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To: Vigilant1
Similar arguments were made by the battleship navy crowd about naval aviation circa 1940.

History settled the debate. Let's not get caught exposed again.

Wiki: "HMS Prince of Wales (pennant number 53) was a King George V-class battleship of the Royal Navy, built at the Cammell Laird shipyard in Birkenhead, England. The Prince of Wales had a brief but active career, helping to stop the Bismarck and carrying Winston Churchill to the Newfoundland Conference; however, her sinking by Japanese land-based bombers in the Far East in 1941 is one of the events that led to the end of the battleship being considered the predominant class in naval warfare."

Hubris can kill.

21 posted on 01/01/2011 1:28:45 PM PST by Travis McGee (---www.EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com---)
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To: Travis McGee
TM:
"Similar arguments were made by the battleship navy crowd about naval aviation circa 1940. History settled the debate. Let's not get caught exposed again."

Sorry, but your comparison is simply invalid and inapplicable. The same was said about antiship cruise missiles like the Exocent making navies obsolete. That was obviously wrong., as are almost all claims about new 'superweapons' making whole classes of primary weapons systems 'useless' and 'obsolete'.

You clearly do not understand just how difficult a modern carrier is to sink. A carrier is literally a small floating city, and has thousands of watertight compartments. To sink one, you need a to breach a significant percentage of those compartments. This weapon is not even remotely capable of accomplishing that. They are in no way the quantum advancement represented by the introduction of aerial warfare. They are merely a different means of delivering an explosive warhead the size of an aircraft bomb on target.

Even in WWII, our carriers were able to absorb multiple direct hits by 1000 pound and larger armor-piercing bombs and not be sunk. Modern carriers are much larger and have far better firefighting and damage control equipment. There have been a number of cases where fires in the hangar decks of modern carriers have led to the explosion of several aircraft fully loaded with ordnance. This involved a hell of a lot more explosives; tens of thousands of pounds of them; detonating within the ship than a half-dozen direct hits from these Chinese missiles could deliver. Our carriers not only survived these incidents, they returned to port under their own power.

So the idea that these Chinese missiles can actually sink a carrier is fantasy. They could, if they somehow got past our Aegis anti-missile defenses, certainly damage a carrier, but the same is true of any weapon system aimed at carriers. That is the nature of war; attack and defense. This is just another new warhead delivery system for which we already have a good defense.

30 posted on 01/01/2011 1:57:05 PM PST by Vigilant1 (The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.)
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To: Travis McGee
Hubris can kill.

Darn right. It's like the notion that USAF bases and facilities are less vulnerable than 30kt aircraft carriers.

35 posted on 01/01/2011 3:37:04 PM PST by Jacquerie (Our Constitution is timeless because human nature is static.)
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