

Why the U.S. carrier group is scrap metal - bokonist
http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/

======
nir
It's not a good day when the #2 story on HN is a War Nerd piece.

This "scrap metal" BS is typical of the kind of hyperbole nonsense Redditors
get off on. Just because there exists a weapon that can destroy a certain
target, doesn't make this target worthless - if that was true, everything is
"scrap metal" since the first nuclear bomb.

~~~
jerf
I admit I stopped after the first page, but to use a chess metaphor, this
article is about how the chess game is over before it starts because black's
bishop is doomed because white has a queen. Even if every word is true, it's
an analysis so myopic that the value of analysis is a flat zero.

Besides, I remember similar analyses before both Iraq wars. Today you can get
away with describing that army with various denigrating terms, but I'm old
enough to remember how the Iraq army was the world's third-best at the time of
the invasion according to pundits everywhere. (To be honest, I have no idea if
it was true, and it's doesn't really matter since I'm specifically talking
about the punditry and commentary.) People who know what they are talking
about sound sober and realistic, not hyperbolic and bombastic. (And of course
merely "sounding sober and realistic" doesn't prove they do know what they are
talking about.)

~~~
graemep
As far as I remember it was the third biggest, not the third best.

~~~
jerf
Oh, but don't forget: "Elite Republican guard" and "experienced from their
wars with Iran". There was a whole series of talking points. Philwelch may be
correct on the 3rd vs. 4th point, but I am pretty sure the talk was of them
being the third/forth _best_. (Possibly the pundits think they could have
beaten China in some hypothetical fight, since at the time neither could have
really projected force at the other to speak of.)

I did say _pundits_ , after all, and I'd add those making the analysis for
political reasons. More sober analysts knew better, including the ones who
actually planned operation, after all. The fact that they were grossly wrong
because of their various motivations is sort of my point.

------
niels_olson
Ship-based anti-ballistic missile missile?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-161_Standard_Missile_3>

check.

Ability to part 4 acres of sovereign territory 12 miles off your shore with 70
fighter aircraft on board? Priceless.

Air supremacy solves all sorts of problems, including striking the the anti-
ballistic missiles in their silos/bunkers/trucks/staging areas.

Now, the real issue is people taking this bait and all of sudden thinking
"maybe those Republicans know what they're talking about one defense." Um, no.
Because the real answer is "who the hell cares?" Anyone really think we want
to go to war with China? Anyone think China really wants to go to war with us?

~~~
rjurney
The idea is that you store anti-ship missiles on civilian craft, then swarm a
carrier group and launch a sneak attack from tiny speed boats and fishing
vessels. Air supremacy does not solve that, and there is currently no defense
against such a swarm.

Everyone thought battleships were invincible until they turned out to be
exactly USELESS with the advent of good carrier-based airplanes. Its quite
possible that the anti-ship missile, in large deployments in a post-war
declaration period, has done this to the carrier.

Even though the Japanese were smart enough to launch the attack on Pearl
harbor, the US and Japanese navies were both certain their battleships would
be important in the upcoming conflict, and the Japanese navy trained intensely
for large scale night-battles among fleets of battleships. Everyone woke up
overnight to the fact that battleships were exactly useless, and it was a rude
awakening.

~~~
DenisM
You are thinking about a different article - this one:
[http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=6779&...](http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=6779&IBLOCK_ID=35)

The article being discussed here is the one about new Chinese ballastic
missiles as the newest threat.

~~~
rjurney
I read the article, but this one builds on his previous ones about the
ballistic missile threat to carrier groups, and most of the confusion in these
discussions would go away if people read the previous articles as well.

------
nuclear_eclipse
I thought the whole point of the latest CIWS and last-option missile batteries
on carriers was to protect against missile attacks, ballistic or not? Granted,
stealth and/or mach 10 is hard to defeat, but in general, the whole point of
having a carrier is to keep the carrier in a "safe" spot, and use its vast
array of aircraft to _project_ power towards the arena of hostility...

~~~
rjurney
That is true. But the idea is that anti-ship missiles are now so easy to
produce that you can deploy 100 or 1000 of them on small vessels and launch
them all at once in a surprise attack to totally overwhelm the carrier group's
defenses.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
That makes more sense; thank you.

------
jasonkester
This doesn't seem particularly newsworthy. The general thrust is that any
nation willing to declare war on the United States could potentially sink its
aircraft carriers. OK, we'll stipulate to that, but really does that reduce
their value today?

