Military Aviation > Defence in General

The end of Aircraft Carriers?

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shawn a:
How vulnerable are modern carriers?
Mach 3 sea-skimmers.
Swarming attacks by slower ASMs and aircraft.
Terminally maneuverable ballistic missiles.
Ultra-quiet Diesel-electric submarines.
A few hits on one could mean an inability to launch or recover aircraft. If aircraft in flight could not be recovered somewhere, they're gone for good.
To me, a breached reactor means "abandon ship".
The US Navy's Phalanx seems inadequate to counter swarm attacks or mach 3 missiles.
Opinions,anyone?

AVIATOR:
Aircraft carriers are peacetime ships that passed into wartime operational history when the Shkval torpedo was developed by the West's enemies.
You want to try telling the Indians that on their defence forum. India is just getting into aircraft carriers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VA-111_Shkval

shawn a:
I'd heard of that weapon, but didn't think it fully developed, or in operation yet.  Supposedly, the US Navy is working on supercavitating weapons also.
Good statement, though. I feel carriers are too many eggs in a basket, and an obviously tempting target.
And totally worth any enemy's developmental effort to defeat.

Eldorado82:
the high maintenance cose of that kind of ship can be important in a questions like this. however the capabilities they bring to navy are limitless.. we dont have any aircraft carriers because we don't need them. big countire like Us needs them to be able to attack in every part of the world.

shawn a:
Well, what about the ballistic missile threat?
When fully developed and operational terminally maneuverable ballistic missiles are launched, only the Aegis ships can try to swat them down. There's talk of using other anti-missle missiles, even the AMRAAM, but is the AMRAAM fast enough? How many missiles do those Aegis ships carry, it's probably not a secret, so when they are out of missiles, the enemy should know. I imagine more than one interceptor would be launched at every incoming warhead, thus halving the number of ballistics needed to overwhelm defenses.
The capabilities of a carrier are obvious, and well known, and have been demonstrated repeatedly.
Right now they are one of the major kingpins of power projection. Is that going to change?
US subs can have lots of cruise missiles to take out fixed ballistic launching sites, but a lot of the "short range" ballistics are mobile--another problem.

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