A $6b Nuclear U.s. Navy Aircraft Carrier 'sunk' by $100m Diesel 'aip' Sub
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A 20-year-old story about a US Navy aircraft carrier being 'sunk' by a Swedish diesel-electric submarine during a war game has resurfaced, sparking discussion on the implications for modern naval warfare and the limitations of aircraft carriers.
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Unfortunately, skull shaped volcano islands are harder to come by.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kim_Wall
For either, you are going to have to spend basically close to 5 mill a year just on salaries.
Geez, you non-supervillain-aspiring types are so ... mid.
If you're buying a submarine, I'd assume the manufacturer would provide crew training on how to operate it. It's be kinda dumb if they didn't.
Probably enough. I'm surprised anyone would want to be a billionaire's personal assistant, yet those jobs get filled.
My hope is the US Navy would exercise much better situational awareness and discipline.
The article even mentions the added use of layered defence to try and counter this move.
Edit: I'm a former nuclear submarine sailor. We call aircraft carriers 'targets'
Great profession for the paranoid, everyone else trying to find you.
Worked in shipyard with submariners, who are great people once you get to know them.
"During the Falklands War, the British nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror used its periscope to sight the Argentine cruiser ARA General Belgrano before sinking it, but did not engage the Argentine aircraft carrier ARA Veinticinco de Mayo. The carrier was also stalked by British submarines but ultimately retreated and was never attacked."
The US military trains and fights as a team, and the entire point is to use the strengths of one platform to protect the weaknesses of another and vice versa.
Submarines are basically as good as dead if an anti-sub helicopter is nearby. They can't really retaliate, an active sonar will most likely expose them and they are not fast enough to escape a torpedo.
> But claiming this magically makes aircraft carriers obsolete is largely internet fanboy noise.
All surface ships are useless in a symetric warfare. Just look at what Ukraine did to the Russian navy in the Black sea.
Ships are slow and exposed. Even if their defence allows them to survive a direct attack (dubious), they are necessarily prone to saturation attack.
Very useful when you need to bomb a poor country to make them remember that you are a liberal country in name only and their tribute is overdue however.
This last bit above is just pure entertainment.
That's your issue right there.
Interesting that helicopters have proven particularly vulnerable in Ukraine. So subs need to release drones from underseas that surface then find and destroy helicopters.
On the other, there are many ChatGPTisms, it's not this, it's that, groups of 3 terms, em-dashes, etc.
My thinking is that there was a thorough draft written by a human that then was passed through an LLM and heavily modified. Not that there's a problem with that.
Nothing on the "tariff shelf" is gonna fix that, only bankrupt the country like his casino
And next war is going to be just thousands upon thousands of drones since apparently we have no way to stop them over airports and everything else
First is missle defense capability
Second is sonar.
I believe something like 10 years ago, the declassified sonar capability was that it could reconstruct a 3d image of a goldfish 10 miles away.
TLDR; US is never going going "win" wargames because its not a good idea to showcase the true capability. Same reason why F22 and F35s "lose" to other jets - US purposefully nerfs them and flies them at decreased envelopes.
Drones are cheaper, but also not robust like human operated machinery. Great for bombing, not so great for air supreriority. UCAVs may be cheaper in getting missles off, but comms are easy to disrupt and ai capabilities arent there
Also ignore me, all I know about air combat I learned from top gun and iron eagle.
Air defences are just too effective and modern jets are so expensive that nobody can really afford to risk losing them.
Maybe F-35 could change that, it seemed very efficient in Iran. But AFAIK Iran didn't have anything better than the S-300 so it wasn't exactly a fair fight...
For active homing missiles, the aircraft tells the missile approximately where the plane is, then the missile only activates tracking once its close. Obviously this can be defeated if the plane manages to get out of the scan range of the missile before it switches to homing mode.
Semi active homing is a bit more reliable, as it relies on the launching aircraft to track the target, but obviously aicraft needs to be in closer range to track.
With F35, you can have AWACS or ground radar or whatever else continuously updating information on where the target is, and the active homing missile can reliably navigate and switch to homing.
Without the network, F35 is as good as pretty much any other jet, with the exception that its somewhat stealth. But not against modern heatseekers.
