Posted on 07/12/2017 6:26:04 PM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
Britain's new £6.2billion aircraft carriers are vulnerable to relatively cheap long-range Russian and Chinese missiles, a report has revealed.
Multibillion-pound defence projects are at risk from technological advances by potential enemies of the UK, the think-tank study found.
Missiles costing less than £500,000 each could 'at least disable' Britain's new £3.1billion HMS Queen Elizabeth, it claimed.
The report noted: 'Key Western military assets had become vulnerable to targeting and disruption and destruction by long-range precision missiles to a degree that had hitherto been unthinkable.'
It warns the Government has focused more on offensive systems over protective capabilities.
'There has been a growing imbalance within the attack-defence military equation, driven by the spread and speed of applicable technologies,' it adds.
The report by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) lists Iran as an example, saying the country has long held anti-ship missiles from Russia.
It has also claimed to have developed its own Hormuz-2 supersonic, ballistic anti-ship missile, weapons which 'must be seen as a key contextual element of British naval deployments'.
The study says UK defence capabilities costing £16billion a year are 'increasingly vulnerable to low-cost, technology-rich weapons'.
The Royal United Services Institute report names the most notable vulnerability as 'increased peer and near-peer threat from Chinese and Russian long-range precision missiles'.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4683868/6-2billion-aircraft-carriers-vulnerable-missiles.html#ixzz4mfeGtX5a Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
The more immediate problem is that they have no planes, and will be crewed by a very small crew of tea drinking surrender monkeys.
An Iranian motorboat might get them.
For that kind of money, they could have gotten a real aircraft carrier.
What I want to know, with these types of stories......why do the writers think navies are unaware of potential threats? Why do they think the US and UK navies don’t already have counters for the “cheap’ missiles?
exactly.
To add ; All of our carriers are exposed too.
the Journalist weenies haven’t got a clue on how much HE it takes to sink a ship. Carriers have numerous water tight bulkheads and can take multiple hits. They also never travel alone. The escorts can deploy decoys and defensive armament. carrier would know where the missiles originated, and send in a $hit storm....if they had planes, like ours do.
journalism today is a joke. It would be nice if these idiots understood what they are writing about.
A simple case of a carrier is never alone, and provided protection is not that hard to understand.
“Why do they think the US and UK navies don’t already have counters for the “cheap’ missiles?”
Yeah, they are called escort ships.
In the 21st Century, aren’t aircraft carriers simply huge targets that can be sunk, or at least rendered combat ineffective, by even some dinky 2d world country with it’s old diesel-electric subs, which are very quiet, and decent torpedoes?
As Peter Hitchens remarked in his column the other weekend, an aircraft carrier without planes is like a “pub without beer”.
What a bankrupt country, financially for sure and morally too considering they want to kill that infant Charlie Gard and not allow his parents to come to our country and spend money they’ve raised to give him a chance at life.
Nothing can compare to our CVN(IF) models. Brilliant idea to put ‘em in superhero movies so our government can plausibly deny their existence.
/jk
The problem is defending against potentially hundreds of sea skimming & ballistic missiles targeting a carrier at once. Only one or 2 needs to hit the carrier to sink or cripple it. No doubt our opponents will consider using tactical nuclear weapons to do the job.
Ships have a limited arsenal. Land based arsenals are not limited by space & weight considerations. Once the ship’s defenses are exhausted it becomes a sitting duck.
With satellite surveillance, there is no place to hide for a carrier battle group. The enemy knows exactly where the group is. Only long range, thousands of miles, gives the group some measure of protection, while it renders the air assets useless to attack.
Once the carrier is eliminated, the carrier battle group must flee or risk further missile attack combined with air attacks. It has just been rendered nearly impotent.
Remember Midway? The balance of power in the Pacific shifted to the USA when Japan lost 4 carriers there. They never regained dominance. Remember Leyte Gulf? Halsey nearly lost the beachhead chasing Japanese (no planes) carriers. Finally, remember Trump’s missile attack on the Syrian air base. It was devastating & I didn’t hear anything about Russian missile defenses protecting the base.
I contend that in future wars between capable powers, carriers will be prime targets, relentlessly hunted & attacked until sunk. Given they take years to build, they wont last long in any major war. It is too much money, lives, & expertise going to the bottom.
All the money spent on carriers would be better spent on smart weapons & laser type weapons, the likely winners of the next major war.
There are a bevy of affordable anti-ship missiles that even poor Nations can afford.
the key is to get the carrier’s as far off the coast as possible, out of the range of these missiles.
With current manned aircraft that is impossible.
reliable, long-range, robotic aircraft would permit this and keep carriers viable for quite a bit more time.
directed energy weapons will mitigate this but really aircraft like the UCLASS would have helped quite a bit.
It was cancelled.
I’m sure that Trump would make the Uk a great deal on the USS Enterprise and even refuel it’s reactor for free.
Because we spent the last 10 years taking them off our ships? And now that we’ve scrapped a bunch of them we’re now having to hastily put them back on? The US Navy until very recently was taking the CIWS multithreat defense system off US naval vessels and replacing it with an 8 shot missile launcher that could only engage manned air targets and cannot be reloaded in combat. This left the ships vulnerable and the problem did not begin to be remedied until recently. To this day there are still ships floating around on active duty with no CIWS.
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