https://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-apparently-gets-its-ass-handed-to-it-in-war-games-2019-3
I didn't really understand the power of the US military until I saw a Nimitz-class carrier in San Diego. They're such massive ships. 6000 sailors, a full hospital, an air detachment more powerful than some of the nations it sails past. We have 11 of them. Teachers buy their own supplies and our bridges aren't safe to drive on.
The US has 11 aircraft carriers. The entire rest of the entire fucking planet has a combined total of 11.
The US has as many aircraft carriers as the entire fucking world combined. It's incomprehensible.
That's just the CVN's. If you count the LHA's and LHD's as aircraft carriers (which, in order to count the rest of the world's aircraft carriers as such, you really have to) , then the US has nearly twice what the whole rest of the world does.
But we can't afford healthcare.
Right and how many of those other 11 aircraft carriers are owned by US
vassal statesallies?6 additional CVs off the top of my head. If India and Thailand are considered allies (I sincerely don't know anymore who is and isn't), 8. Which yes, means 3 aircraft carriers (2 Chinese, 1 Russian) out of 22 int he entire world are not allied to the US.
I wouldn't consider India a US ally, except if there was a big enough common threat. We've fucked them over at every opportunity, and our military relationship is cordial at best. If China attacked India, and the US decided to dogpile on, then there could be an alliance, but I can't see India joining a war of NATO aggression against China.
Can you imagine how beautiful it would look as a Nimitz-class artificial reef?
There's a wonk idea about retiring them into civilian service as floating hospitals. Load it up with search and rescue equipment and send it to disaster areas and you could have a Nimitz-class mutual aid project.
The only two Navy ships I like are the USS Mercy and USS Comfort. Both are 1000 bed floating hospitals that do all of that minus the additional power/water-pumping capabilities that come with the nuclear reactor. Most of the hospital corpsmen I knew wanted to work on either because you just sail up and down coasts doing humanitarian medical work. If we insist on buying the things we may as well use them for something other than losing another war. A Nimitz-class solely dedicated to mutual aid of some kind would have so much utility if they can get it to that staging ground in a reasonable amount of time.
Minus all of the toxic waste from industrial and nuclear materials on board?
Pretty sexy.
That's what I was thinking. Yes, the US isn't invulnerable, but it is strong.
Also, a lot of these scenarios depend on a Russian or Chinese offensive, when we all know the US would likely strike first. We've seen this with Israel before. The attacker gets the first strike, which is especially valuable for the air force. Planes are hard to replace, so if you wipe them out before they get off the ground, they probably won't recover until well after the end of the war.
https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-117-the-always-lagging-us-war-machine
Imperialists are simultaneously scared shitless of "the enemy" but also incorrigibly convinced of their martial supremacy. Contradiction is a feature, not a bug.
EDIT to add: For what it's worth, aircraft carriers are little more than floating trillion dollar coffins without effective defense from ballistic missiles and saturation attacks, all of which are a lot cheaper to implement than a single aircraft carrier.
Yeah, I listened to a whole Radio War Nerd episode about this and the millennium military games. The problem is that interceptor missiles are orders of magnitude more complicated than plain offensive missiles (hitting a bullet with a bullet), and even if the interceptors are perfect, all you have to do as the attacker is wait until they've used their last one, laugh maniacally, and then launch your second round of missiles.
I've yet to hear anyone explain how the DF-21D's kill vehicle gets or performs terminal guidance.
Satellites and over-the-horizon radar. China's recent advancements in space exploration tech are all a handy mediatic smokescreen/testbed for their increasingly more technologically advanced satellites.
How does that information get processed and sent to the KV in real time as it is performing reentry and has a white-hot plasma shield in front of it? Sure, a network of satellites providing 24/7/365 coverage of the relevant parts of the Pacific could do this but whether that capability exists is unknown and also untested.
It's certainly a credible threat but I think a lot of this "death of the carrier" rhetoric is coming way too soon, especially when midair refueling exists.
