Large vessels, aircraft carriers are sitting ducks for rockets. Even with some anti rocket defense.
It costs large amounts of money to build big ships and it costs little to sink them.
It costs large amounts of money to build big ships and it costs little to sink them.
Obviously it all predicates on politicians making somewhat rational decisions.
That's the part that I find missing from these discussions. Missiles like the D21 sound really deadly, but the information and communications needed to successfully target a carrier hundreds or thousands of miles away and deliver the weapon successfully is the much more difficult part of the equation. As the U.S. Navy (paraphrasing) said themselves, "The D21 has a long kill chain, and plenty of places to disrupt that kill-chain."
Likewise, the carrier goes around with much more than it's planes and escorts. It has the information being fed to it from ISR elsewhere, from satellites overhead to pre-mission information, communications eavesdropping, etc to know what they're up against and when and where they might encounter it. That, in my opinion is far more important than the specifics and specs of such and such weapon.
The success or defeat of a carrier battle group I think is going to depend far more on who knows what and when, and therefor, what's going on in the electromagnetic spectrum, than any singular missile.
You can find it yourself on free satellite imagery collected by the european sentinel satellites, provided globally free of charge. All ships are really easy to see from space, especially giant carriers.
Ofcourse sentinel takes images once every few days, and how that compares to spy satellites and how you target a missile from there i dunno
And regarding the satellites themselves, also agreed. I really believe that success at sea is going to depend a large part on success in space, and many countries know it.
I would expect that every major nation keeps track of every carrier on a daily basis
A carrier is fast. 30+ knot speed, likely more (top speed is classified.) Going with 30 knots gives you 720 nautical mile radius of action, or 2,156,746 square miles.
This is to say nothing of the satellite's capabilities, or the back-end systems needed to find objects in the photographs.
There's better ways to go about it though, and the open source satellites taking photos are probably the worst for this job, to be brutally honest. But some examples:
The Soviets use to fly radar satellites to search for US carrier groups. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A
The Chinese are suspected to have their own satellites for this purpose, though they are passive in nature, searching for electromagnetic emissions from the ships: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaogan (Look up EMCON on how this is countered.)
But in short, it yes a carrier can still hide, though it's tricky. And this is without active measures being taken. And the Carrier Group Commander will have intelligence notifying them of when the overhead passes are. With that, they can start piecing together what the kill chain looks like, from getting that data down to the ground, the time it takes their analysts to find the carrier in it, get that data to command, and then down to the assets to take action against it, plan a sortie, and get the weapon out to where it is...during all that time of which the carrier is free to maneuver and take other counter measures. It becomes a game of cat and mouse.
It's rather dated now, but the classic book "Red Storm Rising" illustrates some of this and how it plays out.
Small fast vessels can be used to search for the carrier and they can fire missiles.
Also, carriers have to be at a certain distance from the shore to mount an attack from them. Once they are close to the shore I'd say they are easy to spot.
A carrier in the middle of the ocean is harder to find and destroy, but it can't be used for attacking, and that's what a defending nation needs: enough deterring power to keep the carrier far from its shore.
AFAIK at this point Kinzhal was successfully used only once, against a barn.
So you need a system or system of systems to find your target, relay that information down to your launchers (securely, quietly, and timely!) so you can launch your relatively cheap weapon. That's where all of the investment in communications, radars, overhead platforms (drones, aircraft, satellites) comes into play. The GlobalHawk that had been flying over the Black Sea for weeks at 40,000 feet isn't cheap, but without one, one's firing missiles blind.
The further out you get, the more eyes and links you need to find and track your target, and that's where it gets expensive. It also becomes less of a sure bet.
Two UK carriers come closest to the way the US Navy works, but are smaller. Russia's lone, damaged carrier is 25% smaller and may travel with a roughly comparable escort, if and when it becomes operational again.
Many other nations' carriers are one half to one fifth the size of a supercarrier. They exist to provide STOL/helicopter platforms.