Modern Carrier Battle Group..Strategies and Tactics

[Ambivalent]

Re: How Do You Sink A Carrier?

OTH radars have been making a comeback. I know for sure the PLA has them and is building more. The US Coast Guard uses them to routinely monitor for drug smugglers. Targeting is obviously a non-issue, but in its role of early warning an OTH radar does quitely nicely, and at long range. Any suspicious target traveling at high speed could be further localized by KJ-2000. Actually any target at all could be further localized by KJ-2000. The problem with the Russians was that they had difficulty tracking carrier groups because they were trying to do so on the high seas in several of the world's oceans. The PLAN would not have such lofty goals. The Western Pacific and South China Sea would be sufficient. A KJ-2000 flying along China's eastern coastline under the cover of fighter CAP and SAM protection could detect incoming ships out to several hundred km.



This is assuming an ASBM carrying a simple HE warhead. There was an interesting discussion at CDF about using submunitions or dispersed DU/tungsten penetrators, which would increase the odds of a hit or partial hits. Enough near misses and you get a full hit. The idea wouldn't be to sink the carrier so much as to make the flight deck inoperable (and maybe start some fires). And in the case of penetrators, the hangar and the decks below that as well.

The US OTH radars have a scan frequency of 18 minutes. All they tell you is something might be out there. They do not classify the contact, and the USN is adept in defeating these with countermeasures. They are good against drug smuggling vessels only because they don't use countermeasures and are not checked in with nautical authorities. The radar picks out a contact that is not listed as a commercial vessel on a known commercial route, so the Coasties go out to have a look see. Btw, it is not all done by the OTH radar, a lot of other patrol assets are required. The same would be true trying to find a carrier. The USN discovered simply firing the CIWS could snow over the radars on a Bear and make them useless. Old Admiral Ace Lyons discovered this in exercises with maritime patrol B-52's, and their search radars were better than the Soviet equivalent.

Submunitions against a carrier would be pretty useless. Their flight decks are 95-100 mm thick HY-100 steel. To sink a carrier requires heavy ordinance, multiple hits by 1000 kg or heavier bombs or multiple torpedo hits. One 1000 kg bomb won't begin to sink a carrier. It would not even put it out of service for very long. You might be surprised, but there are specific ( classified ) requirements for the number and types of ordinance hits a carrier must absorb and still be able to fight. These are far from easy to sink. A lot of lessons were learned from WWII that are incorporated into these ships. Several 500 kg bombs detonated on the deck of Forrestal, plus numerous 250 kg bombs and rockets and missiles galore, and Forrestal did not have modern foam fire fighting systems for the flight or hanger decks, nor did that class have the surivability features built into the Kennedy and Nimitz classes. Carrier's are not easily replaceable so they are designed to take damage and still fly their air wings. Go back to WWII and learn how quickly many Kamakazi hits were patched over. We hear about the few that disabled carriers, but there were a lot of Kamakazi hits that did not take carriers out of combat. Most in fact did not. The majority were resolved with deck patches and the ships resumed operations in a matter of hours or less.

 

[bd popeye]

Re: How Do You Sink A Carrier?

We hear about the few that disabled carriers, but there were a lot of Kamakazi hits that did not take carriers out of combat. Most in fact did not.

True . Of the Essex class only the USS Franklin CV-13 & USS Bunker Hill CV-17 were damaged to the point they had to retire to the US. Both ships were repaired but not in time for further duty in the Pacific War. Bunker Hill and Franklin were the only Essex-class ships never recommissioned after World War II.

As for the FID aka Forrestal after the disaster of 29 July 1967 she returned to Subic Bay R.P. for emergency repairs then she immediately returned to the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, Portsmouth VA for an extensive overhaul. She served the USN until 1993.

 

[Student]

Re: How Do You Sink A Carrier?

In my opinion multiple air launched cruise missiles may do the trick of sinking the carriers. ALCM are more like kamikaze flown planes but with more precision and devistation. Just a thought.

 

[Wolverine]

Re: How Do You Sink A Carrier?

The US OTH radars have a scan frequency of 18 minutes. All they tell you is something might be out there. They do not classify the contact, and the USN is adept in defeating these with countermeasures. They are good against drug smuggling vessels only because they don't use countermeasures and are not checked in with nautical authorities. The radar picks out a contact that is not listed as a commercial vessel on a known commercial route, so the Coasties go out to have a look see. Btw, it is not all done by the OTH radar, a lot of other patrol assets are required. The same would be true trying to find a carrier. The USN discovered simply firing the CIWS could snow over the radars on a Bear and make them useless. Old Admiral Ace Lyons discovered this in exercises with maritime patrol B-52's, and their search radars were better than the Soviet equivalent.