It's funny that this makes the naval commanders nervous about sailing carrier groups in the South China Sea, but sadly that just makes them ask for yet more weapons that our government is all too happy to provide.
I'd imagine it works like any other ballistic missile, even the ones used by the west. The difference lies in the fact that a carrier is technically a moving target, unlike a city. My theory is that the KV-satellite acquires some sort of firing solution before re-entry then just beelines towards where the target is going to be. While carriers are surprisingly nimble for their size, they have little warning of the incoming munition, typology, and intended target, and may not be able to outmaneuver the projectile. Just baseless speculation on my part, btw.
The death of the carrier to me is probably somewhat overdue, precisely because of tech like midair refueling, but also due to the commanders' own shyness about committing a carrier into open battle against a peer opponent with their own military and navy. Even without wunderwaffen like the DF-21, basic-bitch anti-ship missiles can simply saturate their targets and overwhelm their defenses for a fraction of the production and deployment costs of a carrier.
It’s funny that this makes the naval commanders nervous about sailing carrier groups in the South China Sea, but sadly that just makes them ask for yet more weapons that our government is all too happy to provide.
This has been the case for a while; it's all theater, a farce put on by ghouls in the MIC and their former West Point buddies in the Navy and Pentagon to keep the cycle of grift going on in perpetuity. In reality these weapons were almost never meant to be fielded in anger, because if either A) The weapons are fielded and don't work against a real opponent -or- B) Escalation of conflict harms the economy to the point they can't continue the grift, then they lose out.
I’d imagine it works like any other ballistic missile, even the ones used by the west. The difference lies in the fact that a carrier is technically a moving target, unlike a city.
Which therefore means it cannot work like any other ballistic missile...
they have little warning of the incoming munition, typology, and intended target,
Ballistic missile launches are easy to detect and their trajectories are predictable. If China sends a few up on a trajectory that's consistent with the location of a carrier group, the US is going to know exactly what is coming and the carrier will take evasive actions and at this point we get to the unanswered question of how the KV does terminal guidance and how well it can hit an evading carrier, which you're right are surprisingly nimble.
Thankfully, commanders haven't really had an opportunity against a peer state (in that we didn't have open war with the Soviets and haven't yet with China) and hopefully that doesn't change. Agree with the rest of what you said. The cited sources for this article are exactly the kind of people you described.
Which therefore means it cannot work like any other ballistic missile…
According to Wikipedia, the DF-21's reentry vehicle looks similar to the US military's Pershing 2 RV, the later of which has control surfaces and is able to pull up to 25G maneuvers in atmosphere, which is comparable to some AAMs like the Soviet R-60 or mid-cold war variants of the US AIM-9 sidewinder. Assuming the DF-21 is at least as maneuverable as the Pershing 2, then it should theoretically be able to hit a maneuvering carrier, assuming the initial trajectory put it close enough to the ship. This would also somewhat solve the problem of ballistic missiles being easy to detect, since it could theoretically be able to make evasive maneuvers to dodge anti-ballistic missile systems.
Ballistic missile launches are easy to detect and their trajectories are predictable.
Aside from maneuvering, the missile also has two other things working for it that would make it harder to counter: it has a mobile launcher, and it probably runs a relatively low risk of being picked up by NORAD or other land based early warning radar systems, due to the fact that the missile is relatively short range, and generally only going to be used against targets that are close to China. This means that US fleets being targeted by the missile are going to be mostly on their own when it come to detecting and countering incoming DF-21s, and due to the mobile launcher, they also can't have any preset interception courses since they won't know where exactly the missile is going to come from. On top of that, China has even recently developed an air-launch version capable of being mounted on the H-6K bomber, which would further increase the unpredictability of where the missile is coming from, though this version isn't going to be in service for a few more years. Also, the short range of the missile works in its favor as well, since it means that its flight time is going to be much less than that of an ICBM for example.
