What are expected limits, present and future, of U.S. carriers being able to shoot down incoming missiles? Technology will increase missile speed. If U.S./China conflict breaks out, and China fires 200 missiles at one carrier, is there an expectation we will handle this?

USN leadership has stated consistently and repeatedly that they can go in and conduct strikes.

I think there is a difference between what they are willing to do in a real world combat situtaion versus what they say in peace time when there are political considerations. Right now the USN leadership needs to justify spending $10bn on each carrier so they have an incentive to overstate what those ships can do in practice.

Or put another way, I'll believe them when they have an aircraft carrier 500 miles off the coast of Iran during a full scale conflict. Until then, its just something they are claiming. And plenty of people disagree with them.

Even in the Cold War, Soviet land-based bombers (like the Tu-95 and Tu-22M) had far greater range than carrier-borne. Air raids would have salvoed low hundreds of AShMs at a time. Based on range alone, you'd expect US carriers to be pummeled long before they could strike the Soviet coast.

Where are you getting the idea that carriers would be striking the Soviet coast? Their mission was to keep the Atlantic open, which kept them thousands of miles away from the Soviet Union.

But this was not so. US carrier groups were hard to find, hard to target, and hard to survive. EW, EMCON, deception, long-range interceptors, long-range AAMs, E-2s, AAW cruisers/destroyers, Aegis et al, SSN escorts, land-attack cruise missiles hitting soviet air bases, potentially ASATs, and other tools all would have made US carrier groups very difficult to kill. And very dangerous to attack. Soviet naval aviation expected 50% losses per attack.

All that is true, but analysis after the cold war ended and Soviet capabilities became clearer indicated that there is a good chance the Soviets would have won. Some critical US systems like the AIM-54 simply did not work very well, and Soviet capabilities like jammers were much more powerful than the USN realised at the time.

There's a lot of analysis of how carriers can be defended, but anyone looking at it in detail can come away with the realisation its an optimistic framework. There seems to be an assumption that the enemies reconnaissance systems are not robust and can be stopped by only taking out single points. It comes across in the use of phrases like "Kill Chain" which implies that if you take out one link in the chain you can't be killed yourself. Frankly that's a bit child like. Its a "Kill Net" not a chain. Enemies have a vast array of overlapping and redundant reconnaissance technologies and communication systems, and weapon systems that can be linked up in many different ways. They're not particularly affected by some systems being taken out.

The economics of electronics are dicating this, and that's all in favour of detection and targeting systems.

/r/CredibleDefense Thread Parent