New satellite imagery has shown that China may have started construction on a new aircraft carrier. This would be their second one, in addition to refurbished Soviet-era flattop they finished sea trials with last year. When the construction is finished, it’ll be China’s first carrier made in their country. But images leaked from The National Interest shows that it doesn’t look very much like a carrier at all, which is to be expected, considering that China doesn’t have the experience or skill to make anything like modern U.S. carriers. Perhaps this is why they’re so interested in hacking American intelligence.
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Anthony Louis Passanisi contrary to popular belief, the reason the battleships were phased out was because the U.S. carriers based from Pearl Harbor were at sea on December 7th, 1941. We had to use what we had and we had aircraft carriers and subs but not many battleships.
If you look at historical battleships like Tirpitz, Bismark, Yamato, Musashi, they all took a ridiculous amount of air power to take out. In contrast, many carriers were lost by smaller groups of aircraft such as on the Battle of the Coral Sea and to a similar degree in the Battle of Midway.
The U.S. Simply did not have the ships to be a battleship-centric navy in WWII, and hence, our doctrine is still influenced by that. Our fleets are based on large aircraft carriers carrying short range fighters firing even shorter range missiles at other ships.
In contrast, The Soviet Union did not have many battleships in WWII and no carriers. Their fleets were based mainly on smaller surface combatants. Because of this, they focused on putting more powerful weapons on their ships after WWII and increasing their engagement range with the rise of the missile era.
Battleships faded out because the anti ship role had mainly fallen to submarines (the real killer of large surface combatants) and to a lesser degree aircraft (which get the job done at the cost of high aircraft attrition). The naval artillery support role of the battleships has been left mainly unattended. Smaller surface combatants can provide a degree of gunfire support, and aircraft and missiles fill the role as well (at an exponentially higher cost).
Also, it is very telling testament to an aircraft carriers vulnerabilies to anything when t has to be surrounded by a small fleet of up to a dozen ships to protect it.
As Gregory Purcell pointed out, the era of carriers is almost over. Many have speculated that the Ford Class carriers will be the last large carriers ever built by the U.S. Long range cruise missiles can engage a carrier beyond the range of its air wing and long range SAMs can engage the air wing before they are within firing range. More powerful systems like the P-800 can effectively engage carriers with a high degree of accuracy and bypass most of the ships defenses.
Submarines have repeatedly been shown capable of sinking carriers as well. More exotic systems like the DF-21D force the carrier to standoff thousands of miles, meaning it’s airplane shave to fly for hours with multiple refuelings to get the the combat zone.
Getting back to China, a system the DF-21D means that their carriers can act locally with little chance of encountering resistance from American ships. Furthermore, they have a advantage because a U.S. carrier could not keep up a high sortie rate of several hundreds of miles from the combat zone.
The only reason why more countries don’t use carriers is that they don’t need them. Few countries see value in using a multi billion dollar ship to get short range airplanes to a combat area. Most countries have no desire to be that involved and most countries make up for force projection with longer range aircraft and missiles.
It is really quite silly to think that we are the only ones clever enough to build a carrier. China regularly builds much larger ships than carriers, as does South Korea and Japan. And many countries are able to engage in much more intensive engineering projects. It really is just a matter of doctrine.
All made in China means is that Americans will trample each other to buy it on black friday
Contrary to popular belief, there is a huge training gap between shooting at empty Somali boats and engaging a modern warship or submarine. Similarly, there is a huge difference in engaging untrained Iraqis in 40 year old tanks and engaging trained soldiers in modern vehicles being supporting by modern equipment. Furthermore, there is a huge difference between using a fighter to drop guided bombs on a tent and using a fighter to engage another modern fighter in combat.
In short, experience is nearly useless if it is not learns in the same field as it is needed. No matter how good you are at checkers, it doesn’t make you better at chess.
Say what you will; It’s got Style.
It’s a submarine, they have been working on building a submersible carrier for years… You can buy a yacht, that looks like a yacht above the water… Button down the hatches and it goes underwater as a submarine..
You can buy them from a bell to over 300′ long if you have the jingles
From what I was told, the chinese pilots merely takes off from its carrier deck and never come back for a deck landing. Gutless bunch!!
Thing is, they don’t need aircraft carriers. They have the logistics ships and infrastructure here in the US that they could land and disperse a half a billion troops across the US by outfitting containers as barracks carrying a platoon each.
It’s an armed drone carrier!
Y’all play around acting like the Chinese are so incapable. You forget that we are busy cutting our defense spending, while they are just getting warmed up in terms of arming their nation. They may have thought of something completely different that’s going to be a total game changer. We will have to fight them one day, it’s only a matter of time. I think it’s time we start innovating again, too.