Not only ROE limitations, but unreliable missile technology (see the "Red Baron" reports for example) and bad tactics as well. The Navy was better than the USAF in both respects.
Plus the early missiles just had some problems that were fixed over time.
0) Spread the pork into as many congressional districts as possible
1) Omae wa mou shindeiru
In real life, if they can't neutralize the threat in BVR they just turn around and run before getting in range.
Their stealth allows them to get the enemy in range before the enemy has them in range. It's like a boxer with a long reach: jab and move.
How many jet powered or submersible drones can an aircraft carrier defend against?
Drones are game changing on land because they allow smart munitions to be usefully spread across an entire country, far outpacing a defender's ability to deploy air defenses. But a carrier battle group doesn't have this problem: the defenses are necessarily already positioned on and around the thing being defended.
Where the cost balance starts becoming relevant is when destroyers are trying to defend other vessels: something that could be easily shot down by a CIWS at the target might require an SM-1 if the Standard is coming from 100km away from the target vessel.
FPV drones, imo, have created a system of dynamic mines, effectively. Both sides are able to project defenses forward without boots on the ground. I suspect this will revolutionize naval warfare shortly on a similar kind of story. If it ever becomes relevant again.
If you’re just trying to say that there are some drones which won’t be effective against ships that’s just kind of silly. Obviously that’s true.
I'm in optics, not sonar, but I have a hard time believing that sound waves are such unbelievably reliable tools for accurate FFT's of a target. Ultrasonics begin at 100 mm, while "long" visible light is 200x shorter (and wavelength is proportional to resolvable detail). Noise and dispersion in the ocean are significant.
Reminds me of when the CIA planted stories that they could recover data from multiply-erased hard drives using electron scanning microscopes. Possibly - one bit at a time.
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa134.pdf
Armchair admirals can pontificate all they want.
The lesson wasn’t that aircraft carriers are obsolete; it was that air-independent propulsion and patient SSK tactics demand layered, disciplined, team-based ASW. ... The U.S. answer isn’t to panic about aircraft carriers; it’s to layer defenses and distribute risk—push the air wing’s reach (tankers, long-range weapons), fill gaps with manned and unmanned ASW platforms, and keep expanding the fleet’s acoustic picture with fixed and mobile arrays. The Gotland episode didn’t say “carriers are obsolete.” It said “carriers must be escorted by a navy that trains, equips, and fights as if quiet SSKs are everywhere.”
My comment was more directed at if US planners thinks no, would they even be capable of divesting, moving away from carrier model. My guess is no, there's too much sunkcost ineria across domains to pivot. USN is doctrinally, culturally built around carriers, which again numbers are legislated by law, hence extraordinary resource allocation, with layers of industrial and political inertia (no one is going to close/downsize Newport shipyard). The only thing to do is try to patch a potentially obsolete model like distributed survivability to duct tape around the fact that the csg probably doesn't work anymore.
They are amazing and great at coastal operations, but I just don't see how they can chase a carrier group around. They could of course lie in wait and pick the right spot/get lucky, but I'm not sure if this is a viable strategy.
In some cases, sure, you can strip out 90% of the ability and pay 1% of the price, and that's a great tradeoff. Eliminating the human means cost savings and greater expendability - a significant consideration is losing your trainer operators and not being able to replace them.
But let's take an advanced aerial drone. Not a one-way Shahed drone but a F-35 or F-22 contender. It will still need all or most of the advanced avionics that make F-35s expensive. If this is the expensive bit, then you can't save that much by just taking the human out.
So an advanced submarine will surely still be expensive if it aims for a similar level of capability.
And if not... Sure. You can make it Nx simpler and hope it is at least Nx cheaper. But even then there's the question of how expensive it is to defeat. Ukraine is ingeniously working to defeat Russian drones at ever lower costs, as Russia tries to send ever more and more of them at lower and lower prices. It's not enough to make something cheaply - it comes down to "value" for money. If these super-simple super-cheap Chinese drones can likewise be defeated by cheap weaponry, the impact is limited.
