It's a given that aircraft carriers will be sunk in an all out war. They're useful to project power in anything less than an all out war, which fortunately is most of the time.
Edit: I'm a former nuclear submarine sailor. We call aircraft carriers 'targets'
While I support inter-branch shit-talking, even from you bubbleheads, when push comes to shove, CVNs aren't "targets" for SSNs. We're on the same team, fighting against our true enemies . . . the Army and the Air Force.
But seriously... Google returns this for the keywords 'falkland war submarine aircraft carrier submarine sights periscope'
"During the Falklands War, the British nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror used its periscope to sight the Argentine cruiser ARA General Belgrano before sinking it, but did not engage the Argentine aircraft carrier ARA Veinticinco de Mayo. The carrier was also stalked by British submarines but ultimately retreated and was never attacked."
Yes, 40 years ago, a submarine sunk a WWII cruiser. ASW is a thing, and subs are a legitimate threat. But this is also why we have submarines, because the best tool for hunting a submarine is another submarine. But claiming this magically makes aircraft carriers obsolete is largely internet fanboy noise.
The US military trains and fights as a team, and the entire point is to use the strengths of one platform to protect the weaknesses of another and vice versa.
The best tool to hunt a submarine is an anti-sub helicopter.
Submarines are basically as good as dead if an anti-sub helicopter is nearby. They can't really retaliate, an active sonar will most likely expose them and they are not fast enough to escape a torpedo.
> But claiming this magically makes aircraft carriers obsolete is largely internet fanboy noise.
All surface ships are useless in a symetric warfare. Just look at what Ukraine did to the Russian navy in the Black sea.
Ships are slow and exposed. Even if their defence allows them to survive a direct attack (dubious), they are necessarily prone to saturation attack.
Very useful when you need to bomb a poor country to make them remember that you are a liberal country in name only and their tribute is overdue however.
Only an armchair enthusiast, but: these diesel/electric subs are quite slow and have limited range, certainly compared to a carrier group. Even with the new(ish) Air Independent Propulsion, they can stay underwater for a long time - maybe weeks - but can't go very fast. Their limited endurance also means they have to stay close-ish to their bases. The AIP bit often relies on special fuels (hydrogen, ethanol, and in any case, compressed oxygen) meaning they can't refuel at any random port, or generate the fuel at sea, like recharging batteries from diesel power.
They are amazing and great at coastal operations, but I just don't see how they can chase a carrier group around. They could of course lie in wait and pick the right spot/get lucky, but I'm not sure if this is a viable strategy.
See PRC recently revealed XXLUUVs (US will be building them too I imagine), large submarine drones, long endurance, no crew, i.e. expendable blue water one way munition launchers. Space ISR means all movement of carrier groups at any given time is essentially known. Group of XXLUUVs can be plotted on different intercept trajectories. They can be spatially distributed to handoff shadowing. The real problem is not even ASW anymore, imagine subsect of XXLUUVs fleet blasting active sonar not trying even to hide to find subsurface, queue meme of that trumpet boy following annoyed girl. i.e. loud drones that weaponize their expendability as trip wire. Imagine conop: we know where your expensive manned surface/subsurface platforms are, we don't care about being sunk, we're always going to be blasting sensors so we know if you're trying to take us out, mean while we're close enough that we can counter fire before your munitions reach us, and since we're in terminal range, we have weapons grade track all ready. If you ignore us, we're just going to keep following you with weapons grade track that we're broadcasting for other platforms, some of which are other XXLUUVs just outside your ASW range that you don't know about. This moves away from technologic subsurface cat and mouse to industrial/attritional, i.e. PRC can crank out more theatre level XXLUUVs than US can SSNs or their own UUVs.
I see this narrative everywhere: that drones are inherently, and always, much cheaper and effective. I think it's maybe more complicated than this.
In some cases, sure, you can strip out 90% of the ability and pay 1% of the price, and that's a great tradeoff. Eliminating the human means cost savings and greater expendability - a significant consideration is losing your trainer operators and not being able to replace them.
