How is that an argument in favor of a carrier not being expensive? If anything, it implies the actual total cost of a carrier is even more than its own cost.
It seems like the ships are getting good use in the current climate. Carriers are the best choice of weapon in an asymmetrical war against terrorists. Terrorists can't target a Carrier Group, but Carrier Groups can bomb them all day, every day nearly perpetually.
Where Chinese aggression = China trying to police its own area?
Maybe some Chinese carriers should have helped tamper US aggression all those years in Banana Republics, Mexico, Panama, South America, etc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarborough_Shoal#Claims_by_Ch...
The same Philipines the US occupied and used as a colony (and neo-colony) and the same Japan where the US nuked civilians and had the country under supervision (it's army) etc. post-war?
Not to mention this is not actually "stationing their ships in the Philippines and Japan" (which the US does all the time, literally, in their harbors), but having disputes over some sea territory.
The US has not had any ships stationed in the Philippines since the early 90s. In response to local demand the base there was closed.
Granted, parent misspoke of China as stationing ships in those places, but your argument is similarly absurd.
The issue at hand isn't China's possible hostility towards neighboring countries centuries or decades ago but rather their fairly hostile posturing with regards to territorial claims today.
With regards to your second point, from what I've read the Philippines and Japan view China's currently expanding territorial claims to be an aggressive military expansion. I'm not sure the act of US ships being present in the harbors of Japan and the Philippines is analogous to China's military activities in the South China Sea and Western Pacific, particularly as I assume both of those countries have given explicit permission to the US Navy to enter their territorial waters.
(I'll concede one thing, carriers are useful in times of non-war: as a policing force and threat to lesser nations ..)
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?
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.
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.
[1]: http://lexingtoninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/aircraft-ca...
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
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.
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.
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.
http://breakingdefense.com/2014/04/navys-magnetic-super-gun-...
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/10/us-navy-test-...
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.
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).
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.
http://gizmodo.com/this-tomahawk-is-a-mighty-morphin-cruise-...
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")
'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.'
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.
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.
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.
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).
The US has never had such an official doctrine, nor to my knowledge has any of the other major nuclear powers.
Really? Should the US expect it too when it regularly does the same to third countries?
Well, the US is the only nation that has initiated the use of nuclear weapons for warfare so far.
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. . . . .
(edit, missing words)
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.
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.
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.
48h hasn't proven to be a long time in any modern war. In fact the evidence is that modern wars are more protracted than 19th and mid-20th century because, owing to the realities of the modern military (it tends to be heavy on capital equipment and low on manpower) you can't really win a war any more, instead you just blow up expensive stuff and then snipe at each other.
Sure, the Taliban refuses to surrender but China, Russia, or North Korea would be easier, right?
Any plausible war will probably involve a period of escalation and a long aftermath. Which 48h do you get? A confrontation off Taiwan or the Spratleys could easily ignite with a US carrier blowing up after being hit by a torpedo or swarm of inexpensive cruise missiles. The way US politics works we'd have lost before the war even started.
And finally, what do our carrier planes blow up while the carrier remains afloat? No-one except us has much that's worthy of their attention.
The "Carrier Strike Group" is simply all of the other ships (destroyers, cruisers, etc. etc.) that follow the carrier around.
The Strike Groups will remain without a Carrier. They basically are the US Navy, aside from the subs we have hidden around the world.
Furthermore, all of the other ships are completely useless in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. You can't hit ISIS with a Destroyer. You hit them with Airplanes, carried over by Carriers.
The firepower of a single US Carrier is bigger than the vast majority of land-bases in the world. A US Carrier can also move however. Its probably one of the most potent weapons of the US.
Basically, we have ten moving naval bases, that can be stationed anywhere in the ocean. Each one can go toe-to-toe with the vast, vast majority of land-bases in a particular region and win.
Or we can build another few $500 Million to $5 Billion bases in Afghanistan that we later abandon when we change administrations (Bush had different plans than Obama).
The Carriers are a far better use of money than building actual bases. Despite their high costs.
Except you most certainly can hit them with a destroyer. Or did you forget? https://www.rt.com/news/322881-russia-cruise-missiles-isis/
But cruise missiles do not have nearly the same precision as air support fighters.
An F18 flying over your infantry (or infantry of allied partners) will respond near instantly to a call for assistance. In contrast, that cruise missile may take several minutes before it reaches the target.
Nimitz, Eisenhower, Vinson, Roosevelt, Lincoln, Washington, Stennis, Truman, Reagan, and Bush make 10, with Ford entering commission later this year to make 11.
