The Pentagon's biggest, baddest - and costliest - piece of hardware ever

reply to post by Zaphod58


Modern heavyweight torpedoes like the VA-111, Mark 48, ECAN F17 & Spearfish are designed explicitly to explode under a ship's keel, to either break the ship in half or to so weaken it's structural integrity that the ship is removed from service. The Nimitz class carriers are as vulnerable to that as any other warships.

Just one modern heavyweight torpedo will prove quite sufficient to take out a Nimitz class carrier. If it survives without breaking it's back, the underwater damage might prove enough to sink it. If damage control and fortune favor her, she might stay afloat. But the damage to the machinery will prove so overwhelming that she will become a total liability. It'll be "Game Over" for her.

USS Gerald R. Ford & air wing ... $15,000,000,000 ??
Chinese Han Class submarine & 6 torpedoes ... $ buttons

Do the math.

We'll have to agree to disagree on this thread too.

reply to post by LeBombDiggity


Add no ship with a hull design like a Nimitz has been hit with one to see how it will react.

Zaphod58
You guys are right. You know more than the designers and the guys that decide policy for the navy. Carriers are obsolete in the face of modern ships and torpedoes and it's stupid to build them.

Inertia in procurement and strategy for institutional reasons has happened over and over. Look at the experience of the original Admiral Zumwalt. Why were there so many battleships in 1941? Why did the battleship mafia then fight against the obviously increasing power of the carrier's aircraft---which was prior to 1941 a dismissed minority voice. Without a war, they could have been building 80% battleship navies through the 1960's.

Carrier groups are very good for advancing peacetime careers and war against forces without significant submarine capability.

OK, so nobody knows if a large-scale carrier can be easily sunk with contemporary torpedoes, but we do know that destroyers can. They're only 2 billion and carry the critical anti-missile defenses. What happens after that?

Zaphod58
reply to post by LeBombDiggity

 

Add no ship with a hull design like a Nimitz has been hit with one to see how it will react.

Um yeah. That works both ways, you realize.

However, all sorts of other naval hulls have been hit by contemporary heavy weight torpedoes and they all go down like fat white chumps to Mike Tyson.

Now, the carrier is bigger, sure, but there's also a hot-rod nuclear reactor right at the bullseye. How far can a carrier deck list and still be able to land its air wings? During a radiation emergency?

Unrestricted exercises find allied attack subs getting the mark on the surface ships time and time and time again with little success in the other direction.

Speculation is abundant on this thread. You see lots of words like "might" and "could" without any substantiation by some people, I am quite convinced, who have no real-world knowledge on the subject. Presented examples tend to be irrelevant. Sinking a frigate steaming alone in a straight line says absolutely nothing about a modern 100,000 ton carrier. Saying "Look what happened to the Stark!" or "Look what happened to the Sheffield!" may make for interesting video, but it is about as relevant as watching a suicide bomber ignite himself near an Abrams tank.

What is missing from this discussion is context, and it is all-important. Attacking a carrier, whether American or French, and doing more than token damage would have to be done by a nation-state. If that happened it would be attacking sovereign national territory, and that is tantamount to a declaration of war, which has consequences. In fact, it is the kind of thing that sets the spark off. It provides an excuse. It galvanizes and unites the public. Look to history for proof. Surely I needn't point it out.

A carrier has a crew of about 5,000. By far the vast majority are 18-22 years old, the nation's youth. Just imagine what would happen if a carrier sank with all aboard. Well, it's unimaginable, really. In any political situation short of all-out war it would be foolhardy to do so, especially against a nation that still has several thousand missiles in silos all across the Midwest. A carrier never travels alone. A Carrier Strike Group doesn't either. It has plenty of back up.

THIS is the context in which the modern carrier strike groups operate. And they do more than protect the interests of the US. Where do you think all those oil tankers are going? Japan, China, France, lots of places other than the US. This is the world and the political climate in which the carriers operate, and within this context, no one is going to sink one. It's not that they COULD'T. It's that they WON'T.

And as long as we are trading nationalistic jabs anyway, listening the the French criticize American military strategy is like hiring the Captain of the Titanic to head up your water safety program. There's no credibility there.

reply to post by Zaphod58


What do you think of the purported new Chinese carrier design based on a catamaran configuration for the hull?

Seems logical, to me.

And a lot more stable in many seas.

Besides, maybe the crew could have a swimming pool between the hulls somewhere. LOL.

And since we're dreaming . . . why not have such a catamaran . . . with say 8-12 or so layers of hulls . . . below the waterline . . . with lots of Kevlar and maybe foamed titanium or better between?

reply to post by schuyler


True enough . . .

HOWEVER . . .

there was that Chinese sub that surfaced to shocked surprise in the

MIDDLE

of a U.S. Navy battle group.

Thankfully . . . that time . . . it was merely . . . a . . . friendly show of brazen cheekiness.

