Why China Can't Target U.S. Aircraft Carriers

[rangerrebew]

Why China Can't Target U.S. Aircraft Carriers
Loren Thompson


Critics of U.S. aircraft carriers have been arguing for decades that the survival of the world’s biggest warships will increasingly be at risk in an era of long-range, precision-guided anti-ship missiles. In recent years, China has typically been identified as the military power most likely to drive U.S. carriers from the sea.

But the U.S. Navy seems much less worried about carrier attacks than observers who lack military credentials and clearances. In fact, the outgoing Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral John Richardson, told an audience earlier this year that “we’re less vulnerable now than we have been since and including World War II.”

[The_Reader_David]

An excerpt without a link isn't very useful for discussion, particularly when the excerpt doesn't live up to the headline.

[PeteS in CA]

An excerpt without a link isn't very useful for discussion, particularly when the excerpt doesn't live up to the headline.

It took me all of 5 seconds to copy and paste the article title into a DDG search line and find the quoted article. If that long. And when I saw the article I saw what I expected, that @rangerrebew had simply quoted the first two paragraphs of the article. Doing what I did, using your search engine of choice, would have been faster than typing out the complaint you posted.

One reason the Navy is not alarmed is that it has invested heavily in new technologies aimed at bolstering the defenses of carrier strike groups. It also has changed its tactics for operating near China. But the biggest reason for confidence about the future resides in the difficulties China would face in trying to find and track U.S. carriers.
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So what can be so hard about targeting them, using the extensive arsenal of anti-ship missiles that China has accumulated? Well for starters, there are the huge distances within which carriers operating in the Western Pacific can hide. The South China Sea alone measures 1.4 million square miles, and is only one of four marginal seas from which carrier air wings could launch attacks against China.

If a carrier is conducting sea control operations—keeping the sea lanes open to key allies such as Japan—it will likely be beyond the first island chain that parallels the Chinese coast, and thus able to hide in the vastness of the Western Pacific. It is hard to find anything in millions of square miles of open ocean, and in the case of U.S. carriers the target will be moving constantly.

The USN has not sat fat, dumb, and clueless as over the past 4 or 5 decades anti-ship weapons have evolved. It has such weapons, and has defenses against them, both ongoing processes of evolution.

The open ocean is a huge place, which enables "hiding in the open". The USN's location flexibility is far greater than China's location capabilities. The current generation of F-18s are capable of being in-flight-refueling tankers, extending the range of strike aircraft. Test flights have begun with the Boeing MQ-25 tanker drone, so Hornet pilots and aircraft will likely, in a few years, be freed up from being refueling tankers.