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Comment by dist-epoch | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the reasons in any real war, all the aircraft carriers will be far far away from the conflict region.

Now your average Joe can track them from their desktop for free.

Carriers will also never be going alone; they're part of a battle group (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_battle_group) with anti-air and -sea defenses to intercept any incoming counterattacks. In theory anyway, that wiki article has some criticisms about whether it's still viable today with hypersonic cruise missiles, u-boats, drones, etc. It hasn't come to a full on naval battle since WW2 though, so a lot of naval strategies and technology is theoretical. It is being tested nowadays with attacks on ships from the mainland from the Houhtis though.

> hasn't come to a full on naval battle since WW2 though, so a lot of naval strategies and technology is theoretical

Even then, aircraft carriers being unsinkable was a myth.

“In 1942 the US lost as many carriers as the Japanese—and a larger percentage of their overall carrier force” to the extent that it “was almost out of carriers in the Pacific in late 1942.”

“Why the US ended up winning the war in the Pacific was therefore not because of the fleet that they started the war with—it was the fleet that they ended it with—almost all of whose most effective and advanced warships were launched after the Battle of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941” [1].

[1] https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/war-and-deterrence-in...

Aircraft carriers were a key component of projecting power into the pacific. They've never been impregnable (obviously both sides lost carriers in the pacific, including at least one I can think of to a lone submarine).

> “Why the US ended up winning the war in the Pacific was therefore not because of the fleet that they started the war with—it was the fleet that they ended it with—almost all of whose most effective and advanced warships were launched after the Battle of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941”.

Considering that the tonnage of ships the US had was limited by treaty (treaties were expired, but it takes time to build ships) and that Japan's attack further reduced the fleet strength, one would expect that the US won with ships built after Pearl Harbor.

There was an 18 month period in which the US built more fleet carriers than Japan had in the entire war. In addition, Japan lost a huge fraction of their experienced pilots in 1942, which was arguably as deleterious as losing the carriers.

It’s mainly being tested in the Black Sea, where Ukrainians are methodically sinking Russian ship after Russian ship, with cheap drones.

That's revealing a severe deficiency in Russian air-defense and close-in defense (tactics, equipment, probably a bit of both). People looking to smack the US Navy in the same way would be wise to look at how Kyiv's Patriot batteries have fared, though; quite a bit better, including against hypersonics.

Also, the Houthis attacking ships in Red Sea have shown that modern air defenses work. None of the warships have been touched. Two cargo ships have been hit. The warships have shot down a lot of missiles and drones. Which is really expensive and hasn't opened up the Red Sea. But shows that attacking warships is harder than the Houthis, who have proper anti-ship missiles and ballistic missiles in addition to drones.

The Black Sea is a de facto big lake, any big navy would have the same problems as the Russians now have against drones and land-based missiles. In a way the Americans are now experiencing the same problems in the Red Sea, hence why USS Eisenhower had to escape 200 miles North to Jeddah once it started being targeted a few weeks ago.

Which is to say that the Black Sea / Red Sea is not the Midway Atoll with its wide-open ocean.

> The Black Sea is a de facto big lake, any big navy would have the same problems as the Russians now have against drones and land-based missiles.

I doubt that; Russian land-based air defense is struggling in a similar fashion. Very little get anywhere near Ukraine's Patriots, while hand-me-down NATO-supplied weapons are happily taking out S-300 and S-400s in Crimea. As for drones, the US has been dealing with small-boat attackers for significantly longer; I'm sure they're using lessons learned in Ukraine to improve, but in jet ski versus CIWS in open waters, I'm betting on CIWS.

(That said, you would indeed avoid getting a carrier group stuck somewhere like the Black Sea.)

> hence why USS Eisenhower had to escape 200 miles North to Jeddah once it started being targeted a few weeks ago

Notably, it's not on the bottom like the Moskva.

Being able to pretty effectively take down threats doesn't mean you need to unnecessarily risk it, but Russia's difficulty a) defending against NATO missiles and b) striking back against NATO air defense in Ukraine should give folks like China some serious pause in their own planning.

> Very little get anywhere near Ukraine's Patriots,

Not sure about that, plane-launched FABs are creating havoc on the Ukrainian front-lines.

> Being able to pretty effectively take down threats doesn't mean you need to unnecessarily risk it

Of course, but that's how you get to the "Fleet in being" [1] situation, which I'm not sure it's the ideal solution for the US Navy, which (afaik) consumes about a third of the US military budget. I mean, how would the US Navy commanders be able to explain that they're spending that much money only for their magnificent warships to avoid direct battle contact?

> striking back against NATO air defense in Ukraine should give folks like China some serious pause in their own planning.

Neither China nor Russia depend on their fleets in order to win existential wars for them, as they're both continental powers, so not sure a Russian cruiser ending on the bottom of the Black Sea will make any strategic difference. Also, geographically speaking there's no sea between South Korea and both Russia and China, and the sea distance between the same China and Taiwan is pretty small, they'd be able to provide artillery/missile cover for it entirely from land.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_in_being

> Neither China nor Russia depend on their fleets in order to win existential wars for them, as they're both continental powers

Chinese are hopelessly dependant on imports of raw commodities (most notably oil), a naval blockade would sent them back into Middle Ages in a matter of a couple of years. Hence, their continous existence is contingent on strong navy. Which they presumably get, seeing how much they invest in it.

> Chinese are hopelessly dependant on imports of raw commodities (most notably oil),

Good thing for them that Russia is just next door.

> Not sure about that, plane-launched FABs are creating havoc on the Ukrainian front-lines.

The Patriots aren’t on the front lines, and weren’t allowed to even shoot at the planes lobbing bombs from Russian airspace until just recently.

Attempts to knock them out have failed. The same is not true for the Russian equivalents deep in Crimea.

The idea of the US Navy as a “fleet in being” is simply absurd at the present time.

> Attempts to knock them out have failed.

That is false, which is why Romania, my country, has just approved sending one of its (only) two Patriot systems to Ukraine.

> The idea of the US Navy as a “fleet in being” is simply absurd at the present time.

It is absurd if you ignore the facts on the ground (on the sea?), and the facts show that the USS Eisenhower has chosen to avoid direct confrontation with land-based missiles shot by the Houthis.

More generally, people should try to look closer at the facts as they are happening (again, saying that Ukrainian Patriot systems have been unaffected this far into this war is just ignoring facts), that's good advice for any war, past, present or future.

Wake seeking long range semi-autonomous torpedoes are a major threat and are already deployed.

Currently they have about a 100km range.

The subs can fire from far away, move and fire again from different angles.

A ship could have dozens coming from all directions.

That's not exactly how it works. The satellite operator will be taking paid orders to scan over specific areas of the earth, about 4km in width or so.

So you have to have a pretty good idea where the carrier is, and then you get an image delivered with some latency as the satellite will need to pass over a ground station that downlinks the data.

So it isn't free (although umbra has a CC BY 4.0 license for their data, much more permissive than other providers. Nor is it easy to search huge amounts of the ocean for the carrier.

What most entities probably do is tip and cue, which is use a sensor with coarser resolution to get an approximate location and then use a sensor with finer resolution to look closer.

Sure, I was over simplifying it. China will already have a good idea where the carrier roughly is - the previous position.

And they will also have their own satellites.

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