~~~
rjurney
I have to say that it does. Consider the carrier group nearest Iran. If the
theory is true, all Iran needs is a fleet of civilian boats equipped with
anti-ship missiles to defeat the US carrier group. That is exactly what
happened in at least one war game that tested the scenario. In other words:
Pearl Harbor 2.0 is coming soon, the next time we project power from a carrier
group against anyone with an organized defense.

Thats newsworthy. I don't know if its true, but it parallels the fall of the
battleship so much that it sounds plausible.

~~~
neilc
_Pearl Harbor 2.0 is coming soon, the next time we project power from a
carrier group against anyone with an organized defense._

Why didn't this happen in the first Gulf War? Ballistic missiles and small
boats aren't exactly new technologies.

~~~
rjurney
The idea is that anti-ship missile technology has become more widely
distributed since the gulf war. Is it crazy to think that Iran can match
Argentine technology from the 80s?

------
justinsb
If this is true, why isn't it classified? I don't think any government is in
the habit of exposing the 'single point of failure' of their war systems.

As some of the commenters on that article have pointed out, this smells more
like a budget-approval game than an actual credible threat...

~~~
bokonist
The comments to the article are excellent and very informative.

Whether or not the new Chinese missile exposes a single point of failure, I
suspect that the Gary Brecher is still right, and that the U.S. Carriers are
completely obsolete. Between submarines, swarms of cruise missiles, swarms of
small boats, and ballistic missiles, it's hard to imagine carriers surviving
very long in an all out war. Of course this doesn't really matter, because in
such a war nukes are the main worry. But this does mean that the money spent
on carriers is completely wasted.

~~~
nostrademons
I think that carriers are completely obsolete in an all-out war, but the
article is moronic. They certainly aren't obsolete because of "ships have no
defense against ballistic missiles."

A ballistic missile is basically a bomb with a different delivery mechanism.
Instead of being dropped straight down from a plane (like dive bombers of WW2)
or diagonally down (like laser-guided bombs of today), it's boosted to
altitude with a rocket motor, and then gravity takes it back to earth. The
flight path at the end is basically the same, though. That's what makes it
"ballistic".

Carriers have _never_ had a defense against bombs - they certainly didn't in
WW2. But y'know what - they usually didn't need one, because the bombs would
often miss on their own. Or if they hit, they wouldn't cause serious damage,
instead being stopped by the carrier's armor plating. The Harpoon doesn't pop-
up to avoid CIWS (it's usually easier to hit something coming down at you from
above than something skimming just over the waves - there's less radar glare
from the water, and the angle of attack changes less as the missile moves in
closer.) It pops up so it can hit the more lightly-armored superstructure
instead of the armored hull, potentially causing fires and knocking out
critical electronic systems.

We moved to cruise missiles for a reason: they have a much higher chance of
scoring a hit than ballistic weapons. If 80% of your weapons will miss on
their own, you don't need to worry about getting through the enemy's defenses,
you need to worry about increasing your accuracy. Cruise missiles aren't
particularly easy to shoot down either.

As for nukes - yeah, they'll take everything out, as the U.S. found out at
Bikini Atoll in 1946. The defense against nukes is the knowledge that if you
nuke a U.S. carrier battle group, you will have a few hundred incoming SLBMs
within a couple minutes, ready to blow up every single major Chinese city.

Personally, I think the real threat to carriers is the cruise-missile swarm,
coming from dozens of small fishing vessels. Cruise missiles are cheap, they
can be mounted on relatively small vessels, and if they come at you from all
directions, they'll totally overload all your air defense systems. It's not
hard to find a couple hundred private boats and put 1-2 cruise missiles on
each of them.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
_It's not hard to find a couple hundred private boats and put 1-2 cruise
missiles on each of them._

