People like you thought that nukes made conventional militaries obsolete in the 50's. That was wrong then and it's wrong now. In order to maintain control of the seas and skies, we need to maintain our edge in aviation and in naval technology.
I don't think nukes end conventional militaries, but I think they end conventional conflicts between nuclear armed nations. That's why we're fighting Russia in a proxy war in Syria, and not with tanks in the Ukraine. As for China, how many times could our navy and air force obliterate them as it stands? Besides, they're just taking a page from our book, letting us front the R&D, then... stealing the designs.
Much cheaper, much smarter.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/nov/06/troll-armies-s...
Not just Ukraine and Syria, where the influence is obvious, but I suspect we'll eventually find they have a hand in the collapse of democracy in Turkey. And there's the feeding of selective hacking attacks and pseudoscandals to the US press. They've even managed to get the director of the FBI to do their stirring for them.
(Also, the Russian Navy is terrible and barely afloat, so clearly the Russians are going to do as much fighting as possible inland.)
And it would take more than one hit to sink a carrier. These are 100k+ ton ships, and the important bits are armored.
carr[ies] a warhead big enough to inflict significant damage on a large vessel, providing the Chinese the capability of destroying a U.S. supercarrier in one strike.
Additionally, Ships currently have no defense against a ballistic missile attack.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-21
[2] http://www.usni.org/news-and-features/chinese-kill-weapon
Only the "D" version. It's a complex system that involves satellites, which can be shot down, and multiple communications links that can be attacked. And it's expensive, which is why they don't have many.
>Additionally, Ships currently have no defense against a ballistic missile attack.
This is wrong. All US CBGs have ballistic missile defense.
Like battleships, they are a big dumb target. The same way carriers and their aircraft made battleships obsolete modern anti-ship missiles have made carriers obsolete in a theoretical war between superpowers. Countries still covet them as a status symbol (or a way to spend taxpayer money), but I think that is about it.
> And it would take more than one hit to sink a carrier. These are 100k+ ton ships, and the important bits are armored.
That's why the Russian idea is to just bombard them with missiles until enough they poke enough holes in them to sink or disable them. It seems like a reasonable strategy to me.
Yeah, except that's not actually true unless the war goes nuclear. Carriers are very well defended from air attack. The entire battle group is there to defend the carrier, which means aircraft-launched AA missiles, hundreds of SM-2s, plus point defense. Plus ECM and EM-type weapons.
And that's assuming US forces aren't able to destroy any launch platforms, which is probably not a good assumption at this point. It's much harder to pull of a surprise attack than it used to be.
>That's why the Russian idea is to just bombard them with missiles until enough they poke enough holes in them to sink or disable them. It seems like a reasonable strategy to me.
Yeah, that's pretty much the strategy everyone's been using since they switched from boarding actions to guns in the 1500s.
The Russians can't actually mount that kind of attack any more without telegraphing it in a big way, since it would take nearly every remaining conventional bomber and naval asset in the Russian military to ensure success. Nobody else is capable at all unless the scenario posits a US carrier in shallow water off the coast of Shanghai.
I'm not saying carriers are invulnerable. They're not. People make mistakes, and sometimes they're fatal. There are always variables that are impossible to evaluate without knowing the absolute latest top secret stuff. But a carrier group in the open ocean is a tough nut to crack, especially from the air, and attackers make mistakes too. It's far from obsolete.
Well, that hints at the point, doesn't it? No, Russia or China, or whoever the US Navy Brass dreams about re-fighting the battle of Leyte gulf with again, isn't going to try to hit a US carrier group in the middle of the South Pacific. They are probably perfectly happy with preventing said carrier group from parking outside Archangelsk, the Baltic Sea, the South China sea or wherever it is that they want to flex their military muscle..
So in the end I guess the question is whether a carrier group is a cost-effective power projection tool in the age of supersonic (or even ballistic, if we choose to believe those Chinese things are real) anti-ship missiles, submarines and whatnot. Or are they just like battleships in WWII?
A CBG can hit hardened targets from a thousand miles away.
. . . as if that has EVER worked. . .
That said, diesel-electric subs are definitely a weak spot for a carrier group.
The "pivot to Asia" is primarily economic, which is why President Obama has pushed the TPP so hard.
For the last 50 years (at least) the oil in the Middle East has been crucial to American economic security. That is rapidly becoming no longer true because of fracking, renewables, and improving efficiency. Oil is decoupling from U.S. economic growth, so the U.S. can (somewhat) decouple from the Middle East.
So if oil is not going to be the limiting factor on future U.S. economic growth, what will be? Technology and trade are good bets, and Asia is ripe for enormous growth in both.
The ole "what good is an army with no orders"
They're unproven because they're new. They apparently put a bunch of new tech on them, in order to prove them. Proven tech doesn't magically drop out of the sky, you've got to build and test it first. And as far as I understand it, that's what the Zumwalt class is for.
I'm not saying they're good or an efficient use of money, I'm just pointing out that the "unproven" argument is out of place here. You need to start somewhere to prove them, or you'll forever end up using yesterday's technology. (Though I admit yesterday's military technology is looking pretty good these days.)
Well... yeah. That's true of every new ship design. Well, not the useless part. This ship isn't useless either, though you can certainly make the case it's too expensive for what it does.
The navy originally planed 32 ships, so it was definitely not intended to be a demonstrator.
It seems fairly feasible to fix the energy usage by just throwing more energy at it (and the Zumwalt demonstrates that capacity is relatively portable), but the wear on these things is going to be a massive cost even if they reduce the problem 10x from where it is now.
[1]: http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a21174/navy...
it isn't explosives that costs money. A typical $3K "dumb" bomb is made "smart" by bolting-on $25K JDAM guidance kit. When Lockheed Martin is done with that "lump of feromagnetic material" you'll wish it was made of gold instead :)
But the projectile is not the most tricky part. The plan is to develop a single "hypervelocity projectile" which can be fired by both chemical and rail guns, so it seems likely that that part will work out.
The rail gun itself needs a lot more research and development to get to a usable form. See e.g. this rather pessimistic article[0]. Meanwhile, the Navy doesn't care enough about the Zuwalt guns to even buy ammunition for them. How much will they spend on building a better gun?
[0] http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/06/can-navys-elect...
But since the entire advantage of artillery is having the ability to put rounds on targets more cheaply than other methods, once you're paying $800k for a round you may as well use aircraft or missiles.
The railgun will probably get deployed just because it gives them capabilities far beyond AGS. It will have almost double the range and, in theory anyway, could be used against land, surface, and air targets (including ballistic missiles).
So a rail gun on the Zumwalt would basically do the same thing as the AGS. It would maybe have longer range, depending on how many megajoules they can make the gun output, this is still an open problem. And the magazine would have space for twice as many rounds, since they don't need to store the propellant. Given that the Navy apparently just decided that they don't even want the AGS, I don't think they care at all about the capabilities they'd get by installing railguns on the Zumwalts.
They may still install it as basically a pure research project, but if money is tight...
OTOH, only the third one is getting the railgun if it happens at all.
And note, that they do plan to fit rail guns to the Zumwalt class later on, which is possible thanks to their increased electrical capacity. They're not useless.