unanswered question of how the KV does terminal guidance and how well it can hit an evading carrier
In terms of terminal guidance, Wikipedia lists terminal active radar guidance, which probably means the KV is able to just lock on to the largest object it can find and head towards it, assuming the initial trajectory was accurate enough to put the carrier in the radar's field of view. The skepticism about whether it can actually hit the carrier is warranted though, as the DF-21 hasn't yet been tested against targets moving at speed. Electronic counter measures are another issue. The Russian military has come to the conclusion that ECM is the only way in which the DF-21 can be defeated, which is a big positive in terms of the missile's ability to get past all other forms of evading it or shooting it down, but if it's able to be countered just with radar jamming or chaff, then it would still be a massively flawed weapon. However, I couldn't find anything about how easy it is to fool the missile with ECM.
The question isn't whether the KV can maneuver to hit a moving target, the question is how the KV gets real-time terminal guidance to that moving target, so it knows exactly where to maneuver to. It's doing reentry so it cannot see in front of it; radar is blinded, never mind the visible or IR spectrums. Some kind of satellite relay from earth or space based radars is possible but whether they have developed that capability isn't known.
Also, large ballistic missile launches will always be easy to detect by satellite so long as they burn fuckloads of fuel. As for radar, the navy wouldn't be relying on ground based radar in the first place, carrier groups will have multiple ships with AEGIS radars and they've been tweaking some of them for ballistic missile defense since at least the Bush administration. It's gonna be detected.
It comes down to how quickly the American carrier can react versus if and how the KV can react to evasive maneuvers, and both of those questions involve things we just don't know.
The question isn’t whether the KV can maneuver to hit a moving target, the question is how the KV gets real-time terminal guidance to that moving target, so it knows exactly where to maneuver to. It’s doing reentry so it cannot see in front of it; radar is blinded, never mind the visible or IR spectrums.
From what I could find, the missile doesn't go straight down in the terminal phase, rather it levels out in atmosphere near where the target is and then goes straight down when it gets over it, which would give the KV much more time to look for its target without interference.
As for radar, the navy wouldn’t be relying on ground based radar in the first place, carrier groups will have multiple ships with AEGIS radars and they’ve been tweaking some of them for ballistic missile defense since at least the Bush administration. It’s gonna be detected.
This is correct, and I should have been a bit more clear. In terms of detection, its always going to get detected no matter what, but when it gets detected matters as to how much it can be countered. ICBMs are easy to detect since they go hundreds or even thousands of kilometers into the sky, which means that often they are going to be well above the enemy's horizon for upwards of 10 minutes, and thus give a decent amount of reaction time. Short and medium range ballistic missiles are obviously going to be above the enemy's horizon for a much shorter period of time, which in turn gives a shorter window to react to the incoming threat. Add in the fact that the missile could come from an unexpected direction, and this could lower reaction time even more.
In terms of ship based missile detection, I know ships have their own radar system that are easily capable of detecting incoming missiles, my thinking was that ship based radar has to be more general purpose and looks for multiple types of threats, where as land based anti-ballistic missile early warning radars are more specialized towards only looking for incoming BMs when they are hundreds of kilometers above the earth's surface. But you are correct, ships radars should be just as good as land based radar in this scenario since ships have shot down satellites before, and the trajectory of a short/medium range ballistic missile is going to be much lower than an ICBM, meaning that detection range shouldn't be an issue.
No one who knows the answer would risk the jail time to divulge it. Fortunately, for me, I don't know the answer, but I know enough about other naval weapons to spitball here. This is all open source, available on Wikipedia and other platforms.
Missiles have few possible guidance systems, falling into four broad categories:
- Active
- Semi-active
- Passive
- Location
Active seeking is an onboard RADAR transceiver.
Passive seeking relies on the target's own electromagnetic radiation. This category contains heat (infrared) seeking missiles as well as seekers that home on RADAR and radio emissions. It also contains video guided missiles, although those are not historically very common.
