There are only 22 aircraft carriers in service worldwide. Safe for the US, no country has more than two of them at the moment. A single aircraft carrier can do a lot for military power and power projection.
They’re huge, slow targets though. If war breaks out they’ll be the second thing to go after satellites.
Great for these times when there isn’t open conflict between major powers, though. You can easily park it next to some middle east country and bomb the crap out of them.
If nuclear (major) powers are blowing up each others carriers, avoiding a nuclear exchange is going to be difficult. Conventional weapon systems have been just for power projection and using on countries without nuclear weapons since WWII.
I thought about that sometimes. It's funny how the size and cost (and size of the crew) of an aircraft carrier can work as a deterrent from sinking it. As in "this weapon is so expensive that, even if you can destroy it, you'd better not because that would bring an inevitable escalation". I wonder if major powers have devised plans to disable aircraft carriers without completely destroying them and killing the crews. It would make a lot of sense.
War doesn't just "break out". If tensions mount, the US can place its carriers 1000 miles or more away from any Russian or Chinese battery. At that distance, the carriers are not "huge and slow", they are tiny dots on a map and quite evasive too. In the time a hypersonic missile covers 1000 miles, a carrier can move a few miles.
Yes, but homing on a moving target hundreds of miles away is no easy feat. The missile obviously can't do this by itself (like an air-to-air missile). It needs external guidance. There is no radar that has this type of range so you either need a satellite, or an AWACS airplane. In other words, the kill-chain will be quite complex. You can bet there are multiple countermeasures that can disrupt such a kill-chain (shot down the AWACS airplane, blind the satellite with laser, jam the spectrum for the incoming missile, deploy a smoke screen, etc). The simple indication that the "carrier killer" missiles are not such a sure thing is that the Chinese are busy building aircraft carriers themselves. Are they really stupid?
While this is true, there’s limits to the capabilities of many ballistic missiles, some are incapable of changing trajectory. A sufficiently advanced missile should be able to predict course of the carrier and intercept, but I’m sure enemy capability would be taken into account in a high tension scenario.
For France, it would be power projection into west and central Africa, northern South America, the Antarctic ocean, the Indian Ocean departments, and in the francophone Pacific ocean. Remember, France's longest land border is with Brazil and the non-metropole departments are ~1/5 French citizens. Francophone Africa overpopulates France herself by about 5x.
Such a mobile base of operations and air power is worth it to her, per the article.
There have been multiple publicly known incidents where small submarines surfaced near a carrier without being noticed by any ship or submarine in the carrier group.
In a symmetrical conflict against an enemy with submarines they will be completely useless.
Aircraft carriers are more for beating up on nations without substantial resources or power projection once waters have been cleared. Unless you're the US and could stand to lose a few. In a great power conflict, carriers are unlikely to be used in the opening salvos for most nations, since they only have a couple. They're large easy targets and wouldn't be risked.
> There have been multiple publicly known incidents where small submarines surfaced near a carrier without being noticed by any ship or submarine in the carrier group.
I would expect this to be more difficult if the carrier group is on a wartime footing, though.
One of those incidents included a Chinese submarine that surfaced voluntarily 5 miles away. I don't think you can interpret this in any other way than as a demonstration of how they can stalk any carrier near their waters at any time without being noticed.
In 2015 a 30 y/o French submarine "attacked" a US carrier as part of a military exercise where all participants should be on the highest alert. In 2004 a Swedish submarine did the same.
This is counting some carrier-like ships that aren't technically full-blown carriers.
The Australian ships, for example, are "landing helicopter dock" ships. The Japanese ones are "helicopter destroyers" due (due to a prohibition in the Japanese constitution, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_9_of_the_Japanese_Cons... some are still being converted to carry the F-35). A number of the American carriers on the list - the USS Wasp, for example - are actually things like "amphibious assault ships".
But even ordering by the penultimate column (leaving only 'aircraft carriers' according to Wikipedia), still leaves the UK and China with two supercarriers each
I thought that missile tech like the DF-21 had effectively rendered carriers obsolete against equiv-tech adversaries.
& I would expect many non equivalent adversaries to be able to catch up by 2038, rendering these things sitting ducks even when being used for force projection against people in caves.
> we haven't had a symmetrical war in 80 years now.
The First Gulf War is pretty much a symmetrical war in tactics and strategy, even if one side roflstomped the other. Arguably the Russia-Georgia and more recent Armenia-Azerbaijan conflicts would also qualify quite well.
The term "asymmetrical warfare" has a specific meaning in military circles--it specifically refers to guerilla and insurgency tactics (or countermeasures to such tactics). By analogy, I'm interpreting "symmetrical war" to refer to a lack of such tactics.