It's interesting that you talk about EMCON and in the very next post portray the USN as emitting all sorts of ECM to try and simultaneously spoof Chinese OTH, AEW/C and radarsats. And of course the USN will conveniently have a nice fat cloud parked over both Guam and Yokosuka that all of a sudden begin moving towards the Chinese coastline at roughly 35 knots precisely when the USN puts to sea to conveniently shield carrier groups from Chinese E/O sats. Meanwhile the CIWS are firing nonstop all the way to China so as to provide additional spoofing.

Submunitions against a carrier would be pretty useless. Their flight decks are 95-100 mm thick HY-100 steel. To sink a carrier requires heavy ordinance, multiple hits by 1000 kg or heavier bombs or multiple torpedo hits. One 1000 kg bomb won't begin to sink a carrier. It would not even put it out of service for very long. You might be surprised, but there are specific ( classified ) requirements for the number and types of ordinance hits a carrier must absorb and still be able to fight. These are far from easy to sink. A lot of lessons were learned from WWII that are incorporated into these ships. Several 500 kg bombs detonated on the deck of Forrestal, plus numerous 250 kg bombs and rockets and missiles galore, and Forrestal did not have modern foam fire fighting systems for the flight or hanger decks, nor did that class have the surivability features built into the Kennedy and Nimitz classes. Carrier's are not easily replaceable so they are designed to take damage and still fly their air wings. Go back to WWII and learn how quickly many Kamakazi hits were patched over. We hear about the few that disabled carriers, but there were a lot of Kamakazi hits that did not take carriers out of combat. Most in fact did not. The majority were resolved with deck patches and the ships resumed operations in a matter of hours or less.

Maybe you should go back and read my post again before you post a response. Talking about beating a straw man to death, this one takes the cake. I already said the point wasn't to sink the carrier. At least with submunitions. While they certainly will not hole the deck, they will destroy planes, people, vehicles, equipment, radars and other soft targets. Try replacing those in a few hours.

With respect to the thickness of the flight deck and penetrators, according to some guy over at CDF, the armored portion of the flight deck actually runs 15" thick. Your average 5kg 1 km/sec 120mm APFSDS round can already penetrate several hundred mm. These penetrators can be 10 or 20kg or even heavier, and they are traveling at 5-7km/sec. They WILL penetrate the flight deck like it was butter, pass through the hangar and any planes, people, bombs and equipment on the way down, and into the decks below. Maybe all the way into the ocean. If one of them gets lucky it will penetrate into the nuclear reactor. Kaboom.

 

[bd popeye]

Re: How Do You Sink A Carrier?

In my opinion multiple air launched cruise missiles may do the trick of sinking the carriers. ALCM are more like kamikaze flown planes but with more precision and devistation. Just a thought.

Really? What make you make that statement?? What type ship of that size has ever been sunk by conventional weapons? Name the place and what sort of action was taken to sink a ship via conventional air launched weapons the size of an CV.

Did you know that in May 2005 the retired USN CV ex-USS America CV-66 was towed to sea to be sunk by conventional weapons...I posted this in this very thread on 10.21.2006

On May 14th, 2005 the USN sank the USS America(CV-66) somewhere out in the Atlantic. Although it is classified what sort of action was taken by the USN to attack the ship this is know. After multiplie attcks the America was finally sunk by pre-set internal munitions as set by the USN EOD teams.

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The experiments lasted approximately four weeks. The Navy battered America with explosives, both underwater and above the surface, watching from afar and through monitoring devices placed on the vessel. These explosions were designed to simulate attacks by torpedoes, cruise missiles and perhaps a small boat suicide attack like the one that damaged the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen in 2000.

After the completion of the tests, America was sunk in a controlled scuttling on 14 May 2005 at approximately 1130, although the sinking was not publicized until six days later. At the time, no warship of that size had ever been sunk, and effects were closely monitored; theoretically the tests would reveal data about how supercarriers respond to battle damage. The ship rests about 17,000 ft. below the Atlantic Ocean surface, roughly 250 miles off the North Carolina coast.

 

[Ambivalent]

Re: How Do You Sink A Carrier?

In my opinion multiple air launched cruise missiles may do the trick of sinking the carriers. ALCM are more like kamikaze flown planes but with more precision and devistation. Just a thought.

