ggroup2%charon.unm.edu@ariel.unm.edu (CIRT.DEVEL.) (01/23/89)
>What is the reason for having aircraft carriers? Aren't they a total waste >of money? No I don't think so, but you may have other opionions of which you have your right to. >In a global conflict, the aircraft carriers would all be destroyed immediately >by missiles. A missile costs a lot less than an aircraft carrier. Do you realize how many missiles hits it takes to "sink" a Nimitz class aircraft carriers (since that is what is being built right now). I read in a magazine about three years ago that it would take 10 or more lucky hits to make it useless. Consider at the same time that the Soviet version of the anti-ship missile hit about 1 out of every ten missiles. It means that a minimum of 100 missiles must be launched at the aircraft carrier. The Soviets would be hard pressed to get one hundred missiles of during a single attack. We haven't even mentioned the defense systems of carrier task force. >In a conflict against an industrialized nation, like Argentina, capital ships >must stay far away to avoid being hit by a Silkworm or an Exocet or even a >torpedo. Must they really, do have any idea what the effective combat radius a aircraft carrier task force has? Granted they were not "capital" ships, but the ships in the Persan gulf did not move away from the missiles and they are more vulernable to the missiles. >Only in a conflict with a third-world nation, like Lebanon or Libya, can >sea power have any effect. And the same effect can be provided by long-range >land-based bombers. In the assassination attempt against Khadaffi, our land- >based bombers actually had enough range to detour around the Iberian >peninsula and fly over the Strait of Gibraltar! Yeah, but the pilots were not in the best of conditiions when they got there, as the short hop the carrier pilots had to make. Think about we only have 2 (maybe three) wings of F-111's to do this with. I can think of any other plane other than B-52's or B-1's in the US Air Forces inventory that has the range to that, and I wouldn't call that a "surgical" or tatical strike. Which is what the FB-111's were doing. >Aren't capital ships and carrier battle groups as obsolete as horse cavalry? >Don't people remember HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales? How about >HMS Sheffield and Gen. Belgrano? Do you actually have to send an AEGIS ship >to the bottom in order to prove sea power obsolete? Or would even that >be enough? The HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales were, if I am not wrong, sunk during World War II by aircraft. I cannot recall if they were sunk by land based or carrier based aircraft. But remember the British had a hard time sinking the BB Bismark and they had aircraft there use too. It was the Exocet that sunk the Sheffield, it was the fact of one, the Sheffield was made of a metal compound that caught on fire and two, the antidefense systems on the ship weren't because the British were cutting corners on there budget. Mark Giaquinto | "This time the promise is not ggroup2@charon.unm.edu, ggroup2@charon.uucp | just illusion, I'm heading for 669 Black Hawk Dr NE 87122 | glory, ..." -- LEARNING TO Albquerque, New Mexico | FLY, Emerson, Lake and Powell.
Mark Moraes <moraes@csri.toronto.edu> (01/24/89)
Sinking an aircraft carrier may not be necessary to neutralize it's capability - destroying the catapults at the front could keep it out of action for quite a while (if the damage was repairable) If the E-2s require the catapults as well (don't think so, but I'm not sure) then the effective protection to the battle group would also be decreased significantly.
military@cbnews.ATT.COM (William B. Thacker) (01/25/89)
>Do you realize how many missiles hits it takes to "sink" a Nimitz >class aircraft carriers (since that is what is being built right now). >I read in a magazine about three years ago that it would take 10 or >more lucky hits to make it useless... That is the official US Navy opinion. You can find people who will raise serious doubts about that. (A single Exocet hit wasn't supposed to gut the Sheffield either.) The matter has not been tested on modern supercarriers. Historically, one or two kamikaze hits often sufficed to disable the flight deck -- without which the carrier is useless -- until major repairs could be done, although those carriers were not precisely comparable with modern ones. >It was the Exocet that sunk the Sheffield, it was the fact of one, the >Sheffield was made of a metal compound that caught on fire... Sorry, not true. Many people have criticized aluminum superstructures, which are known to be a fire hazard, in the wake of the Sheffield's loss... but the Sheffield was steel. Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu