Re: Does india really need aircraft carriers
in wikipedia i read that carriers will not be much useful in future wars because of supersonic drones that are are difficult to be detected by radar and half the indian navy says that they should have invested more in submarines considering the soviet era and old german subs .there is a rift in the navy on whether they should invest more in submarines or aircraft carriers
So let's understand what a carrier is(ex-carrier personnel feel free to correct me, I served in the luftwaffe on land).
A carrier is a big well-defended ship on which aircrafts can land and take off. The ship contains an arsenal of amunitions and lots of aircraft fuel. Under the flight deck are the hangars with repair and maintenance facilities of a whole airbase.
You move such a carrier as close as possible to the targets you want to destroy and then the aircrafts start unloading the bomb arsenal on the carrier onto the targets, making as many runs as possible - the shorter the distance, the more bomb transports are possible within a certain time. Land based aircrafts can not easily move so close to targets of opportunity and thus much more land based aircrafts are required to deliver the same bombload during the same timeframe. The timeframe might at first seem irrelevant, but the targets are important to humans who try to figure out how to safe them. The more reaction time they have, the better they can protect the assets the aircrafts want to target. So why can't land based aircrafts not simply operate from nearby? Fuel, lots of fuel, airports have pipelines directly supplying them with fuel that is 20-30% of the weight of a combat aircraft ready for mission. An aircraft carrier is a large tanker that easily brings the fuel along to any place it swims. On land it takes time to lay the pipelines, with a good infrastructure days, under the worst conditions months. No matter what, the aircraft carrier is already away to the next target until the new base on land is ready. The majority of the human population lives near a coast and 90% of bulk trade is by sea and thus via ports, so lots of important targets are within carrier reach.
In air defence mode it is about maneuvering to avoid being shot while shooting someone else. That consumes the fuel in an aircraft rapidly because of the accelaration switches. The more sure a pilot is to consume the fuel and afterwards fly home alive from the ongoing air battle, the more tricks he can try. The closer the base, the faster an aircraft can refuel and re-enter the fray with a fresh pilot, while his predecessor tries to relax his shaken nerves. Nearby defended SAM stations on warships help to even further enhance the odds of the carrier based aircrafts.
Aerial refuelling by tanker aircrafts for carrier aircrafts is a stop gap measure because the range from carrier to target or air battle in many cases is not ideal. A tanker aircraft is useful, both for longer range and higher speed when delivering ordnance on targets and for re-fueling the higher energy storage for maneuvers in air combat (
).
UAV are currently low speed long endurance observation plastforms that hover above a target and then drop a bomb while being operated by a human from far away with a radio-datalink to the aircraft that can be jammed therefore should be frequency hopping with compensation for incomplete data transfers.
These UAV can not be cheaper then a manned aircraft with the same capability because the expensive prt is not the pilots seat, but the avionics to which you have to add a radio data link that can withstand the extreme abuse every enemy is going to try to unload upon it (The Taliban bought laptops and watched the images drones were openly transmitting from their observations.). The problem gets amplified if you want to move this machine without someone else intercepting the messages to and from for locating the craft.
Extreme g-maneuverability of UAV is theoretically possible, but modern airframes already have less g tolerance than the latest g-suits can make tolerable. Other than the pilot and the frame, there are lots of objects in an aircraft that all have to withstand this g-limit, making things prohibitively expensive.
India is developing unmanned aircrafts as a means to create cheaper cruise missiles. The returning UAV will be more expensive than a cruise missile, but can be reused while the cruise missile is destroyed. Along with this idea for cost efficient munitions idea does work on multiple warheads per missile for a range of missiles. Combined these ideas would give India a cutting edge in technology because they have the means to achieve the same ends at a fraction of the costs. These improved cruise missiles won't displce aircrafts, but take over many bomber roles with manned aircrafts doing complex bomber attacks and operating as fighters, the best means for air defence.
An intermediate between these missiles and a big manned bomber are many small UAV bomber concepts. None would dare to enter defended enemy airspace sitting inside one of these.
The new perspective UAV provide is long endurance observation platforms that can carry limited armament and switch pilots who need to rest. These will likely be mixed with manned platforms and take over boring and dangerous tasks.
It has not yet been discovered how the airwings of the future will be composed, but flattops, such as aircraft carriers, don't mind what kind of wing takes off and are thus versatile to adapt while continuing to be the most potent sea-control tool. Submarines will remain only sea denial platforms.
Tell me whose access to the Indian Ocean should be denied by Indian submarines?
Some Pakistani submarines can on the other hand threaten Indian supply, so Indian carriers traditionally have a strong rotary wing to hunt these down.
