Re:New Warship’s Big Guns Have No Bullets
by gozur88 on Tuesday November 08, 2016 @05:07AM
(#12898983)
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?
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..