Re: The End of the Carrier Age?
What a lovely feeling, ..... to settle down after a busy day, a Glass of Aberlour 60% proof single malt in my hand, some Tangerine Dream on the headphones and best of all Mrs Sampan tied up with a chick flick on the couch and unlikely to disturb me once
So to business
Good Site Jeff, but two things:
1) Most of those Carriers are not Strike Carriers just Force Protection which I never said would go.
2) All the Carriers under construction were rolled out before Autumn 08. Whether they are all ever completed or have their specs/roles/completion dates considerably revised remains very much to be seen. SO too will how many new Carriers of any description are now in the planning stage for future construction.
From pla101prc
Well lets leave aside matters of Duel use, Plain Deception or the fact that it is well within the PRC's technical capabilities to build anything they need when they think they need it, I would remind you this is not a Country A vs Country B thread but about the global transition from one major weapon platform to another.
from Bladerunner
Not often I you and I find ourselves on the same side of an argument, but yes this is a question at the heart of the proposition. Also many types of ship can launch missiles and of many facilities that they require, a runway is not among them.
victtodd, you touch on some very salient areas. Principally the fact that nobody wants to risk their Capital ships and that beyond a certain level of risk that they will not be used. This is a problem then is it not? as you do not project much power from your home port, but the whole rational of the Carrier Strike Group is to project power abroad. If they cannot fulfil that function, then what is the point of maintaining them?
Add to this that I can foresee a general trend in the near future in which an ever greater number of countries acquire the "anti hegemony" stand off weapons that make this risk unacceptable, then you are left with these incredibly expensive platforms that can only be used in a rapidly dwindling number of instances. Just not worth it. Nobody wants to spend Billions just a single use weapon after all!
People (and the Brown Article) also allude to the Nuclear War risk and sensibly so. Here again, I strongly suspect that the world is going to try and stabilise itself through accepting strategic reality and acting accordingly.
The first point to accept is that virtually all nuclear arsenals now must be assumed to be Second Strike Capable in some form or other through being either solid fuelled, submarine based etc etc. This means that a decisive first strike is just too risky and MAD remains not an option.
The upshot of this will be massive Nuclear stockpile reductions and a tacit no first use policy between all major powers. In short a country's nuclear arsenal will simply become the final line of defence to protect territorial integrity.
I can see various reasons for doing this (beyond morality) principally the huge cost of maintaining and securing nuclear weapons but also the fact that we have had MAD deterrence for over 50 years now and we are able to analyse the results. While nobody would argue that preventing war was anything other than a good thing, we can also see the flip side which is that MAD is also unable to resolve conflicts. What I mean by this is that the Cold War was not so much "Cold" but a conflict Frozen in stasis at the point just before shooting would otherwise have started. Indeed any movement of relative positions between 1945 and 1990 would have been purely due to Plate Tectonics. For many the Cold War may have seemed OK as it prevented war from reaching them, but now we can see that it has had a far more corrosive effect on other areas, which are now causing problems for all of us. If war ifs brutal it is at least usually brief, at least as it is experienced in any one location as fronts sweep across the map. Survivors pick themselves up, dust themselves down and start rebuilding. In the cold war however the fronts did not move and I am sure that local destabilisation that this caused is responsible for many of today's failed states, where conflict (often proxy) has been locked in place and become the normal state of existence for generations of their citizens.
Perversely then, an ability to influence powers great and small but without threatening their territorial integrity, may indeed be the solution to conflict resolution in the future.
Finally (for this evening) another stark reality.
The lead times for the production of modern ships, planes and the training of personnel etc is just to slow for the demands and consumption rates of a major war. Missiles are relatively cheap and can be produced in numbers very quickly. Remember that in WW2, long after German production of planes and armour had ground to a halt, the V rockets were still being manufactured in numbers and being deployed right up until the final days of fighting.
So I will close by paraphrasing Admiral Jackie Fisher, who warned against falling in love with the Aesthetics of primarily utilitarian war machines just for their own sake. He labelled those that did the Bow and Arrow Faction.
