I’d still rather have Iowa’s firing shells the size of small cars at things over the horizon.
There’s something to be said for intimidation and sheer coolness. Plus they’re badass looking ships with history to them. The Zumwalts are the ugliest thing to ever float on the sea.
I mean if we’re gonna waste money, and I think Zumwalts are a waste of money, at least get something badass out of it.
The whole navy is pretty much a waste of money at this point. Especially considering their piss-poor operating efficiency in recent years. There’s still some residual usefulness for carrier groups in acting as bombing platforms to strike enemies who are too weak to fight us. But honestly if we ever need to bomb someone that our regional allies won’t lend us airstrips for, we probably shouldn’t bomb them anyway.
China and Russia certainly appreciate your sentiment.
The Navy is probably the best investment when it comes to the military and always has been. Air Force is maybe a close second these days, but the Navy is still king.
Having a bunch of tanks is only useful for full scale invasions. Having a carrier group is useful for full scale invasions, power projection, natural disasters, keeping sea lanes secure and getting said tanks to where they need to be without them ending up at the bottom of the ocean.
And that doesn’t even touch on stuff like submarines with regards to covert operations and nuclear force projection and the like.
Or disaster relief efforts.
That was under natural disasters.
A Navy is important and having the strongest one is a big deal. Even the Founders were fine with a strong Navy. If anything it’s gotten more important in a lot of ways since then.
I think the issue though is what kind of navy. I’d fully agree the navy has been the key part of American military security since the early republic, and air/sea forces today are still crucial. I wouldn’t discount the value of ground troops, at all, but like with seagoing forces or air forces, it’s all about the kind of force you have.
Our problem today with the Navy is that we built up a huge fleet during the Cold War with a bunch of missions that are no longer really primary–carrier group defense, sea lane protection in the face of massive air and sea-launched missile attacks, large-scale strategic ASW. The navy that could do all that isn’t necessarily the navy that you want to do the stuff we need now, which involves a lot of lower threat level sea lane protection, low to medium levels of power projection in asymmetrical conflicts, and general operations against relatively modestly equipped adversaries. It’s not that we don’t need great ASW or fabulous fleet air defenses any more, but that the ships designed to do all those things don’t really help much when you’re talking low-intensity littoral operations. We can’t ditch those things, because we need to be able to match another high-tech, serious sea-going fleet, but we also can’t expect a fleet designed to fight WWIII and only WWIII to be very useful poking around Somalia or whatnot.
Designing ships that can do everything is very hard, if not impossible, and buying and crewing enough specialized ships to do everything is prohibitively expensive. Modern warship design tends towards specialization, when it could be argued that what we need are the sort of jack of all trades ships we had in the WWII-era cruisers, or even some of the Cold War era ships before we got so specialized. Right now there are some real question marks as to how effective we could be against certain threats that don’t fit right in the parameters the fleet was designed to work with. That’s what makes criticism of ships like the DDG-1000 so telling–these are ships that don’t seem to meet what we really need, but rather seem to be ships that satisfy the sorts of requirements the higher ups want to focus on, the more appealing high-tech, high prestige challenges that really are not front and center right now.
As for the Army, during the fifties the new SAC mafia tried to reduce the ground pounders to a constabulary, thinking that nukes would be all that was necessary. That proved disastrous. While the sorts of heavy forces we needed in Central Europe during the Cold War don’t seem as useful today, without them we’d be totally unable to respond to serious ground attacks by anyone other than folks like ISIS. Our problem is mostly one of strategic mobility, as heavy forces are super hard to move around. But we still need them, even if the chances of having to use them are far less than lighter forces.
I’ll agree on the specialized ships thing for the most part.
I’ll disagree that carrier defense isn’t an important role though. Every nation out there would love to pick off a carrier and places like China are trying to develop specialized weapons for the purpose.
Now that said, a Zumwalt is trying to do the job of a battleship or a old-school heavy cruiser. If we want naval bombardment we have mothballed battleships that would do it better. If we want precision targeting we have Aegis, carrier strike aircraft and cruise missiles. It seems like it can’t really fill the role we’re trying to fill, so we’re going to make it fill a role that’s already filled by half the fleet in a better way (30 mile range is pretty crap only 6 miles better than an Iowa and nothing compared to the 900 miles of a Tomahawk).
I mean I guess there might be scenarios where there is a target near the coast that needs to be hit and a Zumwalt will be a good choice, but that hardly seems worth what we put into it.
The but advantage of the zumwalt was its stealth aspect, which made it potentially difficult to detect offshore.
Eventually the Navy wants to transition to rail guns, and the Zumwalts are capable of the immense electrical generation needed to power them. It’s not something that you could retrofit onto the Burkes. We’re still a ways off from rail gun deployment (and China is racing us to them), But yeah, it’s a cluster fuck.
We do have an immense amount of national capital tied into the carriers. It’s not just building them, but it’s also operating them, supplying them with ridiculously expensive aircraft, defending them with escorts, the whole kit and caboodle. Which is fine when we’re looking at hammering the Taliban or a third-world country, but China has spent decades thinking about how to sink them if it comes down to war. And there is a line of thinking that losing one would be catastrophic in a way that most wartime losses are not.
