The Ship Model Forum

The fact that the Chinese PLA Navy is not only building carriers but continues to view US Navy CVNs as a threat shows that carriers are just as relevant in this current world order:

[url=https://ca.news.yahoo.com/chinas-military-us-aircraft-carriers-150356998.html]Business Insider[/url]


[quote][b][size=200]China's military has US aircraft carriers in its sights, but those flattops aren't 'little teacups,' their captains say[/size][/b]
Christopher Woody
Tue, April 12, 2022, 8:03 a.m.·7 min read


China's development of advanced anti-ship weapons has renewed debate on aircraft carriers' future.
[b][u]US officials say carriers aren't invulnerable but are well defended and won't be easy to attack.
Anyone thinking they're "little teacups out there or something" is wrong, Capt. Paul Campagna said.[/u][/b]
In March 1922, the US Navy's first aircraft carrier, the USS Langley, entered service. A century later, some are questioning whether carriers can survive in the wars of the future.
The development of increasingly sophisticated anti-ship weapons by capable adversaries, namely Russia and China, has raised doubts about those ships.
[b][u]The captains of two of those carriers discounted the concern, saying the US Navy's 11 flattops would be tough to find and hard to stop.[/u][/b]
Questions about whether carriers are "obsolete" have come up before, including when Congress was debating whether to build the USS Enterprise, the Navy's first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, in the late 1950s, Capt. Paul Campagna, the commanding officer of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, said.
(...SNIPPED)[/quote]

That article is the usual nonsense from someone who has no clue about naval matters.

Quote:

General Nick Houghton, Chief of the Defence Staff from 2013 to 2016, declared: “We cannot afford these things. We will be able to afford them only with detriment to the balance of the surface fleet.”

It seems that the UK is still able to produce generals who are completely ignorant about warfare. Why would we need a surface fleet if we have no aircraft carriers to defend it and support landing operations? We may as well scrap the whole lot and use the OPVs to patrol up and down the channel, flying little Union flags to keep patriotic hearts bursting with pride.

Aircraft are still at the forefront of war-fighting capabilities so it makes sense that aircraft carriers are just as useful as they have been since they were invented.

The author states:

"She is named not after the Queen but as the successor to an earlier HMS Queen Elizabeth, a 1913 Dreadnought, which, after a vastly costly career, was scrapped in 1948 – having never sunk an enemy ship."

Perhaps the Telegraph should look into Patrick Bishop's "vastly costly career". Isn't it time he was scrapped for having never made an intelligent comment?

[url=https://ca.yahoo.com/style/aircraft-carriers-source-national-pride-160518534.html]TELEGRAPH[/url]


[quote][b][size=200]Are aircraft carriers a source of national pride – or a ludicrous waste of money?[/size][/b]


Patrick Bishop
Sat., February 5, 2022, 11:05 a.m.

Book review How to Build and Aircraft Carrier by Chris Terrill - Christopher Pledger
Aircraft carriers have been around since the First World War. If the usual laws of military Darwinism applied, they would be extinct by now, gone the way of the battleship which was eventually just too costly, resource-hungry and vulnerable to survive. But no. The carrier is flourishing. Fourteen navies operate them. The US has 11. They have become as much a national phallic symbol as Dreadnoughts were at the start of the last century – and they attract the same sort of controversy.
Britain’s membership of the carrier club is secured by HMS Queen Elizabeth, which completed her maiden operational voyage just before Christmas, returning to Portsmouth after 28 weeks and 26,000 miles at sea. Hot on her heels comes the second in the class, the Prince of Wales. Together, they earn us the respect of the Americans and put us up there with China and ahead of Russia, France and India. It’s about much more than military muscle. Boris Johnson, who inherited the building project from the Blair-Brown era, trumpets the new supercarriers as the embodiment of national prestige, flying the flag for Global Britain.
The ships are certainly impressive. Big Lizzie, as she is apparently nicknamed, is the largest and most powerful ship the Navy has ever built. She weighs 65,000 tonnes, is 280 metres long, and can carry up to 40 aircraft – notably the horrendously expensive American F-35 Lightning stealth fighter. The flight deck is the size of three and a half football fields. Her six engines generate enough energy to power a city the size of Swindon. And so on…
It adds up to an amazing feat of engineering, and it’s this aspect of the story and the human dynamics that go into making the whole enterprise work that fascinate film-maker Chris Terrill. He knows it inside out, having followed events since the first cut of steel in 2009 to last year’s deployment in the Far East, filming material for his BBC documentary Britain’s Biggest Warship. He’s an anthropologist and enthusiast who underwent the punishing training to qualify for the green beret of the Royal Marines at an impressively advanced age (he is 69).
(...SNIPPED)[/quote]

Anyone who thinks the US carrier force is ‘finished’ is a fool and/or never been to sea in a fighting ship. Reminds me of the nay-sayers back in the 1950’s when Adm. Rickover was espousing nuclear power for naval vessels and the gaggle of doubters who said it was totally impractical. Well, here we are 66 years after the Nautilus and nuclear naval vessels are still going strong.