But let's take an advanced aerial drone. Not a one-way Shahed drone but a F-35 or F-22 contender. It will still need all or most of the advanced avionics that make F-35s expensive. If this is the expensive bit, then you can't save that much by just taking the human out.
So an advanced submarine will surely still be expensive if it aims for a similar level of capability.
And if not... Sure. You can make it Nx simpler and hope it is at least Nx cheaper. But even then there's the question of how expensive it is to defeat. Ukraine is ingeniously working to defeat Russian drones at ever lower costs, as Russia tries to send ever more and more of them at lower and lower prices. It's not enough to make something cheaply - it comes down to "value" for money. If these super-simple super-cheap Chinese drones can likewise be defeated by cheap weaponry, the impact is limited.
The other thing Ukraine war demonstrates is that there are limits to what you can do with cheap drones. They are fine for harassing each other - terrorist bombings of civilian areas, disrupting oil refining etc. But apart from stunning special operations done by drones by the Ukraine side, the deep and painful strikes are still done by expensive classical rockets - ATACMS, Storm Shadow etc.
In the case of submarines that is necessarily the case though.
The people that go into a submarine aren't normal people, or they weren't back in the day anyway. They are people you would be really unhappy to throw away.
You can think completely differently about these platforms if those people aren't inside them.
> It will still need all or most of the advanced avionics that make F-35s expensive.
Those jets are catch-all do-everything machines, almost entirely because it's so crazy expensive to build jets + the political/contracting games played, that they are forced to jam everything into them. There's lots of efficiency and tactical gains in small niche applications where each platform is specialized for the job.
> Ukraine is ingeniously working to defeat Russian drones at ever lower costs, as Russia tries to send ever more and more of them at lower and lower prices. It's not enough to make something cheaply - it comes down to "value" for money. If these super-simple super-cheap Chinese drones can likewise be defeated by cheap weaponry, the impact is limited.
Even in Ukraine we really haven't seen 'cheap' defenses properly scale up to deal with the drone problem. Ukraine was getting 90% shoot downs in the early days but that's changed in the past year where Russia's tactics adapted. They've have been getting hammered weekly, even deep into their air defences along the polish border.
With Chinese SAMs and extreme range air-to-air missiles all of the fancy F-35 avionics will mostly be just them doing everything trying to survive those encounters far away from the frontline in Taiwan... where they mostly become very expensive missile launch platforms (bombers) and some radar networking. If you remove maximum survivability + narrow into niches those get a lot cheaper.
It's substantially cheaper after skipping personel + operational costs of training and associated maintenance etc. Keeping the human bits trained involves flight hours, platform wear and tear etc. Unmanned = do more with less, i.e. same airframes can focus on useful missions. Or sustain more with much less upkeep. Wasting hours wearing down platforms to maintain crew proficiency is SUBSTANTIAL over lifetime of highend platforms. XXLUUV fleet - skipping out on 1,000s of crew, and can be built to lower standards etc. The AI proliferates experience across all hulls simultaneously. For same acquistion you can acquire 2/3x size fleet, have most in storage while a few do day to day operations with significantly cheaper OPEX while maintaining readiness.
XXLUUVs aren't cheap or lowend, they are highend but PRC shipbuilding advantage over US simply monumental, i.e. they can match capabilities and win attrition game on budget. Like UUVs following surface fleet is basically DARPA ACTUV proposal... TLDR is instead of spending 500k-1M per day (US costs) on fleet size ASW you can use a few 10k per day drones that keep tabs on marked targets. PRC has ship building capabilities to execute this at fraction of cost. Once you remove manning, attrition based strategies become even more potent for PRC industrial base.
UKR demonsrates how shitty deindustrialized powers are at generating fires. PRC is has industrial base to make 30m cars and 20m motorcycles annually. This translates to industrial base that can output 5 digit shaheed tier munitions daily. This basically enough satuate any layered defense US+co can prepsition. That's just lowend. Medium end like cruise missiles PRC can probably do ~1000 a day, see their cruise missile gigafactory. The key difference between RU, is PRC (like US) has C4ISR to make efficiently use munitions. RU is closer to Iran level.
