The Top 40

I remember liberals after 9-11: Many played the 'Jedi mind trick' and said "I never said cut defence". The trouble is that the next time - minus our Carrier Fleets - we may not be so lucky and the Hinge of Fate may swing thus ending Pax Americana.

The Defense Department believes it entered active service around 2009.

At the time, the Navy assumed it was a terminally-guided impact weapon and many trees died discussing countermeasures and avoidance tactics.

http://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2009-05

Then they discovered it was a FAE weapon and -- ruh-roh...

Two hundred to five hundred kilotons power with a chemical FAE warhead?
Why do I find that difficult to believe?
Two to five KT would be a stretch unless the Chinese have discovered some ultra powerful chem fuel. Not Impossible I suppose but quite unlikely. If you want that sort of explosive power then a boosted HEU warhead is one way to go. But that opens up another whole can of worms.

If it is the kind of quality everything else in China is, then we're okay. But if they're made by Foxconn, well....we have a problem, Houston.

Stuart: I agree with your point. The biggest conventional bomb in the US arsenal is GBU-43/B (a/k/a MOAB) it weighs 11 tons, and produces a like amount of explosive force. It is designed to be dropped by a C-130. I think that to get it up in the air on a rocket would take something like a Delta IV.

I think there are more important points. One is that the carriers are like the last dinosaurs, too big for their own good. Their biggest vulnerability is not to mythical missiles, but to swarming tactics in confined waters, like the Persian Gulf.

We also have a tremendous problem with our latest generation of fighters. The F22 is useless until somebody solves the problems with its life support systems. The F35 is not operational yet because of systems integration problems.

We need to cut our losses on the F35 program. Drop the Naval and Marine versions (the marine version is the one with the hover fan) and give them more updated F18s. Then focus on getting the AF version operational.

But, I think that the 2 birds one stone approach for the carrier fleet is to develop a generation of UAV fighters and bombers. They could fly off of much smaller carriers.

As impossible as it was to convince established opinion in 1930-something that battleships were out and aircraft carriers were the immediate future, established interests cannot conceive of how vulnerable and ultimately useless carrier groups have already become.

How much of that missle technology found its way into ChiCom hands from classified sources during the Clinton years?

Carriers are what the battleships used to be - vessels for showing the flag. And extremely vulnerable to boot. There are all manner of superior ways of attacking the target, but none of them are as impressive as CBGs. Submarines (with the use of cruise missiles, perhaps) are one of them; so are small, heavily automated ships sometimes called "arsenal ships". So are huge swarms of tiny vessels each with one missile launcher.

But much as was the case with MTBs in WWII, no naval officer likes the alternatives. Why? Because it offers less clarity in career progression. Commanding a carrier is quite an honour, indeed; commanding a swarm of Zodiacs, not quite so much.

A carrier group contains inherent logistical weight to respond effectively to almost any conceivable natural or unnatural disaster. Bandages, fresh water, or bombs, it's all in the same package.

If the ChiComs have developed this system to kill carriers, and it works even half the time, maybe the Chinese haven't thought it all the way through of what options are left if carriers are no longer effective?

We have nukes and GPS and drones, yet we still train our troops how to fight with bare hands or a knife. There are good reasons for why we do that, and they are strategic in nature.

Carriers are for using force against enemies that don't have an air force or missile threat.
I'm retired Navy Air and I knew in the 1950s that carriers were only useful against enemies that can't get to them. We used to have mock battles between CBGs. Typically, both carriers lasted about and hour before both sides had delivered successful attacks. When I brought this issue up, I was told that such talk could shorten my career. During Vietnam our carriers operated unopposed and the flight decks were rimmed with bombs, rockets, and other flammables. One pass by a low flyer dropping a couple of napalm cannisters could have easily put the ship out of operation for months. This has been the gorillla in the room for all these years. Fletcher Christian is correct: "But much as was the case with MTBs in WWII, no naval officer likes the alternatives. Why? Because it offers less clarity in career progression."

Any carrier combat operations today require on board tankers and longer range Air Force tankers to get the jets to the target and back. If the carriers have to stand off too far to avoid being attacked, they are essentially dearmed. We need a few for showing the flag where there is weak oppostion and for disaster response. IMO, we don't need the number that the Navy brass considers "indispensable."

Subs, ICBMs, long range strategic bombers are still our "big sticks."

How much of that missle technology found its way into ChiCom hands from classified sources during the Clinton years?

That information is classified.

Further to this, and for what it's worth: There is an old game called Trillion Credit Squadron, which sets out rules for space naval combat in the universe of the even older SF pen-and-paper role playing game Traveller. It also included rules for designing and "building" ships and fleets, and then having them compete against each other in simulated battle. The name refers to the budget. Ships ranging all the way from small fighters to million-ton planet smashers could be designed.

One year, someone decided to use a computer for the design process and also to run simulations pitting one fleet design against another, and the people doing it took the winning design to a national competition. It comprised absolutely enormous swarms of individually weak ships, and everyone laughed at it - and every one of the people doing the laughing lost against it.

This was repeated for five years in succession, with various changes in background tech level and so on. The wasp swarm won every time against the behemoths, and eventually the contest stopped because nobody was having any fun.

I strongly suspect that wargamers have done this with wet-navy designs as well - but of course nobody takes hobby wargamers seriously. And, equally of course, people who wargame as part of their profession have careers at stake.

IMO, we don't need the number [of carriers] that the Navy brass considers "indispensable."

Back in the '80s, CNO commissioned a consultant to do a study on the number of carriers the Navy needed.

"How many carriers can you provide justification for?"

"Tell me how many carriers you *want* and I'll justify them."

It comprised absolutely enormous swarms of individually weak ships, and everyone laughed at it - and every one of the people doing the laughing lost against it.

The Navy sold the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) to Congress on that basis. An LCS flotilla was supposed to be composed of small, fast, stealthy, WWII corvette-sized ships, capable of traversing shallow waters (the littorals), each configured with an armament suite to complement the others in the flotilla -- either anti-air, anti-sub, anti-missile, anti-ship, mine countermeasures, etc., and all reconfigurable at-sea.

What the Navy *specified* to the shipbuilders was a ship the size of a WWII light cruiser, with somewhat-stealthy hull, a single gun for self-defense or naval gunfire inshore support, a couple of Phalanx mounts and Griffin missile launchers for close-in counter air, and an arsenal of containerized missile packages, which are each so heavy that they can only be installed/extracted at a shore installation.