The other thing Ukraine war demonstrates is that there are limits to what you can do with cheap drones. They are fine for harassing each other - terrorist bombings of civilian areas, disrupting oil refining etc. But apart from stunning special operations done by drones by the Ukraine side, the deep and painful strikes are still done by expensive classical rockets - ATACMS, Storm Shadow etc.
XXLUUVs aren't cheap or lowend, they are highend but PRC shipbuilding advantage over US simply monumental, i.e. they can match capabilities and win attrition game on budget. Like UUVs following surface fleet is basically DARPA ACTUV proposal... TLDR is instead of spending 500k-1M per day (US costs) on fleet size ASW you can use a few 10k per day drones that keep tabs on marked targets. PRC has ship building capabilities to execute this at fraction of cost. Once you remove manning, attrition based strategies become even more potent for PRC industrial base.
UKR demonsrates how shitty deindustrialized powers are at generating fires. PRC is has industrial base to make 30m cars and 20m motorcycles annually. This translates to industrial base that can output 5 digit shaheed tier munitions daily. This basically enough satuate any layered defense US+co can prepsition. That's just lowend. Medium end like cruise missiles PRC can probably do ~1000 a day, see their cruise missile gigafactory. The key difference between RU, is PRC (like US) has C4ISR to make efficiently use munitions. RU is closer to Iran level.
ATACMS and Storm Shadow range are functionally toys in IndoPac, i.e. we're talking about different scale of of highend warfare over much greater distances and magazine exchanges. UKR is frankly schoolyard fight and has no worthwhile lessons for Indopac except it's important to have strong industrial base for attrition game, i.e. RU able to sustain very incompetent exchanges vs entire US+NATO support. Incompetent as in wildly inefficient and constrained because they have shit C4ISR that can't dismantal UKR IADs or logistics insulated on NATO soil. There's no "sancturary" in IndoPac.
The useful lesson we learned in last few years relevant to highend peer to peer fight is basically shit tier missiles can penetrate the most sophisticated ABM in the world (Iran vs Israel), more than carrier groups has magazine depth. XXLUVs basically another layer of massing fires in quantities current surface fleet composition can't survive, but strips out ambiguity around long distance / standoff kill chains by parking satuation sized salvos always in terminal range. Again these are not cheap low end solutions, these are HIGH END solutions that PRC simply can build cheaply at scale.
That's a good point of course. But I guess that also means we have to figure out how to operate these vehicles with 0 crew - not even remote crew, because they would need training too. I guess that's something we can't do yet - if we could, the humans wouldn't be there already.
> XXLUUVs aren't cheap or lowend, they are highend but PRC shipbuilding advantage over US simply monumental, i.e. they can match capabilities and win attrition game on budget.
I don't doubt China's supermacy in either low or high end manufacturing. But how limited are they here by the ability to build lots of hills Vs to fill them with expensive sensors etc? It seems like a stretch to say that because they can make lots and lots of ships they can make lots and lots of sophisticated unmanned subs too. Either way, if China's industrial prowess is so much better than the US's, it sounds like they would beat NATO with or without drones - they are maybe an efficiency improvement, but if they put their heart into building normal subs, they would still out build the US.
I agree industrial capability appears to be key. NATO, vis a vis Russia, apparently knows they can't destroy all their tanks and kill every last soldier, and instead you need to target supply lines and command structures. AFAICT, this has basically informed th last few decades of NATO strategy. I guess the question is, what is the strategy "against" China. Because, you're right, if it's an attritional war then we're screwed.
- Eliminating their food calories and energy imports via effective/unrestricted submarine warfare (resulting in mass famine and internal insurrection)
- Strategic nuclear weapons
The problem is NATO subsurface barely exist outside of US, so they're not really relevant. Even surface fleet barely matters, if anything would probably drag US down because NATO would share US unrep. As for PRC industry they have AESA radars in <10k agriculture drones, their cruise missile gigafactory was CNCing turbofan blades, they expanded primary sub shipyard (bohai, huludao) to 24 bays (US has 5), which also does nuclear. When PRC smashes scale, it probably means they have unit costs down and something cooking.
