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Old 05-05-2022, 05:59 AM
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Arrow “Floating Pointlessness”: Is this the end of the age of the aircraft carrier?

FLOATING POINTLESSNESS: IS THIS THE END OF THE AGE OF THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER?
By: Marc Wortman - Vanity Fair News - 05-05-22
Re: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022...rcraft-carrier

Russia’s Moskva missile cruiser near the Tartus port of Syria, in 2015. The ship sank in April after a cruise missile attack by the Ukrainian military.

Few sights are more majestic, even breathtaking—and ferocious-looking—than a massive warship, gray and bristling with weapons, flanked by other equally badass vessels in a naval flotilla, bounding through the high seas. That is the indelible image of the unstoppable power packed by the great navies of the world. But on April 14, with just two relatively low-tech, shore-launched Neptune cruise missiles, Ukrainian forces punched big holes in the side of a heavy Russian missile cruiser, Moskva, the flagship of Moscow’s Black Sea fleet. Like darts popping a balloon, the weapons sent the paragon of the Russian navy to the bottom of the sea.

This isn’t supposed to happen. After the Moskva sank, a palpable shudder went through not just the Kremlin but also the Western naval affairs community, from the analysts to the admirals. Big ships, including Russia’s, carry a panoply of high-tech defense systems to ward off missile, bomb, torpedo, and cyber attack. They’re guarded by smaller fighting ships, surveillance systems, fighter jets, tracking satellites, and submarines, nearly all of them on hand for the sole purpose of protecting the mother ship from just this sort of assault.

But down the three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar ship went.

The Moskva was the largest—over two football fields in length—and most powerful warship to be lost in combat anywhere in the past 40 years. (Despite strong evidence to the contrary, the Kremlin claims that the ship was the victim of an accidental fire that blew up its munitions.) Retired former NATO supreme allied commander U.S. Admiral James Stavridis called the loss of the Moskva “a gut punch to the Russian military and the Kremlin,” a triumph for the Ukrainians, catastrophic for Russia’s war-making abilities, and a heavy blow to its national pride. (Adding insult to injury, the Ukrainian military reportedly used drones to hit two 55-foot Russian patrol boats on May 2, though the fate of these ships remains uncertain.)

But, writing in Bloomberg, Stavridis warned that Western forces should not gloat. The sinking, he contended, “is a stark reminder of the vulnerability of surface ships—including aircraft carriers, the heart of the U.S. Navy—to relatively low-cost, numerous and technologically advanced cruise missiles.” The world’s shores now teem with such ship killers. Are American or allied ships and, most worrisome, the 11 U.S. nuclear aircraft carriers (with another on the way), now costing $13 billion-plus even before they go to sea, at risk?

That gnawing worry focuses especially on Chinese ship-killing capabilities, which are far more advanced than anything Ukraine used to destroy Moskva. For the past two decades, China has been building up its maritime defenses. It now possesses a vast arsenal of land, sea, and air ship-targeting cruise and ballistic weapons. In a single salvo, China could shoot swarms of hundreds of state-of-the-art hypersonic missiles traveling at multiple times the speed of sound and with ranges over a thousand miles. At present, several analysts believe that American carriers and other big ships operating in the littorals of the East and South China Sea would not last in the face of such an attack.

Disturbing to contemplate, the two rivals seem increasingly on a collision course over Taiwanese independence and freedom of the seas in the South and East China Seas, which China claims for itself. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has openly stated his nation’s intention to achieve “reunification,” by force if needed, with Taiwan, island home to the Western-leaning Republic of China, by the time of the People’s Republic’s 2049 centennial. Invading Taiwan, however, would almost certainly result in an American response, quite possibly leading to rapid escalation of violence between nuclear-armed nations.

The key to Chinese success, say its military planners, lies in the vulnerability of U.S. carriers. In a widely reported speech on December 20, 2018, retired People’s Liberation Army Major General Luo Yuan laid out a plausible war strategy for dealing with its U.S. rival, which he characterized as “a paper tiger.” In what Sarah Kirchberger, head of the Center for Asia-Pacific Strategy and Security at the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University in Germany, describes to me as a “Pearl Harbor 2.0” scenario, Luo, a deputy secretary-general of the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences, called for the “puncturing” of U.S. strengths with a preemptive strike specifically on U.S. aircraft carriers. In fact, China has practiced targeting its anti-ship missiles at mock-ups of aircraft carriers.