ATACMS and Storm Shadow range are functionally toys in IndoPac, i.e. we're talking about different scale of of highend warfare over much greater distances and magazine exchanges. UKR is frankly schoolyard fight and has no worthwhile lessons for Indopac except it's important to have strong industrial base for attrition game, i.e. RU able to sustain very incompetent exchanges vs entire US+NATO support. Incompetent as in wildly inefficient and constrained because they have shit C4ISR that can't dismantal UKR IADs or logistics insulated on NATO soil. There's no "sancturary" in IndoPac.
The useful lesson we learned in last few years relevant to highend peer to peer fight is basically shit tier missiles can penetrate the most sophisticated ABM in the world (Iran vs Israel), more than carrier groups has magazine depth. XXLUVs basically another layer of massing fires in quantities current surface fleet composition can't survive, but strips out ambiguity around long distance / standoff kill chains by parking satuation sized salvos always in terminal range. Again these are not cheap low end solutions, these are HIGH END solutions that PRC simply can build cheaply at scale.
> Wasting hours wearing down platforms to maintain crew proficiency is SUBSTANTIAL over lifetime of highend platforms.
That's a good point of course. But I guess that also means we have to figure out how to operate these vehicles with 0 crew - not even remote crew, because they would need training too. I guess that's something we can't do yet - if we could, the humans wouldn't be there already.
> XXLUUVs aren't cheap or lowend, they are highend but PRC shipbuilding advantage over US simply monumental, i.e. they can match capabilities and win attrition game on budget.
I don't doubt China's supermacy in either low or high end manufacturing. But how limited are they here by the ability to build lots of hills Vs to fill them with expensive sensors etc? It seems like a stretch to say that because they can make lots and lots of ships they can make lots and lots of sophisticated unmanned subs too. Either way, if China's industrial prowess is so much better than the US's, it sounds like they would beat NATO with or without drones - they are maybe an efficiency improvement, but if they put their heart into building normal subs, they would still out build the US.
I agree industrial capability appears to be key. NATO, vis a vis Russia, apparently knows they can't destroy all their tanks and kill every last soldier, and instead you need to target supply lines and command structures. AFAICT, this has basically informed th last few decades of NATO strategy. I guess the question is, what is the strategy "against" China. Because, you're right, if it's an attritional war then we're screwed.
The writing style of this article is interested, on one hand, it's packed full of details and information like a well-researched, human-written article.
On the other, there are many ChatGPTisms, it's not this, it's that, groups of 3 terms, em-dashes, etc.
My thinking is that there was a thorough draft written by a human that then was passed through an LLM and heavily modified. Not that there's a problem with that.
"In question" != "proven." Sure, Tom Clancy wrote a whole chapter on what would or wouldn't have happened if the Backfires had sortied from Murmansk. But it's funny how the people who push the idea of carriers being obsolete are the military equivalent of the chattering classes, not the people whose job it is to fight and win wars.
Submarines similar to spamming ballistic or antiship missiles is one of those things we'll never really have a full answer for. There's only so many sonobouys you can drop in a huge ocean you need to transit. Ships just like soldiers will always be expendable at some level.
Interesting (to me) that the AIP is based on a Stirling engine. It's the first time I've heard of one being used at scale. No doubt HNers will have countless other applications at their fingertips, but to me they've always been only theoretically useful desk toys.
There are 2 things that are VERY classified when it comes to US military.
First is missle defense capability
Second is sonar.
I believe something like 10 years ago, the declassified sonar capability was that it could reconstruct a 3d image of a goldfish 10 miles away.
TLDR; US is never going going "win" wargames because its not a good idea to showcase the true capability. Same reason why F22 and F35s "lose" to other jets - US purposefully nerfs them and flies them at decreased envelopes.
Or maybe the Typhoon is actually better than the F35 and F22 at dogfighting and general "within visual range" combat. But its unlikely that would really matter in a real war, F35 doesn't need to be good at those things if it just shots you down long before you know its there.
The F-35 can self escort to an extent, but the concept of operations is generally to avoid direct air combat. Instead they would try to attack at night, relying on low observability, jamming, and careful route planning to avoid detection or interception and then destroying adversary aircraft on the ground using stand-off weapons. That's basically how the predecessor F-117 operated.
