http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/8011625.stm

- Sorry, no Ewoks here!

On a note, as flashy as they have become, it is interesting that even they realise that they have no idea how their navy would perform in operations - as it never has!

Also, for those modern military buffs out there (I only go up to the nineteenth century!), why would China not possess an aircraft carrier? I thought most modern military powers did (China dwarfs us, and yet we've just built a whole new line of Carriers...)?

Aircraft carriers are only meaningful if you need to move shorter-ranged aircraft into a distant theater. China's land-based planes have effective range over their entire territory plus deep in Russia, India, and the Middle East.

Russia and the UK both still maintain carriers, but I don't think either have done much of anything in decades (Falklands in the UK case) and are unlikely to in the future. They're expensive, difficult to risk without doubly expensive support fleets (of which the UK can only put one of to sea, IIRC), and largely irrelevant given the the combination of US long-range bombing superiority and the ICBM detente.

Russian and UK carriers are small and are used for mostly VSTOL aircraft like the Harrier. The Marine Corps is the only US service that deploys the Harrier and they do so on those MAU taxi ships like the USS Tarawa etc...

The US carriers are basically a portable full service air base with everything from AWACS type aircraft, Ariel refuelers, Anti submarine aircraft, SAR, ECM, cargo, fighters and attack aircraft. There really is no comparison to an American carrier, the power difference is comparing mountains to mole hills.


I think the Russians have one maybe two small ones and the British Navy has plans to have a larger carrier force with I think they are Queen Elizabeth class ships, the Russians...who knows, also the French have large carriers as does Brazil I think.

Check that...

After looking at some websites I found this video of a Russian Carrier.
http://www.patricksaviation.com/videos/Guest/59/

Clearly they are more advanced than I thought yet the carrier is much smaller and lacks the number of Aircraft that a US carrier has....also note I don't see an aircraft elevator system so they might be lacking in the aircraft maintenance part that is arguably one of the more important parts of power projection.

My suspicion is that the Chinese are only looking into carriers to protect their interests in the middle east. Like the port they're building for Pakistan in Gwadar.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/kaplan-pakistan
"The purpose of the Navy," Vice Admiral John Bird, commander of the Seventh Fleet, tells me, "is not to fight." The mere presence of the Navy should suffice, he argues, to dissuade any attack or attempt to destabilize the region. Source (http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_1_seventh-fleet.html)
But then the "oh noes! teh chinese are coming!" panic attacks in the media are going on because the US military feels that their budgets are threatened. So they're bringing up all sorts of stupid crap like "oh noes, teh navy can't repeal firepower of that magnitude! its a trap!"
http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/
http://www.defensereview.com/chinese-anti-ship-ballistic-missile-asbm-kill-weapon-flummoxes-us-navy/
So I also think that the purpose of bringing up the Chinese carrier is to make the US Navy seem threatened, and therefore needs a bigger budget boost, not a cut.

"In no way is the Chinese navy on a par with the United States - or even Japan," said Bates Gill, an expert on the Chinese military.

Bates Gill has to be a made-up name.

If the DoD would actually bid realistically and the defense contactors have more than a "sticking it to the Gov" attitude on their pricing we'd be able to afford to keep upgrading our military gear....imho

'Bates Gill has to be a made-up name'

- Oddly enough, that's the first thing I thought.

'My suspicion is that the Chinese are only looking into carriers to protect their interests in the middle east. Like the port they're building for Pakistan in Gwadar. '

- Smidget, I imagine there is a lot of hype going on in order for the Military Hawks to get their bigger slice of the budget. But then, I don't think that should dissuade from an actual reading of the military scale in the Far East. Indeed, British admirals (Jack Fisher, Churchill) used increased German naval construction from 1905 onward to push for a massive increase in British battleship construction, which resulted in the massive building programme that, quite frankly, saved our arses a decade later.

With that in mind, there is no denying Chinese military improvements and build up over the past two decades. Now, I'm not saying it's part of a programme, scheme, or in support of some devious policy, like Germany's. IMO, it is simply the reflection of Chinese economic growth, which every state has a right too. China now has interests in the Far East and Africa that it never had 30 years ago, so it is right for them to extend their capabilities to facilitate their trade and sources of raw materials - for which they so greatly depend. And I'd also add that they are still critically weak in off-shore operations, not to mention extra-theatre capability. Their ability to project airpower is, as we've discussed, non-existent, and their navy is still comparably lesser than many other powers.

Despite all that, there is no denying the growth of Chinese naval power, to which this thread refers.

Oh, and, thanks for the run-down on Carriers guys.

