{"id":298699,"date":"2024-11-17T08:00:36","date_gmt":"2024-11-17T08:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=298699"},"modified":"2024-11-18T08:16:13","modified_gmt":"2024-11-18T08:16:13","slug":"have-us-and-royal-navy-aircraft-carriers-just-been-rendered-obsolete","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=298699","title":{"rendered":"Have US and Royal Navy aircraft carriers just been rendered obsolete?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lewis Page \u2013 The Daily Telegraph Nov 16, 2024<\/strong><\/h1>\n

There\u2019s been some discussion among those interested in military matters lately, regarding the most recent trials by the US of its \u201cQuicksink\u201d technology.\u00a0A Quicksink bomb was used recently<\/a>\u00a0to sink a retired US big-deck amphibious vessel, a ship that would be regarded as an aircraft carrier in most navies. The perennial suggestion has been made, yet again, that aircraft carriers have been rendered obsolete \u2013 that aircraft carriers should no longer be \u201ca pillar of our defensive strategy\u201d.<\/p>\n

Obviously there are a lot of people in the Western defence world who are against aircraft carriers, and they have every right to their opinion. But it might be helpful all the same to look at just what Quicksink is, what it\u2019s for, and how relevant it actually is to the aircraft carrier debate.<\/p>\n

First, Quicksink is not a bomb: it is a piece of seeker technology added to a smartbomb guidance kit, the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM). A JDAM tail kit is attached to one or another kind of ordinary dumb aircraft bomb, turning it into a smartbomb. Normal JDAMs are equipped with inertial and GPS satnav guidance, and steer themselves as they fall using their tailfins so as to hit a set of coordinates with great accuracy. A Quicksink JDAM is different in that it has a seeker which can lock onto a ship beneath it and guide the bomb to hit that.<\/p>\n

For\u00a0the most recent test<\/a>, the US Air Force took a normal dumb bomb, the 2,000-pound BLU-109\/Mk 84, and added a Quicksink JDAM to create a Quicksink GBU-31. This was dropped from a B-2 Spirit stealth bomber to hit the former USS\u00a0Tarawa<\/em>, which was also struck by other weapons, and \u201chelped to sink\u201d the old ship.<\/p>\n

The information that an aircraft carrier \u2013 or any ship \u2013 can be sunk if it is hit by heavy aircraft bombs is hardly new, however. Nor is Quicksink new: it has been demonstrated previously in 2021 and 2022. Tests using various other JDAM variants against ships date back to 2004, and aircraft bombs were sinking ships more than a century ago.<\/p>\n

Nor is Quicksink intended for use against aircraft carriers. An aircraft carrier has very strong air defences, provided by its own aircraft and its group of escort warships. Even a B-2 stealth bomber would probably struggle to get near enough to a carrier that it could drop free-falling bombs on it: and no nation in the world apart from the US possesses long-ranging stealth bombers anyway.<\/p>\n

If China or Russia managed the extremely difficult feat of localising a British or American carrier and sent aircraft to attack it they would not be carrying free-falling bombs, but stand-off missiles of one kind or another \u2013 or perhaps no aircraft would be sent. Instead\u00a0China might launch long-ranging ballistic or hypersonic weapons<\/a>\u00a0from land thousands of miles away. The carrier would quite likely not be where it was expected to be by the time the attack arrived, and its defences would be likely to shoot the missiles down even if it was, but at least the attackers would not be on an impossible suicide mission with a Quicksink equivalent.<\/p>\n

Quicksink is not intended for attacking aircraft carriers, or indeed any warships with serious air defences. The value of Quicksink is that the US has huge stockpiles of JDAMs and 2000-pounders, and they are cheap as chips compared to ship-killing missiles like the new\u00a0Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM)<\/a>\u00a0or the Tomahawk Block V-a.<\/p>\n

In the event of China mounting an invasion attempt against Taiwan, there might be hundreds or even thousands of Chinese vessels in the Taiwan Strait, most of them troop carriers or logistics vessels \u2013 probably including many civilian ferries and the like. Even the mighty USA would struggle to afford a big enough arsenal of LRASMs, Tomahawks and similar advanced weapons to sink them all.<\/p>\n

What the US might manage to do, however, is suppress Chinese air defences in the vicinity of the Strait. Chinese radar planes and fighters might be shot down, Chinese warships sunk and Chinese land-based radars and missiles destroyed. Then US planes (or drones) could move in and shower thousands of cheap Quicksink JDAMs from the sky to cripple the swarming invasion flotilla. If the US couldn\u2019t make the airspace above the Strait completely safe, its stealth bombers and stealth F-35C carrier planes could still, perhaps, survive in it and drop Quicksink JDAMs in large numbers without running out of weapons. Drones might still be sent in, even if they suffered losses. The smartbombs\u2019 guidance would mean the US aircraft could fly high, above the threat from basic close-in air defence weapons such as guns or light missiles.<\/p>\n

So Quicksink is a good idea: but it isn\u2019t new, and it doesn\u2019t have anything to do with the aircraft carrier debate.<\/p>\n

There are in all truth many grounds on which to criticise Britain\u2019s aircraft carriers: most obviously the fact that they don\u2019t have catapults. This means that they can only operate the cripplingly expensive F-35B jump jet, which isn\u2019t as good as the other, cheaper F-35 variants. Even if it were true that having no catapults saved us billions (it isn\u2019t true \u2013\u00a0this was a fiction concocted by blundering Ministry of Defence bureaucrats over a decade ago<\/a>) the catapult decision would still be costing us money, not saving it. The extra expense of the F-35B \u2013 and the fact that it is our only modern, fifth-generation fighter jet \u2013 means that our carriers don\u2019t usually have any planes at all, and we have never been able to equip one with more than eight jets. This, aboard ships designed to carry 36.<\/p>\n

As the ships cost only \u00a36bn+, however, it\u2019s hard to describe them as a major pillar of our defence establishment. The landbased fourth-generation Typhoon fighter, which arrived well into the\u00a0fifth<\/em>-generation era, cost \u00a323bn \u2013 and that\u2019s in 2011 money, so think \u00a333bn today. To give that figure a frame of reference, it\u2019s about the same as the projected cost of replacing the national nuclear deterrent.<\/p>\n

No, carriers are not a major pillar of UK defence.<\/p>\n

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

Has relatively cheap new technology just rendered Britain\u2019s two aircraft carriers, and America\u2019s 12 carriers groups obsolete?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":194592,"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":[61,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-298699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-Commentary","category-Current_Affairs"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298699","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=298699"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298699\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":298700,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298699\/revisions\/298700"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/194592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=298699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=298699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=298699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}