F35 maybee. F22 has never been publically flown within its actual combat envelope. Super maneuverability probably makes it possible to notch the living fuck out of heat seakers, i.e turn past 180 degrees, afterburner out.
I’m sorry, but you clearly don’t know anything about the F 35 development program. It is held up as an exemplar case of preventing congressional pork, as every single development and integration contract was competitively won on a best-value basis.
Yes, and it is a matter of pure happenstance that 46 states directly benefit from that program. That's just like how other competitive trillion dollar systems are typically developed.
Isn’t that like how the F4 didn’t need to be good at dogfighting because it would shoot enemies down from BVR (first versions didn’t even have a gun, only missiles) and then rules of engagement over Vietnam nullified that advantage?
Also ignore me, all I know about air combat I learned from top gun and iron eagle.
Well in Ukraine both sides are generally too afraid to get their jets anywhere near the frontline and just use them to launch long range cruise missiles and such from a safe distance.
Air defences are just too effective and modern jets are so expensive that nobody can really afford to risk losing them.
Maybe F-35 could change that, it seemed very efficient in Iran. But AFAIK Iran didn't have anything better than the S-300 so it wasn't exactly a fair fight...
F35 main advantage is basically being able to target things provided by other assets.
For active homing missiles, the aircraft tells the missile approximately where the plane is, then the missile only activates tracking once its close. Obviously this can be defeated if the plane manages to get out of the scan range of the missile before it switches to homing mode.
Semi active homing is a bit more reliable, as it relies on the launching aircraft to track the target, but obviously aicraft needs to be in closer range to track.
With F35, you can have AWACS or ground radar or whatever else continuously updating information on where the target is, and the active homing missile can reliably navigate and switch to homing.
Without the network, F35 is as good as pretty much any other jet, with the exception that its somewhat stealth. But not against modern heatseekers.
In Iran, did the F35 got deep and low, like an A10 would? Were they used as B2 would, high altitude bombers? Or did they stayed at the border and were used as mobile EW planes to coordinate/acquire targets? Because I've read about 2 and 3, and too much internet almost made be believe 1, so I'm asking here where someone who actually know something might answer.
Rules of engagement and the fact that nobody was properly trained on tactics that worked with the missiles. IIRC only the air force added a gun to the F4, the Navy just improved their training regime, and ended the war with better kill ratios than the air force.
Plus the early missiles just had some problems that were fixed over time.
> Isn’t that like how the F4 didn’t need to be good at dogfighting because it would shoot enemies down from BVR (first versions didn’t even have a gun, only missiles) and then rules of engagement over Vietnam nullified that advantage?
Not only ROE limitations, but unreliable missile technology (see the "Red Baron" reports for example) and bad tactics as well. The Navy was better than the USAF in both respects.
> I believe something like 10 years ago, the declassified sonar capability was that it could reconstruct a 3d image of a goldfish 10 miles away.
I'm in optics, not sonar, but I have a hard time believing that sound waves are such unbelievably reliable tools for accurate FFT's of a target. Ultrasonics begin at 100 mm, while "long" visible light is 200x shorter (and wavelength is proportional to resolvable detail). Noise and dispersion in the ocean are significant.
Reminds me of when the CIA planted stories that they could recover data from multiply-erased hard drives using electron scanning microscopes. Possibly - one bit at a time.
Not an aircraft carrier but a destroyer or battleship in a group certainly has awacs that can knock shit out of the sky pretty reliably, and probably something anti torpedoe as well.
But how many can they knock out? Patriot air defenses are extremely effective. But on some level they’re not very useful if the interceptor missiles are materially more expensive than the things they’re intercepting against a foe of equalish economic means.
“Drone” covers many orders of magnitude in capability, but a CIWS can handle functionally unlimited numbers of the low-end, and the high-end don't clearly win the cost-per-kill war.
Drones are game changing on land because they allow smart munitions to be usefully spread across an entire country, far outpacing a defender's ability to deploy air defenses. But a carrier battle group doesn't have this problem: the defenses are necessarily already positioned on and around the thing being defended.