In any case, the US doesn't really have that many carriers. I mean, we have more than the rest of the world. But they're so bloody useful..
If you count things in the class of what the US calls carriers, the rest of the world has, I believe, 0 (some sources refer to these as "large-deck" carriers.)
If you want to include what the rest of the world has for carriers, you need to go to "medium-deck" carriers, where the US has more (even without counting the large-deck ships) than the rest of the world combined in the form of its amphibious assault ships (LHA/LHD).
But with only Helicopters and V/STOL aircraft... the Supercarrier is actually a better system. Helicopters don't provide the straight immunity or take advantage of modern asymetric warfare: Helicopters can be shot down by enemy rockets.
V/STOL aircraft like the Harrier Jet or F35B are expensive (either in lives: due to the high number of accidents on the Harrier, or costly in specs. IIRC, the F35B doesn't have the same specs as the other fighters). The Supercarrier filled with F18s might be cheaper than an Amphibious Assault Ship filled with V/STOL aircraft.
So from an overall cost perspective, Supercarriers with standard aircraft still remain the best bang for their buck.
How do you know that? The only conventional war I know of that was decided in hours was the Six-day war and that was because Israel inflicted a surprise attack on Egypt. Not saying you are wrong, just curious why you think so since the US hasn't been facing an equal adversary in war since WWII.
States hold war materiel and personnel on military bases, these weapons have long supply chains and generally cannot be hidden. Once you've blown these things up, then the state cannot make war any longer.
With aircraft, missiles, satellites, AWACS, advanced intelligence capabilities, the expected speed of conflicts has gone from days to hours in the last few decades. The US enjoys complete dominance over the rest of the world's militaries. There is no state, no imaginable alliance of states that could withstand a full-scale US military attack. We'd destroy their air forces, naval forces, and any ground forces they could muster within hours.
So long as we refuse to fight an unconventional war, then our troops could just go home. It's because our leaders get cocky and idealistic that we get dragged into ongoing guerrilla conflicts.
You also need a lot of ships to protect all the countries that cry about their neighbors invading them, human rights atrocities and other "emergencies" that take our military all over the world to protect other countries that are fully capable of doing it themselves, but prefer to put our military in harm's way instead.
So if a nuclear superpower effortlessly takes out a US carrier using a few Kalibr missiles, we will nuke them and be utterly destroyed, thereby proving the carrier was not vulnerable? By that definition ("I'll nuke you if you touch it") a block of cheddar cheese is invulnerable.
Also, the US doesn't just have nuclear weapons to retaliate with. We're perfectly capable of devastating these smaller countries without them.
You have, however, contributed a 4th good reason to get rid of aircraft carriers:
>If Russia or China decides to target our carriers, the response will have nuclear components.
.. that their early and costly destruction in a conflict may well be the tinder for nuclear escalation.
Well, lets get rid of them.
All conflicts long-term going forward will be won with economic resilience; meaning even if attacked, invaded, controlled, etc. - long-term the attacking force's culture will succumb to economic attrition.
Future of war is economic.
You might make an argument that for a brief period around modern times, wars were lethal enough that this was not the case. But even during this time period, the ability to inflict damage was largely an economic factor.
I think [0] would show some other reality.
0: http://johnpilger.com/articles/a-world-war-has-begun-break-t...
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.
Sure, in a conflict with a major international power, our carriers won't stick around. But first, 48 hours is a long time in the context of modern conventional warfare. Guerrilla warfare lasts as long as the people involved want it to last, conventional wars are decided in time periods measured in hours. So a carrier battle group isn't particularly vulnerable. Sure, new tech like ASBMs will force us to change tactics, but we're developing new tech too.
Also, nobody is predicting another war with a major international power. The game changer isn't carriers and hasn't been for decades. The game changer is nuclear weapons. If Russia or China decides to target our carriers, the response will have nuclear components. Nuclear weapons are the only things keeping our carriers afloat anyway, if they didn't exist, we'd have scrapped them a long time ago.
So, 48 hours. During this time, each carrier, with it's compliment of an entire fighter-bomber wing, has destroyed much more than its share of enemy military targets. Also, the battle groups don't have to actually see battle in order to be useful. A carrier is essentially a floating air base that we can put pretty much anywhere we want, giving us the global strike capabilities that make it so, if we have to threaten a petty tyrant with utter destruction, he doesn't just laugh us out of the room.