This is more of an introduction for the layman of the carrier's role within military history:

[url=https://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/companies/expensive-massive-and-lethal-the-future-of-the-aircraft-carrier/ar-BB1dWGQ2?li=AAggFp5]CNBC[/url]

[quote] [b][size=200]Expensive, massive and lethal: The future of the aircraft carrier[/size][/b]
Brad Howard 2 hrs ago
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The importance of aircraft carriers in military history cannot be overstated.
Current Time 1:29
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Duration 10:00
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The future of the aircraft carrier

Aircraft carriers helped the United States win key naval battles in World War II, especially in the Pacific Theater. In the decades after World War II, aircraft carriers gave the United States the ability to project its military power across the globe. But advances in naval warfare could unseat the role of the aircraft carrier.
a close up of a boat next to a body of water: In this handout photo provided by the U.S. Navy, the future USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78) is seen underway on its own power for the first time on April 8, 2017 in Newport News, Virginia. The first-of-class ship - the first new U.S. aircraft carrier design in 40 years will spend several days conducting builder's sea trials, a comprehensive test of many of the ship's key systems and technologies. © Provided by CNBC In this handout photo provided by the U.S. Navy, the future USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78) is seen underway on its own power for the first time on April 8, 2017 in Newport News, Virginia. The first-of-class ship - the first new U.S. aircraft carrier design in 40 years will spend several days conducting builder's sea trials, a comprehensive test of many of the ship's key systems and technologies.

"If you want to operate aircraft carriers, you need a whole lot of high-end technology to be able to defend it," said David Larter, a naval warfare reporter for Defense News. "It's been the advancement in anti-ship cruise missiles that can be launched from land. It's been advancements in cruise missiles launched from bombers or fighters that just pose an enormous threat."

(...SNIPPED)[/quote]

That is true. But even in terms of strategic planning this is not a good idea.

I agree that money is going to drive this and discourage any significant transition to more small carriers, but the [i]impetus[/i] behind why they're re-examining the issue is the strategic context and the concern about survivability - cost doesn't yet come into it.

[quote="Timmy C"]The idea behind smaller carriers isn't about cost - it's survivability. One big deck is great for dollars-per-sortie, but it becomes an all-or-nothing proposition. At least with multiple carriers, the loss or disabling of one still leaves you with another deck and its planes. It's one thing to try to maximize the amount of sorties to ensure constant coverage over a target area when your opponent has no real ability to strike your carrier (i.e. the last thirty years), and quite another thing when you're up against a potential enemy that does have such an ability and you're wanting to complicate their targeting as much as possible.

That being said, that's just the logic behind it - I'm not 100% on board with it, as there are other measures one might take to improve the carrier's survivability.[/quote]

Hi Timmy, I know that the idea is to distribute the airwings so that they are more survivable, but once the plan is implemented the usual squabbling about funding is likely to eventually reduce the number of these carriers so that they are of very limited utility.

For a start, are the vessels going to be big enough to operate Hawkeyes and the F-35C? If so, the cost saving is likely to be less than 2:1 in favour of the smaller carrier. Are they going to be nuclear powered? If not then either the vessels' operating range will be greatly reduced, or more oilers will need to be built and manned and provided with escorts to supply them.

The logistics of supplying more carriers with avgas, fuel oil, ordnance etc. is likely to lead to significantly greater costs than at present.

If the USN were able to secure the funding for a comprehensive enhancement of the carrier battlegroups, with escorts and logistics ships, including the cost of building at least twenty four carriers which are, at the bare minimum, 50 percent the size of a Nimitz, then this plan MGHT work.

This debate has existed since the 1920s. As a follow on to the Lex/Sara, the Navy debated on how to best use the remaining treaty tonnage - two more Lex; five 14,000 tonners or something in between. It was the same arguments - larger air groups in a few baskets or smaller air groups in many baskets.