. . . evidently.

majesticgent
I'm curious, since most of the aircraft the US is developing are VSTOL (vertical/short take off and landing), and emphasize on stealth. Why not focus on more lighter, cheaper, carriers that can support these planes since most missions are surgical in nature now days?

You mean like these?

www.navy.mil...


In practice against a sophisticated adversary the carrier would need to stay far away, and fly larger longer range aircraft, like the way the UCLASS ucav was suppossed to be before it was nerfed. F-35 and VSTOL are completely against that (small/short range).

What is missing from this discussion is context, and it is all-important. Attacking a carrier, whether American or French, and doing more than token damage would have to be done by a nation-state. If that happened it would be attacking sovereign national territory, and that is tantamount to a declaration of war, which has consequences. In fact, it is the kind of thing that sets the spark off. It provides an excuse. It galvanizes and unites the public. Look to history for proof. Surely I needn't point it out.

A carrier has a crew of about 5,000. By far the vast majority are 18-22 years old, the nation's youth. Just imagine what would happen if a carrier sank with all aboard.

So a floating 'human shield' is the strategy? Why not include puppies and babies?

"If you blow up our carrier we will blow you up with the weapons which actually work like missiles, bombers and submarines."

(actually I think carriers are still the least replacable surface ship because of their air power---other surface ships are even more vulnerable to submarines and partially, missiles).

schuyler
And as long as we are trading nationalistic jabs anyway, listening the the French criticize American military strategy is like hiring the Captain of the Titanic to head up your water safety program. There's no credibility there.

My criticism of these large aircraft carriers is as valid with British, French, Russian, Chinese, Indian warships ... they all share the same vulnerability. My criticism isn't US-specific.

So

LeBombDiggity

My criticism of these large aircraft carriers is as valid with British, French, Russian, Chinese, Indian warships ... they all share the same vulnerability. My criticism isn't US-specific.

To be perfectly Frank, the smaller carriers and the smaller associated task forces, probably make those smaller carriers even more vulnerable.

Naval warfare will be changing drastically once the next generation of advanced weaponry becomes standard. Till they get knocked off the top, Carriers are the top dog. I'm guessing they have at least another 20+ years of dominance as lesser powers won't have all those capabilities for awhile still.

That's not to say that they will stay there. I'm sure the people who designed the Yamamoto and Bismarck thought they were the top dog till the end too.

One sub right next to it and it's toast. Consistently in war games subs sink surface ships.

Vasa Croe
Ok..so I was reading this article on the new USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier. VERY impressive at a VERY large cost. 220 air attack per day and housing 4000 sailors.



That got me thinking though. Doesn't this make this ship a VERY large target for any other force in the world? I mean imagine the boost to an attacking country if they targeted and sank this ship and imagine the detriment to the morale of the US forces if this happened.

I would think announcing this ship to the world would be a good way to go ahead and have other countries plotting to sink it.

They go on to say:

The Navy also plans to buy another three such carriers, at a cost of $43 billion. One is slated to be called the USS John F. Kennedy, while others have not yet been named.

So they are building 3 more of them as well. That is a HUGE ship....I can't even imagine the firepower that these 4 ships would have and how much havoc they could wreak in battle.

Source

edit on 9/27/13 by Vasa Croe because: (no reason given)

Let's not hyperbolize. It's mach 10. Still pretty damn fast though. Right now it's range is limited but it does give pause as to getting close enough to launch a carrier wing.

Biigs

Vasa Croe
That got me thinking though. Doesn't this make this ship a VERY large target for any other force in the world?

Yup, thats why china is developing a mach 21, anti carrier ballistic missile.

link to souce

That's true but not all are deployable at the same time

buster2010
More money being wasted. We have more aircraft carriers than Russia, China, India, United Kingdom, France and Germany combined. We already have 10 aircraft carriers the nation next to America is Italy with the grand total of two. Why do we need all these carriers? Small wonder why we are going broke. We let our vets go without proper medical care because we say we don't have the money but we can spend hundreds of billions on ships we don't need.

edit on 27-9-2013 by buster2010 because: (no reason given)

That hangar space is well above the water line. All the same, the idea that carriers are almost impossible to sink is ludicrous on the face of it. The Chinese have acquired a 230knot torpedo from the RUssians that there is no present defense against.
www.militaryperiscope.com...

LeBombDiggity

Zaphod58
You can mission kill a carrier or knock her out for awhile relatively easily. But to kill one, of any nation, takes a lot more than one or two torpedoes.

No it doesn't, Zaphod. Aircraft carriers are perhaps easier to sink because they're not as compartmentalized as others due to all that hangar space. And that's even before you consider that modern torpedos are designed to break the ship in two.

All you need do is explode one torpedo under a carrier. If it's back doesn't break, the machinery will be so shaken that your ship will be out of the war for years. It'd probably be cheaper to build a new ship than repair it. And that's so much more true of a nuclear powered ship, with all the scope for radiation hazards.

You're being complacent, Zaphod. The ocean floor is littered with torpedoed aircraft carriers ... ones sunk by traditional contact torpedoes, not the backbreakers in service today.