I imagine that it's extremely difficult to do this undetected, which is why we
have intel services.

~~~
nostrademons
Say that the intel services say that _every_ small craft is having missiles
loaded onto it. What do you do then? Shoot every boat on sight, civilian or
military, on the theory that it _might_ have a cruise missile on board?

Many of these boats don't even show up on radar. They're not a big enough
target for you to hit with missiles. Even if you could, the missile costs more
than the boat. So you'd need to dispatch a destroyer or a bunch of aircraft to
strafe it with gunfire.

But then you leave your destroyers/aircraft open to counterattack from small
boats. At $30k a boat and $500k a cruise missile, how many of them do you have
to sink to equal a $100M aircraft or a $1B destroyer?

Incidentally, Japan had a similar plan for defense of the home islands in WW2.
They produced nearly 6000 Shinyo, suicide motorboats with a crew of one and a
massive explosive in the bow. As the American invasion fleet entered home
waters, the plan was for these to swarm the fleet and blow up as many vessels
as possible. I suspect this is a major reason why we dropped the A-bomb
instead of going forward with an invasion of the Japanese home islands.

~~~
stcredzero
There was a proposal to build lots of fast, highly maneuverable catamaran
vessels using stealth technology and armed with cruise missiles. If I was
China, I'd be building a few squadrons of those things. (You could even have
them leave the missile behind in the water, to pop up and launch itself
towards the group at a predetermined time, making it much harder to find the
launch platform.)

------
skmurphy
Another view
[http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htintel/articles/20090403.a...](http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htintel/articles/20090403.aspx)
as the "annual magic missile announcement"

------
Rod
I am not a weapons expert, but some questions pop in my mind:

How do you hit a moving target from 2000 Km away? Using satellite images? UAVs
serving as spotters? Well, worst-case scenario the U.S. carriers could release
collosal amounts of smoke and create such a thick smoke-screen that no light
or IR radiation would penetrate.

The Chinese could try to guide the missile remotely with a human operator
being fed with "real-time" video, but good luck steering a missile at Mach 10
with a joystick, LOL.

Moreover, at Mach 10 the transmission delay could be a serious problem. After
all, electromagnetic radiation takes some time to travel 2000 Km -- approx. 7
ms (to which one must add the processing delay) -- and controlling a missile
with super-fast dynamics with a 10 ms delay is not trivial. A thought
experiment: try driving your car on the highway at 200MPH, with your
windshields covered and with no sensing other any "real-time" video of the
road ahead which has a delay of 100 ms. Good luck!

If the enemy missiles use radar, they're giving away their position. Advanced
high-speed anti-radiation missiles (HARM) could perhaps try to intercept them.
A desperate counter-measure could be to release immense ammounts of metal
strips to fool the missiles' radars.

If I remember right, the U.S. Navy had plans to equip carriers with super-mean
machine guns capable of shooting 1 million bullets per minute, thus creating
such a thick cloud of lead that no enemy missile would be able to pass
through. Sounds low-tech, but it could work, right?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
We think alike.

A carrier group is moving at 20 knots. Taking 10 minutes to reach the target,
_the group has moved 3 or 4 nautical miles in any direction._ And it's not
like you can have a radar lock on the target from the instant you launch.

Launching has its own perils. Assuming your launch system survived a first
strike, or you start a sneak attack, satellites, airplanes, and ground support
personnel can watch a missile being launched. There exists an intercept for
ballistic missiles in early boost phase from several platforms: laser and
anti-missile-missile come to mind.

But let's say you reach apogee and you have radar lock -- after all, a carrier
is nothing if it isn't a big hunk of flat metal in an otherwise noisy ocean.
So you're 100 miles or so up at mach 10 and you're heading straight down at
the carrier.

At this point the Aegis system kicks in with the RIM-161 system. It's another
proven system designed to do what -- that's right, take out ballistic
missiles.

Assuming you make it through _that_ , then you've got the phalanx system, a
system which uses radar to throw up a hailstorm of lead at a missile headed
for the carrier.

Now I've said nothing of Electronic Counter-Measures. You can be assured,
however, if you're using radar that radars can be jammed, fooled, and made to
spit out confusing data. There are all sorts of other fun games you can play
with ECM, but I'll leave that for another day.

