic scenario for carriers and limits of prop planform/SWAP potential, it's functionally carrier at 0 sortie scrap metal range. Realistically carriers max effective standoff is ~2200km, at which point effective sorties down to 20% (rest tanking/support). So no, mathematically, carriers cannot fastandfurious straight line out of this, and definitely not surface fleet escorts. The capabilities I'm describing is pedestrian for PRC. Unless one thinks PRC cannot build a better shaheed than Iran who literally built them in caves with box of scraps.