Semi-active missiles contain a RADAR receiver, but no transmitter of their own. The transmitter is based on a friendly platform (usually the ship it was launched from), and is typically called a director or illuminator. The missile will either fly along the transmitted beam or the director will illuminate the target and the missile will seek it. The US's Standard Missile series is an example of this type.
Location is either GPS (or equivalent) or Inertial Navigation (gyros and accelerometers). These aren't useful for attacking ships, as they're not stationary, but it can get a long range missile within range to turn on it's seeker.
Capable anti ship missiles use a combination of the above.
An aircraft carrier is always in a strike group and surrounded by other ships.
Viewed from above, a carrier has a large, flat surface that can't be coated with radar absorbant material, due to the extreme wear and tear flight operations put on the flight deck. That makes it an enormous RADAR reflector, especially compared to the surrounding ships, many of which are designed to have reduced radar cross sesctions. While the ocean is also a large reflector, the signal wouldn't be nearly as strong due to the irregularity of the sea surface, especially in rough places like the South China Sea.
American super carriers are nuclear powered, which means they don't have big exhaust stacks, so Infrared seekers are out.
Each type of ship has different radio emissions, based on the types of radars and communications that are onboard. This can be used to discriminate between classes of ships, and can even be used to identify specific ships (ships operate RADARS on slightly different frequencies to prevent interference. Also, each RADAR and radio transmitter has unique irregularities in it's signal which can be analyzed and used to determine its source). With how the physics of electromagnetic radiation in the radio spefctrum works in the atmosphere, a passive receiver can detect and identify a transmitter at twice the RADAR's effective range, so passive detection is an extemely effective way to locate a target. The downside is that it only gives you direction, not range.
A semi-active seeker is extremely unlikely.
GPS satellites would be very juicy targets in a war between the US and China. Both countries have demonstrated the capability to destroy satellites. I am not aware of a China based GPS-like system, and the US controls the GPS system, to the point where, in wartime, the system would shift to encrypted only, making it useless to all non-NATO receivers. But, an Inertial Navigation System (INS) is pretty simple and effective with modern components.
So, to conclude, the likely DF-21D guidance is:
- Inertial navigation to get in the area
- Passive EM seeking to get near the target and discriminate between targets
- Active RADAR seeker in the terminal phase
Sorry if you already know this stuff. To get into any further depth, I'll have to find what else is freely available.
China has the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System as an alternative to GPS.
I don't trust that at all. They just say that so they can justify more funding.
Remember the Millennium Challenge 2002 where the US got completely fucking clobbered in a simulation of the War on Terror so they just cheated and changed all the parameters to make sure they won? Remember that the military has total control over these exercises and has manipulated them for propaganda purposes in the past. As such this should probably just be ignored, or else engaged with with extreme skepticism, from the perspective of understanding what they hope to achieve by saying this.
It's possible that the conclusion is correct but if so only because the military is so full of bloat, corruption, and profit-focus that throwing more money at it could only make it worse.
While the Millennium Challenge is a hilarious story, the red forces were able to win primarily because the general in charge of them found all of the loopholes in the rules and exploited the shit out of them. He did this essentially to protest the notion of having a wargame in the first place, because he correctly realized that the military's real goal in holding wargames was to do propaganda and get funding for more military hardware.
The value of carriers is to provide a platform to launch missiles and aircraft anywhere in the world, the reason we have them and other countries don't bother is that we're the one with the global spanning military hegemony that requires that capability. The reason they're more vulnerable despite being really hard to sink is that we're pretty good at shooting down anti-ship missiles, but if you wanted to take one out of the fight with an electronics attack or a tiny suicide boat that would be extremely difficult to stop.
whatever happened to those ship-mounted railguns? The ones that were supposed to be able to launch like a 25kg projectile with enough force that it'd hit its target with the energy of a double trailer truck going 65mph, going far to fast to be to intercept or probably even notice before impact.