What a lovely feeling, ..... to settle down after a busy day, a Glass of Aberlour 60% proof single malt in my hand, some Tangerine Dream on the headphones and best of all Mrs Sampan tied up with a chick flick on the couch and unlikely to disturb me once
So to business
Good Site Jeff, but two things:
1) Most of those Carriers are not Strike Carriers just Force Protection which I never said would go.
2) All the Carriers under construction were rolled out before Autumn 08. Whether they are all ever completed or have their specs/roles/completion dates considerably revised remains very much to be seen. SO too will how many new Carriers of any description are now in the planning stage for future construction.
From pla101prc
Well lets leave aside matters of Duel use, Plain Deception or the fact that it is well within the PRC's technical capabilities to build anything they need when they think they need it, I would remind you this is not a Country A vs Country B thread but about the global transition from one major weapon platform to another.
from Bladerunner
Not often I you and I find ourselves on the same side of an argument, but yes this is a question at the heart of the proposition. Also many types of ship can launch missiles and of many facilities that they require, a runway is not among them.
victtodd, you touch on some very salient areas. Principally the fact that nobody wants to risk their Capital ships and that beyond a certain level of risk that they will not be used. This is a problem then is it not? as you do not project much power from your home port, but the whole rational of the Carrier Strike Group is to project power abroad. If they cannot fulfil that function, then what is the point of maintaining them?
Add to this that I can foresee a general trend in the near future in which an ever greater number of countries acquire the "anti hegemony" stand off weapons that make this risk unacceptable, then you are left with these incredibly expensive platforms that can only be used in a rapidly dwindling number of instances. Just not worth it. Nobody wants to spend Billions just a single use weapon after all!
People (and the Brown Article) also allude to the Nuclear War risk and sensibly so. Here again, I strongly suspect that the world is going to try and stabilise itself through accepting strategic reality and acting accordingly.
The first point to accept is that virtually all nuclear arsenals now must be assumed to be Second Strike Capable in some form or other through being either solid fuelled, submarine based etc etc. This means that a decisive first strike is just too risky and MAD remains not an option.
The upshot of this will be massive Nuclear stockpile reductions and a tacit no first use policy between all major powers. In short a country's nuclear arsenal will simply become the final line of defence to protect territorial integrity.
I can see various reasons for doing this (beyond morality) principally the huge cost of maintaining and securing nuclear weapons but also the fact that we have had MAD deterrence for over 50 years now and we are able to analyse the results. While nobody would argue that preventing war was anything other than a good thing, we can also see the flip side which is that MAD is also unable to resolve conflicts. What I mean by this is that the Cold War was not so much "Cold" but a conflict Frozen in stasis at the point just before shooting would otherwise have started. Indeed any movement of relative positions between 1945 and 1990 would have been purely due to Plate Tectonics. For many the Cold War may have seemed OK as it prevented war from reaching them, but now we can see that it has had a far more corrosive effect on other areas, which are now causing problems for all of us. If war ifs brutal it is at least usually brief, at least as it is experienced in any one location as fronts sweep across the map. Survivors pick themselves up, dust themselves down and start rebuilding. In the cold war however the fronts did not move and I am sure that local destabilisation that this caused is responsible for many of today's failed states, where conflict (often proxy) has been locked in place and become the normal state of existence for generations of their citizens.
Perversely then, an ability to influence powers great and small but without threatening their territorial integrity, may indeed be the solution to conflict resolution in the future.
Finally (for this evening) another stark reality.
The lead times for the production of modern ships, planes and the training of personnel etc is just to slow for the demands and consumption rates of a major war. Missiles are relatively cheap and can be produced in numbers very quickly. Remember that in WW2, long after German production of planes and armour had ground to a halt, the V rockets were still being manufactured in numbers and being deployed right up until the final days of fighting.
So I will close by paraphrasing Admiral Jackie Fisher, who warned against falling in love with the Aesthetics of primarily utilitarian war machines just for their own sake. He labelled those that did the Bow and Arrow Faction.