>strategy "against" China
Honestly, I don't think there is one, or a sensible one. The "cope" strategy, is after distributing assets in 1IC, 2IC US+co can create survivable force structure that basically sinks all of PLANavy, which TBH was always the easy part. Somehow this translates to defeating PRC because it delays invasion. That's basically the TLDR of what most rational seems to boil down to. None of it talks about the fact that US+co can sink all of PLAN, but PRC mainland fires complex can basically dismantle US posture in 1st IC without a single ship, and basically lock down and islands (TW,JP,functionally SKR, PH) in perpituity. An umbrella of distributing assets are all the drone hellscape proposals that forgets PRC can outdrone everyone else. Or PRC medium/long range fires can hit/displace US posture 5000km around PRC, which includes CENTCOM/parts of EUCOM (no one ever looks west). Which is basically where thinking stops, i.e. all the strategy assumes because US can preposition hardware, it puts PRC at disproportion vunerability, but more and more we seek PRC capabilities will leak fighting outside of Indopac, including PRC pursuing global strikes, i.e. imagine if every US asset larger than 20 meters can be destroyed in under an hour. We're talking about all surface combatants, support ships, bombers, fuelers, awacs, fixed infra targets aka everything highend - the entire US expeditionary model. IMO is why golden dome exists, because PRC hitting CONUS is rocketry is a few years away from mainstream discussion. This without mentioning CONUS strategic targets. Or that if PRC dismantles US exquisit delivery platforms, they not only win the fires generation game (very hard to destroy sheltered launchers vs carriers, bombers that can be sheltered), or that in a both navy airforce gone scenario PRC has industrial base to reconstitute faster. Nevermind US+co has only fought vs adversaries with less than 50% US industrial output.
Those jets are catch-all do-everything machines, almost entirely because it's so crazy expensive to build jets + the political/contracting games played, that they are forced to jam everything into them. There's lots of efficiency and tactical gains in small niche applications where each platform is specialized for the job.
> Ukraine is ingeniously working to defeat Russian drones at ever lower costs, as Russia tries to send ever more and more of them at lower and lower prices. It's not enough to make something cheaply - it comes down to "value" for money. If these super-simple super-cheap Chinese drones can likewise be defeated by cheap weaponry, the impact is limited.
Even in Ukraine we really haven't seen 'cheap' defenses properly scale up to deal with the drone problem. Ukraine was getting 90% shoot downs in the early days but that's changed in the past year where Russia's tactics adapted. They've have been getting hammered weekly, even deep into their air defences along the polish border.
With Chinese SAMs and extreme range air-to-air missiles all of the fancy F-35 avionics will mostly be just them doing everything trying to survive those encounters far away from the frontline in Taiwan... where they mostly become very expensive missile launch platforms (bombers) and some radar networking. If you remove maximum survivability + narrow into niches those get a lot cheaper.
The people that go into a submarine aren't normal people, or they weren't back in the day anyway. They are people you would be really unhappy to throw away.
You can think completely differently about these platforms if those people aren't inside them.
Do you have a source for this claim? I have argued with colleagues for years and they all say that satellites cannot track carriers
Nothing that states it as fact, but there's write ups about PRC yaogan IMINT constellations many years ago, that basically said when constellation size reach X, they'll have Y revisitation rates. We're at X & Y, and people in PLA watching, doing napkin math, using PRC commercial sat specs (jilin/gaofen) like swath size to determine that more or less on paper has functionally persistence in at least pacific theatre, i.e. the gaps were insubstantial that predictive algos can find carriers basically at all times, unless carriers can teleport. Combine this this PRC rolling out a lot of SAR in last few years (i.e. like 200-300 more satellites into have launched since initial articles) + wake detection algos, and on paper they should be able to persistently track carriers through cloud coverage. Of course cannot say definitely, it's just mathmematically possible now unlike a few years ago when constellation too small.
Again, none of this will be publically disclosed as "fact", it's more (as customary with analysis is PRC), the supporting evidence is so overwhelming that it cannot be denied. Extrapolate to PRC and US spaceforce rolls out megaconstellations sized IMINT, it's more or less over for carriers. Maybe stealth bombers or submarines.
"we have only to be lucky once, you will have to be lucky always"