Strip away the carriers and what do we have? A ton of Burkes. We are a destroyer navy, and that would have been a scary idea 50 years ago, but the Burke has the displacement of World War II cruisers. And the Burke is a pretty decent all-around vessel, if a bit on the expensive end. But they’re capable of most missions, and you won’t risk a carrier or 5,000 sailors by sending one.
Why do they want to transition to rail guns? From what I gather, railguns are useful primarily against ships with otherwise impenetrable point defense-- so American ships. What’s their mission in the US Navy?
Chinese ships with rail guns.
Heh, I never said carriers weren’t important, and by extension of course defending them is important. But the Navy build up its defenses during the Cold War based on scenarios that no longer apply–massed attacks by Bears and Backfires firing long-range ASMs, or fleets of missile subs doing the same (or using a host of mega-torpedoes or whatnot). CVBG defense today faces a different set of challenges, and I’m not totally sure the force mix we have is exactly right for that, but I’ll leave that to the pros.
I admit to a personal bias towards a more general purpose navy with more general purpose ships. I realize that specialized platforms are the best at what they do, but in terms of cost/benefit and the current global threat matrix, I really think that overspecialization is more risky as an option.
Theoretically they have already finished their anti-aircraft carrier missile.
A medium-range ballistic missile, the DF-21D was designed to house conventional (non-nuclear) munitions and be fired from mobile, ground-based launchers, and like other conventional ballistic missiles of its type, it follows an arcing trajectory that takes it into the earth’s atmosphere before closing in on its target at hypersonic velocities. There are a number of elements of the DF-21D’s design, however, that make it particularly difficult to intercept, even if you believe in the infallibility touted by the United States regarding their missile defense apparatus (though there is very little evidence to support that bravado).
In particular, the reentry vehicle on the DF-21D possesses the ability to maneuver dynamically to avoid intercept as it closes with its target at an extremely steep descent angle. It’s also, at least theoretically, capable of targeting large vessels in the vast expanses of the open sea. As large as an aircraft carrier may seem when you’re alongside one, even “4.5 acres of sovereign American territory” amounts to a pinhole of a target in the massive Pacific.
They are much faster, with longer range. Their ammunition is also cheaper.
The weak point in any long-range anti-carrier weapon has always been targeting. Even a nuke needs a decent targeting solution, and as large as a carrier group is when spread out, even that can be hard to pinpoint, much less finding the CV itself, which would be necessary for a non-nuclear strike.
Can the Chinese (or anyone) do that with enough accuracy to insure the effectiveness of point attack weapons? I have no idea. My experience is decades old by this point, and probably useless. I would be very very interested though in the answer (as, um, I’m sure would be the CNO).
No, this isn’t true at all. Locating the carrier is trivial. It’s the loudest thing in the ocean, and it’s radiating like the sun.
Stealth is not on the carrier’s side. They are forced to defend themselves against incoming threats.
Ah, here’s where you are wrong I think. Locally, yes, if you have a sub in range or something, finding the general area of the carrier is feasible. Trying to locate a carrier group on a global scale, without having assets right there (assets that are very susceptible to interdiction, interception, or destruction) is much, much more difficult. I’m talking about relying on space-based detection primarily, because sea, subsurface, or air detection to the level of good targeting data, at least in the time frame I was familiar with, was very risky and still wan’t precise. We figured the Russians would need hard radar locks on carriers to have really good launch solutions, and would be willing to sacrifice ships or planes to get those. Once launched on a hard bearing, the active seekers of missiles could eventually refine the solution, but it was always best to have a tattle-tale painting the target if you could.
Now, I’m not up on all the current stuff, so there could well be a lot of sensor systems I know zip about, but I would be pretty surprised, day, if anyone had a sound-sensing system that could detect a carrier in the middle of the Pacific or even with a thousand klicks of say China with enough precision to attack it effectively. A sub could get a good bearing, but if it’s close enough to refine that solution sufficiently to be really good, I’d expect there would be a real high chance of that sub dying.
The real threat I think would be surprise attack from peacetime, when air and naval assets could get close, get good solutions, and then in effect be sacrificed after the attack they guided in succeeded.
I have to think by now that satellite photography can detect the wake of a carrier group pretty quickly. Also keep in mind you don’t need to care about the whole ocean - those missiles have a range and are land-based, so you only need to care about the area adjacent to China. I imagine, for example, that China has the entire relevant area of the South China Sea fully sensored up. I doubt that much happens there without them knowing.
Certainly possible. Though if we recall the search for that Malaysian aircraft, the ocean is a big place, even a small section of it.
The crucial thing is getting enough resolution or precision for actual strike targeting, not coarse or rough locations. That’s where I’m really uncertain about the state of the art. Even with satellite images, there’s a time delay (I have no idea bout any near real-time satellite imagery, if it’s even feasible), and even with a known sub-set of the ocean it’s still an awfully large place to cover with limited assets–assets that would have to be geostationary to keep constant coverage.
Well, I doubt either the Pentagon or the Chinese equivalent is going to pop in to clarify for us, so we’ll just have to speculate!