> Your tonnage argument is good for the short term, but they won't be behind for long.
It takes years to build a carrier. There's no 100,000+ carrier being built by the Chinese at all. Its not their strategy.
> And if they hit our aircraft carriers with the hypersonic missiles they've developed, our advantage disappears outright.
How do those missiles hit a target they can't see? That's why the US has spent so much money shoving the most expensive radar suites on F35 fighters, so that those airplanes can radio-back to their ships about the position of enemies.
Basically: to have the same sight and stealth as the USA, China has to develop an F35 analog of their own.
> You're not making a stealth carrier. You can't hide a carrier.
Yes you can.
Step 1: Run out to the ocean to an area where satellites aren't over consistently.
Step 2: Move randomly at 35 mph with your twin nuclear engines.
Step 3: Where's the carrier?
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You can't scan the whole ocean. Its physically impossible, even with satellite coverage. No stealth capabilities needed at all, you just hide in the vast emptiness that is the ocean itself.
No, but you can scan the radius of uncertainty of where a known carrier-sized object may have gone in a satellite gap of a few hours at a top speed of say 40 kts, known maneuvering capability, and a known starting position and velocity, pretty easily.
Now, if you add teleportation in so you have to scan the whole ocean, sure, but that’s a big “if”.
Is there any reason to think your satellite, drone, or spy plane will survive that 2-hour window in a wartime scenario to in fact, pick out the aircraft carrier in the 15,000 sq. mile area it could have traveled?
> Is there any reason to think your satellite, drone, or spy plane will survive that 2-hour window in a wartime scenario
The threats of concern...have quite a large inventory of drones, spy planes, and other sensor platforms, and, in any case, if your method of evading detection is destroying all available hostile sensor platforms, stealth is superfluous.
If a drone is flying at 10km high, it can only see 357km before the horizon blocks its sight.
The Carrier's AEW in service (E2-Hawkeye) is allegedly able to detect threats up to 550km or so away. (remember: the Hawkeye is also in the air, so it will be peaking out of the horizon long before the carrier is visible)
The escort cruisers allegedly have Raytheon AN/SPS-49, which apparently have 474 km range vs air enemies (other radars / sonars exist for sea). Either way, if the drone can see the Cruiser, the cruiser probably can see the drone. Furthermore, AEGIS cruisers are literally the "shields" of the carrier: deployed in front to kill targets before they detect the carrier. So likely: you're not detecting the carrier first. The first things you detect are the AEGIS escort ships. Nominally, these radar systems are for missile tracking, but they will serve as eyes/ears for the strike group if a squadron of drones is approaching.
The one-two punch of the aerial radar (Hawkeye) + sea-based radar (Ticonderoga AEGIS cruisers) means that its no small feat to "sneak up" upon the carrier strike group.
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How long does it take for your drone to travel from 550km away to ~300km, during which it is under threat from at minimum, the escort cruiser? Maybe an airwing or two who could scramble a counter-attack? Its not like your drone is flying straight at the carrier either (you still haven't found the carrier: you only found an escort cruiser. The carrier is likely over the horizon still).
> if your method of evading detection is destroying all available hostile sensor platforms, stealth is superfluous.
Yeah, that's the idea for a Carrier's defenses anyway. The CSG has not only incredible airborne radar systems (E2-Hawkeye), but also incredible ship-based radar systems scanning for this sort of stuff.
That's why stealth aircraft (like F35) are so key for future wars. That's the only way to penetrate the radar coverage. Things like autonomous drones have a control signal that can be tracked, while F35 manned aircraft could go radio silent on their stealth approach (relying upon the human brain in the aircraft to make decisions without any connection to homebase).
Unmanned + Stealth is possible, but its a difficult kind of paradox. A lot of decisions need to be made during radio-silence periods.
You want to win at the sensor war. Detect the enemy before they detect you. Then destroy the enemy's eyes and ears.
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And then the AEGIS radar systems are also deployed on each Destroyer in the strike group (4 to 9 Destroyers deployed per CSG). That's a lot of sensors your drone squadron has to fly around to successfully find a carrier.
That is a risk, but it's tough to localize and hit a moving target. In any major conflict the reconnaissance satellites are likely to be knocked out quickly on both sides, which means everyone will be relying on aircraft and submarines to develop missile targeting tracks. They can't be everywhere at once. And carrier escorts now carry ABMs which have proven at least moderately effective in tests.
> Carriers are very big, very slow moving targets that change their velocity very slowly.
Where did you get that idea from? Carriers are equipped with two nuclear engines to travel at outstanding speeds. Naval doctrine is to have Carriers simply outrun most of their threats while pew pew pewing them from the sky. (Ex: Submarines don't stand a chance against this tactic)
Carriers might be a big ship, but its a big AND fast ship. The biggest source of Navy deaths is people falling off the sides of Carriers, they're that fast.
> With a 1200mm f/8 lens you can detect an aircraft carrier from 300km away.
The horizon at 30m height is only 20km away. Anything beyond 20km is literally hidden by the curvature of the Earth.
To even see 300km away, you need to be 7000 meters in the air (aka: an aircraft). If you're 7000 meters high, you have the issue of surviving against the Aircraft Carrier's airwings (aka: F35 fighters) long enough to do anything useful. Air Superiority is a bitch.
If the lens is in space, you have the issue of predictability. US Navy likely knows that satellite is there, and will either disable it or avoid it entirely.
Speed is counterbalanced by size. Going at 35mph is very slow when you're 300m long.
You need to survive with an aircraft once to get a picture of the carrier. Then the carrier sinks. Air superiority is a numbers game. There is precisely 0% chance that you will catch it every time.
With your strategy you have to win every time. The missile only has to hit once for the entire CSG to sink.
