Posted on 05/28/2015 10:37:39 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Considering that 1) such airfields will continue to be highly useful for force projection and 2) the MSM urinated all over Ronald Reagan for calling the battlewagons back to duty (it was the optics they hated, the politics and the demonstration of cojones), and yet Reagan's successor, who planned to retire all four of them in order to gift blue-haired Park Avenue ladies with nice, fat tax refunds but suddenly found he needed a couple when it was time to break some of Saddam's toys and excavate his bunkers (using 1937 fully-amortized ammunition, thank you), it begins to appear that the opposition to the maintenance of the battleship divisions was always either tax-cut politics or defense-blowdown politics, and in this article we see both sorts of arguments used on just about every weapon system and ship type in the Navy's Order of Battle, by what I'm increasingly confident is a snarky, pimply little 'Rat "oppo" scribbler or a Russian opinion troll pretending to be a typical American 'Rat.
Gun- and AA-9-equipped Mach 2 a/c (did someone say "Tomcat"?) are formidable interceptors against even the fastest Russian "ship-killers", which are (think about this a minute) pilotless, brainless hot rods with 1000- or 2000-pound bombs screwed on the front.
How did the kamikazes do against the Fleet off Okinawa? Awesome, you say? Actually sank American ships? OMG, they sank some American ships. Awesome, even. Awesome if you were a Japanese pilot or admiral, giving it your best shot and still losing your ass, game set and match.
We already have missiles that shoot down missiles. We have had thaht capability since the late sixties.
However the roles will shift with technological changes, and something else will be at the very point of the spear--depending on the nature of the conflict.
I am reminded the BUFF is still flying after nearly 61 years after upgrades. The Iowa class is even older, and the carrier has been around, in one form or another since the Langley. Good basic designs fill niches well, it is only the overall importance of those niches which changes.
Imagine launching swarms of stealthy ship-killer drones with loiter capability and the ability to engage an enemy's vessels with multiple drop free, but powered and maneuverable attack drone warheads.
Now imagine those warheads able to independently coordinate an attack from different levels and directions on a target.
Even the best countermeasures will only be able to be directed in so many directions given the time allotted before impact.
The mobile airfield remains relevant, but in order to protect it, the distance of projection of force will have to increase.
Lasers and railguns will be limited by recharge rates of capacitor banks. Consider effectiveness limited by target acquisition and recharge speed, and the idea of relatively cheap, expendable, programmable, weapons systems which can 'jump' and overwhelm enemy targets comes into its own.
While those are only part of the equation, the means to transport and deploy those in theater becomes what will shape the navy of the future. Do we go with smaller, platforms, fewer crew, more stealth, or do we go with larger platforms which can have more power, more room to mount defensive armament, and greater capacity to deploy and carry weapons?
I think the answer is a combination of those, and not just one or the other.
I think the big question will become one of how many baskets we put our eggs in, and whether those eggs will be surface, air, or submarine assets (or a combination of all three).
It’s not like Congress and the military is going to listen to some comments. But I would think Chinese trolls would want to build as man $50 billion carriers as possoble. Kind of similar to what we did to the USSR.
“Carriers are mobile military bases.. attack one and it’s instant war.”
If the attacker is a state actor. Shades of USS Cole.
What they're worried about is NAVAIR, and that is why they are bringing their propaganda against the Naval Aviation establishment and the carriers they ride to deliver our mailed fist wherever it's wanted. When Marines go ashore, they do so under the cover of Naval Aviation.
That's what the Chinese don't like, while they claim as property a chunk of the world's ocean.
Heard the latest one? WESTPAC is now a Chinese-only op area. Signed up for that, PLAN boy?
If 'Rat trolls like nickcarraway have their way, the eggs will all be in Obama grocery-delivery bags on their way to "he'p New America".
Or full of America's hard-won tax cash, burning in the middle of the street in spite, lit up by the biggest Benedict Arnold of all time, bigger even than Srick Wirrie, whose Chinese case officer was Yah Lin "Charlie" Trie, whom nobody has seen since someone put the word "Chinagate" in a newspaper story.
The aircraft carrier is excellent for exporting US power and influence across the sea and, until there is a viable replacement for that tool, we shouldn't be discussing scrapping it because the commies have anti-ship missiles. We should be discussing countermeasures. period.
and energy weapons are the future of counter measures.
News travels slowly. The British had done it a year early in November of 1940. The Japanese took notice, the American Navy, not so much.
The Free Republic armchair admirals already did this yesterday: Link here.
Three words - Submarines and Targets
Nothing new here. SEATO operations in South Pacific. USS Princeton (admittedly an old Essex-class carrier) was “sunk” THREE times. Once by a lumbering P2V Neptune came in at wave top level, undetected and twice by jets, also undetected. That little incident prompted a massive upgrade of radar systems.
How’d that work out? She was “sunk” by a nuclear submarine, undetected. So, yes the age of the supercarriers is most likely dead. There is a solution. In WWII, the Navy had ~100 carriers, including escorts. QUANTITY
A troubling sign of things to come is a Russian firm that is reportedly selling a “Club-K” cruise missile concealable in shipping containers deployable on trucks, rail cars or merchant ships.
There's this thing called a search engine...you might try it sometime and educate yourself about the facts regarding the B2 bomber...
Roughly speaking the cost of 4 b-2 bomber’s = 1 AC Carrier = $8billion.
… fight the last war, that is what they know.
Of course, and it will be that way until we invent a crystal ball that works. I entered basic training in 1965. We learned trench warfare — WW1 stuff.
Roughly speaking, that’s only because the production of the bombers was CANX during production and the USAF had to eat the costs thanks to Congress and the “peace dividend”.
Instead of 132 aircraft, we got 21, now 20.
I watched a history of the kamikaze effort lately. The Japanese killed about 3,000 Americans at the cost of 5,000 pilots. It was a failed effort.
In the 80’s the Navy dad developed rocket boosted shells for the BBs that had a range of some 200+ miles, which would have put some 80% of the world’s cities in range. The program was killed off for budget reasons.
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