Where the cost balance starts becoming relevant is when destroyers are trying to defend other vessels: something that could be easily shot down by a CIWS at the target might require an SM-1 if the Standard is coming from 100km away from the target vessel.
I think it’s pretty clear that these shiny super expensive weapons systems will be overwhelmed by cheaper autonomous systems like drones . They are good for bullying less capable adversaries but I think in an all out war they won’t have a good time. As far as I have read the F22 has never been used in combat because it’s too expensive to lose.
F22 has never been used in combat because nobody wants to go up against it. We deploy F22s and enemy is basically like "well we cant see it and it probably out turns any of our shit, so whats the point"
Drones are cheaper, but also not robust like human operated machinery. Great for bombing, not so great for air supreriority. UCAVs may be cheaper in getting missles off, but comms are easy to disrupt and ai capabilities arent there
You would also need to find a crew to run it. Which requires either a) ex military dudes with direct experience b) extremely talented engineers who can reverse engineer stuff and make it work.
For either, you are going to have to spend basically close to 5 mill a year just on salaries.
> You would also need to find a crew to run it. Which requires either a) ex military dudes with direct experience b) extremely talented engineers who can reverse engineer stuff and make it work.
If you're buying a submarine, I'd assume the manufacturer would provide crew training on how to operate it. It's be kinda dumb if they didn't.
That's the same ballpark as running a mega yacht. So instead of cruising into the Monaco Harbour to watch an F1 race, you get to park yourself on the seafloor just outside the harbour and single handedly blockade a sovereign nation.
It wasnt because of Tariffs, its because its clear that they have no soverignty being apart of the F35 program. USA can try and keep up with China in sixth gen with its own money now, instead of spreading the cost amongst allies. Trump might be playing 4d chess but hes blundering queens left right and center
Wonder if US/USN is even institutionally capable of moving away from carrier expeditionary model if on paper it's borderly demonsntratbly not survivable. Feel like too much of US national prestige is tied to muh 11+10 carrier+lhd literally legislated into law (10 US Code 8062a). Too much big dick energy ego tied to arguably obsolecent platform, well at least for peer war.
The article did not say carriers were demonstrably not survivable in warfare. Or it said that that was not the conclusion of the navy.
The lesson wasn’t that aircraft carriers are obsolete; it was that air-independent propulsion and patient SSK tactics demand layered, disciplined, team-based ASW.
...
The U.S. answer isn’t to panic about aircraft carriers; it’s to layer defenses and distribute risk—push the air wing’s reach (tankers, long-range weapons), fill gaps with manned and unmanned ASW platforms, and keep expanding the fleet’s acoustic picture with fixed and mobile arrays. The Gotland episode didn’t say “carriers are obsolete.” It said “carriers must be escorted by a navy that trains, equips, and fights as if quiet SSKs are everywhere.”
More of a generalized comment, not limited to article. IMO even less point worrying about ASW lessons from 20 years ago vs peer threats with A2D2 that pushes carriers outside their strike distance while being able to hit them outside of it. TBH the entire point those stories were making rounds 20 years ago, i.e. around US pivot to Indopac was because PRC had mediocre legacy diesel subs. It was security theatre of the era, i.e. around the time muh carriers are fast filtered down to lay talking points. The strategic landscape against carriers vis-a-vis medium/long range strikes has change - flip side israel surviving 95% iran missiles is can US csg survive 5% PRC missiles. Likely not.
My comment was more directed at if US planners thinks no, would they even be capable of divesting, moving away from carrier model. My guess is no, there's too much sunkcost ineria across domains to pivot. USN is doctrinally, culturally built around carriers, which again numbers are legislated by law, hence extraordinary resource allocation, with layers of industrial and political inertia (no one is going to close/downsize Newport shipyard). The only thing to do is try to patch a potentially obsolete model like distributed survivability to duct tape around the fact that the csg probably doesn't work anymore.