You don't have to survive long enough to do anything except find the position of the carrier and send it. Once that's done, it's game over. Done. Finished.
> You don't have to survive long enough to do anything except find the position of the carrier and send it. Once that's done, it's game over. Done. Finished.
In 10 minutes, a carrier moving at 35 mph will have moved around 6 miles.
That's a 100+ sq. mile radius. How will your missile in fact, lock onto the carrier on the approach? How does the missile know where to go?
If your missile is traveling at Mach 5, what communication system are you using to track and talk with that missile? Is something in that communication chain still alive to constantly tell the missile where in fact, the carrier is? Or does the missile have such an advanced radar system that it can too, magically pick out a carrier in a 100-sq. mile radius?
As I said, a carrier is big. When you're making a guidance system, wether EO or Radar, you're trading off accuracy, senstivity, and range.
In the case of a carrier, you need very low accuracy - in the 10 meter range instead of the centimeter range - very low sensitivity, because the target is positively huge and sticks out like a sore thumb from its surroundings, so you can get range.
Besides, I think you really underestimate modern sensors. A fighter jet can detect a 1m^2 from 100km away almost omnidirectionally. That's around 10 000 sqkm, and that radar is built for very fast targets and requires very high accuracy.
As for communication, you can communicate from a ground station. You don't need to tell the missile where the carrier is constantly. As we've seen before, carriers are big and sensors are advanced. Carriers also can't change course very rapidly. You just need the missile to get a 50km radius of where the carrier will be when it hits it.
These missiles are very fast. From the order to launch until impact you have 12 minutes.
Ummmm... yeah they can. If we're talking about 10-minutes for a hypersonic missile to arrive, that thing's bearings / velocity can be completely different by the time the missile arrives on the horizon.
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I'm still not really convinced that you'd detect a carrier first in most open seas. Carriers would have airplanes of their own, scanning for enemies, and a number of anti-air destroyers ready to shoot down any spy plane. You call it a numbers game, but IMO, its a sensor game.
Any airplane who approaches the carrier has to themselves, survive the Carrier's defense systems (including the defensive spyplanes keeping watch over the carrier group)
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> In the case of a carrier, you need very low accuracy - in the 10 meter range instead of the centimeter range - very low sensitivity, because the target is positively huge and sticks out like a sore thumb from its surroundings, so you can get range.
I'm not sure if the carrier sticks out that much in its CSG. No carrier works alone: there are a lot of other ships floating around it providing support.
>Ummmm... yeah they can. If we're talking about 10-minutes for a hypersonic missile to arrive, that thing's bearings / velocity can be completely different by the time the missile arrives on the horizon.
Sure, at the expense of distance travelled from last detection.
> I'm still not really convinced that you'd detect a carrier first in most open seas. Carriers would have airplanes of their own, scanning for enemies, and a number of anti-air destroyers ready to shoot down any spy plane. You call it a numbers game, but IMO, its a sensor game.
> Any airplane who approaches the carrier has to themselves, survive the Carrier's defense systems (including the defensive spyplanes keeping watch over the carrier group)
Look at exemples of modern warfare. Air defences are made to whittle down and slow down repeated strikes by your oponents. No one has ever managed to completely prevent any intrusion at all, much less from a single carrier's airwing.
>I'm not sure if the carrier sticks out that much in its CSG. No carrier works alone: there are a lot of other ships floating around it providing support.
The surroundings in the context of that comment are the open ocean. Unless you mean that the sensors aren't going to be able to distinguish the carrier from other ships in the CSG.
> Look at exemples of modern warfare. Air defences are made to whittle down and slow down repeated strikes by your oponents. No one has ever managed to completely prevent any intrusion at all, much less from a single carrier's airwing.
Exactly. Now: Does China have the capability to launch these repeated aerial attacks to whittle down the defenses of a US Carrier Strike group?
And secondly: what ships in China's Navy can defend against such an assault (since our Navy is designed to do just what you described to our opponents).
Again, they don't need to whittle down the defences, the CSG is completely unable to stop a volley of Mach 5 missiles. They just need to find the CSG, once. No AD system has every managed anything near a 100% interception rate, even less against surveillance platforms.
There is no ship in the Chinese Navy that can defend against such an assault. But they don't need to, because they largely only care about their backyards. They don't need carriers.
Also the US Navy has no hypersonic anti-ship ballistic missiles. The USN was always very late compared to their oponents as far as AShM go.
What platform is carrying that hypothetical lens? How does it avoid being destroyed before detecting and tracking the target? How does it data link targeting targeting data back to offensive platforms? What is the visible horizon range at its operating altitude? How well does it see at night, or through clouds?
The lens is given as a general example you can easily apply the Rayleigh criterion to to verify. You can use many other types of sensors.
You could carry such a sensor on a satellite, a drone, or even the missile itself.
You need to get within 300km of the carrier once. It doesn't matter if it's the 15th try or if you don't survive either. You really overestimate air defences if you think an airwing can do that. And of course you can make even better sensors, we have the technology and it's been practically done.
The satellites are vulnerable and will likely be the first casualties in any major conflict. Neither side can afford to build enough long range drones with powerful sensors to blanket large areas of open ocean.
Sometimes adversaries will get lucky and have the right platform in the right place at the right time, but it's hardly a sure thing. In the end it will probably come down more to timing and luck than any other factors.
You don't need to cover large areas of the open ocean. Only where you have tracked the carrier to be. You are insane if you think that hiding a carrier is feasible in 2021. Even with cold war tech the US had tracked down most USSR submarines let alone carriers.
And if they hit our aircraft carriers with the hypersonic missiles they've developed, our advantage disappears outright.