The warheads are very small on ALCM's, and the launch platforms must come inside the range of the carrier's air wing to launch these. The Soviets presented the USN with the prospect of hundreds of incoming bombers and missiles from several quadrants at once, the reason for the development of Aegis and VLS. A cruise missile would not begin to match the damage a 2000 lb iron bomb can do. I think for any nation to assure sinking a US carrier, it must count on the ability to put big armor piercing iron bomb on target in quantity. By quantity, study the amount of ordinance it took to sink the Yamato and Musahsi. It will take at least that to sink a modern CVN due to the extreme compartmentation and the arrangement of armor, magazines, fuel bunkers and void spaces used. An enemy navy would have to defeat the carriers air wing badly and disable most of it's escorts to be able to deliver the quantity of ordinance necessary to sink a modern CVN. Not an easy task. A few cruise missile hits will damage a carrier, but they are designed to fight with some damage.

 

[Ambivalent]

Re: How Do You Sink A Carrier?

It's interesting that you talk about EMCON and in the very next post portray the USN as emitting all sorts of ECM to try and simultaneously spoof Chinese OTH, AEW/C and radarsats. And of course the USN will conveniently have a nice fat cloud parked over both Guam and Yokosuka that all of a sudden begin moving towards the Chinese coastline at roughly 35 knots precisely when the USN puts to sea to conveniently shield carrier groups from Chinese E/O sats. Meanwhile the CIWS are firing nonstop all the way to China so as to provide additional spoofing.


Maybe you should go back and read my post again before you post a response. Talking about beating a straw man to death, this one takes the cake. I already said the point wasn't to sink the carrier. At least with submunitions. While they certainly will not hole the deck, they will destroy planes, people, vehicles, equipment, radars and other soft targets. Try replacing those in a few hours.

With respect to the thickness of the flight deck and penetrators, according to some guy over at CDF, the armored portion of the flight deck actually runs 15" thick. Your average 5kg 1 km/sec 120mm APFSDS round can already penetrate several hundred mm. These penetrators can be 10 or 20kg or even heavier, and they are traveling at 5-7km/sec. They WILL penetrate the flight deck like it was butter, pass through the hangar and any planes, people, bombs and equipment on the way down, and into the decks below. Maybe all the way into the ocean. If one of them gets lucky it will penetrate into the nuclear reactor. Kaboom.

How do you propose to make a submunitions dispenser operate at 5-7 km/sec? That's Mach 14.58 to Mach 20.41. The standard US military submunitions dispenser, the Alliant Tech Systems Tactical Munitions Dispenser operates between 370 and 1300 km/hr ( Mach 0.3 to Mach 1.05 ) and at climb angles of up to 30 degrees and dive angles up to 60 degrees. Dispensing submunitions requires the skin of the bus to come off, creating enormous aerodynamic instability, and the resulting torque is used to eject all the submunitions at once. I don't see a carriage submunition achieving the sorts of speeds you propose. Artillery shells can also carry submunitions but their deployment speeds are far below the typical Mach 5 muzle velocity.
Guided submunitions require parachutes or an inflatable balute to stabilize them and to orient the seekers towards the target areas so they can find a target. How then to accelerate this notional penetrator ( with a seeker in the nose how will it penetrate anything ? ) to the speeds you propose? Or are you proposing dumb penetrators? How then to aim a dumb, unguided submunition? Have you ever seen a carriage munition deploy it's submunitions? The skin peels off and the submunitions are scattered randomly by the sudden instability of the bus. The bus tumbles and all these bomblets come out in every direction tumbling and spinning. What mechanism do you have to stabilize and aim these penetrators, and then get them up to the speeds you propose. Your proposal has too many unanswered questions.

 

[Wolverine]

Re: How Do You Sink A Carrier?

How do you propose to make a submunitions dispenser operate at 5-7 km/sec? That's Mach 14.58 to Mach 20.41. The standard US military submunitions dispenser, the Alliant Tech Systems Tactical Munitions Dispenser operates between 370 and 1300 km/hr ( Mach 0.3 to Mach 1.05 ) and at climb angles of up to 30 degrees and dive angles up to 60 degrees. Dispensing submunitions requires the skin of the bus to come off, creating enormous aerodynamic instability, and the resulting torque is used to eject all the submunitions at once. I don't see a carriage submunition achieving the sorts of speeds you propose. Artillery shells can also carry submunitions but their deployment speeds are far below the typical Mach 5 muzle velocity.
Guided submunitions require parachutes or an inflatable balute to stabilize them and to orient the seekers towards the target areas so they can find a target. How then to accelerate this notional penetrator ( with a seeker in the nose how will it penetrate anything ? ) to the speeds you propose? Or are you proposing dumb penetrators? How then to aim a dumb, unguided submunition? Have you ever seen a carriage munition deploy it's submunitions? The skin peels off and the submunitions are scattered randomly by the sudden instability of the bus. The bus tumbles and all these bomblets come out in every direction tumbling and spinning. What mechanism do you have to stabilize and aim these penetrators, and then get them up to the speeds you propose. Your proposal has too many unanswered questions.