Edit: I'm a former nuclear submarine sailor. We call aircraft carriers 'targets'
"During the Falklands War, the British nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror used its periscope to sight the Argentine cruiser ARA General Belgrano before sinking it, but did not engage the Argentine aircraft carrier ARA Veinticinco de Mayo. The carrier was also stalked by British submarines but ultimately retreated and was never attacked."
The US military trains and fights as a team, and the entire point is to use the strengths of one platform to protect the weaknesses of another and vice versa.
Submarines are basically as good as dead if an anti-sub helicopter is nearby. They can't really retaliate, an active sonar will most likely expose them and they are not fast enough to escape a torpedo.
> But claiming this magically makes aircraft carriers obsolete is largely internet fanboy noise.
All surface ships are useless in a symetric warfare. Just look at what Ukraine did to the Russian navy in the Black sea.
Ships are slow and exposed. Even if their defence allows them to survive a direct attack (dubious), they are necessarily prone to saturation attack.
Very useful when you need to bomb a poor country to make them remember that you are a liberal country in name only and their tribute is overdue however.
Great profession for the paranoid, everyone else trying to find you.
Worked in shipyard with submariners, who are great people once you get to know them.
They are amazing and great at coastal operations, but I just don't see how they can chase a carrier group around. They could of course lie in wait and pick the right spot/get lucky, but I'm not sure if this is a viable strategy.
In some cases, sure, you can strip out 90% of the ability and pay 1% of the price, and that's a great tradeoff. Eliminating the human means cost savings and greater expendability - a significant consideration is losing your trainer operators and not being able to replace them.
But let's take an advanced aerial drone. Not a one-way Shahed drone but a F-35 or F-22 contender. It will still need all or most of the advanced avionics that make F-35s expensive. If this is the expensive bit, then you can't save that much by just taking the human out.
So an advanced submarine will surely still be expensive if it aims for a similar level of capability.
And if not... Sure. You can make it Nx simpler and hope it is at least Nx cheaper. But even then there's the question of how expensive it is to defeat. Ukraine is ingeniously working to defeat Russian drones at ever lower costs, as Russia tries to send ever more and more of them at lower and lower prices. It's not enough to make something cheaply - it comes down to "value" for money. If these super-simple super-cheap Chinese drones can likewise be defeated by cheap weaponry, the impact is limited.
The other thing Ukraine war demonstrates is that there are limits to what you can do with cheap drones. They are fine for harassing each other - terrorist bombings of civilian areas, disrupting oil refining etc. But apart from stunning special operations done by drones by the Ukraine side, the deep and painful strikes are still done by expensive classical rockets - ATACMS, Storm Shadow etc.
The people that go into a submarine aren't normal people, or they weren't back in the day anyway. They are people you would be really unhappy to throw away.
You can think completely differently about these platforms if those people aren't inside them.
Those jets are catch-all do-everything machines, almost entirely because it's so crazy expensive to build jets + the political/contracting games played, that they are forced to jam everything into them. There's lots of efficiency and tactical gains in small niche applications where each platform is specialized for the job.
> Ukraine is ingeniously working to defeat Russian drones at ever lower costs, as Russia tries to send ever more and more of them at lower and lower prices. It's not enough to make something cheaply - it comes down to "value" for money. If these super-simple super-cheap Chinese drones can likewise be defeated by cheap weaponry, the impact is limited.
Even in Ukraine we really haven't seen 'cheap' defenses properly scale up to deal with the drone problem. Ukraine was getting 90% shoot downs in the early days but that's changed in the past year where Russia's tactics adapted. They've have been getting hammered weekly, even deep into their air defences along the polish border.
With Chinese SAMs and extreme range air-to-air missiles all of the fancy F-35 avionics will mostly be just them doing everything trying to survive those encounters far away from the frontline in Taiwan... where they mostly become very expensive missile launch platforms (bombers) and some radar networking. If you remove maximum survivability + narrow into niches those get a lot cheaper.
XXLUUVs aren't cheap or lowend, they are highend but PRC shipbuilding advantage over US simply monumental, i.e. they can match capabilities and win attrition game on budget. Like UUVs following surface fleet is basically DARPA ACTUV proposal... TLDR is instead of spending 500k-1M per day (US costs) on fleet size ASW you can use a few 10k per day drones that keep tabs on marked targets. PRC has ship building capabilities to execute this at fraction of cost. Once you remove manning, attrition based strategies become even more potent for PRC industrial base.
