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 states allies?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