The Ranger was built to try out the small basket. After a few years of experience, it was decided that 14,000 tons was too small.

The idea behind smaller carriers isn't about cost - it's survivability. One big deck is great for dollars-per-sortie, but it becomes an all-or-nothing proposition. At least with multiple carriers, the loss or disabling of one still leaves you with another deck and its planes. It's one thing to try to maximize the amount of sorties to ensure constant coverage over a target area when your opponent has no real ability to strike your carrier (i.e. the last thirty years), and quite another thing when you're up against a potential enemy that does have such an ability and you're wanting to complicate their targeting as much as possible.

That being said, that's just the logic behind it - I'm not 100% on board with it, as there are other measures one might take to improve the carrier's survivability.

Another daft idea! What the discussion seems to be about is augmenting the USNs supercarriers with some smaller vessels capable of operating about twenty F-35Bs.

So, how many small carriers would there be?

As the perennial problem for the USN is cost, this is a non-starter. What would inevitably happen is that rather than have 12 supercarriers, the USN might get 20 (or so) smaller carriers instead. The sortie rates and type of aircraft involved would make this force significantly inferior to the one it replaces.

And then in the future there would be the calls of "carriers are obsolete!", "carriers are too expensive!" and, after the inevitable cuts, the USN would end up with 12 (or fewer) of the small carriers to do the job of the Nimitz and Ford classes.

What the USN should be doing is reinstating the idea of the supercarrier as a "one stop shop". It should be a base for ASW fixed-wing aircraft (a replacement for the S-3 is desperately needed) and helos, as well as the F-35C, Hawkeyes, tankers etc. These are vital to the ability to project power - and that is the true role of the aircraft carrier.

[url=https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2020/06/01/us-navy-upgrades-more-ships-for-the-f-35-as-the-future-of-carriers-remains-in-flux/]Defense News[/url]


[quote] [b][size=200] US Navy upgrades more ships for the F-35 as the future of carriers remains in flux[/size][/b]
By: David B. Larter   1 day ago

An F-35B Lightning II fighter aircraft with Marine VMM-265 prepares to land on the flight deck of the amphibious assault ship America. The Navy has used its amphibious assault ships to test the notion of smaller carriers. (Lance Cpl. Kolby Leger/U.S. Marine Corps)
WASHINGTON — Former acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly hadn’t been out of the job more than a month before the Navy canceled an ongoing study he’d launched into the future of aircraft carriers — a review he optimistically termed “Future Carrier 2030.”
Modly and his predecessor, Richard Spencer, had been excited by the prospect of fielding smaller, more risk-worthy carriers that could reduce the chance of China or Russia landing a major punch in a conflict simply by sinking or disabling a single ship, such as a Nimitz- or Ford-class aircraft carrier with thousands of sailors and tens of billions of dollars of hardware aboard.
(...SNIPPED)[/quote]

More about the Chinese threat to US CSGs:

[url=https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2019/12/06/with-china-gunning-for-aircraft-carriers-the-us-navy-says-it-must-change-the-way-it-fights/]Defense News[/url]

[quote][b][size=200]With China gunning for aircraft carriers, US Navy says it must change how it fights[/size][/b]
By: David B. Larter   December 6
WASHINGTON — [b][u]Just because China might be able to hit U.S. Navy aircraft carriers with long-range anti-ship missiles doesn’t mean carriers are worthless, the service’s top officer said Thursday.

The chorus of doom and gloom over China’s anti-access weapons is too simplistic, [/u][/b]Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday said, but that doesn’t mean the Navy should refrain from adjusting the way it fights.

“Let’s look at this like a physics problem,” Gilday proposed. “[People will say]: ‘Hypersonics go really fast and they travel at long ranges. Carriers can only travel [‘X’ distance], so carriers are going to have to go away.’ That’s a very simplistic way to look at the problem.


(...SNIPPED)


New CONOPs

The discussion around making the carrier relevant in an anti-access environment is nothing new, but in the past several months the topic has gained traction because of a recent report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments that called for the Navy to build its capabilities to fight at extended ranges.

The study called for the carrier air wing of the future to be able to hunt submarines (serving as a replacement for the S-3 Viking aircraft), provide surveillance and targeting, and destroy ships and land targets with standoff weapons, all while fighting at nearly double the range of today’s air wing.

