Is Naval Warfare even worth pursuing anymore

Pretty much any kind of battleship or carrier can be sunk in seconds with conventional-weapon rockets fired from hundreds if not thousands of miles away. All the old doctrines about "force projection" have been rendered obsolete IMHO. Navies of major powers continue to spend billions on new flotillas but it's just the inertia of military-industrial-complex tax-and-spend bullshit. Prove me wrong.

You need ships to transport supplies across the oceans, you are chair general scrub. Do you know how much it takes to transport a company of soldiers? How about a Battalion? A Regiment? Brigade? I'm not talking about shipping personal because efficiency is Airbus but what I am talking about is vehicles, ammo, medical supplies, equipment, food, ect.

Until space is used as an effective axom to transport supplies from spot to spot the navy will always have a place.

Now because of this massive need for logistics, these ships need adequate defense. Not only that but Aircraft Carriers make extremely effective launching points to drop Paratroopers to Expeditionary Force landings.

*the following is the sound of OP just getting BTFO because he plays too many video games and has never set foot in the military*

When did force projection become obsolete? I must have missed that.

China is also the only country capable of sinking carriers at present, in simulations and assuming our new destroyers that are coming out this year are unable to defend against it.

>what are nuclear submarines

Fucking retard

1.If all else fails submarines are still useful

2.The navy's purpose has evolved so much, it's now about the ability to extend global power.

We probably won't see grand naval battles in the future, but the Navy still has itsome place.

>force projection is obsolete

Source. I don't need a source to tell you you're wrong because we can look at today in the South China Sea the effects of lack of force projection.

Many of these submarines host nuclear weapons, constantly monitoring a country's shores.

To believe they are obsolete is entirely naive.

...

you can literally see her nipples through her top

Well I guess I got schooled in this thread.
Sheeeeiiittttt.

I freely admit I've never served in the military and don't pretend to be an expert. I don't play vidya tho. I am just an old fart who occasionally enjoys surfing Bangladeshi frog cartoon Intertube chat-boards.

The poster who mentions logistics makes good points but I fail to see how that matters at all given the ability to fire intercontinental missiles (nuclear or conventional) with deadly accuracy.

Jap/US failure in the South China Sea is due less to military presence than weak diplomacy IMHO.

Nuclear submarines guy has a good point I guess. Still targetable with missiles or torpedoes though.

Why are navies still a thing that exist? The whole point of a navy is to pick up troops from one piece of land, and transfer them across the water to another piece of land, and planes are much superior to boats in that and every other regard.

>defense of coastline
Planes can do that too
>sending supplies to soldiers in foreign lands
Planes can do that too
>b-but submarines!
Are meant to down boats, if there were no boats there would be no need for submarines

It's 2016 people, the ocean is completely irrelevant in modern warfare.

>The poster who mentions logistics makes good points but I fail to see how that matters at all given the ability to fire intercontinental missiles (nuclear or conventional) with deadly accuracy.
You don't shoot mosquitoes with machine gun, missiles are expensive as shit. That, and air delivery is not as cost effective as waterways, water shipping is extremely cheap and useful.

>Subs are meant to down ships
What are missile subs

>The poster who mentions logistics makes good points but I fail to see how that matters at all given the ability to fire intercontinental missiles (nuclear or conventional) with deadly accuracy.
I didn't realize we were able to deliver people and supplies by ICBM these days without wasting tons of money.

Besides, why is a missile launched from a few thousand miles away better than a faster missile launched from a boat a few miles away?

Also, believe it or not, piracy still exists in the world.

but user, we are entering the golden era of railgun warships

Why build military camps in foreigner countries if you can have mobile one with airfield, hospital and nuclear power plant?

You're not factoring the enormous cost of fuel that planes consume compared to nuclear driven watercraft.

>our
hello fellow countryman of france

The Aegis system and conventional point defenses make bombardment of ships with non-nuclear ICBMs pointless, because cost makes constructing enough missiles to even cause minor damage to a single ship extremely prohibitive if not completely impossible. And there is no better instrument of force projection than a carrier, which has air assets to kill anything within 1600 miles, and an entire Marine Expeditionary Force on board.

I'd sink my sub in her depths

>China is also the only country capable of sinking carriers at present
US will be the second if Trump wins.

BB-61 and 63 await for reactivation now in new role - CV killers.

>Pretty much any kind of battleship or carrier can be sunk in seconds
You have literally no idea what you're talking about. Only way to sink an Nimitz-class aircraft carrier "within seconds" is with a nuclear warhead.

what if I fire a swarm of say, 70 silkworm missiles at a carrier group, from different directions?
sure the aegis will take care of half or even more, but a few leakers will inflict lot of damage

Who is this penis Venus?

and what exactly are you launching them from?
Missiles don't appear magically from thin air, they need to be launched from a suitable platform that's in range if the target.

That was the Soviet Navy doctrine. But that still required a navy.

