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Good stuff. I don't understand americans obsession with "confronting" china (it's so far removed from any real threat against the US), but I certainly don't begrudge them for looking for a quid pro quo with us europeans.
Quick question re: drone swarm versus fighter jet. One of the popular discussions between amateur war nerds these last years is the question of aircraft carriers, with the ‘contrarian’ side postulating that in the event of a peer conflict, all those deployed will be sunk pretty much immediately, and the ‘conventional’ side maintaining that surely no, the navy knows what it’s doing. This new paradigm sounds like the former are correct.
As far as carriers are concerned, drones themselves are not the issue. That doesn't make carriers a good idea, but the unique ability of carrier makes them less vulnerable to drones than land-based aircraft. The cost efficient case of a drone vs jet is a drone that is walked by a dude in range of the airfield. That sort of drone wouldn't be able to fly from the coast to the carrier group.
At the end of the day, a carrier is a mobile airfield. Carrier aircraft are significant advantages because the airfield moves great ranges, not because the aircraft does. When aiming for the same metric of success, land-based aircraft can almost always out-perform a carrier aircraft thanks to not having the carrier takeoff/landing restrictions. Carriers beat land-based airpower because the basing advantage is just worth more, which is why Chinese anti-carrier ballistic missiles aren't depending on PRC airpower.
The conceptual problem with carriers is that those mobile airfields aren't as unfindable as they once were. As the number of satellites up high looking down increases, it gets easier and easier to find them. The proliferation of detection systems doesn't help. While the Chinese carrier-killer missiles may or may not actually work as propagandized, carriers have always been vulnerable to massed land-based attacks if they could be found. Drones would be a part of that, but fundamentally the issue is detection.
The question mark for the war nerds shouldn't be whether carriers are useful- they quite demonstratable have been- but rather if manned aircraft carriers are still the way of the future.
Drone carriers- as in, carriers that only hold unmanned drones, not ships that themselves are unmanned- are an interesting possibility, and while there are still a lot of conceptual and technological issues to consider, they could be substantially cheaper (and thus far closer to within range of mid-tier countries) while keeping the advantage of the mobile airfield.
It was less about using drones versus carriers, more , ‘missiles are to carriers what drones are to planes’, the offense getting way too cheap for carriers to stay viable . Although I suppose a missile is a kind of rocket-powered drone, and boat drones and sub drones are also a threat. The Carrier started off all ATT no DEF, and as the things that could kill it got smaller and faster and cheaper, its ATT was no longer a DEF; every fly can kill it but it can’t kill every fly.
‘Not as unfindable as they once were’ , that’s very very euphemistically put, no? Unhideable, more like. I don’t mean just PRC killer missiles. Iran or Sweden could sink them. Way below peer.
Ah, I misunderstood you. If the argument is that missiles are making carriers obsolete, I generally disagree, particularly if the assessment is based on carriers being 'no DEF'. Carrier groups have one of the strongest defenses available, which is the ability to move at a respectable speed. There's a reason nearly every 'the carrier was sunk!' wargame has to move the carrier into range of the enemy threat, and/or keep it stuck in a certain location.
'Carriers are expensive, missiles are cheap,' itself is just one framing. The script can be flipped around with 'cruise missiles are expensive, and airstrikes are cheap.' An all-missile force seems like a grand cost-efficient idea until the war goes on for more than a week, and the realities that missiles are also expensive that sustainment of operations is its own virtue / necessity. We already saw this is Ukraine, where Russia had to transition to kamikaze drones as a substitute for cruise missiles because it burned through most of its strategic stockpiles of cruise missiles in a matter of weeks and then months. Hence why artillery, far less capable, has dominated. There is a cost curve comparison where- over time and strikes- the carrier wing starts to become more and more cost-efficient than the cruise-missile-reliant alternative.
Much of the cost of carriers is on the issue of sustainment. As a result, the cost comparison of carriers to missiles isn't the cost per unit, but the cost for however many missiles one believes it would take to achieve the same effect. A carrier is a lot of eggs in a single basket, and critiques that it is too many eggs in one basket are conceptually valid, but the comparison is with how many other baskets would be needed for the same number of egg deliveries, not the cost of the basket to crack it, if that makes sense.
No, not really. The difficulty of fighting carriers has never been that they were actually unfindable, or even well hidden, but rather that the difficulty of finding them and then getting weapons to bear before they moved off again. Naturally if you require the carrier to be in a functionally inland sea in range of the enemy's most intense detection and fires capability, it is easy to find and destroy them.
The question is why you would expect them to be there in the first place after a war started, and what is supposed to threaten them while they are where they would go.
Unlike Millenium Challenge 2002, the exercise that 'proved' the vulnerability of carriers to small craft, most navies don't get teleported into point-blank range of ships that physically couldn't stay afloat with the weapons strapped to them and then have their defenses turned off. Nor do motorcycle couriers actually works as well for managing command and control- including relaying of targeting information. It would certainly be interesting to see an Iranian swarm attack into the Indian Ocean, but it wouldn't be particularly threatening.
Similarly, diesel submarines have been killing carriers since WW2, but their limitations in range and speed are just that- limitations. When the diesel submarine in quiet mode goes maybe 10 knots an hour, but a carrier can sail around 30 knots an hour while striking 1000 miles away, what you have is an ambush threat, not a roaming hunter. And if diesel submarines are in quiet mode and submerged to avoid detection, how they are receiving the targetting updates of where to go is, well, a non-trivial question.
There is (considerably) more to the thinking behind this, but the core point is that WW2 technology has been sinking carriers since WW2, so overall peer capabilities has never been the requirement, even as the primary defense of carriers is their mobility, not being totally hidden.
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