grainy
mouthful
Everybody gets all hot and bothered about how cool air craft carriers are, but they are not as useful as you all think in this day and age. There is a strong movement away from them. In fact, it is third rate countries that are looking to acquire them now. The US and Russia are actively trying to sell these massive floating targets when we aren’t making them into artificial reefs.
No part of that statement is true. While the US does have several dozen decommissioned carriers, they’re making way for the Ford-class supercarriers. We have three under construction (the most of any country). The only other countries that are building them right now are the UK, China, and India. While we can call China and India “third rate” countries, they’re not when it comes to military spending.
And while they are massive targets, carriers don’t travel alone. Nor are they easy to sink.
Aside from nuclear weapons, they’re pretty much the biggest deterrent to military action in the world. When a US carrier shows up in the neighborhood, people pay attention.
Oh sweep, well have a battle over this when I have some time. But I gotta catch a flight. Trust me, I’ll sink your battleship! 
Think of aircraft carriers as a large erect dick that the US can use to intimidate less endowed nations.
I’m with sweep 100% on this. You flat out cannot conduct global warfare without them.
Aircraft carriers are cool and all, but these are way more impressive to me. Especially once they really start to ramp up production…very tough to hit, long flight times, casualty risk way lowered, and getting more baddass every year.
How does an aircraft carrier stop ballistic missiles? It doesn’t. Zero defense. China could wipe them all out with their version of cruise missiles. They are just there so that rich navy brats can feel important and sail a big ship. A waste of your tax dollars. Zero defense.
They don’t fight. Look at the last two wars. All our operations took place from airbases using long range bombers that cant be used on current or future carriers. They’d start in some place like Alabama, bomb a village and land in Diego Garcia.
Even the planes aircraft carriers do carry, while expensive and awesome in a pimp my ride sense, are useless for conve tonal warfare. It’s all cheap drones. We don’t need fancy smancy top gun style airplanes. And guess what those planes, can’t stop a chinese cruise missile (unless they accidentally manage to collide with one). Oh and then it’s all drones once you can do short range. No need for aircraft carriers.
No, it’s all ego. Sure we use them for “intimidation” but actually the intimidating thing is our ability to bomb anywhere in the world from Alabama. Our ability to use silent subs from any wetspot on the planet to rain fire.
Admirals like their big ships. So expect them to talk them up. They also liked racehorses during wwI.
I would agree if it was every man for himself but what use are our allies if we can’t build drone launchpads in their country? Or better yet have solar powered drones that can fly forever and only land for rearming/restocking
Enemies are predictable. Allies, not so much.
Carriers have their weaknesses, and nations like China are thinking of novel ways to target them, but they’re a crucial bedrock component of naval power.
Carriers are pretty important for power projection, assuming that you don’t want to have “dropping nukes” as your only offensive strategy.
Drones are an increasingly influential weapon, but you still need a place to launch and refuel and/or rearm them. If you don’t have a nearby ally to lend you an airbase, then a carrier is a floating city for you to base your attacks.
They have rediculously complex layers of systems designed to effectively stop all cruise missiles fired at them. Carrier fleets are currently considered the most impervious point defenses constructed in world military history. China has interestingly developed a maneuvering warhead in recent years in an effort to deal with this, but even this is estiamted to have a very low effective rate. Beyond that, carriers are designed to continue operations even after several full fledged torpedo, bomb or cruise missile hits. Most analysts estimate nothign short of a nuclear warhead will actually cause one to sink. Not to mention layers of Aegis defense systems operated by the destroyers and subs surrounding the aircraft carriers that are effectively impermiable. Oh, and good luck finding these constantly moving targets amidst millions of square miles of oceans with almost no need to refuel. Your lack of knowledge on this topic is laughable.
This only works against nations with little or no military might. An overseas midair refueling line cannot maintain an fast tempo, and is easily disruptable by any modern airforce. This argument is just silly. Standard practice to engage a nation with a workable air defence is 1) cruise missiles for key air defense nodes to form a crack, 2) stealth bombers overseas for other now susceptible nodes to widen the crack 3) carrier based operations to open the corridor.
Are you actually this clueless? Drones have 0 survivability or capabilities against an actual oponent with actual air defenses and jets. They are throwaway scraps heaps that operate on turbo props with no over the horizon targeting and no air to air, they can’t even carry large enough weapons to hit priority miltary targerts. They are used for lobbing the odd 500 lb bomb towards a terrorists tent. If you were to go against any actual openent such as saudi arabia etc, you cannot use drones until you have completley decimated their air fleet. This requires your “top gun jets”. And if you actually had to engage a true military power (which is the situation you prepare for), then you would need these jets for extended operations, and to provide air support for ground operaitons. If China ran operations in Taiwans waters tomorrow and you sent a drone fleet to stand in as a preventative measure, they would laugh the whole time they were picking those things out of the sky like claybirds before they even got armed. We send a carrier, and noone is laughing.
To be fair, I think ChickenTikka is talking about UCAVs and not Reapers when he mentions drones.
Well, show me a production UCAV that has F22 or F35 capabilities and we’ll revisit the discussion. Right now in real world land, we have Reapers. Not to mention that a UCAV with full jet capabilities would still need a carrier just the same as a “top gun jet” would as the mechanics would basically be the same. Oh, and due to relying on wireless signals, they’d be absolutely suscepetible to jamming and hacking. You could literally fly jamming craft around and just shut down the US UCAV fleet if it existed.
This is true now, I agree. The future is going to be drones. I know somebody who is building crazy advanced ones now. And soon, they will land on mini carriers. Still not large payload, but it’s not that hard to imagine. The biggest things standing in the way of drones (besides engineering, which is advancing) are
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the resistance to change of the military (usually doesn’t change quickly until faced with a conflict and then innovates quickly)
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the chivalrous idea that it is cowardly to kill an enemy from a robot as opposed to when you are actually in the plane. Inane.
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bad PR from civilian casualties
http://www.informationweek.com/government/security/darpa-seeks-to-launch-drones-from-ships/240150024
I used to work for BAE systems with unmanned artillery programs. What’s said above is patently false. Will drones play a bigger role? Yes. Will they replace F22’s, etc? No.
Main reason: You can hack a drone and immediately turn it against your opponent. You could then hack entire militaries as well. The US has had MASSIVE issues with Chinese hacking. Last year we had Afghani cells (who are essentially stone aged) hacking predator camera feeds. The military does not operate like the civilian sector. Low probability is not good enough when you’re dealing with a potentially catastrophic and easily recognizeable weakness.
Backup reason: Most modern militaries currently have the capabilities to jam signals to such a degree as to render wireless drone control inneffective. Could it then auto pilot? Yes, but then you have an entire military doing search and destroy or whatever the hell it wants beyond your control.
Lastly, none of this negates the need for cariers, which is where this began.
China’s new missle is not actually designed to sink a carrier, just disrupt its operations by damaging the deck and superstructure.