Are the US Navy Carrier Fleets Obsolete?

NO

 

Keep telling yourself that.

 

Okay.

As soon as warplanes become irrelevant I will rethink it though.

 

No...

BTW:
Your source is interesting, a new one for me. The "Black Pigeon Speaks" aka "Navyhato." Can't figure that one out.

It seems they popped up on the radar screen last year. (2016) and the radical left aren't happy campers.

It's conservative so they say but ...

Actually they are claiming new conservatism (neo-conservatism) ??? Another form of neoconservatives ??? RINO's ???





I'm confused.

https://twitter.com/navyhato?lang=en

 

In a total war with Russia or China, the lifespan and survivability of a carrier task force can be measured in hours if not minutes.

But for banana republics like N.Korea or Iran these huge juggernauts are still meaningful.

 

As we all know, there are 2 kinds of warships -- submarines and targets for submarines.

 

Well I'm no expert by a friends son is on an American attack submarine attached to a carrier battle group and is not alone to hit one of these you need to get past the dedicated and advanced submarine screen and its many escort ships with the latest in missile defense systems and their surface radar and sonar screen and the carriers formidable strike ability. No simple thing and in a war they would not assume an attack isn't coming they always assume one is coming.

But lets assume war is likely with China, we would very likely base most of our air assets on island nations we are allies with and South Korea and maybe even India and use submarine based missiles to strike the Carriers could reinforce South Korea or move to destroy the Chinese fleet with surgical strikes keeping them out of immediate risk.

 

Precisely; it's entirely situational. The thing about ocean going warfare is that constant technological changes constantly alter the effectiveness and durrability of all vessels depending on the theatre of war and the nature of the conflict.

 

Carriers obsolete ???

There's a reason why the Chi-Coms are building aircraft carriers.

There is a reason why the British just recently launched their firs super carrier and the second super carrier is under construction.

That Royal Navy's super carrier AOR (Area of Responsibility) is planned to be in the Western Pacific when it deploys.

THE NATION'S FLAGSHIPS
They are the biggest warships ever built for the Royal Navy - four acres of sovereign territory, deployable across the globe to serve the United Kingdom on operations for 50 years.

HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales will be the most advanced warships in the Royal Navy fleet.

While work continues to bring HMS Prince of Wales to life at Rosyth, HMS Queen Elizabeth has been undergoing sea trials since leaving the Scottish dockyard in June and entered her new home in Portsmouth for the first time in August.All parts of the Armed Forces, international partners and British businesses across the country are involved in building the nation's future flagships.

-> https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/news-and-latest-activity/features/queen-elizabeth-carriers


Displacement: 70,600 tonnes (69,500 long tons; 77,800 short tons)!!!

• Planned Carrier Air Wing of up to 40 aircraft
• (50 full load - can be expanded to 70+):
• F-35B Lightning II
• Chinook
• Apache AH64
• Merlin HM2 and HC4
• Wildcat AH1 and HMA2
• Merlin Crowsnest AEW

 

Not to mention carriers have a number of vital roles to play in situations short of war.

But to the OP. I've never heard of a single major weapons system ever being declared "obsolete" without it being proven in actual combat situations.

And given no supercarrier has ever been attacked much less hit and damaged, much much less mission killed, destroyed or sunk I would say any proclamation of obsolescence is way over stated.

 

No, not yet. But they will become obsolete at some point in the future. All weapons systems do.

 

Hell no.

 

In addition to the question of this old technology being war capable is whether a carrier is a bit of a "White Elephant". If these ships are so important, to big to fail, or to expensive both material and symbolic. Will the US Navy actually put a carrier in harms way ? If not, then what good is it ?

This violates a core principle of war: Never introduce an element that you can't afford to loose.

 

OP

If you get rid of your outdated carrier fleet can we have the planes, please? At stupendous cost we've just had 2 carriers built for our navy but we can't afford to buy planes for them. No I mean it - it's true!

 

I think that we see the last generation of super carriers. They will phase out in the same manner as the battleships.
Two aspects:
More and more countries will handle production of hyper speed anti ship missiles.
Once the proper drones with VTOL will come online the carrier will become small, cheap and numerous.

 

Nice idea but they're the wrong kind. Our carriers don't have cats and traps. We neen the short take off/vertical landing variety (if they work).

 

My guess in a big war, they would bring in Carrier Groups only when land based aircraft and sub launched missiles took out the majority of enemy locations which could fire hypersonic missiles and they could be assured of air superiority and ground strike advantage a limited use of such missiles isn't likely to pose much of a threat to a well designed carrier strike force in support and sub screening advantages. They do offer advantages such as being a mobile serious striking weapon to project strength and I must add useful when in humanitarian operations if a large air launch platform is needed for some major disaster.

 

Have so called "hypersonic missiles" ever been used in combat? Or for that matter have proven themselves in any kind of remotely realistic training conditions?

 

Name one.

And one really widely fielded, and not created for a specific conflict that never really left test and was never widely adopted.

Like say gliders.

 

The decision to kill the Battleship was due much more to politics than the ships being obsolete. They were still the only unsinkable ships in our fleet, even the "supersonic shipkiller missiles" could not penetrate their armor.

But the very name caused people to go ballistic, with the "battleship diplomacy" of a century prior. Plus they were only returned as a temporary measure to pad the fleets until more Nimitz class carriers could be built.

But Battleships never became obsolete. The wars we had ours involved in after WWII proved that very well.

 

Nope. Is funny how people go on and on about things like that, and do not understand everything involved. Like targeting a single ship out of a fleet that os beyond the horizon and can not even be seen. And how it is going to get through all of the screening ships to find that target and not get shot down.

Same problems with the DF-21D. That one frightens me even more, because of what could happen if China was ever stupid enough to launch one in a conflict.

That is simply because other than the DF-21D, all other ballistic missiles in that series are designed to carry thermonuclear warheads. And there is a reason why decades ago both the US and USSR (Russia) agreed to stop putting conventional warheads on ballistic missiles. I know if I was the commander of such a group and I saw a thermonuclear classed ballistic missile heading at my group, I would be demanding weapons free of my own weapons for a nuclear response.

 

Unsinkable doesn’t matter when one of those missile can still mission kill it. You don’t have to sink a battleship to wreck all of its electronics antennas, all of its above armor gear (like the Harpoon and Tomahawk launchers and the CIWS), and start a major fire that kills a large portion of the crew.

 

And once again, ignoring that both the Battleship, but all the other ships in the fleet have weapons designed to prevent that from happening.

Why do people always try to make it sound so easy to do? Yea, ignore every single piece of hardware that covers the ship to detect and destroy inbound threats, we will pretend that a single missile can be launched and take out that one ship with no problem.

 

No, on the contrary, what I’m saying is all it takes is one missile getting through the defenses for a battleship to be mission killed and out of the fight.

Whether it sinks or not is insignificant.