If someone can build a hypersonic missile, someone can also build a hypersonic missile interceptor missile… And you can fit a lot of missiles in a CVBG.
Sure, the CVBG doctrine only really works against the Japanese (where both babies are fighting over small islands that are far from their respective homelands)… But I don’t think that hypersonic missiles obsolete carriers in that role.
I do think that that role is useless against China or Russia given that they aren’t really colonial imperial powers with territory around the world, but…
The whole point of the hypersonic missiles is that you cannot intercept them.
We don’t even have the technology today to intercept (fixed) ballistic missile trajectory at an acceptable rate (the US Patriots had enough problem dealing with Iraqi Scuds made in the 1950s!), and the hypersonic missiles with maneuverable and unpredictable flight paths made them orders of magnitudes harder to intercept.
The Russian Zircons (hypersonic cruise missile) fly at Mach 8-9, which means if a CVBG can detect flying objects 200km from the horizon, they literally have 72 seconds to react. That’s slightly over a minute to detect, track, calculate intercept paths (they can’t against unpredictable targets), and launch the interceptor missiles with literally no second chance if the first wave fails to hit their target (and they will fail).
It doesn’t matter how many missiles you can fit into your entire carrier battle group, if the success rate is 1/1000 (and that’s a BIG if), then good luck lol.
We don’t even have the technology today to intercept (fixed) ballistic missile trajectory at an acceptable rate
IIRC the US’ missile interception system has a 40% success rate when the ballistic missile has a known origin and a normal parabolic trajectory
so yea, that nuke is hitting whether ppl like it or not, even if we went back in time 50 years people would still be able to nuke today’s US, only half as effectively
Governments have overstated the effectiveness of missile defenses in the past, including against Scuds. During the first Gulf War, the United States claimed a near-perfect record in shooting down Iraqi variants of the Scud. Subsequent analyses found that nearly all the interceptions had failed.
And going into the second linked article:
The United States Army has said that its Patriots intercepted about 40 percent of the Scud missiles that Iraq fired at Israel during the war in 1991. That is a far more modest estimate than the one originally given by the military and by the Bush Administration. In the gulf war, former President George Bush once said that the Patriot’s record was nearly perfect.
But Moshe Arens, who was Israel’s Defense Minister in the gulf war; Gen. Dan Shomron, who was chief of staff of the Israel Defense Force during the war, and Haim Asa, a member of an Israeli technical team that worked with the Patriot missile during the war, say that one or possibly none of the Scuds was intercepted by the Patriots. They appeared in a documentary scheduled to be aired today on Israel television. An advance copy of interviews with the three was made available to The New York Times.
What had likely happened was that the Patriots intercepted the discarded missile body after it had been separated from the warhead at the terminal phase:
I’m just saying that even 1970s China could still nuke 100 US cities (assuming the US knows the exact origin point of each Chinese nuke, if they don’t then it goes up to 200)
What even is the turning radius of an HGV? Sure, you’re not constrained by silly things like pilot blackout and whatever, but that doesn’t mean it can zig zag at will.
I don’t think hypersonic missile interception is possible, unless the US gets laser weapons working or something like that. Hypersonics are incredibly fast, and Russia’s fighter jet launched hypersonics easily defeated the Patriot air defense systems in Ukraine, when they targeted them. Even intercepting normal supersonic and subsonic cruise missiles is a crapshoot, the iron Dome in Israel gets defeated by homemade rockets at times. Interception technology is very overrated currently.
Also hypersonic missiles fly so fast that they generate a plasma cloud around them and rendering them very difficult to be tracked by radars. So you might not even see them coming at all! And even if you do, your radars can’t track them. And even if you can track them, they’re too unpredictable to calculate an intercept path.
Interceptors are more difficult to make than the missiles themselves, and often are more expensive. They also don’t have 100% interception chance so you need to fire 2-4 just to be sure.
If someone can build a hypersonic missile, someone can also build a hypersonic missile interceptor missile… And you can fit a lot of missiles in a CVBG.
Sure, the CVBG doctrine only really works against the Japanese (where both babies are fighting over small islands that are far from their respective homelands)… But I don’t think that hypersonic missiles obsolete carriers in that role.
I do think that that role is useless against China or Russia given that they aren’t really colonial imperial powers with territory around the world, but…
The whole point of the hypersonic missiles is that you cannot intercept them.
We don’t even have the technology today to intercept (fixed) ballistic missile trajectory at an acceptable rate (the US Patriots had enough problem dealing with Iraqi Scuds made in the 1950s!), and the hypersonic missiles with maneuverable and unpredictable flight paths made them orders of magnitudes harder to intercept.
The Russian Zircons (hypersonic cruise missile) fly at Mach 8-9, which means if a CVBG can detect flying objects 200km from the horizon, they literally have 72 seconds to react. That’s slightly over a minute to detect, track, calculate intercept paths (they can’t against unpredictable targets), and launch the interceptor missiles with literally no second chance if the first wave fails to hit their target (and they will fail).
It doesn’t matter how many missiles you can fit into your entire carrier battle group, if the success rate is 1/1000 (and that’s a BIG if), then good luck lol.
IIRC the US’ missile interception system has a 40% success rate when the ballistic missile has a known origin and a normal parabolic trajectory
so yea, that nuke is hitting whether ppl like it or not, even if we went back in time 50 years people would still be able to nuke today’s US, only half as effectively
Even this claim has been called into question.
From NY Times: Did American Missile Defense Fail in Saudi Arabia?
And going into the second linked article:
What had likely happened was that the Patriots intercepted the discarded missile body after it had been separated from the warhead at the terminal phase:
Check out the NY Times article I linked above.
Hey it’s the they missed the point meme
The whole point of hypersonic cruise missiles is that they don’t have a fixed flight path while also moving 10 times the speed of sound.
Intercepting such a target is physically impossible.
I know
I’m just saying that even 1970s China could still nuke 100 US cities (assuming the US knows the exact origin point of each Chinese nuke, if they don’t then it goes up to 200)
What even is the turning radius of an HGV? Sure, you’re not constrained by silly things like pilot blackout and whatever, but that doesn’t mean it can zig zag at will.
I don’t think hypersonic missile interception is possible, unless the US gets laser weapons working or something like that. Hypersonics are incredibly fast, and Russia’s fighter jet launched hypersonics easily defeated the Patriot air defense systems in Ukraine, when they targeted them. Even intercepting normal supersonic and subsonic cruise missiles is a crapshoot, the iron Dome in Israel gets defeated by homemade rockets at times. Interception technology is very overrated currently.
Also hypersonic missiles fly so fast that they generate a plasma cloud around them and rendering them very difficult to be tracked by radars. So you might not even see them coming at all! And even if you do, your radars can’t track them. And even if you can track them, they’re too unpredictable to calculate an intercept path.
Interceptors are more difficult to make than the missiles themselves, and often are more expensive. They also don’t have 100% interception chance so you need to fire 2-4 just to be sure.