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Why Aircraft Carriers Still Rule the Oceans
An anonymous reader writes "Despite being created during World War I, the modern carrier has evolved to be the pinnacle of modern warfare's best and most visible symbols of power. Nothing says 'show the flag' more than a carrier off an enemy's coast. Some, though, have called the carrier a 21st-century version of a battleship — high on looks and weapons but vulnerable to modern weapons. Critics note air-power killed the battleship; people now suggest super-sonic 'carrier-killer' missiles will make the carrier a relic of the past. With their cost in the billions of dollars, some point to killing off carriers as an obvious cost saving measure. Carriers though still have a lot of uses. Many navies, like India and China, are adding them to their arsenal, and they are still feared by many. While carriers might be old, they are a symbol of power that no missile or submarine below the surface can match yet."
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Carriers have been replaced. Now its Supercarriers and Titans. Carriers and dreadnoughts have had their roles reduced to ship transports and structure shoots.
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Part of the reason that carriers remain relevant is that, while they do have their own weapons, their MAIN weaponry is the planes that they carry. And it's easier to upgrade those planes (subject to limitations such as the elevators, etc...) than it would have been to upgrade a BB's weaponry.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Because we haven't got railguns yet to slap onto battleships. We'll almost contently see the return of it in our lifetime. When it does happen you can be sure you'll see cruisers with small versions if they can get away with it. But you'll see very worlds military building battleships with those suckers as soon as they think they can.
But let's be honest, despite what the article says, there's a few other reasons besides power projection. Pirates, shipping lane protection, and they work much better for disaster relief than a couple of cruisers. The capacity just isn't there. But a carrier is a city onto itself. Besides, it's hard to get a small aircraft that does tactical attacks halfway across the world to take out a pirate base. Bombers sure, but by the time it's in the air they could have scuttled.
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Aircraft carriers are force projection, not a symbol of power. It's incredibly useful to have a bouyant, nuclear city able to go where it's told to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_projection
If aircraft carriers are obsolete, what is going to replace them? Submarines can't project force outside of the water except to launch a limited number of missiles. Sub Carriers were tried by the Japanese in WWII, but were never especially practical. If your planes have to fly across three countries to get to their destination from the nearest airbase they aren't going to be able to offer much support.
Doesn't it seem more likely that people who run carriers will instead look to develop ways of stopping those supersonic missiles? That is the general idea behind the carrier battlegroup already. The carrier is in the middle projecting force, and everybody else is there making sure it stays safe. Besides, the kind of enemies that the Navy is fighting today are the ones that have ramshackle fishing boats and maybe an RPG to scare freighter captains with, not highly technological nation states. The nations they fight are the kind that don't even have a Navy and the only missile danger is losing fighter planes to SAMs.
I read the internet for the articles.
Which carrier has been sunk by a super-sonic 'carrier-killer' missile? Let's wait until a carrier is actually killed before declaring the end of its day.
A carrier lets you park a military city 10 miles off just about anyone's border just about any time you want to. Until something either replaces that function or ends its utility the carrier will persist.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
This.
A carrier can hit you hard with missles/guns. Or a carrier can hit you fast by launching jets. A carrier is a portable full array of armed forces (land, sea, and air).
That's why they aren't battleships.
It's not just about the Carrier. Having a Carrier says "Our nation/military is so strong, we can put 6,000 people on a boat and blow up your country from 300 miles away."
The Carriers of today are not the Battleships of WWI. Carriers have multiple defense systems like CIWS (shoots 3,000+ RPM) and Sea Sparrow missiles. A Carrier Group will have some sort of Aegis defense mechanism on board a few ships as well. Not to mention the aircraft complement of 50+. Throw in an E-2C and not much will get within 100 miles of that Carrier.
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Why are we even talking about the aircraft carrier when we should be out building helicarriers!
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Okay, so I've served on a carrier. But seriously, do we NEED 12 carrier battle groups? Mind you, a typical battle group isn't just the carrier -- it's the carrier, plus a few destroyers, plus a few fast-frigates, plus an attack sub or two. Not to mention the 120 planes in the squadrons -- attack, fighter, AWACS, anti-submarine.
Surely 10 groups is enough. Perhaps even 8.
US carriers have been routinely sunk by canadian, australian, dutch and english subs. As another commentator mentioned, aircraft carriers are great for projecting power against an inferior enemy, not as much when facing a sophisticated foe.
Localized hypersonic sound pulse emission combined with teraflop level calculation for precision targetting to disperse a concentrated aerosolized polymer matrix mist loaded with synthetic diamond.
I think anyway.
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
Sinking a US carrier by being undetected has been demonstrated. see http://www.dutchsubmarines.com/boats/boat_walrus2.htm
What we need is a submarine aircraft carrier!
The US had two or three at the end of WW2, surrendered by Imperial Japan. Incidentally there was a plan by Imperial Japan to use these to deliver plague infested fleas to the US west coast. These submarines were no joke. The US scuttled them when the Russians, an ally at the time, wanted to inspect them.
Billy Mitchell demonstrated the vulnerability of modern warships in 1921.
And then went on to become the first person to ever achieve a perfect score in Pac-Man.
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Part of the reason that carriers remain relevant is that, while they do have their own weapons, their MAIN weaponry is the planes that they carry. And it's easier to upgrade those planes (subject to limitations such as the elevators, etc...) than it would have been to upgrade a BB's weaponry.
It probably also helps them remain relevant that nobody has let a single one get any closer to something dangerous than they absolutely had to since the second world war... The concern is not so much that aircraft carriers are not powerful; but that they are so questionably survivable in the face of today's more sophisticated missiles that there may or may not be an aircraft carrier to come back to within the time it takes for the aircraft to go out and back.
They are better than battleships for beating up on hilariously outmatched little countries, since their range is longer; but that, along with saber rattling, is all they've been used for for quite some time.
Better yet: Just eliminate the men and the planes. They take-up too much room. Replace them with self-guided missiles that don't need to eat or sleep. You can carry thousands of them in the space of an aircraft carrier and project power as quickly as you press a button. No need to wait for waking-up the men, fueling the planes, moving them into position, et cetera. Missiles are ready near-instantly.
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The rest is an instructional video.
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Akagi.
The vulnerability of carriers has been proven. A very long reach may allow them to outclass other surface ships in a duel, but they are still just very long armed boxers with glass jaws. We know what happens when carriers meet carriers. We expect must the same when surface-based craft hunt carriers.
In today's world there are many weapon systems that can match the long reach of a carrier, although it is (so far) unproven how accurately they can target a ship 400-600 miles out to sea. Targeting will inevitably improve, and then it becomes a matter of numbers where the missiles are cheap going up against an expensive carrier.
The US can do a lot more for vastly less money with 4 supercarriers and 10 pocket carriers designed for helicopters and UAVs than 11 supercarriers. And we still get the prestige of the supercarriers.
They are better than battleships for beating up on hilariously outmatched little countries, since their range is longer; but that, along with saber rattling, is all they've been used for for quite some time.
That's what all US military technology has been used for for quite some time. Last I checked we haven't gone to war with China or Russia recently, and the rest of the world (not counting our allies) is pretty much made up of hilariously outmatched little countries.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
I stopped reading when he suggested that current air carriers could be destroyed by "a swarm of iranians flying Cessnas" (I didn't know Iranians had that many Cessnas) or with a German V2 (yes, really). That guy is a joke, and presents any information as if he had a personal issues with aircraft carriers (maybe one of them ran over his mother?)
Why can't
The problem is, like people who naysayed torpedo boats in WW II, the replacement for aircraft carriers is NOT submarines or battleships.
It's the 21st Century.
The replacement is small mobile destroyers with racks of armed and unarmed drones, operating in task forces.
The fact that the current brass can't grok that, does not mean they are right. Just ask Canada which provided more actual combat equipment in Libya to take out the dictator from just a few small ships than all the planes we launched from Italy did.
Change is Change. It isn't "like" what happened before.
(caveat - I was only a Sergeant with a SECRET clearance who ended up in a HQ unit after doing counter-terrorism and other ops)
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It's been done, it was called WWII.
And the deciding factor was who's carriers got caught with their pants down.
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Missiles alone can not project power. They have to be launched from somewhere - a land base, a ship or aircraft.
Carriers are effective at controlling large areas of ocean and land due to their ability to launch long range aircraft. This allows them to stay out of range of anti ship missiles while it's aircraft destroy the enemy's ability to launch attacks. When you consider that fact that a US supercarrier has a larger air wing than most nations, and that the US possesses twelve of them when no other nation has even one, it becomes clear why carriers rule.
The real weapon is, as always, knowledge. The decisive carrier battles of WW2 were decided by the ability to place the assets where they were needed to destroy the enemy. Lose the knowledge battle and carriers are just great big targets.
Of course, when you need to gather knowledge about the enemy, aircraft are extremely useful. So are submarines. Float a ship loaded with deadly anti ship missiles and threaten a carrier group with it. You'll know a submarine is in the area when your ship unexpectedly explodes and sinks.
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Everyone is missing the point. The real strategic purpose of a carrier is that they are so big, expensive, and have so many sailors on board that to actually sink one is basically asking for all out war. It's the same reason we have 30k troops in SK. It's not like they could stop a North Korean invasion. It has been calculated that 30k troops being killed would be enought to convice Americans to start a nuclear war.
It's basically like going all in playing poker. Parking a carrier no matter how vulnerable is going all in and asking your opponent how bad they want to win.
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Alot of those ships are getting old. Enterprise is 51 years old. Nimitz is 45 years old. If you stop building them, the number of carriers will naturally drop through attrition as the older ships are retired. There's a problem though: There is one and only one shipyard capable of building nuclear supercarriers. It's not a cargo ship. It's not a cruise liner. It's not even a normal naval vessel. It's a floating, nuclear powered, military city with a hanger and an airstrip on the upper decks. If you don't keep that yard busy building a ship every 5 or 6 years, you lose the ability to build them entirely. Why? Because all the people with the knowledge necessary will be looking for new jobs. When you do decide to build one, you'll be restarting from ground zero; and, it will cost significantly more to build that one than to have just kept the system running at a slow but steady pace. That's the argument anyway.
No. If a carrier wants to control the straits it wouldn't sit in them. It would sit 100 miles outside in the Indian ocean and launch planes over the straits. This is what's so silly about Iran's blustering. Yes they could close the strait, for a week or two during which the carrier groupings sitting outside the gulf and based in Bahrain, and UAE would destroy every coastal harbor in Iran from which they could launch a dingy. And once the coast has been annihilated the strait demined the whole thing would be over and Iran's abilities would be severely hampered.
Hell, the US navy already has the battle plan written.
As apposed to some random jack with a pseudonym reminiscent of a pervert who's spouting opinions so perverted that history doesn't support them?
Grow up.
It probably also helps them remain relevant that nobody has let a single one get any closer to something dangerous than they absolutely had to since the second world war.
True. Very, very true. And, in WWII, the main dangerous thing they got close to was other carriers. After the Battle of the Coral Sea it was clear that whoever got off the first strike would probably win, which is why the Japanese were in such a hurry to change the loads on their planes at Midway and got caught with their pants down.
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Yep. First, take control of the skies. Carriers are very handy for that. Next, cover the area with attack copters. Finally, move in with frigates and destroyers. Nothing will be able to move without attracting a hellfire or SM-3. SEALs can mop up any fortified oil platforms, just like the last time the iranians got uppity.
The iranian tactic of swarming with large numbers of small craft will merely create a target rich environment. Sure, they might get lucky and sink a ship but their entire coastline on the strait will look like the surface of the moon.
Clean up the mines then it's back to business as usual.
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I see you are either suffering from ignorance of the simple statistical data, or have been brainwashed. Neither of these are character flaws; they are simply deficiencies. Not accepting the truth after being made aware of the misconception would be a character flaw.
Cumulative deficit spending in constant dollars:
Reagan, 8 years: 1.600 trillion
GHW Bush, 4 years: 1.462 trillion
Clinton, 8 years: 1.610 trillion
GW Bush, 8 years: 4.351 trillion
Obama, FIRST 3 YEARS ONLY: 4.765 trillion
Gee. Reagan and Clinton were almost exactly the same in terms of accumulated debt. GHW Bush was almost twice as bad considering he only had half as long to work with running up debt as either of the former. And GW Bush and Obama were SPECTACULARLY the worst. Obama has been much worse than GW so far, but both are an unparalleled absolute disaster.
Fact: 9 trillion of the 15 trillion cumulative debt outstanding as of the end of September 2011 and accumulated since the founding of the Republic is down to the GW + Obama period alone.
Note: all the yearly figures run from October through September, so they don't quite correspond to presidential terms, but they are very close.
Now, having corrected the spectacular misconception, here's something to chew on. Presidents can't spend a single dime without the House of Representatives budgeting it. The House has COMPLETE control over the purse strings. All the Presidents do is PROPOSE budgets to the House. Then after the House passes a budget the Senate and President have to concur with it; there is a dance of reconciliation between the House and Senate, and then the President just says "yeah fine, I guess" or "Hell no", after which Congress can still override the veto.