> Sure, $6 billion looks like a lot of money. But it's a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the Carrier Battle Group. You need a lot of ships to properly protect a carrier
That doesn't make the carrier less expensive, it makes it more expensive.
> If Russia or China decides to target our carriers, the response will have nuclear components.
Are you suggesting that the US will initiate nuclear war?
Regarding your first point, that exact sentiment was addressed in the article under the heading "The future is drones and submarines" (whose thesis is obvious). Selected quoting from there:
The supercarrier requires an exponential and compounding set of very expensive investments. The total acquisition cost of a carrier strike group exceeds $25 billion, an air wing another $10 billion and the annual operating costs of perhaps $1 billion.
...
"Yet, a cruise missile fired from a wide range of lower signature ships costs less than a third of each bomb delivered by a fighter from the deck of a carrier. Nor do these platforms require a carrier’s defensive shield — and they can launch from beyond the range of carrier-based aircraft.
...
A similar shift is occurring now and will displace the modern equivalent of the dashing cavalry officer — the fighter pilot. The knight class never passes willingly — as they take justifiable pride in their acumen and truly believe in their mission. However, the carrier and its air wing cannot be allowed to drive strategy or procurement.
As an outsider, it's hard for me to fully assess these arguments (including from the paragraphs I elided). But they sound rather convincing.
I can think of a couple of counterarguments to both points (and that part of the text in general):
1) one thing that is often overlooked is how hard is to pinpoint the carrier and provide this information to a missile. For a sea-skimming missile horizon is at ~12 miles (20 km); given the distances involved (F-35C has a combat range of about 1k km) and carrier's speed (60 km/h) you will need to provide updates to a missile regarding current carrier's position, which you can't know if you aren't over the horizon for a carrier — in which case you will probably be shot down. This makes the danger of low-cost missile platforms somewhat lower. For a more thorough discussion of the problem see [1].
2) Drones are unusable against sophisticated opponent. First of all, there will be no datalink: space assets will be denied (either jammed or destroyed), direct radio links will be jammed, too. Therefore the drone will need to orient, fight and decide who to kill autonomously, which is problematic both from technical (e.g. autonomous navigation and decision making) and moral (autonomous killing machine, anyone?) standpoints. Therefore, we can't switch human pilots for drones.
Remind me again of the number of successful ship launched cruise missile strikes against capital units
The only successful recent use (and that was an AA picket) is Air lanched Argentinians vs the Royal navy and that required some very ballsy pilots and good luck that the target ship was uplinking and did not have its radar on when she was engaged.
And if the RN had had a full CAV in the south atlantic the Super Etendards would have not got to firing range
The US policy on first-use of nuclear weapons is quite clear. We will use them as an option against another country that is nuclear capable or has weapons of mass destruction (chemical or bio). As a US military war vet do I think we ever would unless faced with overwhelming military odds against us? Nope.
Obama has been doing all within his power (very little due to congress in-fighting) to try and reduce our nuclear stockpile as much as feasible. With 3 seawolf class nuclear missile submarines sneaking around somewhere in the ocean, it is unlikely that anyone no matter how advanced could prevent nuclear retaliation should they pre-empt the US.
That being said, the entire premise of this article is a bit silly, and coming from war is boring, I'm a bit surprised as their stuff is generally spot on. The thing about a full Carrier Strike Group is the blue water ability to project the US air power anywhere in the world. That is what keeps carriers relevant (for now). The new hypersonic glide vehicles might change the game certainly as there isn't really much of any defense against incoming warheads going Mach 10, but those are still a bit out tech-wise.
> The thing about a full Carrier Strike Group is the blue water ability to project the US air power anywhere in the world.
This is why we have carriers and carrier groups. So that we can arrive in your nautical back yard and say "Here we are!" and get noticed. It's all about the high visibility projection of power thousands of miles away.
This was one of the objections about the UK government building the Queen Elizabeth class carriers. You don't need carriers unless you're intending on using them to project your military might into places you're not wanted in a highly visible way.
My takeaway from the article is that carrier vulnerability is increasing from low cost, high range missiles. As the article mentioned, they only need a few hits. Carriers are a big target, and from the sounds of it potential nation-state enemies have adopted anti-carrier naval doctrines based on small signature boats with high damage output.
Carriers seem to be highly effective in uncontested waters, allowing force projection anywhere in the world. The article is saying that carriers are becoming less relevant when contested by a prepared enemy.
Right. The US Navy is solving the currently severe weakness from a swarm of fast attack suicide boats via the Railgun and Laser weapons programs. Trials of both are currently happening for our blue water ocean folks.
That still leaves the vulnerability of the new class of hypersonic anti-ship weapons systems, but I suspect there is something to attempt to counter that as well. The X-51A Waverider and any future versions are a good example of that.