[b][u]If the Navy wants to counter China’s anti-ship cruise missiles and increasing naval capabilities, it must resurrect the Cold War-era Outer Air Battle concept, which focused on longer-range aircraft to counter Russia’s bombers[/u][/b]. However, instead of fighting at 200-plus nautical miles, the air wing will have to fight at 1,000 nautical miles, according to the study’s lead author, retired submarine officer and analyst Bryan Clark.

“The air wing of the future is going to have to be focused less on attacking terrorist training camps and huts in Syria, and more focused on killing ships and submarines at sea — dealing with naval capabilities and island-based littoral capabilities,” Clark said in a telephone interview earlier this year. “Those are the challenges: Range and the mission set is changing.”

[b][u]In other words, the entire air wing, both the range at which it can fight and the missions it is set up to execute, must be completely overhauled.

Clark called for the effort to start with the Navy fully committing to the MQ-25 Stingray autonomous refueling drone, which when operational will be able to drag the current air wing out to the 1,000-nautical-mile range.[/u][/b]

Boeing inked an $805 million contract award last year for the first four aircraft, and in September the company announced that the Stingray’s prototype had taken its first flight.[/quote]

Admirals, naval staffs, and all the ex naval officers working in defense and think tanks, do not sense that the day of the aircraft carrier is over. despite the hype over "hyper-sonic" weapons, both China and Russia evidently have plans to include CVs in their fleet plans going forward. Such adversaries' ships and their escorting assets will not be immune from hyper-sonic missiles.

India is building a carrier, and has one old CV in service (ex-Russian). AFAIK the Indian navy is planning construction of at least one more. France, Italy and Spain have CVs of some use, and the Royal Navy will have two Q.E. class in service. The JMSDF (read Japanese navy) has four "helicopter destroyers" in commission. [Japan is constrained by treaty from calling those ships what they are, but operating the F-35B from some of them in future does give it away.] I may be forgetting someone, but the carrier battle group concept - or aircraft capable task force - is still the surface combat standard for blue water navies.

Member DavidP in the post above references the post WW II love affair with strategic bombers and air delivered "atomic weapons." Nuclear capability became something of a peace keeper with M.A.D., and such science fiction type weaponry as hyper-sonic missiles may become a different reiteration. Under a nuclear umbrella, the great powers just continued to pursue their strategic objectives mostly by conventional means. For reasons of both cost and domestic politics, such hyper-sonic weaponry might advance the use of more unmanned CAVs in conventional ops.

If India, Japan and the USN sail up and down the South China Sea, what is the PLAN going to do? Destruction of a USN carrier, aside from retaliation, would 1) put China's export dependent economy at grave risk, and 2) endanger China's access to the critical resource of oil. With China's voodoo finances and its fragile economic issues, that would be a really bad idea.

The greatest threat to warships going forward may have more to do with the incredible costs associated with modern naval technology and construction; the time lag between steel cutting and commissioning, and, more concerning, unsustainable deficit spending that politicians ignore at the real peril of national security concerns.

Could hypersonic missiles be the final nail in the aircraft carrier's coffin?


[url=https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2019/10/14/will-ground-based-hypersonic-missiles-replace-aircraft-carriers-in-the-defense-budget/]Defense News[/url]

[quote][b][size=200]Will ground-based hypersonic missiles replace aircraft carriers in the defense budget?[/size][/b]
By: David B. Larter   5 days ago
WASHINGTON — A debate on the future of aircraft carriers is roiling the U.S. Department of Defense, and it is increasingly spilling out into the open. While the debate over the efficacy of carriers in high-end conflict is nothing new, a general understanding that the DoD will not have unlimited funds with which to deter an increasingly potent China and Russia have made the questions particularly urgent.
At issue is a choice about continuing to invest in aircraft carriers and the associated air wing — the mainstay of U.S. global power projection since World War II — or to gradually reduce investment in those systems and increase investment in new capabilities such as long-range conventional hypersonic missiles.
It’s a question that Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Mike Griffin put bluntly in his remarks last month at the Defense News Conference.
[b][u] “Let’s just propose a thought experiment,” Griffin said. “Which do you think the Chinese leadership would fear more: 2,000 conventional strike missiles possessed by the United States and its allies in the western Pacific capable of ranging Chinese targets, or one new carrier? Because those two things cost about the same amount of money. Those are the kinds of questions we need to be asking ourselves.”[/u][/b]
(...SNIPPED)[/quote]

The age of the aircraft carrier depends on the next war as others have posted before, just as the battleship, the tank, the airplane.