The First Gulf War was fought as a tank, air, and infantry warfare model, much akin to World War II-style tactics. And actually, the numbers were a lot closer than you might expect; the Gulf Coalition was made up of ~1 million men (the majority of them US), with Iraq having about ~600-700k defenders arrayed against them. Actually, it was remarked at the time that it seemed a risky strategy, since conventional military theory generally has you wanting about a 2-3× manpower advantage to be able to overcome a defending force.
The Iraqis were arguably not particularly inferior in terms of technology--they were a petrostate after all, and able to buy the fancy modern weapons on offer from both sides of the Cold War ideological divide. However, their organizational capabilities were decidedly inferior. It's not entirely clear to me why their anti-air capabilities were completely ineffective, but the US was able to achieve total air superiority and it used this decisive advantage to completely eviscerate Iraqi command-and-control. In the actual field, the losses that the Iraqis sustained quickly turned to utter routs.
tl;dr Carriers, US wise, the whole military, keeps is high budgets because Congress uses the political leverage to keep themselves in office.
Large military assets like carriers are safe against other super powers simply because any conflict that would involve their loss is going to be so costly on all other fronts as to make the point moot. So while Russia and China could sink one with effort the cost long term are their best defense, simply put the economic trade issues if a conflict comes up out weighs everything else.
US wise, the military branches have always had a pissing match going on. The Navy with its carriers and the air force with its manned bombers. Both technologies are either obsolete or nearing it with the advent of smarter drones; both flying and water borne; let alone combined with new artillery like rail guns and hypersonic missiles.
However that pissing match is saved by both parties in Congress who use the funding to keep political power. The US could keep its peace at half the military it has and the Chiefs of Staff know it. Congress would not even let the military close bases it clearly did not need. Congress regularly has the military buy weapons it doesn't want.
So combine the internal political power Congress wields with a large military establishment with one up man ship attitude between the Air Force and Navy and we are stuck with a very expensive relic of days gone past.
I am not sure how much turn over is required in Congress to pare down the military. Don't get me wrong, you may seem claims they have or will cut the budget but remember the US Congress considers increases automatic and reducing the increase while still increasing constitutes a cut.
This seems like an odd decision given recent developments in the area of supersonic missiles. China and Russia seem to have to technology to easily sink carriers from quite a distance. Aircraft carriers are almost obsolete.
They allow you to project power, as the saying goes, anywhere in the world, for extended durations, without needing the permission or assistance of any friendly nation (i.e. airstrips in a nearby country) [0].
If you're going up against any nation that doesn't have the ability to sink an aircraft carrier (which is almost every nation in the world) they are very far indeed from obsolete.
[0] So long as you have a serious logistics chain and serious support vessels including protective warships; if all you actually have is one aircraft carrier, you're going to find it pretty useless for long-term power projection.
The defense against Russia and China is the nuclear deterrent. There is not going to be any direct war between France (or the West for that matter) and Russia/China.
I don't know about the French Navy but the US Navy has long had mature and adequate defenses against supersonic missiles. The US has been iterating on that kind of defense tech since the 1980s and has been a regular part of their planning.
OP probably meant hypersonics, of which USN / everyone else has no current defenses against. TLDR of a recent panel on state of anti-hypersonics is Pentagon hopes to have a "workable" defense against hypersonics by mid-2020s.
They aren’t there to project power directly at other big military powerhouses.
They’re used to project power indirectly, by proxy wars in less developed countries (and sometimes for direct wars with them, without proxy of other empires, at least at start).
I think guiding a hypersonic glider on a moving target is a difficult task. I thought waves could not penetrate the plasma around the glider, making the last phase of the flight unguided ?
At 83000 metric tons, this will be second only to the American supercarriers (Nimitz class and Ford class at 110000 tons). Even the British Queen Elizabeth class is smaller at just 72000 tons.
Why spending money in army? Even if it's nuclear powered, it involves a lot of pollution for maintaining this kind of huge ship. I'm French and sad that our taxes go in this and not useful things
Ok it's a side-effect benefit, but there has to be different ways to keep working on nuclear energy in more useful ways (useful for people, for the environment, by useful I mean at least not destructive, why not creating a cargo ship rather, or hybrid wind and nuclear powered cargo ships, ...)
Europe hasn't been building weapons for a while. The recent clash with Erdogan and heavy dependence on US military is making them realize it was a mistake.
You need your own military, and you better have more than the guy next door. (especially when he is crazy).
