Comment by expedition32
10 hours ago
The US not going full in on drones reminds me of the British ridiculing submarines.
The Chinese are going to spam literally MILLIONS of drones all over the Pacific...
10 hours ago
The US not going full in on drones reminds me of the British ridiculing submarines.
The Chinese are going to spam literally MILLIONS of drones all over the Pacific...
Drones have a limited range and limited capacity to inflict damage. Yes, they are effective at hunting infantry, but you can't reach across an ocean and strike the US with "millions of drones".
Relatedly, aircraft carriers are great for beating up on small powers, but they are vulnerable and would not be effective at reaching across the ocean and bombing China.
Plus, both nations have nukes, so the idea of either China or the US "winning" a war against the other side is easily cancelled out.
What you are left with, is a lot of posturing about superpower wars which is a waste of time. All sort of people thumping their chest, wargaming things out, as if any of this nonsense isn't immediately squashed with the nuclear trump card.
There will be no superpower wars.
There will, however, continue to be wars against smaller states, and the F35, aircraft carriers, etc, are really effective at those kinds of things. That is, effective at waging the wars that will actually happen. Nukes and the pacific ocean stop any war of consequence against China.
> Drones have a limited range and limited capacity to inflict damage.
This drone has greater range than an F-35 and is cheaper to make:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_MQ-28_Ghost_Bat
https://www.boeing.com.au/products-services/defence-space-se...
China’s selling cheap cruise missiles. They come in unmarked shipping containers, so they can reach any target globally, as long as it is within a few hundred miles of a shipping route.
Now, consider how many drones can be manufactured in garages using a shipping container full of components and 3d printer filament.
(Doing it that way means the drone designs improve continuously and with minimal manufacturing lag after tactics shift.)
But we are making a fuckton of them.....
When did Britain ridicule submarines?
Around 1900. They were held in very dubious regard in the early days of development.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1941/january/chap...
On British naval luminary compared submarine warfare to piracy, leading to the emergence a few years later of a tradition of Royal Navy submarine captains flying the Jolly Roger after completing successful missions.
First Sea Lord Admiral Wilson famously called submarines "underhanded, unfair, and damned un-English." Yet this didn't prevent the RN from purchasing submarines from the US in 1901, far earlier than most other industrial nations.
I don't know if you've looked recently, but the pacific is, likev pretty big. Maybe even bigger than that.
The primary problem with killing carriers is, has been, and will be, finding the things.[1]
Drone strikes on oil refineries work because, with few exceptions, the refineries rarely move. You can literally program a drone to go x miles in a specific direction and then drop a bomb.
It's also considerably harder to hide things like drones in big empty spaces.
If loitering drones became a serious threat (as opposed to the, you know, literally super sonic missiles the navy has spent the last 40 years planning for) itms pretty easy to imagine anti-drone planes/ships/drones sweeping a large radius around your carriers.
[1] Satellites can definitely do things, but they're not magical and people can track where they're looking and just... sail in a different direction. Also if someone was actually using satellites to target american carriers with munitions the americans would probably just destroy the satellites.
A carrier battle group can easily be seen and tracked by commercial satellite constellations.
At minimum they travel with 6 or 7 ships and leave a wake a mile long and they only go tens of miles an hour, it isnt a speed boat.
Here is an Indian carrier (formerly Russian) on google maps and the US ones are large https://www.google.com/maps/place/14%C2%B044'30.3%22N+74%C2%...
I think people forget how many satellites are pointed at all parts of the planet. They are used for crop reporting and weather and all sorts of shit. It isnt the 1960s where only the super powers have them and they drop rolls of film.
Satellites aren't pointed at "all parts of the planet". They're generally taking regular photos of known locations, when the right type of satellite passes over. That's where you get lucky shots like the one you noticed. Then that satellite has to orbit, and there isn't another one nearby just ready to take another photo. Then the carrier changes direction...
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What is the carrier for if the jets it carries cannot stop swarms of drones?
The only thing I can come up with is “war crimes”, but, as Iran pointed out, if you can afford an aircraft carrier, you have trillions of dollars of easily hit civilian targets, so you pretty much automatically lose if the other side retaliates in kind.
> Satellites can definitely do things, but they're not magical and people can track where they're looking and just... sail in a different direction
I know nothing about this really, so forgive my ignorance.
Assuming a carrier is found and tracked by a satellite in the ocean, how could it possibly escape the satellite's detection before being targeted by a drone or some other type of munition? If the ship starts sailing in a different direction, the people (or AI) tracking via satellite would notice and adjust, right?
I believe satellites are usually in an orbit. They can’t follow an carrier for example. The satellites may be in a constellation that can track the carrier. That is why anti-satellites weapons have been developed. E.g., a jet fighter flies straight up and then fires a long range missile.
https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Ty...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon
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I don't believe parent is right, but satelites don't stay in one place unless they're on the equator, because otherwise they have to be moving. This means that you need many satelites to maintain coverage of a single spot.
I don't know how many military satelites China has, but I would have assumed it would be sufficient to cover the pacific sufficiently to find an aircraft carrier. (the obvious caveat here being clouds, which are fairly common over the ocean)
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Some quick Googling implies China has satellites capable of tracking shipping via radar from geostationary orbit. I'm not really convinced that aircraft carriers can hide these days?
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Once the big valuable vessel is found, it can be reasonably tracked from orbit.
