Slashdot Mirror
Automating Future Aircraft Carriers
Roland Piquepaille writes "Britain and France will jointly build three new huge aircraft carriers which will be delivered between 2012 and 2014. With their 60,000 tonnes, these 275-meter-long carriers will be the largest warships outside of the U.S. Navy. They're going to cost about $4 billion each, but with their reduced crews due to automation, they'll save lots of money to taxpayers during their 50 years of use. StrategyPage tells us that these ships will need at most a crew of 800 sailors instead of 2,000 for ships of that size today. At a cost of $100K per sailor per year, this represents savings of more than $6 billion. Impressive -- if it works."
So, is there any chance at all that the Aircaft Carriers will actually stay in use for the entire 50 years? Won't be replaced by anything newer or better?
I would guess they would be.
The real problem with this mentality is that these are warships. Smaller crews are vastly less efficent at damage control and have much smaller margins for casualties before the ship ceases to be combat effective. Automation is all well and good but ships that size NEED vast crews simple due to the unpredictable nature of sea service. Imagine if you have a gastro outbreak onboard and 400 of your crew are down. Larger crews can absorb unexpected events much more easily than smaller ones. Plus most of these studies tend to ignore hte fact that less crew means more and longer watches for the duty stations that remain. The US is moving to this right now with the new San Antonio LPDs and DDX program but they are facing the same choices. Reality wise we'll probably see much more automation and relyability but I have serious doubts if anyone will field a warship of this size without a crew of at least 1/2 the normal rate.
Except wasn't the reason carriers were so effective in the first place because 100 miles is almost nothing compared to the strike range a carrier can put out? (not sure what it is, 700 or so?) Plus, sometimes it helps to have eyes in the sky on the situation, and a large object on station at the same time. How many people could you evac to a DD(X) via helicopter? Does it even carry them? (Plus, when was the last time somebody on board a carrier died as a result of a strike on that carrier? sixty years ago?)
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
I don't like this trend at all.
The more money we have to pay and the more lives we have to put at stake in order to go to war, the less likely it is that we actually do go to war.
The only way that war becomes "fair" is if both sides incur the same 'cost' of the war (monetary, soldier deaths, civilian deaths, etc.). If 33,773 American soldiers or civillians died because of our involvement there, we'd be pulling our troops out as fast as we possibly could.
With this, we're spending less money and putting fewer lives at risk to kill a proportionally higher number of foreign militants. At what point does war become a targeted genocide? We're putting our enemies in a position where their only method of directing their anger twoard us is by targeting civillians in suicide attacks. This scares the hell out of me.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
This gives them the ability to project power. Which is something England and France cannot currently do.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
Who exactly is this aimed at?
There are no major nation states left that could maintain a sustained war a la WWI or WWII any more. Every European state lacks the trained cadre of military personel to field a major army. Any every small nation is so outclassed by even 20 year old US/NATO equipment that spending billions on "next generation" systems makes no economic or military sense. Russia lacks economic power to play, and China lacks the geographic location to every conventionally threaten the US or Europe.
Example, the US Abrams tank is 2-3x better than any other tank it will meet except perhaps the British Challenger tanks. The US could build a tank for a fraction of the cost that would still outclass anything it will face.
The sheer military and technological superiority of even decades old weaponry is why most of the world has shifted to guerrilla or terrorist political tactics.
$6 billion is pretty good savings, but if they were to skip building the ships entirely, they would save another $12 billion on top of that, for a total of $18 billion saved. I'm sure people can think of lots of uses for $18 billion that are more valuable than deploying aircraft carriers...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Urrgh. I think I am going to become a "WeaponNazi" and take to reminding people everytime they call a monster weapon a TOY that:
These things are used to KILL PEOPLE! Real People! Not on TV, not in a "reality" show. For real! People like you and me, even if they dont like a lot like us, still humans.
Please don't allow the media to lull you into this sense of complacency about monster weapons of any kind. Be they owned by so called "bad folks" like Iran, or the supposedly good folks (yeah right), like the US or UK.
Repeat after me: A Weapon is NOT cool! It is NOT a toy.
And spouting that bull about "bullets don't kill people, blah blah blah". Bullets helps people kill other people faster, more safely, dependably, in larger numbers. Advanced weapons like these reduce the emotional cost of killing someone even further.
You know, you are correct. Real war truly sucks. The problem is, most of the people on Slashdot have no idea how much it sucks.
The problem is, they don't show any of this on television. Check out for instance John Simpsons report from Kudistan during the beginning of the Iraq war. They were in a Peshmerga/US special forces convoy and got hit by friendly fire. The whole thing was a huge mess, really bloody, and yet an incident hardly worth mentioning, except that there were reporters there. He caught the whole thing on film.
I don't think anyone on Slashdot would find being in that situation terribly cool or fun.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
Aircraft carriers are obselete.
In a major fleet engagement against a worthy adversary (Which the US and NATO hans't had since the demize of the USSR) yes, one suspects the US super carriers of today are excessively vulnerable and losing even one of them would certainly be extremenly painful experience for the Americans both in terms of money and expecially prestiege and civillan morale/political support on the home front. They are, however, valuable when it comes to projecting strategic air power agianst third world dictatorships and regional powers such as Iran that cannot or have, at most, only a limited chance of penetrating the protective screen of a super carrier and seriously threatenting it. Basically super carriers are still useful for quiclkly making air support available for conflicts such as the US led wars in Iraq. Conflicts which a 19th century British general of the Victorian army would instantly reckognize as being similar in character to the a colonial punitive expeditions of his own time. What is really interesting is how would one of these new carriers would cope when hit by, say, a salvo of large sized modern ASW missiles? I mean one would expect that the skeleton crew would have extreme troube coping with the extensive damage since most of the automated systems would either be out of commission or working at limited capacity.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Anyone who has seen "Top Gun" even once must realize that, without the director on their side, Maverick and his friends should have failed to defend their carrier.
Taking on the realisticness of 'Top Gun'? Boy, you're a brave fellow.
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