It is indeed: many Europeans countries have large, successful defense industries that produce things from spy satellites to handguns, tanks, machine guns, optics and every thing in between. Some of those are inferior to what the Americans make, some of those are on par, some of those are superior as can be seen from the US armed forces choosing European designs. "Europe hasn't been building weapons for a while" is an absurd statement, but perhaps expected from the other side of the Atlantic.
In case you forget, your country still has enemies, it's called Russia, and if you are not careful, Turkey and North Africa too. France has already way underspent it's NATO target of 2% GDP for many years, this is just replacing a rusty half-century old ship by 2038, in essence, merely maintaining France meager navel power.
If you are French then you probably don't know that your economy is kept afloat through the military occupation of former French colonies in the African continent where rare materials and wealth is extracted from their lands in essentially arbitrage-pay the poor African colonies pennies and resell it on the international market at disgusting multiples.
So the fact that you cannot see the link between offensive military projection capabilities and your economy suggests that this topic is not very well discussed sort of like how you can't read about the United Fruits company in American history textbooks or the genocide of native americans in the millions through biological warfare and weaponized poverty pushing their descendants further into poverty and irrelevance-even Canada does it openly.
Seriously, those comments are beyond stupid, the world is not made of friendly people (nor Bisounours) and without an army aggression from an external power is guaranteed. Even with one assymetric forces mean war can happen, like it did recently in Karabash for instance.
Macron got humiliated by Erdogan, so he wants a bigger toy now. Also, envy, as the British will have two more modern carriers. That's why....
In more sophisticated words: France's naval forces are kinda weak and don't have power projection capabilities. You can't pretend to be a world power, if you don't have the force to back it up with.
Literally how Turkish people think. They think this is all about pride or showing who's the boss. French people don't give a damn. The naval carrier isn't to project power against Europe or Turkey, the French Navy and Airforce alone is more than capable perhaps one of the most powerful in EU that shared with UK.
The power projection is aimed towards maintaing their former African colonies where they still rely on to fund/subsidize a lot of social benefits and programs in France.
You also have Turkish people and pretty much everyone around the world able to join the French Foreign Legion which makes it very easy for the French republic to minimize political fallouts losing its citizens in Africa while able to deploy large armies consisting of non-French individuals fighting for French interests and sovereignty in the region.
WW2 was over long time ago. France is at the absolute vanguard of EU's offensive capabilities. After USN, perhaps only French Navy can compare as its own French owned vertical industries all come together to build up its standing army.
They kind of got embarrassed by the Turkish navy, as they got 'checked', while trying to blockade the Turkish aid to one of the Lybian factions. The Lybian civil war is a war were there are no good vs bad guys, just different factions. The French backed one is losing. Also with the Turkish vs. Greece conflict, France sided with the Greeks, yet they realized they couldn't help much as if a conflict was to happen near Turkish shores they would lose, and Turkey would be able to inflict massive loses.
TLDR: France doesn't have real power projection capabilities. France realized their navy is not up to par. It is like a lap dog that is all bark, but doesn't have any power to bite, and they would lose political soft power as well:
That's not quite accurate. France did not reply to an act of war from an allied nation (turkey is part of nato). The turkish navy had a radar lock on a French ship. It is not easy to know if a radar lock is guiding a missile or not: in general it is assumed to be the case and the locked ship will fire in response before being hit. Erdogan is playing with fire with such tactic, and did similar things in the air between turkish f16 and greek air force, even suggesting to find a way to shoot down a greek jet in a way where the pilot could eject.
If the war/battle were to happen in an open sea/ocea, turkey would lose.
But the current disputes are all near shore, and turkey does have major home advantage as they can field missiles anywhere near shore. The french would lose.
It is like open pitch battle vs. storming a castle. You need at least 3x the men of the defenders, to be able to defeat a well defended castle.
They kind of got embarrassed by the Turkish navy, as they got 'checked', while trying to blockade the Turkish aid to one of the Lybian factions. The Lybian civil war is a war were there are no good vs bad guys, just different factions. The French backed one is losing.
France realized their navy is not up to par. It is like a lap dog that is all bark, but doesn't have any power to bite:
> We are acting in the long term: over the next few years we will build the nuclear propulsion systems for our SSBNs and SSNs. If our engineers did not design on-board nuclear boilers for decades, we would weaken this know-how and our sovereignty.
At the very least, they are relying on that nuclear knowledge when the French submarine fleet needs replacing in the future.
> Meaning that's a pork project for their nuclear industry.
France has a dependency on nuclear for it's civilian power generation as well. So it's a strategic industry to maintain just so that they can keep a market for engineers. Especially since the military ramifications make it hard to cross borders with that type of knowledge, even among allied countries.