UKR demonsrates how shitty deindustrialized powers are at generating fires. PRC is has industrial base to make 30m cars and 20m motorcycles annually. This translates to industrial base that can output 5 digit shaheed tier munitions daily. This basically enough satuate any layered defense US+co can prepsition. That's just lowend. Medium end like cruise missiles PRC can probably do ~1000 a day, see their cruise missile gigafactory. The key difference between RU, is PRC (like US) has C4ISR to make efficiently use munitions. RU is closer to Iran level.
ATACMS and Storm Shadow range are functionally toys in IndoPac, i.e. we're talking about different scale of of highend warfare over much greater distances and magazine exchanges. UKR is frankly schoolyard fight and has no worthwhile lessons for Indopac except it's important to have strong industrial base for attrition game, i.e. RU able to sustain very incompetent exchanges vs entire US+NATO support. Incompetent as in wildly inefficient and constrained because they have shit C4ISR that can't dismantal UKR IADs or logistics insulated on NATO soil. There's no "sancturary" in IndoPac.
The useful lesson we learned in last few years relevant to highend peer to peer fight is basically shit tier missiles can penetrate the most sophisticated ABM in the world (Iran vs Israel), more than carrier groups has magazine depth. XXLUVs basically another layer of massing fires in quantities current surface fleet composition can't survive, but strips out ambiguity around long distance / standoff kill chains by parking satuation sized salvos always in terminal range. Again these are not cheap low end solutions, these are HIGH END solutions that PRC simply can build cheaply at scale.
That's a good point of course. But I guess that also means we have to figure out how to operate these vehicles with 0 crew - not even remote crew, because they would need training too. I guess that's something we can't do yet - if we could, the humans wouldn't be there already.
> XXLUUVs aren't cheap or lowend, they are highend but PRC shipbuilding advantage over US simply monumental, i.e. they can match capabilities and win attrition game on budget.
I don't doubt China's supermacy in either low or high end manufacturing. But how limited are they here by the ability to build lots of hills Vs to fill them with expensive sensors etc? It seems like a stretch to say that because they can make lots and lots of ships they can make lots and lots of sophisticated unmanned subs too. Either way, if China's industrial prowess is so much better than the US's, it sounds like they would beat NATO with or without drones - they are maybe an efficiency improvement, but if they put their heart into building normal subs, they would still out build the US.
I agree industrial capability appears to be key. NATO, vis a vis Russia, apparently knows they can't destroy all their tanks and kill every last soldier, and instead you need to target supply lines and command structures. AFAICT, this has basically informed th last few decades of NATO strategy. I guess the question is, what is the strategy "against" China. Because, you're right, if it's an attritional war then we're screwed.
- Eliminating their food calories and energy imports via effective/unrestricted submarine warfare (resulting in mass famine and internal insurrection)
- Strategic nuclear weapons
Do you have a source for this claim? I have argued with colleagues for years and they all say that satellites cannot track carriers
On the other, there are many ChatGPTisms, it's not this, it's that, groups of 3 terms, em-dashes, etc.
My thinking is that there was a thorough draft written by a human that then was passed through an LLM and heavily modified. Not that there's a problem with that.
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa134.pdf
Armchair admirals can pontificate all they want.
The article even mentions the added use of layered defence to try and counter this move.
My hope is the US Navy would exercise much better situational awareness and discipline.
First is missle defense capability
Second is sonar.
I believe something like 10 years ago, the declassified sonar capability was that it could reconstruct a 3d image of a goldfish 10 miles away.
TLDR; US is never going going "win" wargames because its not a good idea to showcase the true capability. Same reason why F22 and F35s "lose" to other jets - US purposefully nerfs them and flies them at decreased envelopes.
In real life, if they can't neutralize the threat in BVR they just turn around and run before getting in range.
Their stealth allows them to get the enemy in range before the enemy has them in range. It's like a boxer with a long reach: jab and move.
