this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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Isn't modern US doctrine that aircraft carriers are the dominant force in the navy? China has limited aircraft carrier capability and lacks the self-sufficiency of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.
The War Nerd: This Is How the Carriers Will Die (2009)
hypersonic missile tech has only become more asymmetric since then
Amen
If someone can build a hypersonic missile, someone can also build a hypersonic missile interceptor missile... And you can fit a lot of missiles in a CVBG.
Sure, the CVBG doctrine only really works against the Japanese (where both babies are fighting over small islands that are far from their respective homelands)... But I don't think that hypersonic missiles obsolete carriers in that role.
I do think that that role is useless against China or Russia given that they aren't really colonial imperial powers with territory around the world, but...
The whole point of the hypersonic missiles is that you cannot intercept them.
We don’t even have the technology today to intercept (fixed) ballistic missile trajectory at an acceptable rate (the US Patriots had enough problem dealing with Iraqi Scuds made in the 1950s!), and the hypersonic missiles with maneuverable and unpredictable flight paths made them orders of magnitudes harder to intercept.
The Russian Zircons (hypersonic cruise missile) fly at Mach 8-9, which means if a CVBG can detect flying objects 200km from the horizon, they literally have 72 seconds to react. That’s slightly over a minute to detect, track, calculate intercept paths (they can’t against unpredictable targets), and launch the interceptor missiles with literally no second chance if the first wave fails to hit their target (and they will fail).
It doesn’t matter how many missiles you can fit into your entire carrier battle group, if the success rate is 1/1000 (and that’s a BIG if), then good luck lol.
What even is the turning radius of an HGV? Sure, you're not constrained by silly things like pilot blackout and whatever, but that doesn't mean it can zig zag at will.
I don't think hypersonic missile interception is possible, unless the US gets laser weapons working or something like that. Hypersonics are incredibly fast, and Russia's fighter jet launched hypersonics easily defeated the Patriot air defense systems in Ukraine, when they targeted them. Even intercepting normal supersonic and subsonic cruise missiles is a crapshoot, the iron Dome in Israel gets defeated by homemade rockets at times. Interception technology is very overrated currently.
Also hypersonic missiles fly so fast that they generate a plasma cloud around them and rendering them very difficult to be tracked by radars. So you might not even see them coming at all! And even if you do, your radars can’t track them. And even if you can track them, they’re too unpredictable to calculate an intercept path.
Interceptors are more difficult to make than the missiles themselves, and often are more expensive. They also don't have 100% interception chance so you need to fire 2-4 just to be sure.
Aircraft carriers are only good for shows of force against vastly inferior militaries where the US can easily enforce complete air superiority
Otherwise, they're just a massive sitting defenseless duck against modern anti-ship missiles