As far as I know, with existing known technology and defenses, there's probably a number n, such that if you launch more than n simultaneous non-hypersonic cruise missiles, an aircraft carrier is going to be unable to deal with them all. This of course assumes you can launch that many missiles, in range of the carrier, simultaneously, without advanced warning.
Now, the navy also isn't dumb, so I'd venture to guess they avoid parking their carriers within that range when possible, and that they probably have some other defenses like C-130's and other ships mounted with directed energy weapons and other missile defense and whatnot. I imagine they also aggressively pursue and maintain intelligence on the location, number, and readiness state of those missiles. This starts to get complicated because there's a complicated interplay of strategy and tactics related to the off-ship capabilities, and defenses have counter-strategies (such as launching a bunch of Surface-to-air missiles at those C-130's immediately prior to launching the cruise missles) and those counter-strategies have counter-strategies, etc. etc.
I also have no idea what that number n is. It could be infeasibly high.
I would think a conservative estimate for n is roughly (number of surface-to-air missiles ready to fire in the battle group) + (number of hits needed to sink a carrier) / (probability of hitting). I suspect the first term will dominate.
If the battle group has one Gerald R. Ford class carrier, two Ticonderoga class cruisers, and three Arleigh Burke class destroyers, then it has up to 2 * 8 + 122 * 4 + 96 * 4 = 888 RIM-162 ESSM missiles and 2 * 21 = 42 RIM-116 RAM missiles, for 930 missiles total.
The carrier also has Phalanx. Three guns, 1550 rounds each, maybe ~100 rounds per kill, effective range just under 1.5 km - a distance which a missile doing Mach 0.7 will cross in under seven seconds. My vague impression is that these can't be relied on to make much difference to the numbers.
Maybe there are lasers and whatnot around now. Not enough to make a significant difference.
Note that these numbers assume that the escorts' VLSs are loaded entirely with ESSM, and that all the carrier's weapons can be brought to bear on the incoming missiles, neither of which are realistic assumptions. But it's also assuming the carrier's air wing doesn't get to do any air defence, which is probably also not realistic.
Anyway, given all those assumptions, 1000 missiles and you have a very strong chance of a kill. 2000 and the carrier is toast.
If cruise missiles cost 1.5 million dollars each (roughly what Harpoon and Tomahawk cost, although what things cost in defence budgeting is a bit of a metaphysical question), the toast option is 3 billion in ammunition, plus there will be costs for launchers and various other sundries. The carrier alone is 10+ billion, so that looks like decent value.
In reality the CSG will be unable to fire 930 missiles at a single salvo because of time and targeting constraints, as the incoming missiles will be detected simulataneously.
Also, you don't need to sink the carrier. Just prevent it from launching aircraft. Once that's done it's defenceless.
The Navy isn't dumb, and that's why they build submarines.
Carrier Groups still have an important role to play in lower-intensity conflicts, but in a Pacific war with China they'll be about as useful as Battleships were in WWII.
Eh, you see a headline every so often alleging this but they're pretty far off the mark.
CSGs are defended by the entire system operating in layers. During conflict conditions they'll have airborne early warning radar flying to see threats coming a long way out. There's usually at least 4 AEGIS equipped ships. The carrier air wing will be doing patrols and intercepting threats at great distance. The carrier itself will be practicing emissions control and hiding within the sizable perimeter created by all of the above. And there's a lot of sophisticated EW decoys and such, that we don't know much about from open sources other than they're taken very seriously.
There's plenty of room for debate about just how effective this all is against a nation like China that has a lot of satellite intelligence/surveillance assets, but the simplistic "carriers have no defense" articles are just empty clickbait. These articles usually assert that there's no defense whatsoever against ballistic missiles, which ignores that 2 of those 4 AEGIS ships will be specialized to do exactly that, and have demonstrated it in testing.
One interesting tidbit is a few years back the US Navy submitted a request to do an exercise where they'd demonstrate taking down an inbound salvo of several 100 missiles simultaneously. Congress declined to allocate the budget for it.
