Are the US Navy Carrier Fleets Obsolete?

Actually whether it sinks or not is kind of a big deal. A "mission kill" that takes a major warship out of combat for a week or so isn't nearly as dire a situation that sinks it, eliminating it for good, and leaving half its crew dead.

 

Wrecking the electronics, missile launchers, and superstructure of a battleship will put it out of the fight a hell of a lot longer than a week.

 

If the mission of a battleship is shore bombardment then not so much.

 

Going to be pretty hard for them to coordinate gun fire when all of their antennas are destroyed. Going to be pretty hard to avoid being hit by more missiles when their CWIS is wrecked.

 

assuming if you are referring to the Iowa class battleships they would never be relying on the CWIS for missile protection. Their escorting Ticonderoga or Burke class ships would do that. And probably do it pretty well.

And as long as the guns are trainable and the fire control computer (mechanical so it is very hard to disable), simple radio instructions can be used to direct fire inland.

Finally you overlook a major function of battleships when operating in a fleet structure. That is to absorb missile strikes that would undoubtedly destroy lighter armored vessels and worst of all, carriers.

 

Uh-huh.

Vessels designed to take the impact of 14 and 15 inch shells, and 250 and 500 pound bombs get their antennas messed up somehow by a missile that somehow penetrates, and they are worthless.

No, it does not take just one missile. There is no ship built in the last 60 years that was designed to take the damage these things could. And they were designed to operate in an era long before most of those electronic gadgets that were added on later.

Oh gno, the fire control RADAR is not working! Gee, good thing we can still fire it optically!

 

There seems to be this idea put forth pretty often that if a major warship takes ANY damage that some how its "mission killed".

Which is ridiculous. A major warship that has suffered a severe diminishing of its capabilities can still be of great combat value. A supercarrier that has two of its four catapults put out of action and two of its four aircraft elevators (say on the forward half of the ship) can still launch very effective strikes.

For that matter a carrier with all its catapults, its aircraft elevators out of action and its speed reduced to 15 knots can still be a very valuable platform for helicopters, Ospreys, and even STO/VL fighters.

An Iowa class battleship with its missile launchers disabled and the aft 16 inch turret damaged can still put out a volume of fire that dwarfs that of most ships.

Arguably the only major warships in the world that are "one shot and they're dead" are Soviet era built warships which are so packed with weapons and suffer from inadequate damage control procedures that a single hit by a missile will probably cause so much collateral damage that the ship is indeed probably "mission killed" or simply "killed".

 

The electronics of a Cold War era Battleship didn’t exist on any battleship that has ever been hit by 14 or 15 inch shells.

I guarantee they wouldn’t survive.

 

Submarine based ICBM's are the most survivable weapons. Land based and aircraft-delivered ones are much more vulnerable. But once you launch your attack you have shot your wad (artillery term) and then that's all she wrote. And you can expect that the retaliation would be equally devastating on yourself. So there is no sane reason to launch such a strike against anyone with similar capability.

That's why Kim Jong Oon wants his own toys like this.

Next in line, long range strategic bombers, are the most powerful and least vulnerable weapons systems. However anything that flies can be brought down so you would need a QRF to fetch back downed pilots and crews or else they will end up in a modern Hanoi Hilton.

Next in line, helo attack teams, that travel in pairs or more, also with a staged QRF, can pull off small ops like hostage rescues or assassinations. But they cannot do anything major such at take out an entire line of fortifications and/or prestaged assault position like Kim has.

I think the war against Kim in N.Korea will become an air war, such as the first stages of Desert Storm back in 1991. But as stated these will need prestaged QRF's all along the North-South DMZ.

You are exactly right -- each conflict and era are different than before.

 

One tactical nuclear torpedo can crack the back of any capital ship.

 

Pearl Harbor proved the vulnerability of BB's to aircraft.

Similarly, CVN's are vulnerable to submarines.

 

One nuclear missile warhead can effectively destroy the capital of a nation. Once you start talking about nuclear weapons other types of warfare have become largely irrelevant.

 

If the three U.S. aircraft carriers had been in Pearl Harbor at the time of the Japanese attack they would probably have suffered even worse fates than the battleships there.

 

Armament required to sink it: one tactical nuclear torpedo.

 

I don't think so. They tried that at some place called the Bikini Atoll.

 

Would you quit saying that. It makes no sense whatsoever in the context of this kind of conversation.

You do know that all it takes to destroy a massive air base is one tactical nuclear weapon as well.

again, you keep saying that and it is horrendously foolish.

 

I still love that old film news reel..

 

USS Nevada post-Operation Crossroads visible with extensive damage.

 

You know what's funny to me is? Those guys just sitting around and shooting the breeze thinking..

Let's see what happens if we put a bunch of old navy ships in a ocean and blow them up with a nuclear bomb..just for "shits and gigles"

Presto that's how you tube started

 

Maybe they don't work, because as I understand it we've scrapped all our VTO aircraft.

 

Now he tells us, after we've just spent zillions on having ours built. But I joke - of course they've had their day: just a couple of enemy HE missiles, one to the fore and one aft, and in the blink of an eye a carrier will become totally incapacitated, so all those zillions are money down the drain. Well done you gormless desk warriors in the MoD! It'll be drones and guided missiles from now on; and I hesitate to add what the following means of warfare will be because it doesn't bear thinking about.

 

I think that is the test where they put various animals on the ships, pigs, goats, etc. Not fun for them.

 

At Bikini they were using air bursts and they learned that the Navy is fairly immune to air bursts -- no worse than a hurricane.

But a nuclear torpedo is a different story -- these are warship crackers.

 

Politics effectively limited them somehow in 1922, then war experience elimated them for real in 1943.

That was no politics that killed the battleship, but the plane, an idea that was novelty before WWII. Battleships, or ships-of-the-line, were designed with direct naval combat, column vs column, in mind. This type of combat disapeared even before the end of WWII. Yours didn't do much in WWII in that regard, their biggest claim to fame being as slow, overpriced AA platforms and beach shelling monitors - both tasks that can be overtaken by "lesser" ships.

Two things about that: First, the Iowa-class battleships have pushed the "all-or-nothing" armor concept to a point where a large part of the ship is unarmored, notably pretty much all of the bow. That means they are still vulnerable to structural damage even from relatively light HE, naval weapons.

Second; The technology for sinking heavily armored ships already exists anyway, also since WWII. Remember that wire-guided bomb that the Germans used to sink Roma towards the end? It had no problems penetrating armored decks. There are little AP naval missiles right now simply because armored ships have all but disapeared, not because it's science-fiction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_X

I know that all modern warships are equipped to deal with aircrafts or incoming missile, but you pointed out the case about battleship being armored in the case of a hit, right? We also know that much of the soviet doctrine would have been to launch a large, simultaneous missile volley expecting a percentage will get through the defensive measures.

Maybe there is a need for a modern amphibious assault ship with a shallow draught equipped with big guns - such as the rapid-fire Mark 16 8-incher that was used on the DesMoines class, for conventional shore shelling and ground support.