I hate to be picky, but the enemy has always had the range on aircraft
carriers. An aircraft carrier’s role is
to deliver airpower into a theatre and stand off and deliver while evading
enemy counter measures. Unless your
platform can threaten to support an opposed landing on a hostile coast, it is
of scant use and that is why the submarine is a weak arm.
It is still about boots on the ground and a carrier task force can do
just that. It has been the global police
man since WWII.
If you are going up against a prepared capable enemy force, of course the
equation changes sharply. Yet here we
are transitioning to fighter drone technology available in flights massing
thousands of birds able to saturate enemy capabilities. I like our chances.
War itself has been obsolete for a long time and the larger wars more
so. Combat hostilities are today at
their lowest level ever and the trend continues downward. Soldiers still talk and plan for another
Great War but convincing cause has long since disappeared.
The future of naval warfare: Are US supercarriers
useless?
DodBuzz asks an interesting question: Will aircraft carriers remain useful in future wars? The
answer is no. And the
reason is missiles like you're seeing in this photograph: a Raduga KH-22cruise missile mounted on
a Tupolev Tu-22 Backfire long-range strike bomber.
Mark Jacobson—former advisor to General
Stanley McChrystal and ex-CIA chief General David Petraeus—told DodBuzz that
America's potential enemies are constantly thinking about how to beat the US
military with new tactical ideas but, surprisingly, the Pentagon seems to be
anchored in the past:
The services don't
change. I'm not sure all the service chiefs get this yet… Are we focusing on
new types of destroyers? Is anybody willing to question the existence of
aircraft carriers? If you look at history this may be the battleship all over
again [...] It won't be a useful weapon in the Taiwan Straits, and it may not
be one 15 years from now, depending on how many nations have hypersonic
missiles.
In fact, they can be rendered useless today.
Carriers have been indispensable platforms in recent wars—without them, the US
wouldn't have been able to quickly deploy air squadrons in different operation
theaters. However, this has only been possible because the US Navy wasn't
facing an enemy equipped with a KH-22 or a similar weapon.
The KH-22 is supersonic cruise missile that
can sink an American super carrier from miles away, hitting them at Mach 5. It
was designed by the Soviet Union after analyzing the naval battles of World War
II. They asked this question: If we can attack aircraft carriers from a long
distance, do we need to match their air power? The answer was obvious. Just
like the battleship was rendered useless by aircraft carriers, the latter can
also be neutralized with fast, impossible to stop missiles fired from a long
distance. That's why the KH-22 was developed. With the newest variants, an
airplane can fire one of these beasts from almost 372 miles (600 kilometers)
away, opening a hole five meters in diameter and a dozen meters deep into any ship.
The first time you see
an American nuclear super-carrier in person, you can't believe the size. It's
simply astonishing. It must be even…Read…
It's hard to imagine a Russia vs United States
war scenario today, but the fact is that Russia is also making these missiles
forexport: The KH-22E uses
conventional warheads, but they are equally lethal to carriers. Knowing all
this—and knowing that China probably has these or clones of them, and other
countries will get them too—does the United States really need more super
carriers?
Seems to me like Jacobson is right. The next
naval war could turn carriers into this century's battleship.
UPDATE: A reader posted
a link to this brilliant paper by US Navy
Captain Henry J. Hendrix, Ph.D. Perhaps all the armchair Commanders-in-Chief
would like to read it and learn something, but here's the final paragraph of
his conclusion:
An innovative culture
has characterized the U.S. Navy throughout its history. The carrier had its
day, but continuing to adhere to 100 years of aviation tradition, even in the
face of a direct challenge, signals a failure of imagination and foreshadows
decline. Money is tight, and as the nautical saying goes, the enemy has found
our range. It is time to change course.
So what's the most effective vehicle in the
Navy's arsenal, then? Submarines, of course.
These guided-missile
submarines, known as SSGNs and each carrying up to 155 Tomahawks, represent the
most effective path forward in strike warfare.
Super quiet, the Ohio
SSGNs can penetrate enemy waters unseen, positioning themselves to unleash
massive waves of precision strike weapons to take down critical nodes of enemy
infrastructure, weakening resolve and resistance from the strategic center
outward. Stealthy submarines, loaded with low-cost precision cruise and
ballistic strike
Money is tight, and as
the nautical saying goes, the enemy has found our range. It is time to change
course. missiles capped with conventional warheads, provide the United States
with an elegant "one target + one missile = one kill" solution.
No comments:
Post a Comment