Luo explained what he believes would happen: “Historical experience tells us that the United States is most afraid of people dying…. If we sank one of their carriers, this would cause 5,000 casualties; if we sank two: 10,000 casualties—don’t you think America would be afraid?” He implied a likely American retreat after such a loss.

When I ask Kirchberger, a noted expert on China’s maritime defense forces, whether U.S. ship defense systems could thwart a swarming hypersonic missile attack, she replies, “At present, probably not.”

The Pentagon knows that. Indeed, last year U.S. forces “failed miserably” in its battle simulation of a confrontation with China. That was according to the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs Air Force General John Hyten, commenting after the war game. According to Defense One, he reportedly said, “An aggressive red team that had been studying the United States for the last 20 years [China] just ran rings around us. They knew exactly what we’re going to do before we did it.” Lesson learned: The U.S., he said, would have to change its long-standing war-fighting doctrine. “In today’s world, with hypersonic missiles, with significant long-range fires coming at us from all domains, if…everybody knows where you are, you’re vulnerable.”

A Naval War College professor who asks not to be quoted by name tells me, “The Chinese have made operations in the Western Pacific a dangerous place with the panoply of weapons that they can bring to bear.”

But active-duty American naval officers sharply disagree with the idea that their ships would wither under a missile or other assault. According to Business Insider, Captain Paul Campagna, commanding officer of the carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, a 1,100-foot behemoth, said on April 5 at a major defense conference near Washington, D.C., “For anyone that’s worried about the modern threat that’s out there, I’ll just say that the carrier is not on an island…It deploys with the air wing. It deploys with the strike group. It deploys with a layered defense that goes from the bottom of the ocean and out to space, and anyone who thinks that we’re fragile, little teacups out there or something like that is grossly mistaken.”

Maybe not “fragile, little teacups” waiting for an adversary to smash them to bits, but less than 10 days later, two small missiles sank the Moskva.

The U.S. put its first aircraft carrier into service a century ago. The Japanese managed to sneak up on Pearl Harbor with six carriers to unleash waves of hundreds of fighters and torpedo aircraft on the U.S. Pacific Fleet moored there on December 7, 1941, bringing the Americans into World War II. Fighters and torpedo airplanes from U.S. carriers served as the forward punch for the grueling Pacific island-hopping campaign that followed all the way to Tokyo. Japan lost 21 carriers in the war, breaking the back of its navy. While not as devastating to the total assembled forces, nonetheless, the British lost eight of its flattops, and the U.S. lost 12. Many others were struck and put out of combat. Needless to say, thousands of sailors went down with their ships.

Since World War II, the world’s navies have made enormous technological and engineering advances. Today’s nuclear-propelled aircraft carriers are maritime marvels—ferrying an entire naval air station, pilots, and aircrew, typically as many as 90 fighter jets and helicopters, their missiles, fuel, spare parts, telecommunications, and everything else that it takes to project air power from the seas that cover 71% of the earth.

These vast ocean-going fortresses can power through the waves like a Jet Ski shooting up a fantail and cutting tight arcs. At flank, or full, speed, they can make better than 35 knots (officially the Navy says 30-plus). That’s more than 40 miles per hour—and thanks to their nuclear propulsion they can steam at top speeds nonstop until they reach their destination. A friend of mine, a former U.S. Navy pilot not authorized to speak about his time in the service, deployed as a high-ranking officer aboard an aircraft carrier until less than five years ago. When posted as officer of the deck, he drove the ship. “It’s amazing,” he tells me, “to be on board that ship when it kicks into gear. It’s impressive how maneuverable those things are.”

At any one time, the U.S. typically deploys one to two carriers in the Pacific, a similar number in the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea, and one in the Mediterranean, while another is in transit and the rest undergo shore repairs and readiness preparations. Those carriers are not only there for fighting wars; they also serve as what the Naval War College professor I spoke to calls “valuable pieces on the strategic chessboard.” Some call it “carrier diplomacy,” big-stick demonstrations of U.S. global power. Within 72 hours, the U.S. can have a carrier at a crisis hot spot anywhere in the world.

But the former Navy pilot and carrier officer finds, “[Our] country’s antiquated predilection toward carrier diplomacy is a strategic liability in a near-peer [i.e., China and Russia] wartime environment…Though our ship’s defense systems are more robust and capable than a Slava class cruiser [such as the Moskva], we are certainly vulnerable, especially carriers.”

