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.
“Why do they think the US and UK navies don’t already have counters for the “cheap’ missiles?”
Yeah, they are called escort ships.
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.
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.