This topic reminds me of Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising, the way the carriers were taken out.
Way before swarm drones, swarm boats. Saturation, overwhelming the defenses. How fast does it take
to replenish vertical missles a battle group screen these days?

Carriers will still be viable, but with the cruise missle they'll still be vulnerable in port.
And what ports are defended? Dont think the enemy would pass up a fat stationary target.
If carriers doubled their Phalanx and Rim fire armament, I'd feel better.
In fact, if the whole fleet doubled their AA that would be a plus.
Not to mention all the unarmed Aux ships.

Paul

I think they are now too vulnerable to all kinds of threats. Some carriers should be retained in case they can be used in low threat environments. In the next large scale war, they will be devastated as the battleships at Pearl Harbor were. The casualties will be horrendous. The history of naval warfare has been the dominance of increasingly longer ranged weapons.

And yet another report predicting that the carrier's role as the queen of the seas may be numbered:

[url=https://www.defensenews.com/newsletters/tv-next-episode/2019/08/12/role-of-aircraft-carriers-questioned/]Defense News(video)[/url]

[quote][b][size=200]Role of aircraft carriers questioned[/size][/b]
By: Jeff Martin   2 hours ago
Congress is taking a hard look at what role aircraft carriers could play in future war

(FULL REPORT AT VIDEO LINK ABOVE)[/quote]

This question/issue brought into the spotlight again with the [url=http://www.shipmodels.info/mws_forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=179588]looming early retirement of the USS [i]Harry S. Truman[/i] mentioned in another thread[/url]:

[url=https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/03/26/uss-trumans-early-retirement-could-present-questionable-future-carriers.html]Stars and Stripes/Military.com[/url]

[quote][b][size=200]USS Truman's Early Retirement Could Present Questionable Future for Carriers [/size][/b]
26 Mar 2019
Stars and Stripes | By Caitlin Doornbos
The USS Harry S. Truman will retire two decades early if Congress approves the Navy's 2020 proposed budget as-is, a move some say could indicate a questionable future for aircraft carriers.
The Navy's proposed budget -- published this month -- calls for dismantling the Truman in 2024 instead of funding the planned refueling of its nuclear reactor core that year.
[b] Commissioned in 1998, the carrier is 20 years old, making it the fourth-youngest of the Navy's 11 active carriers, according to the service.
Canceling the Truman's refueling would open up funding for other capabilities, Rear Adm. Randy Crites, deputy assistant Secretary of the Navy for management and budget, said during a Pentagon presentation March 12.[/b]
In its 30-year shipbuilding plan submitted to Congress this month, the Navy said the change "is in concert with the Defense Department's pursuit of a more lethal balance of high-end, survivable platforms (e.g. CVNs) and complementary capabilities from emerging technologies." CVN is Navy shorthand for a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
(...SNIPPED)[/quote]

Here is nobody thinking that the age of carriers is over...

@ carr: Perhaps should read more carefully.

1.) a carrier can be disabled simply by hitting armed and fuelled planes, because the secondary explosions will disable flight operations (see WW2 and the fires on Forrestal and Enterprise). It is very obvious that several explosions at the stern do not damage the island - for sure not an argument, how resistant the island is against damage. Its sensors and communications are not longer important, if flight operations are disabled.

2.) in the test - which for sure only demonstrate the destructive power of the missile and was for sure not a test of the ability of the frigate to defend itself - the superstructure of the frigate was destroyed at a length, which is equivalent to the length of the bridge of an Arleigh Burke or the island of a Ford class carrier. For sure from that impact is not possible to tell if a taller superstructure would have been destroyed to a similar level, but most antenna on the two mentioned US classes are not distributed over many decks, but are relatively concentrated - and everything above is likely damaged or disabled, if the structure below is destroyed (including energy and data connections). And that was a very light anti-ship missile!

As comparison:
Norwegian NSM: 125 kg warhead, Mach 0,9
Russian 3M54T (Kalibr): 200 kg warhead, Mach 2.9 (there are also versions with a 400 kg warhead, described as armour piercing)
Russian 3M45 (P-700 Granit): 750 kg warhead (also described as armour piercing), Mach 2.5

That means NSM is a light-weight anti-ship missile, typical for many western designs. Its warhead is much weaker and the kinetic energy on impact is much smaller compared to Russian missiles. I.e. the missiles likely fired on carriers are much more destructive than the one, which was tested on that Norwegian frigate.