0) Spread the pork into as many congressional districts as possible
1) Omae wa mou shindeiru
Also ignore me, all I know about air combat I learned from top gun and iron eagle.
Air defences are just too effective and modern jets are so expensive that nobody can really afford to risk losing them.
Maybe F-35 could change that, it seemed very efficient in Iran. But AFAIK Iran didn't have anything better than the S-300 so it wasn't exactly a fair fight...
For active homing missiles, the aircraft tells the missile approximately where the plane is, then the missile only activates tracking once its close. Obviously this can be defeated if the plane manages to get out of the scan range of the missile before it switches to homing mode.
Semi active homing is a bit more reliable, as it relies on the launching aircraft to track the target, but obviously aicraft needs to be in closer range to track.
With F35, you can have AWACS or ground radar or whatever else continuously updating information on where the target is, and the active homing missile can reliably navigate and switch to homing.
Without the network, F35 is as good as pretty much any other jet, with the exception that its somewhat stealth. But not against modern heatseekers.
Plus the early missiles just had some problems that were fixed over time.
Not only ROE limitations, but unreliable missile technology (see the "Red Baron" reports for example) and bad tactics as well. The Navy was better than the USAF in both respects.
I'm in optics, not sonar, but I have a hard time believing that sound waves are such unbelievably reliable tools for accurate FFT's of a target. Ultrasonics begin at 100 mm, while "long" visible light is 200x shorter (and wavelength is proportional to resolvable detail). Noise and dispersion in the ocean are significant.
Reminds me of when the CIA planted stories that they could recover data from multiply-erased hard drives using electron scanning microscopes. Possibly - one bit at a time.
How many jet powered or submersible drones can an aircraft carrier defend against?
Drones are game changing on land because they allow smart munitions to be usefully spread across an entire country, far outpacing a defender's ability to deploy air defenses. But a carrier battle group doesn't have this problem: the defenses are necessarily already positioned on and around the thing being defended.
Where the cost balance starts becoming relevant is when destroyers are trying to defend other vessels: something that could be easily shot down by a CIWS at the target might require an SM-1 if the Standard is coming from 100km away from the target vessel.
Drones are cheaper, but also not robust like human operated machinery. Great for bombing, not so great for air supreriority. UCAVs may be cheaper in getting missles off, but comms are easy to disrupt and ai capabilities arent there
Unfortunately, skull shaped volcano islands are harder to come by.
For either, you are going to have to spend basically close to 5 mill a year just on salaries.
If you're buying a submarine, I'd assume the manufacturer would provide crew training on how to operate it. It's be kinda dumb if they didn't.
Probably enough. I'm surprised anyone would want to be a billionaire's personal assistant, yet those jobs get filled.
Geez, you non-supervillain-aspiring types are so ... mid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kim_Wall
Nothing on the "tariff shelf" is gonna fix that, only bankrupt the country like his casino
And next war is going to be just thousands upon thousands of drones since apparently we have no way to stop them over airports and everything else
The lesson wasn’t that aircraft carriers are obsolete; it was that air-independent propulsion and patient SSK tactics demand layered, disciplined, team-based ASW. ... The U.S. answer isn’t to panic about aircraft carriers; it’s to layer defenses and distribute risk—push the air wing’s reach (tankers, long-range weapons), fill gaps with manned and unmanned ASW platforms, and keep expanding the fleet’s acoustic picture with fixed and mobile arrays. The Gotland episode didn’t say “carriers are obsolete.” It said “carriers must be escorted by a navy that trains, equips, and fights as if quiet SSKs are everywhere.”
My comment was more directed at if US planners thinks no, would they even be capable of divesting, moving away from carrier model. My guess is no, there's too much sunkcost ineria across domains to pivot. USN is doctrinally, culturally built around carriers, which again numbers are legislated by law, hence extraordinary resource allocation, with layers of industrial and political inertia (no one is going to close/downsize Newport shipyard). The only thing to do is try to patch a potentially obsolete model like distributed survivability to duct tape around the fact that the csg probably doesn't work anymore.