But the new Queen Elizabeth British line does look bad-arse :P

http://www.naval-technology.com/projects/cvf/images/CVF_20.jpg

- Complete with aircraft lift! Displacing 65,000 tons, not too bad compared to the French 45k, though still short of the American 100k :o

Purdy!!

http://www.naval-technology.com/projects/george-h-w-bush/

Well Halo You know us americans we are just fat and lazy so it falls over into our ships they are just fat not to lazy though...

Rofl, good point eh :P

Carriers are eminently useful in small scale conventional wars. If it came down to a serious slogging match with Russia or China, I think we would lose an awful lot of them though. While we emphasized them (and their support fleets), the Russians in particular emphasized ways to destroy them. I recently read that the Chinese supposedly have figured out a way to turn ballistic missiles (with their huge warheads) into "smart missiles" to target them as well.

The day of the carrier may be coming to a close, much as the era of the battleship did.

I recently read that the Chinese supposedly have figured out a way to turn ballistic missiles (with their huge warheads) into "smart missiles" to target them as well.


Carrier fleets travel at ~ 20 miles/h at a good clip. ICBMs can transit pretty much anywhere in the world in 30 minutes. Much like horseshoes, "close" counts with nuclear weapons.

Carrier fleets travel at ~ 20 miles/h at a good clip. ICBMs can transit pretty much anywhere in the world in 30 minutes. Much like horseshoes, "close" counts with nuclear weapons.

Very true, but in this case they weren't even talking about nuclear warheads. Supposedly China has developed in-flight adjustment of terminal phase flight of conventional warheads on ballistic missiles. I'll see if I can dredge up the link I saw that discusses it in more detail. But yeah, a nuke would take out a carrier quite nicely.

Edit- found a link

https://www.usni.org/forthemedia/ChineseKillWeapon.asp

Carriers are eminently useful in small scale conventional wars. If it came down to a serious slogging match with Russia or China, I think we would lose an awful lot of them though. While we emphasized them (and their support fleets), the Russians in particular emphasized ways to destroy them. I recently read that the Chinese supposedly have figured out a way to turn ballistic missiles (with their huge warheads) into "smart missiles" to target them as well.

The day of the carrier may be coming to a close, much as the era of the battleship did.

The day of the carrier will never come to an end until we are able to mobilize our army anywhere in the world at any time. They are just entirely to useful for air support.

Also carriers can travel much faster than 20 miles per hour. They are faster than the ship I was on, and it could do 28 knots. Our cruising speed was around 22 knots.

Purdy!!

http://www.naval-technology.com/projects/george-h-w-bush/

Ahh yea.. the G. H. Bush is really nice...

Strangely though, they already finished the G.W. Bush

sekret pic

http://pro.corbis.com/images/TG003678.jpg?size=67&uid=%7B00794437-AFD7-4B3A-9481-FCBA46DEA903%7D

Best carrier killer is a hypersonic kinetic energy weapon.

Translation: An extremely fast missile with no warhead. Just mass. Spent Uranium or even just copper. It can evade the Phalanx system by speed and even if the phalanx hits, its not going to explode. All the propellant is probably spent by then and the weapon is on a plunging trajectory. Heck take it further and make the engine a booster that jettisons. It goes mach 5-6 and then hits. A carrier is full of munitions and jet fuel. Its going to be finished because the impact will do such massive damage as it vaporizes and ignites everything in its path and creates a massive exit "wound" like a big bullet hitting an apple. You don't need anything as sexy as a nuke. Just a good engine and guidance system to get an inert payload on target really really fast and when it hits, it doesn't even need to sink the carrier. All it has to do is wreck the flight deck and set the carrier on fire.

Ultimately, the best military is the one that figures out how to take out the expensive weapons with dirt cheap ones.

The Chinese seem to have figured this out and they probably have created the ultimate cheap deterrent and have almost made war obsolete while allowing them to take and do whatever it is that they want. Why build a carrier if you can just render them obsolete with a relatively cheap solution? Why build a navigation system when you can just hack an existing one that leads you right to the target with its own signals? Why nuke a city when you can just hack its power and traffic control grid and shut it down? Why have a spy network in a foreign power when you can just offer cheap manufacturing for everything that handles information? Put some back door code in a boot sector of a hard disc or a firmware chip and there you go. Knowing everything's hardware address because you put it in the damn thing helps too. Why cripple an economy when you can just become its biggest lien holder all the while amassing gold and currency for that rainy day by design which you could do any day because you built all the parts in the computer systems that handle financial transactions? Oh, and be sure to harmlessly remind your adversary that you can do all these things and more. It goes pretty far. All China really has to do is build one strong fleet for the South China Sea and another for their interests in Africa and Africa probably would love any money that building a Chinese naval base would bring. We would probably just leave them alone and let them have their way. Unless we totally unplug, they can hold us hostage with our own technology.

'Ultimately, the best military is the one that figures out how to take out the expensive weapons with dirt cheap ones.'

