Posted on 05/28/2015 6:52:21 AM PDT by C19fan
“History,” it has been written, “does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.” Today it’s rhyming with Gen. Billy Mitchell. In the 1920s, Mitchell challenged conventional thinking by advocating air power at sea in the face of a naval establishment dominated by battleship proponents.
The hubris of the “battleship Navy” was such that just nine days before Pearl Harbor, the official program for the 1941 Army-Navy game displayed a full page photograph of the battleship USS Arizona with language virtually extolling its invincibility.
Of course, the reason that no one had yet sunk a battleship from the air — in combat — was that no one had yet tried.
(Excerpt) Read more at medium.com ...
WWIII follows. Our forces throughout the world would be mobilized including in the region inplaces like Guam and Japan. The nuclear triad of land based missiles, submarine launched nuclear weapons, and aircraft and cruise missiles armed with nuclear weapons would retaliate.
Taiwan would be an afterthought. You don't wipe out five carriers without the subsequent Armageddon. The Japanese learned that after Pearl Harbor.
When Nelson made that statement, ships did not carry guns powerful enough to readily knock down fortress walls, while forts had guns much bigger than a ship could carry.
I wonder what his thoughts would be upon seeing a WW2 battle ship with 16" guns able to toss a 1,000 pound explosive shell several miles?
We used to have a 600 ship navy during the days of Vietnam.
Tell me what can we do to be completely invulnerable?
There are two kinds of ships:
SUBMARINES...........and...............TARGETS.
Take it to the bank.
An aircraft carrier is a.... big.... fat....TARGET!!
Satellites are all fine and dandy, but even if they can effectively locate a carrier there needs to be effective integration to systems capable of targeting and hitting it.
Cruise missiles are going to be range limited. And the longest ranged versions will be subsonic and take a long time to reach a target at distance. Over water they’ll be easy pickings for AMRAAMS.
Ballistic missiles aren’t easy to guide once they’re launched. There’ll be a time lag between when the CVN is located, when the missile is targeted and launched, and when it hits. The carrier will be miles away from where it was at that point, meaning that the targeting will require a predictive element on where the carrier will be. THEN the missile needs to survive Aegis, which is proven to work against ballistic missiles. While a ChiCom nuke will be bigger than the Bikini bombs, the Bikini tests (Able Shot, specifically) did show pretty conclusively that anything other than a really near miss is going to be not only survivable but also not a mission-kill.
I’m convinced that the next paradigm will be shipbased drone swarms as the leading edge. The ships will be drones that are submergible nucs that can launch swarms of smaller airbased drones that are similar to tomohawks in that they can be programmed to arrive at a GPS location following a certain route at a certain time, but instead of just detonating they will launch their arms and then return to the ship or another location for refurb/refuel.
Personnel and maintenance costs would be much less, need for logistics is greatly reduced, and the ships and drones can be engineered to perform at specifications that would not be possible if they were manned. It’s coming.
It is the classic battle of Guns versus Butter that all Great Powers in decline have faced, Butter usually wins out because it has more constituents. You just have to take a look at Europe and what they spend on defense. The US has provided the security umbrella to allow them to feed their welfare state. We won't have that luxury as our power declines.
At its peak, the U.S. Navy was operating 6,768 ships on V-J Day in August 1945, including 28 aircraft carriers, 23 battleships, 71 escort carriers, 72 cruisers, over 232 submarines, 377 destroyers, and thousands of amphibious, supply and auxiliary ships - from “Ship Force Levels 1917-present”
Six Thousand Seven Hundred and Sixty Eight.....
Go to Ft. Pulaski outside Savanah GA to see the effects circa 1863 rifled cannon had against the kinds of forts Nelson described.
Then think of what a single broadside of 16” superheavy armor piercing shells travelling at Mach 2 after being fired from an Iowa Class BB would have. Followed up by a broadside of HE shells.
THEN think of what a dozen 2000lb JDAM penetrators dropped from six F/A-18s operating from a carrier several hundred miles away (if not more, with inflight refueling) would have.
“Supercarriers are great against an enemy that can’t shoot back but against a legitimate military they are sitting ducks. There will be a repeat of the British losing the Repulse and Prince of Wales off Malaysia.”
They may look like sitting ducks but our carriers are always in a task force protected by destroyers, subs and cruisers, all with the most modern missile technology.
In WWII at the end we were producing a Liberty ship a day. We were producing them faster than they could be sunk.
In WWII at the end we were producing a Liberty ship a day. We were producing them faster than they could be sunk.
“In WWII at the end we were producing a Liberty ship a day. We were producing them faster than they could be sunk.”
Quantity has a quality all its own.
I’ve read some books about how much of the final stuff was built internally underway - wiring, weapons systems, etc. Even plumbing.
Yamamoto was right.
This country is over. It was never as clear to me as last night.
I was at my daughters high school graduation. Mind you I live in one of the top 10 "wealthiest" zip codes in this metro area. My daughters high school is not only one of the top performing in the state, it's one of the top performing in the country. It's also heavily Mormon. My daughter is also in the top 5% of the class. So every function I go to revolves around the top 5%, NHS, etc. That is what I see. Again, heavily Mormon because their children excel.
Well, last night was the "general population" graduation.
Holy crap.
It was a sea of third worldism. And you could cut the tension with a knife. Everyone was sectioned off with their own "kind" (with a few exceptions like the multigenerational Mexican-American families--who have incidentally lived here for generations without strife). That was what was so concerning--the complete balkanization of the people in the crowd.
I can't even imagine what the other schools look like in less desirable areas.
That assumes a carrier sails someplace alone. It doesn’t as you well know. It has its own concentric rings of submarines, cruisers, destroyers, as well as ASW aircraft. Let’s not forget sonar, and other counter measures.
A carrier battle group is nothing to toy with, even if you are a very sophisticated Russian boat, diesel or otherwise.
Sure a battleship could sink our carriers but they’d never get close enough to get them in range. Stupid article.
The OMFG class of submarines (USS Ohio, Michigan, Florida, Georgia) have been modified to each carry 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles in their former Trident missile tubes. We used to have an anti-ship version of the Tomahawk. Perhaps it's time to resurrect it.
If the writer of this article wanted to convince me that we don’t need that many Supercarriers anymore, this is one thing he could have said. One day we’ll have the U.S.S. Clinton and U.S.S. Obama. At that point, he would have had me sold. No more carriers!!!
Yes, now that would be a good discussion.
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