The interesting thing about drones is the ability to attack from many directions at the same time, overwhelming the short-range defenses. IIRC no fewer than 5 naval drones attacked the Moskva missile carrier at once, and successfully sank it eventually. Naval drones are compact, barely visible, and, unlike torpedoes, highly maneuverable.
Aerial drones are also highly maneuverable. Large navy ships are pretty tough on the outside, able to withstand a blast of a moderate-size shell or bomb. But they have smaller, harder-to-reach vulnerable areas. This is the kind of target drones are apt to attack precisely.
Most anti-air weapons are pretty expensive to fire, because they were intended against high-value targets like planes or cruise missiles. They are insufficient and wasteful to fire against hundreds of small, inexpensive targets.
It's like having a shotgun and a sledgehammer, but fighting against a swarm of hornets. Despite a large advantage in damage-dealing capacity, you quickly become incapacitated.
> IIRC no fewer than 5 naval drones attacked the Moskva missile carrier at once, and successfully sank it eventually.
That's a hallucination, Moskva was by all accounts sunk by a couple of conventional anti-ship cruise missiles.
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> Aerial drones are also highly maneuverable. Large navy ships are pretty tough on the outside, able to withstand a blast of a moderate-size shell or bomb. But they have smaller, harder-to-reach vulnerable areas. This is the kind of target drones are apt to attack precisely.
Yeah, except missiles are better at it and the navy has spent the last 30+ years innovating ways to defeat missile attacks. What exactly do you think is the difference between a "drone" and a missile here?
> Once the big valuable vessel is found, it can be reasonably tracked from orbit.
Satellites orbit. They move. They have a limited area they can see at any given time and that area is constantly shifting.
Something with the budget of the US Navy can do the math to figure out where the satellite can look and then move. If your sat is orbiting the earth every 4 hours, a carrier group could be 100+ miles away by the time it comes back around.
And, even if you manage to get a satellite picture that shows that at 8:32pm the carrier group was at lat 32/long 42; you can't exactly just open up your missiles and program that in and sink a carrier.
On your first point - it is much more difficult than you think to "reasonably track" a vessel. There's no hardware just sitting there to watch what direction the carrier moves next. Satellites have to orbit - that's why you only get new photos of ground targets once or twice during a news cycle. Carrier movement patterns in wartime are designed to avoid reacquisition.
Finding the things is not trivial. Finding them twice is even less trivial.
If a network of hydrophones can track submarines, why can't they also track carriers?
The oceans are unreasonably large, you would need an astronomical number of hydrophones to get any type of coverage. Hydrophones are primarily placed in choke points for this reason.
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China is putting containerized missile launch tubes and drone launch systems on their container ships. If these get widely deployed at some point, there could come a time when there will be weapon systems already on-location in all of the major ports of China's adversaries. Most naval facilities have civilian ports nearby.
Despite the nuclear reactor, aircraft carriers won't stay in the fight long if their supply lines are disrupted. And also it's not likely that a carrier group could fend off a wave of 10,000-20,000 drones launched from a container ship that happens to be sailing near it.
At the end of the day, we rely more on nuclear weapons and MAD to deter these kinds of major hostilities between powerful countries. Talking about how conventional weapons match up is a bit of a red herring. The only thing that would change that would be very reliable nuclear missile/warhead interception systems - and I don't think any country even has a roadmap to such a thing.
> China is putting containerized missile launch tubes and drone launch systems on their container ships. If these get widely deployed at some point, there could come a time when there will be weapon systems already on-location in all of the major ports of China's adversaries. Most naval facilities have civilian ports nearby.
Why not just put a nuke in their instead? Like, how is this supposed to work, china just has a totally not suspicious container ship sitting in every major port not moving or carrying cargo or letting anyone inspect it and nobody notices that its full of weapons???
> And also it's not likely that a carrier group could fend off a wave of 10,000-20,000 drones launched from a container ship that happens to be sailing near it.
If there's a state of war, you don't get to just sail your container ship next to a carrier, that's uh, not how that works.
Like, if this was a tom clancy novel maybe china could do some kind of super clever first strike where they attack a bunch of carriers at the start of a war with their super secret attack ships, but at that point why don't they just sneak their ninja assassins on to the carriers and take them over for the glory of china.
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20,000 drones could hit a carrier and not sink it. 100,000 drones would not sink it. Not if they all landed direct hits. It's like firing a handgun against a tank. You need more oomph.
To sink an aircraft carrier you really need like 10 direct hits with hypersonic missiles. Or a couple of hits with a torpedo. If you are lucky, maybe even a single torpedo hit. People underestimate how hard it is to sink a ship. You really have to attack it below the water line, from the bottom. A single torpedo is more effective than 100,000 drones when it comes to sinking big ships.
What drones could do, is damage the runway and radars and other equipment that would constitute a "mission kill" -- e.g. the carrier has to withdraw for a period to fix the damage to equipment on deck.
But now think a little bit -- the drones have limited range. They have to be launched from somewhere. So just launch missiles from that location. You get the same thing -- a mission kill. You don't need a million drones. And the missile will have much larger range than the drones, and will cause more damage.
So the bottom line of all of this is no US aircraft carrier would venture near Chinese shores in the event of a war with china. That is probably because those shores would be lightning up with mushroom clouds anyway, as would ours. So what do you need the drones for?
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Yes, if you keep your carriers out of striking range they are invincible! lmao
You don't need to be out of striking range if they can't find you, that's the entire point.