China Has ‘Swarm’ Ambitions With New Drone Carrier

https://theaseanpost.com ^ | 8 June 2022 | Didier Lauras

[RomanSoldier19]

Officially it is just a research vessel, but China's newly unveiled drone carrier is a clear sign Beijing is rushing to deploy an autonomous swarm of unmanned devices in its push for military supremacy in the Pacific Ocean.

State media last month showed the launching of the Zhu Hai Yun – "Zhu Hai Cloud" – capable of transporting an unspecified number of flying drones as well as surface and submarine craft, and operating autonomously thanks to artificial intelligence.

The 89-metre (292-foot) ship would be operational by year-end with a top speed of 18 knots, vastly increasing China's surveillance potential of the vast Pacific area it considers its zone of influence.

"The vessel is not only an unprecedented precision tool at the frontier of marine science, but also a platform for marine disaster prevention and mitigation, seabed precision mapping, marine environment monitoring, and maritime search and rescue," Chen Dake, lab director at the firm that built the carrier, told China Daily.

[central_va]

Give it a rest. CVNs will be damaged ( hopefully they can be repaired ) and so will planes, tanks and everything else made for war. C’est la Guerre.

[Pilsner]

That's just the tech we know about. They can toot their horns, but this is nothing...
Strategy - these ships would be blown out of the water with missiles with ranges of 200 miles before the first drone could be launched...
So much for drone ships.
Would you like to withdraw your question?

No Phil, I will stand by it. Worse than you thought: inside the secret Fitzgerald probe the Navy doesn’t want you to read dave.kristula.com dave.kristula.com dave.kristula.com

[grey_whiskers]

If Biden cannot accept the fact that Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia are all integral parts of China, his they/them army will have to face the might of the PLA. pic.twitter.com/yrUI6BNXvS— khan (@SameeraKhan) June 10, 2022

[Pilsner]

That's just the tech we know about. They can toot their horns, but this is nothing...
Strategy - these ships would be blown out of the water with missiles with ranges of 200 miles before the first drone could be launched...
So much for drone ships.
You DO realize that aircraft aboard carriers have ranges much more than a few hundred miles, right? I just showed you missiles that have a 200 mile range.
Would you like to withdraw your question?

No Phil, I will stand by it.

I hope we don't get into a shooting war with China. And if we do, I hope the US Navy in your head, the one where news articles are operational weapons systems, the one where everything works, the one where our technology is so advanced that we don't even have words to describe it, the US Navy that operates so effectively it will effortlessly swat away all opposition, is the US Navy that fights the war.

I hope the US Navy that fights the war is not the one where half trained watch standing officers blunder through the night in busy seaways, not speaking to the officer in the CIC because the two are in a personal snit. The one where radars are down for months at a time, but that doesn't matter because the personnel standing watch don't know how to use them anyway. Worse than you thought: inside the secret Fitzgerald probe the Navy doesn’t want you to read.

I hope the US Navy that fights the war is not the one where, while approaching a busy foreign port, steering control is transferred to an unmanned station, resulting in death and destruction as the ship sails on with no input from the helm. Singapore Safety Report on USS John S. McCain Aug. 21, 2017 Collision

I hope the US Navy that fights the war is not the one that allows nuclear subs to remain infested with bedbugs for over a year, and, when changing course in the shallow China Sea ponders "Should we check that the new course is safe at this depth?" Decides "Nah, it'll be fine. In fact, increase speed from 16 knots to 24 knots!" then wrecks the boat's bow. The Story Of How The Submarine USS Connecticut Crashed

I hope the US Navy that fights the war is not the one that has apparently let its traditional excellence at damage control decline to the point where sailors can neither a recognize fire on their ship, nor effectively combat it. Long Chain of Failures Left Sailors Unprepared to Fight USS Bonhomme Richard Fire, Investigation Finds

I hope the US Navy that fights the war is not the one that is poorly positioned to fully repair its fighting fleet of warships damaged in future high-end battles, the Government Accountability Office found in a report released this week.

I hope you are right, and my concerns are unfounded. I hope that we would not see a repeat of the hubris that cost the US Navy so dearly in our first year in WW2, when its hierarchy stood by our nearly useless Mark 14 torpedoes, and refused to even consider the possibility that the Japanese Long Lance torpedoes were orders of magnitude better than the Mark 14 would have been if it actually worked, and they were, at least for surface engagements. I hope we don't see the hubris that needlessly lost hundreds of merchant ships, their crews and cargoes, by refusing to convoy merchant ships, because that was what the Brits did, and it must be a bad idea since the US Navy did not invent it.

I hope...

[Catholic and Conservative]

Related story from 2 days ago:
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4070264/posts?page=1

In 2019, US warships off the coast of California were swarmed by drones from a Hong Kong-registered cargo ship, the MV Bass Strait.

Additional information about the drone incidents here: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/drone-swarms-that-harassed-navy-ships-demystified-in-new-documents

[Pilsner]

Double post.

[philman_36]

I hope you are right, and my concerns are unfounded.

You sound like a concern troll nitpicking a few select
instances in an effort to demonize the whole Navy.

[Pilsner]

You sound like a concern troll nitpicking a few select instances in an effort to demonize the whole Navy.

Is it possible to cherry pick "a few select instances" and give a false impression, good or bad, of a large organization? Sure.

What reason do we have, on June 14th, 2022, to be confident that these "instances" are not representative of the current culture of the US Navy? Representative of the least efficient ships hopefully, but representative of what one would expect to find in the US Navy.

And what reason do we have to be confident that these "instances" are not representative of the average US Navy ship, which were unfortunate enough to encounter a nonroutine situation that exposed them?

A theme that runs through these mishaps is orders and procedures are not followed. The US Navy, and its COs, have adopted standing orders and procedures that cannot realistically be followed, given the state of the crews and ships, so they are not. The chain of command knows that. But rather than adopting standings orders and procedures that make sense, given the state of the crews and ships, and then ruthlessly ensuring they are followed, and accepting responsibility, they turn a blind eye, and hope

[philman_36]

It sounds to me like you’re just pulling “stuff” out of your posterior.

[kevin_in_so_cal]

FWIW, I haven't seen this posted yet. From 2019.

“It operates like a flashlight,” says THOR Program Manager Amber Anderson. “It spreads out when the operator hits the button and anything within that cone will be taken down. It engages in the blink of an eye. It’s built to negate swarms of drones; we want to drop many of them at one time without a single leaker getting through.”