Military planners certainly aren't omniscient or infallible, but they're a lot more sophisticated than the content free contrarian takes you see thrown around on the internet a lot. It ends up being a doomsayer about military technology is a pretty easy grift as nationalists on various sides drink it up uncritically and people with authoritative knowledge on the topic are constrained from openly rebutting it. All that said you do see some pretty in depth open info from GAO reports, stuff from CSBA, etc.
Has the belief that these platforms are survivable ever been tested in a meaningful scenario (ie, a conflict between two carrier-group-capable adversaries)? I get that the Navy does a lot of stuff to mitigate this threat, but it's a hell of a threat to mitigate.
>>>Has the belief that these platforms are survivable ever been tested in a meaningful scenario (ie, a conflict between two carrier-group-capable adversaries)
Not since WW2.....but the US Navy built up a LOT of invaluable experience on damage control practices and ship design based on the pounding our carriers took fighting the Japanese. Our current Ford and Nimitz CVNs are the refined iterations of a design lineage going back to the very durable Essex class. That said, the recent destruction of the Bonhomme Richard amphibious assault ship, which sustained cost-prohibitive damage in port due to a single arsonist, is disturbing.
There are wargames where we lose carriers against China.....and there are wargames where we don't. They're not invulnerable, but they never have been against a true peer anyway. Often it boils down to the CSG Commander not being overly cocky in terms of how he maneuvers his force.
The USS Bonhomme Richard fire was a worst case scenario. Only a fraction of the crew was onboard to do firefighting. And many of the damage control systems were shut down for yard maintenance.
In terms of actual conflict no. There's been no large scale naval conflict since WW2. The closest is the Falklands war, which did show anti ship cruise missiles can be effective, but is not a good basis for generalization.
The Navy does do large scale wargaming exercises of course, though any of the interesting details aren't going to be public so that doesn't really help shed any light on it.
No. But it hasn’t been looking good for carriers in war games/modeling exercises. China’s ASBMs might work today against a CSG or they might not (they need good targeting and maybe ABM systems can handle); but I’d analogize the US carriers of today to the 68030 and China’s ASBMs to the 386, where 68030 is probably a better chip but one side has a clear route to a Pentium, the other doesn’t, and economies of scale are in play, too.
EW decoys, early warning radar, AWACS and so on is useless against passive sonobuoys, satellites, stealth camera drones, and a missile with dual-mode guidance.
Every time the navy is asked about the survivability of the carrier groups they seem to start talking about the “whole kill-chain” of the enemy weapons. It sounds like they plan to knock out the targeting satelites before they could target them instead of trying to catch the missiles. Or at least thats how I read the tea leaves.
They're not going to target one link. They're going to target the whole kill chain. Satellites, sure, and the satellite ground stations, and the missile launch sites, and the update path from the satellite ground stations to the missile launch sites, and jamming radio reception for the missiles in flight, and optical chaff or some other kind of confusion, and radar chaff, and probably some I haven't thought of.
If the satellites don't work, then submarines and sonobuoys will be used. If those don't work, attritable intelligence drones will be used. If those don't work, they will go for the CSG first with whatever works, sinking the AEGIS ships, and then work their way up to the carrier.
The absolute trump card though is that they are preparing hypersonic intelligence drones. If those work out, they're going to be impossible to stop and there's no hiding a carrier from a plane flying past with line of sight.
If they are hypersonic in the atmosphere then they have radio opaque plasma around them. How do they transmit and receive radar pulses? How do they see with optical sensors?
That is not how plasma stealth works. The temperature of the plasma determines the minimum frequency of RF that gets through.
So you have to use a higher frequency radar and make sure the temperature of the plasma is not too high in front of the radar. You don't have to put the radar on the nose.
For optical sensors you would be imaging off-axis. So you can put the sensors pointing, say, 30 degrees below forwards relatively far back and there will not be much plasma in front of the sensors as it comes from compression and not friction.
There's a NASA PDF floating around that cites ~7000 K as the temperature of a plasma in front of hypersonic aircraft and concludes that radar is feasible then.