We are talking about an ASBM. What additional acceleration do I need? 5-7km/sec is reentry speed for an MRBM with a range of ~3,000km. Targeting is provided by the ASBM until submunition release. The point of submunitions/penetrators is to provide an area effect and thereby ease the targeting burden of the ASBM, which no doubt will still pose a challenge regardless. I had thought you were following along but I guess not.

And let's face it, neither of us are munitions experts, so the fact that you don't know how to disperse submunitions at 5-7km/s has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not it can actually be done. The skin of the missile would not have to peel off, the munitions doors could be ejected. The centrifugal force of the spinning missile could then disperse submunitions to a target area the size of which would determined by the rate of spin, how long they had been dispersed prior to impact, etc. There is absolutely no reason for the missile body itself to be tumbling. It could not survive any kind of tumbling at those speeds anyway. In the case of penetrators, fins shaped to impart spin to the penetrators themselves could be deployed for additional stability. Any number of solutions could be used. It's not that hard.

 

[Engineer]

How do you propose to make a submunitions dispenser operate at 5-7 km/sec? That's Mach 14.58 to Mach 20.41. The standard US military submunitions dispenser, the Alliant Tech Systems Tactical Munitions Dispenser operates between 370 and 1300 km/hr ( Mach 0.3 to Mach 1.05 ) and at climb angles of up to 30 degrees and dive angles up to 60 degrees.

I like how this guy points to a system that doesn't work at 5-7km/sec, then argues that it is not possible for other systems to function at such velocity.

Right, so in an analogy, a bus is very aerodynamics inefficient, so therefore no land vehicles could travel at the speed of sound? :roll:

with a seeker in the nose how will it penetrate anything ?

If a munition with a seeker in those nose couldn't penetrate anything, how did all those LGB and cruise missiles launched by the US penetrate buildings?

It's interesting that you talk about EMCON and in the very next post portray the USN as emitting all sorts of ECM to try and simultaneously spoof Chinese OTH, AEW/C and radarsats. And of course the USN will conveniently have a nice fat cloud parked over both Guam and Yokosuka that all of a sudden begin moving towards the Chinese coastline at roughly 35 knots precisely when the USN puts to sea to conveniently shield carrier groups from Chinese E/O sats. Meanwhile the CIWS are firing nonstop all the way to China so as to provide additional spoofing.

Of course the USN can remain EMCON and at the same time emit all sorts of EM signals. Why is that possible? It is the US, that's why.

But in a hypothetical scenario, with China using the same electronic warfare technologies and applying the identical tactics, nothing would work against the USN. There will be a thousand reasons explaining how satellites can see through clouds, how data-link can't be spoofed, how decoys can be discerned from actual targets, how units can still be detected even when operating under EMCON, etc. Why? It is the US, that's why.

Have you not notice this pattern yet?

 

[Totoro]

Re: How Do You Sink A Carrier?

No one would really search for a ship with an optical sensor. If one is going to use satellites to try to search for ships, they'd use radar, probably one working in S band, which would be basically immune to any sort of weather/cloud/rain/whatever. Operating from an altitude of some 250 km, search area could be decent enough, close to 500 km in width. Detecting and classifying targets from such distance would not be a problem. Of course, the reason why no one is really using satellites for such missions is cost. Soviets could have hoped for short periods where they'd launch a certain number of satellites and still cover only several parts of the world's ocean. And keeping a heavy satellite in such low orbits lasts a short time, perhaps a few months. Furthermore, its orbit doesnt really allow it a lot of freedom. Sure, one could use thrusters more, but then its life expectancy, as seen in soviet us-a satellites, could drop even more, to mere weeks.

If one would desire a long term near continuous coverage of, say, 1000 km wide swath of ocean, with 30 minute gaps between satellite passes, they'd have to use literally over 330 satellites. Like I said, short term coverage would be possible with fewer satellites, with as little as 6, but then their lifetime would drop dramatically as they'd have to be reorbited with each revolution, and they'd become more or less one time, single mission, surveillance platforms.

It also has to be said that taking down a satellite at 250 km is relatively easy feat, though it does offer some theoretically nifty political possibilities for certain countries.