This is all cat and mouse, but I wouldn't be so quick to completely discredit a carrier strike group. Yes the Carrier is a HUGE liability, but the amount of firepower in 1 group is simply mind numbing and taking out the entire group before a sustained counter attack would be near impossible. For reference, the US Navy currently has 10 of these operating globally.
If you recall, during the opening war in Afghanistan, a CSG managed to launch 1 Tomahawk cruise missile every 12 seconds for 48 hours sustained during the opening salvo. That is only a single CSG.
Because we need to anticipate conditions in which communications links and space assets (e.g., GPS and comms links) are unavailable.
UAVs do not yet have the autonomous intelligence to operate on their own, and even if they do, we haven't yet decided to give robots the decision to kill autonomously.
Answer 2 =) we already do, to some degree. E.g., Cruise Missiles have had the ability to navigate on inertial guidance and terrain-following technology for decades, and we use those a lot. But again, a cruise missile can only get programmed for one target, go there, and hit it.
A pilot can go to the target area, notice that the target has moved or new conditions exist (e.g., a bunch of children have been moved in as human shields), or notice that new targets of opportunity have popped up, and immediately take appropriate action.
And, we're back to the autonomous AI tech is not yet that good (and I'm not sure that we want it to get that good).
Re: cruise missile targets, not quite for the targetting. A group of the Tomahawk Block IV missiles can be launched over a target area and loiter for some time with a list of pre-programmed targets or updated live from any other sensor platform (a jet, helo, satellite, etc). Say there are 20 targets and 25 missiles live loitering around an area. When the operator says to strike, 15 of the missiles can strike simultaneously while a few can stay aloft to provide BDA (battle damage assessment for non-military folk) and then go in for the 2 of the 1-2 punch.
The Block IV missiles can also share targets amongst eachother and decide which target to strike (among a list of programmed targets) themselves based on factors such as proximity and other classified bits.
Yes, they have these fantastic capabilities, and they are improving all the time.
That said, note that even your example included live updates via comms/satellite links...
Consider the scenario where comms and orbital assets are unavailable/unreliable.
We still need human pilots. We're working to the day when we won't, but, we're not there yet.
(BTW, I'm all for unmanned, and think the F35 is already obsolete, and that humans are the limiting performance factor in esp. fighter aircraft (e.g., limiting it to 10g accelerations, but we're just not there yet for all scenarios, to answer the GP question as to "why not")
> Are you suggesting that the US will initiate nuclear war?
'The United States has refused to adopt a no-first-use policy, saying that it "reserves the right to use" nuclear weapons first in the case of conflict.'
Nah. If we forgo nukes then you'd see the whole world scrambling to build nukes to protect themselves and our conventional advantage would get nullified. We need them more than other nations do.
We need the posturing, it helps us to not actually have to use them.
Think about it this way. In a gang, typically the strongest and most capable warrior will be the leader. That leader has to be perfectly willing to instill fear in the others and sacrifice one for the harmony of the group if he has to. If he were to tie his own hands behind his back out of some strange sense of fairness, then he's essentially abdicating his role as leader.
The US is heavily invested in peace. We want peace more than just about every nation on the planet. By that I mean we don't just want national security, i.e. no other nations threatening us. We want every nation to be secure, happy, and open for business. We don't want random African nations fighting a war against each other. That's bad for business. France doesn't care if the Congo and Tanzania are fighting an all-out war. We do. So we invest a lot of money in institution-building at the international level.
Organizations like the African Union promote economic peace and unity but it's only possible for them to flourish if the constituent nations feel militarily secure. This is where the US's overwhelming military and nuclear dominance come into play. We have to keep our big stick, ready at hand to Hulk smash anything threatening us, so that everyone else can relax and let the cooler heads prevail.
> Are you suggesting that the US will initiate nuclear war?
Initiating a nuclear war after a nation state starts taking out your aircraft carriers is not entirely unexpected. Nuclear or not, the response would be amazingly serious.
Serious yes, but nuclear, surely not? If the US would use nuclear retaliation after a conventional attack (or more likely, a conventional defense, because nobody sane would attack a US carrier unless it posed an immediate threat) I think that would violate all doctrine on the use of nuclear weapons.
The entire official nuclear policy of every single nuclear power (as far as I'm aware) is that they will only use nuclear weapons in response to a nuclear attack or an existential threat. Officially. I believe Putin stated at some point that he would not consider the use of small tactical nukes to be nuclear escalation (if Russia does it), but I would expect the US to be better than that.
I can't imagine a scenario where our carrier fleet is in imminent danger that doesn't qualify as an existential threat. We haven't faced that since WW2 and Japan did end up on the receiving end of nuclear arms.