- No kidding. U-boat torpedo warfare, anyone?

IEDs?

The question becomes what kind of platform is needed to launch a hypersonic kinetic missile? If its just mass, that seems like its going to need a pretty big rubberband to launch that rock.

Can you get one of those close enough? Thats the question. Carriers don't go in close. I think the point is them seeing you before you see them.

Now, if you can find the needle in the haystack and catch the carrier group sleeping.... sure. But those guys are pretty good at what they do and carriers have a few lines of defenses an attack has to slip through.

The question becomes what kind of platform is needed to launch a hypersonic kinetic missile? If its just mass, that seems like its going to need a pretty big rubberband to launch that rock.

Can you get one of those close enough? Thats the question. No it isn't the question. The missiles under discussion are substantially the same as ICBMs. Therefore the defense for the carrier group is the same ICBM defense: an economically infeasible problem. And a land based opponent can always "carry" more missiles than any fleet could possibly carry to shoot them down. You get within a couple thousand miles and your a target.

http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/

So? We have lots of targets, but Im betting a Aircraft carrier is a hell of a lot harder to find than the base at Yongsan.

While China may very well have the capacity to hit an Aircraft carrier 2000 km away.. if we get the point where we are point carriers at China and they are firing on us... we have bigger things to worry about.

As far as smaller powers.. I sincerely doubt that North Korea has ANY accuracy on their ICBMs. The range on the F/A-18 Hornet is about 2,500 KM. Keep the carrier over the horizon. No issues. Even if NK or Iran (two most likely culprits, and nations with the Taepodong missiles) could FIND the damn things, they are a VERY long way from being able to hit one via return orbit.

And whats the end game even if they got very lucky? Have they figured out how to hide Pyongyang or Tehran?

LL, at it would take is a medium range rocket with two stages. One stage to boost and another to home in after. 1st stage would get the "rock" high up in the atmosphere near the boundaries of space and the second would build up to mach 10 or so before going on a death plunge. As for guidance, they would need to know roughly where a carrier battle group is and then the weapon could home in directly on all the electrons that carrier group is throwing off in the form of RF, radar etc.

A rail gun could do it as was well too, but ballistic missile tech is very well refined now and the Chinese have been either borrowing it or stealing it for a good many years in addition to the little tweaks they come up with on their own. No one has a viable defense for it other than try to jam the guidance system or kill it on boost stage before it reaches apogee. Killing it on boost might be difficult since the nature of these missiles might require them to be pretty far inland for them to work. You would need to be in Chinese territory or kill the site with your own ICBM to knock them out. Once its on its straight down death plunge its nothing more but a smart meteor and most shipborne defenses are for targets associated with the horizon and not something coming down at mach 10 from directly overhead.

Beats me what this system would cost. The most expensive part is probably the rocket motors themselves. Its not out of the question to MIRV it and have one rocket boost multiple projectiles to take out more ships at once or up the chances of a hit. Either way, it would only have to successful kill a carrier one time to prove its point so there would not be a real need to build too many of them. Carriers are too many expensive eggs in one basket. You sink one and it goes down with all hands...well, that's a 10 billion dollar ship, untold numbers of expensive conventional and nuclear weapons, millions of gallons of fuel, billions of dollars worth of planes, billions more in high tech navigation and guidance/tracking, 6000 payouts of SGLI along with the loss of all the money spent on training that crew.

Carriers are for projecting power over weaker nations. A way of extending hegemony and giving it some teeth. Honestly I hope we stop building them. China's carrier(s), if built, would probably be conventionally powered and small just for the South China Sea and Africa and would be a threat to those areas but nowhere else that has any degree of an air force or missiles.

The smart money for warfare, if we are talking in the traditional sense, is submarines and space based weaponry. The non-traditional is cyber or the use of engineered viruses and diseases (bio-warfare). Still an argument could be made that major warfare is obsolete. Not just the carrier but any concept that major powers could go to war without hamstringing themselves. MAD. Most any major power has the ability to devastate the other without ever having a single troop touch enemy soil, let alone leave their own. Any small nations that get unruly can be curb stomped by the vast edge the larger powerhouse nations field (such as carriers). Economies are all intertwined and interdependent. Crash one and you crash them all. It would be a majorly tough sell for any major world leader to knowingly place their citizens as well as the majority of the globe's in a position where they will vastly suffer. The US going after China or China going after the US borders on madness. Both countries would collapse in the event of a war.

Ahh yea.. the G. H. Bush is really nice...

Strangely though, they already finished the G.W. Bush

sekret pic

http://pro.corbis.com/images/TG003678.jpg?size=67&uid=%7B00794437-AFD7-4B3A-9481-FCBA46DEA903%7D

Clearly a strategic threat, carrying up to forty seagulls, each capable of dropping a messy package on would be aggressors!