"Defense Analysts: US Aircraft Carriers Are Screwed..." Topic

… In A Real Battle.

"When Dubya wanted to celebrate a "mission accomplished," he flew in an S-3 onto a carrier hardtop. When Trump wanted to project American military strength, he spoke on the hangar deck of the newly christened carrier USS Gerald Ford. "Where are the carriers?" the old president's line goes. Nobody comes close to matching America's 10 operational floating airports, and the current administration has announced plans to add at least two more carriers soon.

There's just one problem: A growing chorus of defense analysts says that in a real maritime battle, U.S. aircraft carriers are totally ed.

"Beyond a shadow of a doubt, a carrier is just a target," one former career Pentagon analyst told Reuters in a depressing investigation of flattops' vulnerabilities that the news service published Thursday…"
Main page
link

Amicalement
Armand

Everything is a target.

sub launced drone attack craft.

Gotta respect the opinion of a person who avoids being quoted on the record, he?

For some reason I can't quite put my finger on, I find it hard to take an author seriously who uses the term 'screwed' in this context.

Well a carrier is expensive, maybe the price of 1220 anti ship missiles but what country can seriously afford 1220 anti ship missiles? Imagine a country investing in 1220 ASM:s "good to have if the US attacks us"… I don´t think so.

most countries can hardly afford 100 ASM:s.

And missiles going 10 times the speed of sound… Torpedoes going "hundred of miles per hour"… I believe it when I see it.

Seems like Russia and China are the great boogeymen who can develop the most horrifying super weapons but never show them. Every time they go to war they perform quite bad, but when it comes to having weapons in the none too distant future they have the most terrible weapons…

How did Russia perform in Chechnya? How have they performed in Ukraine?

Yes, submarines have "sunk" carriers in practice. Such is life, every ship can be sunk. War is unfair and maybe if the US went to war against a country like France or Sweden or another country with state of the art submarines and crew they MIGHT lose a carrier. That is war, in war people die and ships sink. But does that mean that carriers WILL be sunk? Mpst definitely not.

Carriers are a component in a mixture of weapons systems, it can be used to great effect or squandered, it can help win a war or be sunk. But they are very very useful, and by the way very very hard to sink.

As I understand it, Carriers operate within a screen of many other ships, miles and miles out. That means a massive warning system as well as defensive capability against any attack focused on the Carrier(s). Nothing is going to get through in sufficient strength to take down a Carrier. And once attempted, that's when the Carrier's aircraft pulverize whoever it was that attacked the fleet. Carriers mean moveable air superiority. That's why we have so many of them, and intend to have even more. For the foreseeable future, the world is a dangerous place and the US needs air superiority everywhere and anywhere, all the time……….

Defense analysts are like weather forecasters. You can always be wrong, get paid and keep your job.

@LarryR: Hedge fund managers, too.

@Oberlindes
Actually hedge fund managers can afford expensive PR 'nudge' campaigns to ensure the public validate their beliefs for them at the ballot box and are thus never wrong…

OT, while I agree a carrier is a floating bullseye as of the moment its the only method of global force projection currently avaliable, until sub-orbital scram jets or similar rock up. The issue is being able to deploy an effective screen – and one of the many issues surrounding the UKs two new carriers, will we actually have enough other vessels to escort them (assuming they actually get an airwing).

Floating Maginot Lines?

@Great War Ace: the US effectively has 3 or 4 carriers (since the only number that matters is the number currently deployed). That's it. We don't have "so many" of them anymore.

At most, we could get maybe 7 out to sea in a surge, and that would be about all we could do, as the remaining carriers are in overhaul.

Neither do we have as large a screen around them as we used to, in terms of number of ships. Those ships are individually much more capable, though. We're down to about 4-5 Aegis destroyers escorting each carrier group.

The fact that Australian desiel subs have breached a U.S. Carrier's escort screen and carried out successful attack solutions on a number of exersizes probably don't count?