Posted on 03/23/2023 11:15:28 AM PDT by Duke C.
Good points. But the current people in charge are unable to comprehend what you say.
” just lots of ballistic missiles. “
No good for moving targets ...
> Everybody knows that battleships can never be sunk by aircraft. <
The instant I read that tongue-in-cheek sentence, I thought of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse. And there you had a link to that very thing.
It’s sad how slow the brass learns. The Bismarck could not fend off air attacks. It was sunk months before the Prince of Wales and the Repulse sortied. Yet the Bismarck’s lesson was lost on the British Admiralty.
Arrogance + blindness, that’s a bad combination.
A CIWS installation is 7 tons by itself, not including ammo. Add to that the tons and tons of scaffolding and decking you’d need to install one on the side of a carrier hull... and then realize that a CIWS cannot shoot straight up. So you stick a bunch of them on a carrier and now have a top heavy carrier that’s still vulnerable to plunging fire and will roll over in a stiff breeze.
So this hyper thing flies low and slow? Then it climbs to the top of the high dive, also slow. But it locates a target and falls really fast? But no one is going to notice it climbing out? Yup, I can see why that would work every time. No one would ever take a shot at a dumb bomb flying straight up? Even our old F-14’s could catch that thing?
Modern ballistic missiles can course correct in flight, even on the terminal plunge - and even a near miss can mission kill a ship even without a nuclear tip.
“Little upstart Japan knocked the snot out of Imperial Russia.”
Well, they were very smart and won one key naval engagement basically destroying the Russian fleet. And since that Russian fleet had spent a year sailing around Europe and Africa so it could get to the fight, Russia was in no position to continue fighting. It was a great upset victory for Japan, but I wouldn’t really call it a “snot kicking” scenario, since the whole thing was over very soon after that first engagement.
In today’s global situation, it seems to me that China is the most likely country to receive such a surprise defeat, since they have spent a lot of time and money building up a navy, but they don’t have any relevant modern naval experience. So they could very well lose that navy in the first engagement and then be unable to engage in any conflict outside their immediate borders.
It depends on whose hypersonic missile and which design we’re talking about, but generally these things have a flight profile like the old AIM-54 Phoenix - they climb out fast, cruise fast at very high altitude, and then either dive straight down onto the target as a top attack munition or dive down to wavetop height and come in hypersonic. Something like the Khinzal mentioned here is launched from more than a thousand miles out (over the horizon) so the first sign you get that the mail’s coming is when *maybe* your radar picks something up at over 100k feet moving at multiples of mach.
There are multiple possible flight profiles. Top down and seaskimming are the two most popular.
“ When country is scraping the bottom of the tank barrel with T-54/55s, it does not say much for the rest of their dwindling arsenal.”
If you do any investigation, you’ll find that Russia is pretty much operating on a WWII manufacturing of arms and munitions level, while the West is in a near Depression level of arms and munitions level of manufacturing, despite all the BS they’re selling us. Our dollar is becoming very weak. We have no strategic oil reserves, we are dependent on our enemies for nearly everything including the servicing of our debt, and our military is led by social justice and LGTBQP warriors. Wake up.
“it does not say much for the rest of their dwindling arsenal.”
I don’t think their nuclear arsenal is dwindling.
> In today’s global situation, it seems to me that China is the most likely country to receive such a surprise defeat… <
If I had to bet today, that’s the way I’d bet. The US has both a technological edge and an experience edge. And probably also better ship and flotilla leadership.
China’s military is untested, but is steadily improving. So 20 or so years from now, who knows?
“A CIWS installation is 7 tons by itself”
1/5 the weight of an F-35
I don’t know about that.
In the 1990s, Clinton gutted our military and we were cross-decking anmo. Our fleet readiness was at 67%.
Bush was a disaster for our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Obama bombed the snot out of everyone and depleted our stockpikes.
Thankfully, Trump came along and started building things up again.
That was 2 years ago. We all know Biden is a disaster. Hopefully Trump did enough to carry us through.
To make a long story short - even a successful strike with missile with the nuclear warhead is not guaranteed to sink an aircraft carrier.
Also worth noting - a Phalanx CIWS installation has at most about 20-30 seconds worth of fire before it runs dry, at which point it is out of action for 15-30 minutes while sailors with carts and wrenches reload it. It cannot fire while being reloaded either.
Not including weight of ammo or the tons of steel needed to hold up the CIWS that you have to add to the topside of the carrier.
It *will* mission kill it (render it unable to perform its mission), which is just as good for most purposes.
You beat me to it. And phrased it more concisely than I would have. Thanks!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.