Bella Thorne

Muh Los Malvinas

Muh getting BTFO'd by the Brits EVEN THOUGH THEY MANAGED TO SINK A BRITISH SHIP

seven ships actually (8 if you count a landing barge)

Thing is, the Argies managed to cripple or sink a British warship with an antiship missile.

But they could not capitalize on that.

Are you pretending to be stupid?

MAHAN
A
H
A
N

That's the China plan. They'll fire waves of missiles from the shore for anti-access/area denial strategy. Once we get our laser defense up it will severely limit even this strategy.

>what if I fire a swarm of say, 70 silkworm missiles at a carrier group, from different directions?
How do you know where the Carrier Group is?

>China is also the only country capable of sinking carriers at present
No

wow that's the stupidest thing i've heard all day

Post dank naval craft.

>Sends flotilla of battleships around the world to show American strength

>Japanese see them and think." Those are great, we need to build ourselves a fleet of those! "

>Pacific war happens

>Japs get buttfucked because they chose to build a bunch of useless battleships
All part of our keikaku.

It was my understanding that they were relatively competent ship-builders but us cracking their cryptography allowed us win midway and after that they never had as much boats as us when they faced us.

Also don't forget that the Japanese never learned ASW tactics. The U.S. Navy was able to do to Japan pretty much exactly what the Germans had tried to do to the Brits since the Japs never used convoys and lacked escorts.

I believe they are actually considering using electromagnetic rail guns as defensive weapons to begin with. Currently lasers require too much time on target to be effective against hyper-sonic missiles. When better energy and cooling tech is available maybe lasers can be used for everything but right now they can only be used for subsonic missiles and drones. They should have kept going with the plasma weapon experiments imho. It wasn't showing much promise but it would have been cool as fuck if they got it to work.

duh, Tupolevs shadowed carrier groups already in the 60s. Those things can fly for a week

I would wage war on her naval

it was just said that firing missiles at a ship is so cost-ineffective that it can't/won't be done. Now you propose 70 missiles as a solution to that problem?????? UHHHHH I must have missed something here...

I think if you can destroy a carrier the cost would be worth it. Carriers are incredibly expensive.

It's almost like you're wrong, isn't it?

maybe, but is it actually worth the missiles? There has to be a better use for 70 missiles than wasting say 65 of them hoping that 5 get through and sink the ship. It would probably be more effective to shoot down the planes once they've left the ship, no? Way more likely that you'd get them. (disclaimer: i know nothing about military tactics etc. purely speculative)

Americans had more battleships than Japanese and they've built them during war as well as before it.

Back to /k/ stupid animeposter

They've had terrible, and I mean terrible damage control crews, and never put a lot of thought into maintaining proper screening for their capital ships.

There was that situation where USN submarine found 2 aricraft carriers alone, without any escort, if it wasn't for American torpedoes failing to work more often than not it would sink them.

>laser weapons

More memey than flying cars

I stand corrected. Railguns are more memey than laser weapons.

No. We are not using those for CIW's.

They don't even work right now.

>It would probably be more effective to shoot down the planes once they've left the ship, no?

It depends on the plane. The F-35 will be difficult to shoot down. I'm not sure about the current wing.

I think hypersonic wave-rider type missiles like the BrahMos Mark II pose a legitimate threat to a carrier strike group.

Back to Sina Weibo, stupid PRC poster.

>not realizing the benefits of a bluewater strategy
triggered

I think I understand, though I really don't quite know the distinctions between different types of missiles. Really I'm just opposed to the notion that using an excessive amount of missiles to destroy one target, even if it is a high priority one, is an effective method of doing so. I don't really have a proper answer as to what the better way of doing this would be, but I'm sure there has to be one. What are the weak-points of a carrier that are susceptible to being targeted, answer that and you probably are taking a step in the right direction.

>What are the weak-points of a carrier that are susceptible to being targeted

This is a pretty complicated question because you cannot just talk about the carrier, you have to consider the whole group including the air wing, destroyer squadron, attack subs and supply ships. It is a very complex system to analyze.

I would say though that likely the only chance of defeating it is with very high speed missiles in numbers that would overwhelm the groups air-defense capacity. This is the weakest link. Sure it would be costly but the stuff you are going up against is also very costly (billions of dollars more costly)

Not going after the ships and waiting for them to attack is giving up a lot of strategic depth. I don't think that would be a good move.

Sinking a carrier would also be a big strategic win because it would drastically reduce your opponents ability to project force and those things take a long time to build.

I should say disabling not sinking because those things don't really sink.

Ok I see your point, missiles might be the only way to go. Would the best strategy then be to go for the ships surrounding/protecting the carrier, disable/sink those, then focus on the carrier itself? Is the carrier the ship providing the air-defense, or is it a coordinated effort on behalf of the group as a whole? I assume that attacking the other ships in the group would leave the carrier 'vulnerable' though idk just how susceptible it would be even if it is alone or the size of the group decreases.

Every other ship in a carrier group is there to support the carrier. This is on top of the carrier itself having its own protection systems and its air wings. At least that's what I understand.

