[gaijin]

My understanding is that there are new, totally non-acoustic methods of ASW tracking that are reliable and increasingly inexpensive.

I mean theoretically the sub could be completely SILENT and some adversaries can still get a good idea of where the subs are, almost continually.

Utility of carriers sunsetting now..?

:(

[piytar]

My understanding is that there are new, totally non-acoustic methods of ASW tracking that are reliable and increasingly inexpensive.

There are. I have worked on some of them.

In a real conflict, that sub would have been splatted about 5 minutes after hostilities ensued.

Despite Obama, our carriers are VERY hard to attack, let alone sink.

You can find most of the information about this technology online if you know where to look, so I am not disclosing any secrets.

[rdcbn]

War is by it’s nature full of surprises.

If we ever engage in an all out war with an adversary with a modern military we are going to take frighteningly heavy losses.

So will they.

Go read the war reports from WWII and multiply the destruction by a factor of 10 and the pace of the action by a factor of 3.

[steve86]

Not without satellite imagery and computational algorithms to analyze subtle surface disturbance patterns.

[doorgunner69]

Utility of carriers sunsetting now..?

Other than against foes without Russian/Chicom level countermeasures, probably not.

[af_vet_rr]

Utility of carriers sunsetting now..?

Carriers, as we know them here in 2015, are already on their way out, it's just going to take several decades. They are way too attractive of a target, and they require far too much infrastructure to support/defend, and as we reduce our military resources, decisions will have to be made - commit a massive amount of resources to defending/supporting large carriers, or commit those same resources to offensive vessels.

More importantly, UAVs are becoming extremely powerful much quicker than people anticipated. When naval planners were working out details of the carriers we will be deploying over the next few decades, UAVs were seen as basically flying cameras (USS Missouri was using them in 1991 against Iraq). Of course, over a decade of combat in Afghanistan and several years in Iraq, not to mention our previous drone usage in combat over the last 25 years or so, combined with miniaturization and better/faster computers is speeding up UAV tech.

The US Navy has been thinking about this a lot - there is a reason why they were making such a big deal out of UAVs working with existing carriers - there have been some unique proposals from the Navy for building UAV carriers. Popular Science or Popular Mechanics even had a nice little rundown of the prospects, including submersible UAV carriers (or submarines with hangars as I call them).

Which is amusing, because submarines that can handle aircraft have been around since the 1930s.