Carriers are slow moving, high value targets for hypersonic missiles.
The Navy currently has no effective defense against these so the only reasonable assumption is that carriers will be lost in very short order in the event of a major conflict.
Apparently, the Navy is still working to ignore this inconvenient fact.
> Carriers are slow moving, high value targets for hypersonic missiles.
That's a BIG maybe. Hitting a ship with a missile is way harder than anyone would think. I mean it's a floating city right? You could get the missile within a few miles of a carrier, but hitting the carrier itself is nearly impossible. Radar? Good luck with the ECM and discriminating which ship is the carrier. Optical? Laser defenses and line of sight limitations for low altitude hypersonic missiles. MITM? Good luck maintaining communications when you have a couple of gigawatts of communication jamming running.
Then, if you actually hit the carrier, the damage control on those things is excellent. We aren't talking about the Moskova here. These guys are well trained and perfectly capable of keeping those things running with huge holes in them. You are trying to sink a floating city after all. You're going to need to punch big holes and a whole lot of them.
So you maybe hit it, and maybe you sink one carrier. Now you have 10 of its friends heading to your country at 30 knots and their Air Force friends flying black things that go bump in the night that you can barely see coming and those are the things that are generally known from 30 years and a couple trillion dollars in research ago. Because sinking a carrier isn't one of those things you can sweep under the rug and deal with the sanctions. You aren't invading Ukraine, you are declaring war on the United States.
No. Satellite, GPS and visual camera guidance from a high attack angle. Hitting a big slow moving ship is way easier than hitting a small hypersonic missile.
Now you have 10 of its friends heading to your country at 30 knots
10 fresh new, indefensible, high value targets coming your way. Scary!
A more likely response is 10 targets moving out of range at 30 knots. I'm no admiral but my knee jerk reaction to a proven vulnerability wouldn't be to sacrifice the entire fleet.
It's one thing to hit a drone, it's another to hit a carrier group.
You can't see because of laser and IR jammers, you can't use radar or datalink because of ECM. It's moving at weird angles because you launched missiles and put them on alert making your targeting solutions off by thousands of feet. Finally, you have all the secret BS that Lockheed Martin has been spending trillions of dollars on that no one knows about.
That's IF the missiles are even able to position correctly with Chinese INS systems and GPS jammers running at full blast.
Just saying, the fat lady has not sung for carriers yet!
There are potential answers to this, like lasers on ships for point defense and on UAV's for area defense. We don't really know what secret projects are running.
Still sending a carrier in an area where such weapons operate looks like a tricky proposition.
No, they are not. Your own link says “allegedly” or “near” wrt to. Chinese and Russian. Zero verification. Breathless claims are just that. We’ll see probbly see fusion before a self-sustaining hypersonic weapon.
Ballistic missiles posing as hyper uberweapons aren’t new. They’re 60 year old tech. The Navy has deployed SM-3, SM-6 and other ABM weapons more than a decade back for that threat.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff disagrees with your assessment.
The top U.S. military officer, General Mark Milley, has provided the first official U.S. confirmation of a Chinese hypersonic weapons test ...
"What we saw was a very significant event of a test of a hypersonic weapon system. And it is very concerning," Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Bloomberg television, in an interview aired on Wednesday [Oct 2021].
You and the Navy can choose to ignore it but all the facts show that carriers are now obsolete weapons of war when deployed against our biggest enemies.
Against hypersonic missiles, the only thing we currently have is "potential".
I can tell you from the physics involved, nothing short of a Star Wars type weapon will work --- either a laser or a particle beam.
And even with such a weapon, it will have to be extremely high power and capable of delivering a knock out blow almost instantaneously at long range. Hypersonic missiles are moving at about 5 miles per second and the flight path is constantly being altered so maintaining an accurate target lock for more than a second will be very challenging. The closer the missile gets, the harder the tracking becomes. And it gets closer very quickly.
If such a system existed (which it doesn't), it and an adequate power supply probably won't fit on a drone.
Frankly, I think an effective solution is decades away. Don't let your kid join the Navy and end up a sitting duck aboard a shiny big target (aka a carrier).
The Navy currently has no effective defense against these so the only reasonable assumption is that carriers will be lost in very short order in the event of a major conflict.
Apparently, the Navy is still working to ignore this inconvenient fact.