Modern warfare is sensor warfare. If you can detect it, you can strike it.
This is why China and Russia put a heavy focus on information warfare. If you can blind America's eyes, then all that's available is prior-gathered information and slow-gathered information from making direct contact with the opposing forces. If you can sever u.s communications as well, then our military is truly fucked. Even disrupting them will severely handicap u.s power.
They are right about u.s airport being vulnerable while groundbound, which is the same for literally every nation, although I have heavy doubts about the f35 actually being effective enough to attain air superiority against countries that are specialized in shooting down aircraft.
Naval warfare, carriers are floating cities that are giant moving targets to surface-to-water missiles, in addition to being almost defenseless against massed missile strikes should they be dumb enough to enter the strike range of China's area of operation.
What we saw from Iran's counter strike on u.s. bases is what we can expect from China and Russia but magnitudes more deadly should the U.S ever be dumber than it is and attempt military action against them.
You say that but they're actually planning on making a super duper carrier
the trick is on defining what a kill is so both can be true at once
It pretty clearly means you can damage an aircraft carrier to the point it can no longer contribute to the fight, but actually destroying and sinking it is harder. The ship would then be removed from combat for repairs.
Equivalent to a wounded soldier vs a dead one.
i was doing a bit but yeah, you are correct. I wish they had just used the words destroyed and damaged instead my dumb brain keeps thinking that a ship can't die so you get to pick what that means because it could be damaged like even though it did not "die" and be unable to be used in future battles which is pretty much a death for a battleship in my mind, you need a new one, but yeah this cleared this up for me
"Sink" is the word we all need here because it's literally what they mean and the writer's decision to use figurative language here just isn't helpful.
Yeah this ain't difficult and I'm sure it's explained in the article but here we are.
It's not explained. The article is kind of shit.
That's Business Insider.
For fun, I decided to list the cited sources:
-
David Ochmanek, a RAND warfare analyst,
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Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defense and an experienced war-gamer,
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USNI News (USNI = US Naval Institute)
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the National Defense Strategy Commission — a bipartisan panel of experts picked by Congress to evaluate the National Defense Strategy
I love the free press
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They're nearly impossible to kill if they stay in the harbor. They're only vulnerable if they go into war.
like it is even dumber than that i feel because like i think they mean kill as in they cannot be repaired anymore but if they are not operational in a fight they are as good as dead
attack the American battle network at all levels, relentlessly, and they practice it all the time
That, and the future of naval combat is under the surface. The day of the carrier has come and gone long ago. Just like the battleship before it, it'll take a devastating naval battle or war to convince the admirals and government acquisition people.
Another consideration is just how much the US spends per missile. Each bit of ordnance in the US arsenal is vastly more expensive than any adversary, and, even though America spends a ludicrous amount on 'defense' each year, the inventory isn't very large simply due to cost. Sure, you could argue that the contractors would just make more, but they won't do it for free, and the industrial base to do it quickly for a near-peer/peer war just doesn't exist. A huge byproduct of the neoliberal policies of the late 20th century pushing manufacturing overseas is that America just doesn't have the capacity to fight a protracted war, especially if some of its bank-breaking toys start getting broken. For all of the antiballistic missile spending, the inventory of actual intercept vehicles likely isn't much larger than what is currently installed, and never will be. Sure, Boeing could convert its 747 factories to make warbirds, but how long would that take, and how many civilian airliner production facilities do they even have? Sure, the shipbuilders can crank out a couple of ships a year, but the shipyard jobs are mostly gone. If an adversary started sinking ships, there just wouldn't be any more (except the LCS, which is just garbage). The mothball fleet would take at least a year to start putting to sea, and with what ordnance? Of course, this is all ignoring the elephant in the room, nuclear annihilation, but it's fun to think about.
When Bush was CIA director he lied about the true strength of the Soviet Union in order to justify increasing military spending. It is possible that this war games report is just lies about China in order to justify greater military spending.
