{"id":288140,"date":"2024-05-24T07:00:36","date_gmt":"2024-05-24T07:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=288140"},"modified":"2024-05-25T05:33:59","modified_gmt":"2024-05-25T05:33:59","slug":"the-enemies-of-the-west-are-building-aircraft-carriers-with-drone-air-wings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=288140","title":{"rendered":"The enemies of the West are building aircraft carriers with drone air wings"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Axe \u2013 The Daily Telegraph May 23, 2024<\/strong><\/h1>\n

China has secretly built an aircraft carrier for drones. The approximately 500-foot vessel appears in recent satellite photos<\/a> of an obscure shipyard on the Yangtze River outside Shanghai.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not the first <\/em>big-deck warship designed to launch and recover unmanned aerial vehicles. Turkey commissioned an assault ship designed for a drone air wing last year. And, around the same time, Iran began modifying a tanker ship into a drone carrier.<\/p>\n

But by placing third in the race to send aerial drones to sea aboard their own flattop, China still comes in way ahead of the United States and other Western powers when it comes to developing a whole new type of warship. Western fleets are focusing on integrating drones with existing carriers<\/a> that primarily operate manned aircraft.<\/p>\n

Which approach is best remains to be seen. But it\u2019s notable that the Turks, Iranians and Chinese are the ones really testing a new naval concept, for better or worse. If drone carriers prove functional and efficient, Turkey, Iran and China could be the first to deploy them on a meaningful scale. Other countries, if they choose to copy the concept, would be playing catch-up.<\/p>\n

It speaks to the sheer scale of Chinese naval shipbuilding<\/a> that foreign media didn\u2019t notice the new drone carrier until nearly two years after the vessel apparently began construction. The overhead imagery points to a vessel that\u2019s roughly as long as a World War II escort carrier but wider, with space on its deck for potentially scores of fixed-wing drones \u2013 or many hundreds of small quadcopter drones.<\/p>\n

Any ship with a big flat deck can launch and recover drones; what will likely make or break these new drone carriers is what\u2019s invisible from the outside: the control systems. Even with the advent of highly-capable artificial intelligence for drone navigation, most drones still need help\u00a0 \u2013 from human operators sitting behind banks of radios \u2013 launching and landing and firing weapons<\/p>\n

Plus, drones are capable of piping back to their bases \u2013 on land or at sea \u2013 vast volumes of video and other data that require intensive analysis, usually by human experts. It\u2019s not for no reason that, in developing its own carrier-launched drone \u2013 the stealthy MQ-25<\/a> \u2013 the US Navy devoted as much effort to the drone\u2019s controls and communications as it did to the airframe.<\/p>\n

If the Turkish, Iranian and Chinese navies can solve the control problem, they could be the first to wage war at sea with robotic air wings. The advantages of drones over manned planes are, by now, well-established: they\u2019re relatively inexpensive and thus deployable in large numbers \u2013 and disposable.<\/p>\n

Lose a drone \u2013 or a hundred <\/em>drones \u2013 in combat, and the cost is strictly monetary. There are no bodies to recover, no skilled pilots to replace and fewer political ramifications than would result from losing a manned plane and its crew.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The Makran, an Iranian logistics vessel that can also act as a helicopter carrier or a dedicated drone carrier. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

But don\u2019t assume, as the Turks, Iranians and Chinese tinker with their new drone carriers, that these experiments will all prove that drone carriers actually work \u2013 and are worth it. It\u2019s possible to imagine what could go wrong.<\/p>\n

The crews could struggle to operate delicate drones in salt spray, bad weather and roiling seas. They could fail to maintain a sortie rate that justifies the cost of building a drone-only carrier. It might be difficult to deconflict the radio channels as more and more drones take flight from the same vessel. Lacking high-performance fighter aircraft for protection, the carriers themselves might prove too vulnerable for intensive combat.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth remembering that the US Navy chose <\/em>to integrate its new drones with its existing manned carrier planes in combined manned-unmanned air wings rather than develop a new ship class exclusively for drone operations.<\/p>\n

The US fleet\u2019s dozen big supercarriers<\/a> are stable platforms in all weather conditions. They\u2019re already capable of launching hundreds of sorties per day, day after day. Their elaborate communications suites already possess massive bandwidth. And sailing with scores of supersonic fighters, they\u2019re among the best-protected warships in history.<\/p>\n

It may be that, at the end of this era of drone experimentation, the Turkish, Iranian and Chinese navies concede the US Navy was right all along \u2013 and drones shouldn\u2019t have their own carriers.<\/p>\n

Of course, it\u2019s also possible the Turks, Iranians and Chinese discover drones should <\/em>have their own carriers. If so, they\u2019ll already have drone carriers in the water; the Americans and their Western allies will have to build them from scratch.<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

China, Turkey and Iran are all developing their own naval carriers dedicated to carrying drones<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":196717,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[78,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-288140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-china","category-Iran"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=288140"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":288149,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288140\/revisions\/288149"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/196717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=288140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=288140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=288140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}