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With inductions down, who’s gonna man, er, work these ships?
Good luck with the trannies, crossdressers, homos and swabbing women who can’t attend their duties cuz one “dissed” another!
They are not allowed by ROEs to do more than what they are doing. Its a leadership problem, not a naval one.
We lose in that game.
I am thinking of how the Navy rushed the battleships back into the war after Pearl Harbor.
They provided anti aircraft support. They were used from very safe positions to support invasions. But their original use case was pretty much long gone by 1944.
Projecting air superiority is critical. I doubt much of anything short if a nuke is going to sink a carrier. But a “thousand drone” attack is not too far away in our future.
Smaller, nimble, and powerful is going to I win the next sea war.
Whoever can make computer systems go dark will win future wars.
My thought is that the Navy needs more Arleigh Burke destroyers. May up the tonnage a bit to De Moines Cruiser class, but better flexibility.
Yeah, but the Ford class has a maternity room and has eliminated all urinals in all heads. And in the unusual event they need to launch and aircraft, it has a crappy EMALS catapult!
But they cannot hang around on patrols and wait for attacks. They most certainly cannot be anywhere near built up defenses unless they are actively pounding them into rubble.
Carrier strike groups as we currently know them are reaching the end of their useful lives. It is impossible to conceal their movements or locations from peer opponents. If you can see an enemy, you can kill an enemy. What matters most is who gets the first effective shot. But with "smart weapons" it is possible for both sides to lose a battle.
New drone weapons are changing "the rules". It is not yet clear what the new strike measures and countermeasures will be.
The Russians learned the hard way, drones are the future of naval combat.
I’ve had concerns about technology obsoleting carriers for a long time. We have so many eggs tied up in eleven baskets that if someone smashes the baskets America is finished for decades or a century as a naval power. I was hoping the drone war in Ukraine would be an eye-opening experience for our planners. Just ignoring the drones, I’ve known several submariners and all of them had a story about how they killed a carrier in a wargame, and it was ruled later as a miss or damage instead of sinking. (The Japanese wargamed the Midway battle and lost significantly twice and a senior admiral overruled the findings. Turns out one of the scenarios was the exact one the Americans used.) A man I worked with was involved in Navy planning back in the fifties and he told me that in order to get the navy built the way we see it today, they had to do away with the reports on how successful mines had been.
The thing is, we haven’t had a near peer conflict. And I don’t think some of the assumptions on how, say, China would go about defeating American interests account for how
China might actually go about defeating the US. Nothing in China gets published in the state media without some level of official okay. Several years ago, a former admiral published an article about how the Chinese would defeat the US and it was by a decapitation strike. All of our planning starts with, “Nobody will use nuclear weapons.” What if that assumption is wrong? When Mao went into Korea, he was told they’d lose a million men. He shrugged. Turns out he was more concerned about a million starving men overthrowing the CCP than he was about a million casualties. China exited the Korean war with the fifth largest AirForce in the world. It was a win for him. You can’t start with the assumption the guy on the other side thinks exactly like you do. Putin, for example, truly sees a different reality than the West does. All of the old Soviet Empire is really Russian, whether they agree or not.
Lastly, wars start when you lose deterrence. We have a leader who is not only compromised by his financial dealings, but he can’t navigate stairs. We look weak, even if he isn’t the one making the big decisions. A study conducted on how criminals choose victims revealed that the number one reason was the victim looked weak or compromised.
Re-purpose carriers to launch drone swarms
“The US Navy is ramping up delivery of its new Ford-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers...”
Ramping up...that means ready in 7 years instead of 8.
*
It’s not that the fleet can’t protect the area....the question is are they being allowed to protect the area?
Yep....as targeting improves the carrier becomes more vulnerable. The big one?
It ain’t the “US Navy” -its all the defense contractors who can’t give up the revenues a carrier battle fleet spins off
I won’t get into game of saying they’re obsolete since they are obviously giving the Houthi’s a few blows, and who knows, maybe some day we’ll get some ADULTS into high-level positions at DOD who realize that 1991* was over 30 years ago and that it might be a good idea to take seriously the need for DEFENSIVE weapons.
*1991 was the year we became invincible after the fall of the Soviet Union and therefore had no need to further modernize our military.
In any case, I do wonder if ‘stepping up’ the production of carriers means making one every 15 years, rather than one every 20 years or so. And, by the way, at our peak, we were building one carrier EVERY MONTH during WW2 (as I recall reading).
They had better get laser weapons operating soon and effectively. Otherwise, we get creamed in the Western Pacific.
Our airbases are all in range of Chinese ballistic missiles launched from land.
Our carriers too are sitting ducks to Chinese ballistic missiles and submarines unless we completely eliminate China’s satellites in the first day or two of the war. Even then, I don’t know how safe they are from swarming reconnaissance drones.