Comment by floatrock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by floatrock | Hacker News Reader

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The aircraft carrier made the battleship obsolete, and I think most war strategists acknowledge that drones and cruise missiles have made the aircraft carrier obsolete in a true hot war. We haven't seen one of those sink yet, but well, Russia controls the historically strategic port of Sevastopol, and yet what's left of their Black Sea fleet has retreated to ports back behind Stormshadow range. Taiwan plans are definitely looking at cruise-missile-vs-airplane-range ratios.

So yes, drones and other unmanned munitions are game changers. I just wish the argument wasn't "increase civilian drones so we have a rich and vibrant military industrial complex ready for when we get to destroy things."

Then again, some of what the article is kinda saying is "if there's civilian applications for this, you don't need to have a military industrial complex (until you're forced to on a wartime footing, at which point you're not starting from zero)." Which is basically the strategic-importance argument that is keeping Boeing afloat these days...

Russia has exactly one aircraft carrier that nearly sank of its own accord. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_aircraft_carrier_Admir...

Taiwan should be building a lot of drones if they intend to fight. However, that's not the only possibility; recent shifts in US posture may encourage the "voluntary reintegration" local political faction, including the possibility of handing over TSMC intact.

It's not Russia's aircraft carriers I'm concerned about.

Russia's experience with drones vs. her guided missile cruisers has more than enough there to translate to more capable aircraft carriers.

If I remember rightly, one of the successful attacks was a floating "drone" made of a small boat packed with explosives. Kind of a hybrid between the torpedo and the fireship, and quite hard to defend against at night.

China has (checks wikipedia) three operational carriers, one very modern Fujian, the obsolete former training ship Liaoning, and Shandong, which appears to be halfway between the two, the first locally built carrier. During WW2, the US fielded ... 111 aircraft carriers. Just a whole different order of magnitude.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_aircraft_carrier_Liaon... (interesting and varied history!)

> During WW2, the US fielded ... 111 aircraft carriers. Just a whole different order of magnitude.

And would have absolutely no way to reach that scale again. Or the equivalent in drone production, which is why it’s absolutely preposterous to take a hostile attitude towards our closest neighbors and trade and potentially put our geographical advantages at risk.

One of things that's a concern is the consolidation of industry into fewer and fewer bigger and bigger plants. Not only does that mean a bottleneck in one place is far worse, it also means that there's not the depth of experience available many places. There's a handful of production engineers rather than dozens. And there's not the same number of plants that can be converted from sewing machines to rifles or automobiles to tanks.

I was reading something that said militarily, the US is now in the same position that Japan was prior to WWII because we've outsourced so much of our production.

China doesn't need lots of aircraft carriers unless the want to invade US.

What they need and they have is enough weapons to destroy any US aircraft carrier approaching their coast.

Naval power doesn't mean just aircraft carriers and China has 100x shipbuilding capacity US has.

If China wants Taiwan back the only thing they need to do is make sure the US Navy and cargo ships can't reach the island.

> drones and cruise missiles have made the aircraft carrier obsolete in a true hot war

The notion of unsinkable carriers is mostly fiction. In WWII I think almost every CV America entered the war with (but 3, Enterprise, Saratoga and Ranger) was sunk by ‘44.

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