Aircraft Carrier Vulnerability

Nonetheless, it seems the US Navy is still fighting the last war. Carriers are extremely vulnerable to missiles. I think fast missile boats and land based launchers probably make large warships obsolete. Tough to say for sure since that hasn't happened, but it seems likely to me.

I am not sure capital ships are as critical now. With drones/hypersonics it seems they are too vulnerable for use in any peer conflict. Pretty sure if China/US were to wage war in 5 years then all the capital ships from both sides in the conflict zone will be scrap within 24 hours. Send 100 hypersonics per ship and one will hit.

They’d need to switch to aircraft carriers and fast. The US has 11. China has 2. They are expensive, require specifically trained crews, and air superiority counters all of that shipyard capacity.

In an infamous 2002 wargame, an American carrier and much of its fleet were destroyed by swarms of speedboats with missiles, simulating potential Iranian tactics.Also, anti-ship ballistic missiles keep getting better. It's not clear whether the US Navy could stop the latest generation of Chinese anti-ship missiles.In both cases, a supercarrier suffers a serious probabilistic problem: the attackers only have to get through once. The defenders need to be 100% effective. That's not

The issue here is China has no capability to swarm attack with these missiles. They don’t have enough, and they aren’t proven. And once you launch them that’s it. You won’t produce any others to get a second strike. So if you launch them all (China has what, 30?) and sink a CSG, the US just sends 2-4 more and now what? Oh and the US also has aircraft in places like Japan and Korea and Guam that can retaliate.The Chinese also don’t have a multi-direction launch capability.The carriers are d

Plenty of countries don't have large banks of conventionally armed cruise missiles, like Riper used. Pretty much just the US, Russia and Maybe China could assemble something like that quickly.Aircraft carriers are still useful, they just aren't invincible. They are supposed to stay out of harms way and project force with aircraft. That is something that Riper's enemies did not calculate well. They grossly overestimated themselves and underestimated him and his men.If we coul

Also not a military expert, but thought I'd chime in. It's complicated, and depends a lot on your objectives. If you just want to defend the waters in your region, using a bunch of smaller surface combatants backed up by land-based aircraft can seem like a more attractive option. Especially when you consider the extreme difficulty and expense in developing advanced aircraft carriers. But here's some things to keep in mind. The biggest is that this is a game of reconnaissance. Ever

Just to play devils advocate isn't this happening right now with the US army's dependence on aircraft carriers vs the Chinese and Russian supersonic missiles?

Perhaps you're unaware of the power that a US Navy carrier group has in 2017 :)

The aircraft carrier needs to be protected by surface ships. Submarines can’t shoot down missiles. Drone ships can’t do the job unless they are the size of destroyer. Ships on long deployments need maintenance, so now you have manned ship. We almost can’t make automomous ships, they needArsenal ships are a bad idea because putting all the missiles in one basket. It is better to have 3 destroyers that can cover different directions, or go on separate missions. The Navy has finally figured out