Shit man, seems like a real pickle to deal with this sort of thing. Glad I can sit on my ass and shitpost rather than strategize against a modern naval fleet.

Additionally, it's safe to assume that no enemy aircraft could get near the group without turning into swiss cheese, right?

It depends on how many there are, what they are flying, what types of countermeasures they have, how good the pilots are etc.

Keep in mind that a carrier carries more aircraft than many nations have in their entire air force. The destroyers are also carrying a butt-load of missiles.

And in the future, there's going to be even more missiles.
That's the plan, at least.

Alright, I've officially been stumped. I thought people were exaggerating earlier when they said that you'd need a nuke to handle something a carrier + its group, but apparently not. The last thing I can think of would be submarines, but I'm sure that there are countermeasures for that (depth charges, radar, etc.). Something tells me that torpedoes probably wouldn't get the job done considering everything else.

something like a carrier + its group*
pardon the typo

>CSG or CVBG normally consist of 1 Aircraft Carrier, 1 Guided Missile Cruiser (for Air Defense), 2 LAMPS (Light Airborne Multi-Purpose System) Capable Warships (focusing on Anti-Submarine and Surface Warfare), and 1–2 Anti Submarine Destroyers or Frigates
Definitely a tough nut to crack.

For ASW there are attack subs in the group plus some aircraft working together with the destroyers.

There will likely be several types of drones (airborne, surface and submerged) in the future too.

>tfw you'd be a garbage general
feelsbadman

>general
>in charge of a navy
reeee

Thanks user(s) for the delightfully informative conversation, I learned a lot. I gotta be able to get up for work tomorrow. Really had no clue how nutty naval formations and strategy were, didn't know there was so much depth. Side note, that webm is SICK.

lel I think he meant field marshal of course.

Admiral! WOOPS, told you I'm not cut out for this sort of thing...

Basically, you'd need your own fleet of missile gunboats, crewed by a bunch of grizzled, nofucksgiven sailors who are reckless, foolhardy and are not afraid to die.

And even then, you'd be losing most of the gunboats to the other ships in the Strike Force. It may take a missile to take out a carrier, but if your cost is "your entire fleet", it may not be worth it.

Yes.

>Denying the boat
You heartless person.

Don't you talk about Bismarck like that ever again

Look at Syrian war. Russian cruiser had a S-400 system that pretty much closed the Syrian airspace to NATO aircraft.

The Automobile will never replace the horse

That's not what he said.

This is the argument. Carrier groups are good if you have at least 100 times the resources your victim does.

stupid dumb
kreigsmarine scum

>victim
lmao

>too big to sink lmao

>user posts nonsense on /k/
> proceeds to get wrekt
>comes and shitposts on Veeky Forums
Such is life.

The railgun will never replace current ballistic weapons

Yeah not only did he agree with the previous user's nonsense. But then the entire rest of the post was just...Christ m8.

you're correct.

Tell me more about the future

Kriegsmarine is best marine

The Red Sox will win the next World Series.

no.

>lasers are memes
There is literally a USN ship with an operational laser on it right now.

he's talking about how everyone acts like lasers are already fully equipped on all USN ships, even though, to my knowledge, they're still in testing.

I've never heard that opinion voiced on Veeky Forums.

More memey is people talking about how great Chinese anti ship missiles are when they have no idea of what kind of kill chain is actually required for them to hit a carrier going 30+kt using ground based systems. Or that CIWS isn't the only thing defending USN ships, it's actually the last line of defense, most of the work is expected to be done by SMs and the Aegis system, as well as electronic countermeasures and spoofing.

>I've never heard that opinion voiced on Veeky Forums.
I have.

Fair enough then. Can't really disagree with the idea that your experiences might be different from mine.

I will agree with you that way too many people seem to think that le chinese ASM's are the end of carriers.

It's not like you fire one missile.DF-21 costs like 2.5 million a launch, a carrier costs 4.5 billion. So launch 500 at the carrier group.

>The U.S. Department of Defense in 2008 estimated that China had 60-80 missiles and 60 launchers;[7] approximately 10-11 missiles can be built annually.[8]

Not feasible.
And none of those missiles are going to do shit if the kill chain is disrupted in any way, which is exactly what the US plans to do in the event of hostilities. The missile hasn't even been tested against maneuvering ships. It's not to say that the missile is useless, but there are certainly ways to counter it, and ways to reduce its effectiveness. The USN would be working together with the USAF as well, and one could expect B-2s and the upcoming b-21 to be putting pain onto any launchers they could locate.

So what if they can be sunk. People make boats to transport people and stuff. A boat that can destroy other boats really well is helpful for a military to own. They can use it to kill their enemies. These battleships the military spends money on are capable of doing things you know. So yes, naval warfare is worth pursuing.

If you've seen star wars then you have a good idea of what kind of things you can get done with machines of war. Come to think of it, someone should build a death star in the ocean. That'd be cool. Like it would fire lasers at cities and blow them up just like in the movie.