You know why we're doing it. We need to deter a resurgent Russia and China.

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.

"People like me"... always a non-starter; it tells me that you're arguing with a model of who I am in your head, that probably has more to do with the people you argued with in the past than anything to do with me.

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.

"People like you" isn't a non-starter if they just mean "people who think nukes end the need for competitive conventional capabilities", and the justification for such a model can be gathered entirely in this thread.

The "like you" part may be completely unjustified - especially when M_Grey said "I don't think nukes end conventional militaries".

He has however made it clear he thinks we don't need them to be competitive, which is why I used that word.

I believe the Russians have noticed this and are therefore resolved not to fight a conventional war with the US either. So what they're doing is expanding both "unconventional" and "deniable" warfare. Why fight a military when you can encourage a society's autoimmune response to destroy itself?

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.)

Russian doctrine appears to be to overwhelm AEGIS et al with many, many missiles. After all, only one needs to get through to sink a 5 billion dollar (NOT including the aircraft and thousands of sailors on it!) carrier. Carriers are a prestige weapon now, like battleships in the 20th century: good for bullying brown people, useless in a "real" war. I don't see what the Zumwalt does about that.

Carriers are not useless for "real" war. Not sure where you got that idea. We could probably spend that money more effectively, but for what government program isn't that true?

And it would take more than one hit to sink a carrier. These are 100k+ ton ships, and the important bits are armored.

The DF-21 "Sunburn"[1] anti-ship ballistic missile:

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

>The DF-21 "Sunburn"[1] anti-ship ballistic missile

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.

Well, that's not true. Many Aegis cruisers and destroyers are now armed with SM-3 missiles which are capable of anti-ballistic missile and anti-satellite.

> Not sure where you got that idea.

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.

>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.

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.

> But a carrier group in the open ocean is a tough nut to crack

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..

Well, here's the thing. A carrier group can attack from blue water. You can play around with scenarios, but the US navy is not going to give adversaries an easy victory by coming too close to land.

Sure. But if the carrier group is "projecting power" in the middle of the ocean, who cares? Get close enough to shore so it can project its power over some militarily interesting area, and it starts to get in range of all kinds of scary weaponry. Assuming a technologically advanced adversary, and not a bunch of goons with Ak-47's and RPG's, of course.

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?

>Sure. But if the carrier group is "projecting power" in the middle of the ocean, who cares?

A CBG can hit hardened targets from a thousand miles away.

Meh. You just have to keep the carrier far away. Anti-ship ballistic missiles FTW.

Anti-ballistic missiles FTW.

Sure. They'll be reliable any day now.

Don't confuse the SM-3 with whatever the USAF is calling its thing today.

Quantity has a quality all its own.

Absolutely, which is why it's a good thing the US has many more ABMs than China has DF-21Ds.

They don't need to have more warheads, they just need to have more decoys and countermeasures than we have warheads.

As far as I know the DF-21D doesn't have decoys. It doesn't have a MIRV bus, so they won't be easy to add, either.

Do you have citations for that?

>We need to deter a resurgent Russia and China.

. . . as if that has EVER worked. . .

You're getting down voted. Given that both China and Russia are currently well into extensive land/sea grabs and Russia is backing the opposition in a war the US is sponsoring (And not losing currently) I am unsure why.

It's a surface ship, so it doesn't have a prayer against a submarine. Russia, China, and any hypothetical technologically sophisticated foe all have submarines.

It most definitely has a prayer against a submarine. A carrier is never alone; it's always protected by a fleet that keeps an eye out for any threats, including submarines.

That said, diesel-electric subs are definitely a weak spot for a carrier group.

The US military leadership presumably intends to use them to re-fight the Pacific island-hopping campaign of WWII, except this time against China instead of Japan. The "Pivot to East Asia" starting in 2012 was the first step. They see the current Middle East conflicts as a minor distraction and are preparing for a major war in a couple decades. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail.

The purpose of advanced weapons, in the context of a frenemy like China, is not to prepare for war but to prevent the temptation of war: deterrence.

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.

In this fever dream, do they not expect China, if pressed, to use nuclear weapons?

Additionally, won't most of the efforts & impact be cyber security?

The ole "what good is an army with no orders"

> They're useless and expensive, and utterly unproven in anything like combat.

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.)

>They're useless and expensive, and utterly unproven in anything like combat.

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.