
The U.S. Navy’s Big Mistake – Building Tons of Supercarriers - smacktoward
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-u-s-navy-s-big-mistake-building-tons-of-supercarriers-79cb42029b8
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tsotha
>The hubris of the “battleship Navy” was such that just nine days before Pearl
Harbor, the official program for the 1941 Army-Navy game displayed a full page
photograph of the battleship USS Arizona with language virtually extolling its
invincibility.

>Of course, the reason that no one had yet sunk a battleship from the air — in
combat — was that no one had yet tried.

This is why I can't trust anything from _War is Boring_. They have too many
obvious factual errors, to the point that you wonder if the author has any
familiarity with the subject.

The British carrier _HMS Illustrious_ made an air-only attack on the Italian
fleet in November of 1940, damaging two battleships that were saved only by
grounding and sinking a third.

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dm2
There is nothing stopping any nation with ICBMs from launching them at
Washington DC, and with enough warheads one would hit, possibly all would hit.
But it would be suicide for the country that launched them.

Yes, anti-ship missiles and rail-gun rounds would likely devastate a carrier
group. Part of any strategy against a country with that capability would be to
take out those targets first (NRO keeping watch on those locations, CIA and
NSA helping out). Trillions of dollars are spent specifically to keep track of
missiles, foreign troops, to improve defenses, and to improve first-strike
capabilities. Even a rail-gun and anti-ship missile can possible be countered,
there are a lot of people working on making it happen.

Part of the deterrent is that we have battle-tested long-range radar systems
that can detect where missiles are launched from. The US has dozens of nuclear
and non-nuclear VERY VERY large bombs in every corner of Earth that would be
used to absolutely destroy whatever launched that missile at a super-carrier.

[http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/50f5450069bedde1150...](http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/50f5450069bedde11500000d-960/071218-f-3539l-001.jpg)

The reason to have war-games is to find weaknesses in strategy and defenses.

If nothing else, I feel safer with a dozen super-carriers on constant patrol.

Having aircraft available in a warzone in a way that carriers provide is
invaluable. It's the reason the Marines have invested in their own smaller
carriers (and the sole reason the F35 needs a VTOL version).

~~~
gnoway
Well it's a good thing you feel safer. I was particularly concerned by this:

"The leader of the red team employed brilliant asymmetric tactics resulting in
16 U.S. ships, including two supercarriers, going to the bottom in a very
short span of time. The Navy stopped the war game, prohibited the red team
from using these tactics and then reran the exercise declaring victory on the
second day."

If true, that's not 'finding weaknesses in strategy and defenses,' that's
'sticking your head in the sand.'

~~~
dm2
If we already know a vulnerability exists, why allow it to be repeated if the
goal is to find unknown vulnerabilities? It's not about winning the game, it's
about finding weaknesses in defenses.

You can't just "launch all nukes" every time in a war-game, everybody already
knows that works.

There is also the good chance that we do have the capability to defend against
the specific scenario, but employing it is either too expensive, temporarily
unavailable, or too secretive.

Maybe the US Navy just wanted other nations to think that we can't detect
submarines at those depths. Then in a war-time situation we can say, "oh,
yeah, we were just bluffing, we can easily spot you at those depths".

If the highly-public and multinational war-game involves testing the exact
ranges of submarine detection, maybe they had good cause to stop the war-game,
and it wasn't necessarily because of losing.

~~~
tsotha
It's also possible the red team was deviating from the rules of the scenario.
These things are never free-for-alls, where you make up your tactics as you
go. When you're moving that many ships and people unless it's somewhat
coordinated you risk injuries and deaths. In a training exercise you're just
trying to make sure everyone is doing what they're supposed to do.

If the Navy wants to explore tactics and vulnerabilities computer simulations
are a much better fit.

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angersock
It's unfortunate that the F35 boondoggle is now also pulling in and sinking
the Navy.

I am curious about phrases such as "interfering with its ability to meet
emerging requirements and threats.".

After all, has the mathematics of force projection and enterprise-scale
conflict changed _that much_ in the last 40 years?

I could see the argument for, for example, reconfiguring carriers to be just
drone carriers (starcraft, lol). But, I'm skeptical that somehow the job of
take off, fly, loiter, bomb the shit out of something, return, refuel, rearm,
repeat has changed that much.

~~~
smacktoward
_> After all, has the mathematics of force projection and enterprise-scale
conflict changed that much in the last 40 years?_

Perhaps not, but the article notes that there was plenty of skepticism about
the survivability of the carrier force 40 years ago, too:

 _Soviet Adm. Sergei Gorchakov reportedly held the view that the U.S. had made
a strategic miscalculation by relying on large and increasingly vulnerable
aircraft carriers. The influential U.S. Adm. Hyman Rickover shared this view.
In a 1982 congressional hearing, legislators asked him how long American
carriers would survive in an actual war. Rickover’s response? “Forty-eight
hours.”_

(Of course Rickover was the father of the nuclear submarine, so his opinions
on the relative superiority of carriers may need to be taken with a grain of
salt added. He certainly wasn't alone in that opinion, though; Elmo Zumwalt,
for instance, wanted to move away from a few big carriers to larger numbers of
smaller ones -- see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Control_Ship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Control_Ship))

Arguably a flattop-heavy force was even more at risk back then than it is
today, because back then there was a real risk that an attack by the most
likely adversary (the USSR, obv.) would be centered around nuclear weapons,
and it's hard to see any scenario where any surface fleet could survive in the
face of that kind of attack. Today's anti-ship missiles and torpedoes are
faster and stealthier, but they're also much less likely to be nuclear-tipped.

~~~
tsotha
Flattops aren't as vulnerable as most people think. It really depends on the
scenario - it's actually quite difficult to land a hit on a US carrier in blue
water. It gets easier the closer you get to land, which is why the Navy is so
hot to get the new drone strike aircraft deployed.

Part of the problem (if you can view it that way) is nobody's attacked a
carrier battle group in a very long time. In theory we have counters for new
systems like streaker missiles, submarines, and the DF-21D, but nobody knows
how things would shake out in an actual battle.

------
thomble
This reminds me of this old War Nerd piece, "This is How the Carriers Will
Die":

[http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-
carrier...](http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-
will-die/)

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gmarx
Tons of Supercarriers? Wouldn't that be a fraction of a supercarrier?

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mozumder
The next generation carriers really needs to be underwater.

I'm wondering how large a submarine can be made, one with a runway and hanger
for dozens of aircraft (or drones..)

~~~
techdragon
Now that's an idea. If you want traditional manned aircraft you have a large
number of limitations on how you can work with them. But drones are flexible,
in fact they can be extremely flexible.

Submarine launched drone aircraft. I wonder if it's possible to get enough
bandwidth to control them from underwater and if it's possible to fit a non
trivial drone into a form factor that could reuse Trident/Polaris missile
tubes, then there's the matter of how to do post mission retrieval underwater.
It's an interesting idea.