US carriers carry over 5,000 sailors, having one taken out would be almost unimaginable (a one time event with more US deaths than the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined).
You might want to step back and just reconsider how riddiculous it sounds. 5000 soldiers over millions of civilians? Really?
Existential threat would be invasion force / bombing run / missile strike coming to continental US territories. Anything else is just "they took our toys"
I don't think you know what "existential threat" means. It means your home country itself is in danger. Losing a single carrier only slightly reduces the US's ability to project force around the globe. But even with all carriers gone (not something that's ever going to happen), it would still be folly to attack the US on its own soil.
> The entire official nuclear policy of every single nuclear power (as far as I'm aware) is that they will only use nuclear weapons in response to a nuclear attack or an existential threat. Officially.
The US has never had such an official doctrine, nor to my knowledge has any of the other major nuclear powers.
Of course the US does which is why it has such a serious policy of preventing nuclear proliferation. Part of these aircraft carrier's jobs is to protect allies so they don't feel the need to acquire nuclear weapons.
Quite the pedantic distinction. Bombing them is enough, except if magically taking out an aircraft carrier is worse behavior than bombing a city or invading a country.
Against a defenseless country looking to surrender that couldn't retaliate. Will be a bit different if it initiates nuclear war against Russia or China.
>Are you suggesting that the US will initiate nuclear war?
Yes, it should be entirely expected in response to such a serious attack, especially since no country would attempt to take out a carrier group outside the context of a much larger war.
Consider that 1) the US doctrine does not forbid first use, and 2) that sinking a carrier and a significant part of its group is tantamount to destroying a small city (the population on the carrier alone is over 6000 people), and 3) that taking out a carrier is taking out effectively 10% of our key naval/air capability. In short, it is an extremely serious action, and would be seen by all as "the gloves coming off".
Anyone contemplating launching an attack to take out one of our carriers/groups should not be the slightest bit surprised to find a few nuclear warheads detonating at over some of their major bases within a few hours of taking out the carrier. Nor would any observer be surprised at such a response.
That said, if an appropriate retaliation could be done without nukes, it probably would be done that way.
But, again, the context is likely to be that of a very rapidly escalating war. . . . .
I still find it unreasonable. Suppose the carrier group is waging war against a country. Planes from the carrier are bombing the country. Would that country not be allowed to defend itself by retaliating against the very forces that attack it?
Any country with the ability to sink the carrier that attacks them, would sink it, and it would be entirely reasonable for them to do so in the interest of defending their sovereignty. Responding to self-defense with nuclear escalation would be utterly unreasonable. And the loss of 6000 people, while tragic, does not justify the use of nuclear weapons either. If it did, we would have had nuclear war long ago.
Sure, the country can defend itself all it wants, but this is war, not Queensbury rules boxing.
So, yeah, if we're pummelling the snot out of some small country (Grenada, Venezuela, ???) and they get off a lucky shot with a missile or torpedo that manages to sink one carrier, then a nuclear response would be unwarranted and unlikely, and we'd just see continued conventional operations by the rest of the fleet.
But that scenario is so unlikely. But we're realistically talking about an all-out attack on a carrier group with ballistic missiles or nuclear subs, possibly with nuclear warheads. This would only be mounted by a Russia or China. Or possibly Iran trying a swarm attack with thousands of small suicide-boats. This would be in the context of a much larger war and operations.
Attacking a carrier group is an undertaking of huge magnitude - a huge escalation in itself, and anyone should expect a serious response from a successful attack. And, keeping open the question of whether that retaliation might be nuclear is also an important deterrent.
The context would certainly determine whether or not it actually goes nuclear. E.g., what other resources can be brought to bear, under what threat is the rest of the fleet? E.g., if it was the Chinese ballistic anti-carrier missiles, and we knew exactly where they were and could target them conventionally, we probably would, but if they threatened the rest of the fleet, and the only way to neutralize them was nukes, ... watch out.
So, overall, I'm not saying it would necessarily be nuclear, but it certainly wouldn't be surprising if it were. And, if it were, I'd expect that it would be seen as not un-reasonable, because if the US follows its own history, we're very reluctant to launch them.
We're specifically not talking about attacking the carrier with nuclear warheads. We're talking about the US initiating nuclear war in response to a conventional attack on a carrier.
And don't underestimate small countries. In an exercise (a long time ago), a Dutch diesel-electric sub "killed" half a dozen US ships, including a carrier. Nuclear subs aren't much of a threat to a carrier (because they're noisy), but diesel-electrics are one of the few weapons that are known to be able to get close enough, because they can be extremely quiet.
That doesn't make the carrier less expensive, it makes it more expensive.
> If Russia or China decides to target our carriers, the response will have nuclear components.
Are you suggesting that the US will initiate nuclear war?