Martin Alexander, an emeritus professor of international politics at Aberystwyth University in Wales, who studies military planning, sent me a skeptical comment about the two latest carriers in the Royal Navy, both of which went into service in the past few years. “Are they £12 billion worth of floating pointlessness?” he asks, and wonders, “Or, as chess pieces (impressive, big, etc.) are all carriers now not much but diplomatic leveraging, the twenty-first century ‘showing the flag’ or ‘send a (BIG!) gunboat’ of our time?” For him, the answer is clear: That’s too much money for demonstrations of seagoing strength that might actually prove of little value in a war with a superpower adversary.

Despite his concerns about carriers’ surviving a fight, Admiral Stavridis doesn’t quite agree with such assessments. He and Marine Corps veteran and author Elliot Ackerman wrote a best-selling novel, 2034, extrapolating from China’s ambition to take control of the waters of the South China Sea—leading to a World War III limited nuclear exchange. I ask him about his views on the present usefulness of these leviathans. “U.S. carriers are somewhat vulnerable,” he notes, “but we have many capable defensive systems available.” Tactically, he explains, “We can’t put all our eggs in the carrier basket, but they remain a potent offensive force alongside new defensive and offensive systems. If properly employed, they are capable of inflicting tremendous damage on an enemy both at sea and on their bases ashore.” If they survive long enough.

The debate over the value of aircraft carriers goes back almost to their beginnings. So far, the big ship advocates have usually won out. Reagan-era secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman, himself a retired Navy pilot, was responsible for driving the Cold War buildup of a 600-ship fleet—presently the U.S. has about 300 deployable ships. In an autumn 2021 article for the Naval War College Review, an important naval-strategy forum, he wrote a think piece about what he terms “the irreplaceable value of sea-based aviation as provided by the aircraft carrier.” He calls for growing the U.S. carrier fleet to 15, which also means spending the money for each carrier task force’s own layered defense.

But these enormously expensive diplomatic shows of force may have little fighting endurance in wartime. In fact, might the damaged pride that goes with losing a carrier inevitably lead to escalation, even risking nuclear war?

Among the greatest services the Ukrainians have provided the world in their heroic stand against the Russian invasion is to show that even a great power will face tremendous and potentially unbearable costs in trying to conquer a smaller nation. Chinese naval expert Kirchberger tells me, “In the short term, I think the risk of a military attack on Taiwan has probably lessened somewhat because of the confusion and dismay in Beijing about the failings of the Russian military in Ukraine. But that says nothing about the longer term…” The risk remains. “As several analysts have pointed out,” she says, “this very decade—the 2020s—is probably the riskiest time frame for Taiwan because after 2030, it can be expected that China’s internal problems through skewed demographics and slowing economic growth would finally catch up and make military adventurism harder. We need, in other words, to be very alert throughout the next five to eight years in particular and be careful not to overlook the early warning signs of impending attacks, whether overt or covert.” In the coming decade, if America is to thwart a Chinese attack, it doesn’t need to send out more big targets to sea, but instead deploy the weapons that can spot and stop an invasion force.

Mounting real-world evidence shows that nations, especially the U.S., continue to spend vast sums on these giant displays of force projection that may not survive the first salvo. With Taiwan’s ultimate fate in limbo, it’s time to put aside pride and focus naval warfare on ships, subs, surveillance, and weapons systems that won’t end up at the bottom of the ocean when the shooting starts. Great ships look majestic and awe-inspiring on the surface of the sea. But when sunk, they are just barnacle-encrusted vanity.
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Personal note: There some good points made in this post. Billions of dollars needed
to build war ships - only to see them sink from an incoming missile - without firing
a shot. It seems to indicate major vulnerabilities from afar - thereby resulting in
the loss of the men and the ships at sea. Aircraft are also vulnerable because of radar
and satellites in space. Reaction times and counter-measures may not be quick enough
to counter the incoming weapons - hence they are lost in the air or on the water.
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It seems today everything has a check-mate process to counter the elements that
will do them harm. But still the reaction times and warnings are too slow to counter
or deviate from being hit. From the time you hear the shot - your dead.
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Nothing is infallible - it is what is - and there is nothing you can do about it!
(I know - I've been there and we've seen it - its inevitable what else can we say?)
The old addage is 'shit happens' and its not necessarily our fault - as we say.
__________________
Boats

O Almighty Lord God, who neither slumberest nor sleepest; Protect and assist, we beseech thee, all those who at home or abroad, by land, by sea, or in the air, are serving this country, that they, being armed with thy defence, may be preserved evermore in all perils; and being filled with wisdom and girded with strength, may do their duty to thy honour and glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

"IN GOD WE TRUST"
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