Well what if they're bitter clingers?
Especially some of these...
AND I was fighting for the Caliphate?
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 ...
” they are saying building additional and maintaining the existing carriers at the expense of ...” the welfare state can’t be done.
We could easily afford to do it with a 10% welfare load. With a 50% and growing welfare load we can’t.
And that means we cannot afford missions we previously could. The money to pay for them, our wealth, is going to welfare.
The other two sections of the essay blatantly lead to the conclusion that underwater drones are the prime offensive/defensive weapon for the Navy.
Notice the self-defeating “attack a fort” quote?
LOL!
Air power, as delivered by carriers, infamously made stationary forts indefensible.
Adm. Rickover's legacy includes 200 nuclear submarines as well as 23 nuclear-powered surface ships. The alternative was conventionally powered vessels. The Soviets and Chicoms certainly didn't view our naval force as “obsolete junk.” And of what relevance was the choice of fuel for these ships to the conduct and outcome of the Viet Nam war?
im sure you’re right. most people don’t understand the defense system surrounding a carrier. I do understand it and what I think you are not fully considering is the chinese and Russian satellites and anti ship tech are getting better and better while the defensive perimeter around carriers is getting smaller and smaller. so it eventually come to a point where we can no longer guarantee the survivability of an asset that, in a conflict, is irreplaceable. you don’t go into a fight with the idea that if we lose a single asset the battle is likely lost. you have to have backups and contingincies. this makes the carrier too valuable to lose and therefore has to be deployed in a less than effective posture. if we had a 600 ship navy the relative value of each ship decreases and i’d feel comfortable with the balance that would create. heck you could even add more carriers, which would be great.
you say very few, if any, could pull off an attempt to attack a carrier task force. I agree. the problem is I think that list would include china and Russia. two of the top four strategic enemies in the world. no iran, no n.korea right?
I love these discussions and I don’t want to come off as “anti carrier” cuz im not. im just pissed that we’re sacrificing the rest of our navy and creating an unhealthy balance in our fleet which in the long run lowers combat effectiveness.
"One good nuke" against any target would result in the same, relevant difference is a CVBG can move, do so quickly and thanks to various stealth tech, can be relatively invisible while doing so.
You can’t ‘stealth’ something from overhead.
A key fact ALWAYS ignored with the anti-carrier crowd.
Carriers are mobile air bases that allow us to project power globally.
As a child in the late 1930s, I remember my godfather, a captain in the navy and Annapolis graduate, telling my father at the dinner table that airplanes could never sink a battleship. They just had to point their guns straight up to shoot down the planes. He was captain of a destroyer that was sunk by a Kamikaze plane during the war.
Today there are relatively cheap supersonic cruise missiles. All wars start with the obsolete concepts learned from the last war.
If we go to war against the PRC, everything is vulnerable including the continental US.
I did a quick search and found no mention of the US Navy having B variants. I know a person that works at the plant for the F-35 in Fort Worth and they tell me a B versions are going to the Marines.
Here’s the problem for battleships: they usually lose against an airplane attack. Carriers have their own planes and can repulse planes far away from the carrier.
IF theres a sat specifically tasked with shadowing a battle group, then I suppose. But even that can be dealt with. Anything else “above” would not last long.
Fact is, hitting a carrier while on station would be mostly dumb luck.
“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.”
I some what doubt that a Nimitz or Nimitz II Carrier battle group will have NO air cover or integral air defense.
War is boring - often has nice pics but much of its analysis is at best faulty.
Well what if they're bitter clingers?
Especially some of these...
AND I was fighting for the Caliphate?
Yep.
They also work better when your target’s air and land base systems have been compromised, either by special forces insertion, by satellite, by missile, or some other means.
You don’t ‘take land’ with carriers. You hold land with carriers.
Subs take ‘land’ by neutralizing the enemy’s sea power.
EMP is going to change a lot of things I suspect. What’s weird about EMP is that it is basically the equivalent of bombing civilian populations. Most of the destruction will occur over time on systems not hardened to EMP - most of which are civilian.
And having land based defenses isn’t enough. It has to be coordinated with the rest of your defense-in-depth so that you can protect your homeland while conserving your defense capability.
Drones are also going to make a pretty big impact in future war. You can use drones to terrorize a civilian population, forcing your military to shift its zone of protection away from military priorities.
Drones create a situation where you are in a room trying to protect a balloon from being popped while the people in the room all have pins.
For example, in a clash with China, we would do well to sweep the seas and seize or force the internment of all commercial vessels and require neutrals to respect a US embargo and blockade of commerce with China and seizure or shut down of all Chinese commercial properties overseas. Carriers would be ideal for such duty and to apply leverage because several carrier task forces could control the oceans around both Africa and South America.
Personally, in the event of a war over Taiwan or China's island building in the South China Sea, I think that seizing everything China has overseas and cutting off all commerce and then offering a return to the status quo would be a better approach than all out combat in China's backyard.
What is the mission of the carrier force? The idea that we would be engaging in just conventional warfare against the Chicoms or the Russians is ludicrous. Look at the wars we have engaged in since the end of WWII. We have not been putting our carriers at risk. Nor would we. We know what the capabilities of our potential enemies are and act accordingly. There is no way Iran will be able to take out a carrier and what would be the consequences if they tried?
I served on an LPH during Vietnam. We had air cover from the carriers. How do we protect our amphibious forces and support vessels?
There are three US shipyards that can repair CVNs with significant battle damage: Newport News, Norfolk Naval and Puget Sound. Avondale (which builds the big amphib carriers) might be, along with Yokosuka.
The “best” hypotheticals about losing a CVN during combat operations at sea usually assume that we’ll use them in ways that we won’t. For example, it’s not like the Navy is going to stage a Custer-like charge of carriers into the Taiwan Strait on the first day of a war with the ChiComs.
Instead the CVNs will be held pretty far back to provide air cover for the assets (like Ohio Class SSGNs, or B-52s with long range standoff weapons) that will be used to attrit the ChiComs down to the point where the carriers CAN move in with limited risk of being damaged or sunk.
The further away a CVN can operate from mainland China durning the first phase of a war, the more survivable it will be. It’ll be harder to find, it will be harder to hit with long-range cruise missiles (let alone ballistic ones). Even with satelites. There will be a layered defense between it and any threat, including Aegis ballistic missile defense ships. So the CVNs will operate pretty far to the East, and in a supporting role.
yeah I agree the biggest problem is that we are spending more and more of our budget on personnel costs and not ships anymore. these overhead costs are drowning us (pun intended) welfare and medicare on a federal level and family support and pensions and such on a dept navy level. you could freeze the budget now and over the years there would still be less and less money going into ship building
I know there are some Admirals that wished they had the ballistic firepower of a battleship without the overhead. There is something to being able to rain big pieces of explosive lead on a target for an hour or two. Way cheaper than missiles at $1M a toss.
‘Rods from on high’ seems like a neat option - tungsten rods let go from a satellite that cause pretty spectacular kinetic damage on impact. Problem is reloading your satellite when it runs out of rods.
A battleship without the overhead would be a nice thing to have in the arsenal. I’ve seen the rail guns. They are very beguiling until you run out of power. Just don’t run out of power.
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