Volkov

At first, the Aircraft carrier had no competition for 100+ mile range firepower, then came the extremely long ranged ship based cruise missile, which would match a Carrier's range with ease. But these missiles are expensive. Now there is the railgun, which can match the range and firepower of an aircraft carrier, and fire a far cheaper payload that is far harder to intercept. With drones, satellites, and radar sets feeding targeting data for Railgun equipped ships and land-bourne artillery, you can match the accuracy, firepower, and range of any aircraft carrier. I can see naval battles descending into a contest of who can hit who first. Or more correctly, become even more like this. Now, an Aircraft Carrier is a big, fragile target, in other words, it's an easy target for a barrage of railgun shells screaming towards it at hypersonic speeds and hit with more force than a tomahawk missile for a fairly small shell.

What do you think?

diddyriddick

The more I learn about naval matters, the more I'm convinced that the US(and to a lesser extent the UK and France) don't keep carriers for their intrinsic military value; they keep them for pure power projection. They've arguably been obsolete since the advent of nuclear power for subs, and sea-launched cruise missiles.

Cicero

I have had similar thoughts. Also, there is so much money, and prestige tied up in them. Generals and Admirals always fight the last war and the last world war against a formidable opponent the air craft carrier was king.

I will check into a naval forum that I joined and see what they have to say.

Volkov

Let's say I'm in command of a nation, alliance, megacorporation, or alien invader with three times the economic, industrial, mineral, agricultural, scientific, technological, manpower, energy space, nuclear, and military resources when compared the united states and war has been declared. Let's say this nation is in the middle of the pacific ocean....and is named......err......The...Empire of....Hypothetical....istahn...land...burg...ville ....grad...ia...

For the cost of one U.S carrier group, I could build several railgun equipped cruisers, destroyers and escort subs. With a spy satellite up and a reasonable guess as to the carrier's location provided by radar, I could find it, then send a barrage of long range supersonic anti-ship missiles and railguns. None of the Carrier group's defenses will defend it from the railgun shells, as they are far too small and are moving far too fast for their defenses to do anything but sit there and cry.

Enough missiles will bypass to wreck the carrier on their own, but combined with the railgun barrage, the carrier is more or less doomed. Once the carrier group sees their centerpiece go into the abyss in flames, their morale will be broken, and the remaining surface ships will be easy pickings for further railgun and supersonic missile bombardment. The submarines can be hunted down by helicopters.

I will send this fleet to join up with another fleet (let's assume I have one of these groups for every carrier the U.S has) which will repeat this tactic with every single carrier, with more and more fleets linking up until the last carrier the U.S has is sorely outnumbered and outgunned and is sent to Davy Jones's locker. Now that the U.S's navy is paralyzed, I can freely hunt down those pesky submarines and then shell all coastal cities, nuclear missile silos, and bases until washington starts waving the white flag.

Once at the table, America would be forced to give up it's offshore bases. It will disarm itself of all remaining nuclear weapons, it will be prohibited from building any more submarines or any ship larger than a corvette, and it will only be allowed 100 ships in it's navy. It will be prohibited from building any ballistic missiles, strategic bombers, and will require permission to launch any further satellites and it will be forced to check every commercially produced Movie, TV show, Video game, Novel, Advertisement, Music Album, or other entertainment media for quality before releasing them to the global market.

I won't force them to pay war reperations and will help them rebuild their nation.

Of course, there is no nation like this around, and the E.U has some ways to go before catching up to America militarily. But it was a nice thought exercise.

Nick

What would these railgun ships be like? Small and fast like destroyers or big and heavily armored like battleships?

Son of Cathal

I imagine they would require a fairly large power supply to whether the Navy can mount this power supply on smaller ships or not will be the question.

I'm with Diddy about the true reasoning behind the maintaining of the US carriers. Apparently there is a poster in the US Admiralty that says soemthing like "Put (insert surface area of Aircraft Carrier here) of US soil anywhere in the world". Pretty much self explanatory

Son of Cathal

Here's an interesting article for the War Nerd. Personally I find this guy to be biased in his opinion, he really has it in for carriers but it's still an interesting article:

http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd...iers-will-die/

Cicero

Yes, I have read his stuff before. Biased, yes, but I do see some truth in what he says.... mainly that the current military industrial complex is making billions on carriers and in their best interest for this to continue.

Volkov

4 square miles of what is the modern day equivalent of target practice. One good sized metal projectile screaming into it at mach 15 or so should sink it.

Now If I were to sink carrier group after carrier group with the method I suggested, how do you think the military brass would react?

Andriko

I think Carriers have been fairly suseptable to silent subs for along time aswell. In a purley defensive war against the US, any country with decent sub and anti-air capability will render them essenstially impotent, and anti-air weaponary is alot cheaper then a massive airforce.

Ofcourse, Dreadnaughts and battleships were prestige only things by 1900 aswell, so there is a pattern for this sort of thing. Carriers are fine if all you need to do is run air strikes against a weak enemy, but in full modern warfare I can't see how usefull they would be anymore.