I think there's a real danger, no doubt. But the end of carriers? All carriers
are rotting scrap heaps? Please. That's a lot of yelling and attention-seeking
blogging, not serious analysis. (Not that I know anything, but I do know a few
things)

~~~
Rod
_"I think there's a real danger, no doubt. But the end of carriers? All
carriers are rotting scrap heaps? Please. That's a lot of yelling and
attention-seeking blogging, not serious analysis."_

I wholeheartedly agree. In my most humble opinion, an emerging fad is to
announce the collapse of all things American. This _meme_ has been gaining
momentum for years. Now we hear stories like:

\- the U.S. dollar will soon be worthless and the American economy will
collapse.

\- the U.S. will disintegrate into a bunch of smaller countries.

\- all American technical jobs will move overseas, mainly to India and (guess
what?) China!

\- the U.S. Military is at its most vulnerable point in History.

I will believe in doomsday scenarios when I have the numbers to analyze. Like
John McCarthy once said: _"He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk
nonsense."_

~~~
sho
While I agree to a point, I would like to add that this meme has not sprung
spontaeneously from a vacuum - in my opinion, it is a fairly well-deserved
reaction to American hubris on a wide spectrum.

One only need turn on Fox News for a few minutes to hear the familiar "I
believe America is the greatest nation on earth", "greatest country on earth",
"greatest nation in history" - you may not personally be a fan of Fox News but
the fact remains it is the most popular news network in the USA, so must be
considered to have some representative credibility - or if you don't believe
that, just listen to George W. Bush's similar words. As a native of another
country, I can attest to the laughter, then annoyance, then sneering cynicism
about all things American such oft-repeated nonsense provokes. And I am far
from anti-American.

I don't personally believe that America is headed inevitably for ruin and
poverty, but its post-WWII shine is definitely wearing off as it takes its
more rightful place as just another country - a big, rich, successful country
mind you, but not the God-appointed Country of Countries in the minds of the
"Greatest, Free-est, best nation on earth" crowd. It's not hard to understand
the _schadenfreude_ this inspires as the hubristic boosterism drifts yet
further from reality.

Everyone hates a braggart. Everyone rejoices, at some level, when the braggart
is shown up to be the vain fool he always was. There's an element to this in
the meme you describe, I think.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Something was bugging me about this comment. I think this is it: _Everyone
hates a braggart_

Why would I hate a braggart? I could care less about people bragging about
their stuff -- cars, clothes, country, whatever.

The only reason I would hate a braggart is, unfortunately for this context, if
I felt inferior to them. But otherwise, who cares? They're just a bore. Lots
of people are bores, about all kinds of things. I don't wish them any ill or
harm, and I would not rejoice to see them brought down. I just find better
things to do than hang out with them. That is, once again, unless I felt that
they had something I really needed or envied.

I guess that's the rub, huh.

EDIT: I'm very sorry if my comment seems rude. I'm sure there's a better way
to say what I wanted. I just didn't want the idea that hating people who brag
was somehow a normal or acceptable thing to do. It's not. I say -- let
braggarts be braggarts. At least they seem happy about whatever they feel so
superior about.

~~~
rdouble
_Everyone hates a braggart_

It's a cultural thing. Scandinavians and Australians in particular hate
braggarts and even have phrases for this cultural tendency: janteloven and
tall-poppy syndrome.

Other cultures have responses for the boastful which range from eye-rolling
and groans (UK) to active encouragement (NBA, pro boxers, battle rappers).

~~~
sho
Haha, right on. Native Australian here : )

------
skwiddor
Hardly news

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE writes in 1912 !

<http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/22357>

"It is an amazing thing that the English, who have the reputation of being a
practical nation, never saw the danger to which they were exposed. For many
years they had been spending nearly a hundred millions a year upon their army
and their fleet. Squadrons of Dreadnoughts costing two millions each had been
launched. They had spent enormous sums upon cruisers, and both their torpedo
and their submarine squadrons were exceptionally strong. They were also by no
means weak in their aerial power, especially in the matter of seaplanes.
Besides all this, their army was very efficient, in spite of its limited
numbers, and it was the most expensive in Europe. Yet when the day of trial
came, all this imposing force was of no use whatever, and might as well have
not existed. Their ruin could not have been more complete or more rapid if
they had not possessed an ironclad or a regiment. And all this was
accomplished by me, Captain John Sirius, belonging to the navy of one of the
smallest Powers in Europe, and having under my command a flotilla of eight
vessels, the collective cost of which was eighteen hundred thousand pounds. No
one has a better right to tell the story than I."

Captain John Sirius is, of course, a submarine captain.

and as submariners say :

"There are only two types of naval vessels:

Submarines....... and Targets!"

