A national security official under Joe Biden who reviewed the document is said to have turned pale on realising Beijing had “redundancy after redundancy” for “every trick we had up our sleeve”, The New York Times reported.
Last year, Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, said that “we lose every time” in the Pentagon’s war games against China, and predicted the Asian country’s hypersonic missiles could destroy aircraft carriers within minutes.
Ukraine is proving cheap and plentiful is the new version of superiority, like the aircraft carrier supplanted the battleships, so too does the missile
Quantity has a quality of its own
This is a lesson America knew back in the WWII days when they countered the superior Tiger and Leopard Panzers with Sherman tanks, but seems to have forgotten in recent times with its multitude of white elephant projects for “superior systems” which are much more expensive whilst yielding tiny improvements over existing systems.
Meanwhile the era of the drone is upon us, and that’s all about using said “quality of its own” of masses of cheap and easy to make drones.
Eh, a carrier is a whole nother thing.
One carrier with a flight detail would be in the top ten most powerful Air Force’s on the planet, and we’ve got like 7 of them?
And that’s not counting all the support in a carrier group.
There are certain types of drone attacks that might have some effect on a carrier, but it would take an insane amount of preparation and be inconceivably expensive.
At most theyd have 1-2 attempts, it would be the modern equivalent of the WW2 nukes if someone could sink a modern US carrier, even in a surprise attack to start a war.
Please read the article. The government and Pentagon themselves are saying they will lose.
From a different comment in this thread:
Why are you taking trump and kegsworth word?
They’re fear mongering
It’s not fear mongering. It’s a real area-denial weapons system capability that the PRC initially deployed in 1991, and upgraded the terminal weapon into a hypersonic glide body in 2015. Lob a few of those at a CVN and it’s probably going to the bottom of the ocean.
Yup, there is no good counter apart from simply not being there. And CVNs aren’t known for their agility.
I don’t mean to belittle the force projection that a super carrier can bring to bear, but these hypersonic missiles are pretty scary, if they work
An Aegis missle can knock it down tho…
They cost 4.7 mil a pop, which isn’t much to the US military. And don’t even need launched by the carrier, it’d be launched by ships between the middle and the carrier.
Apparently China claims they have hypersonic rockets made out of concrete for the low low price of 99k each, but that’s not exactly believable. Especially since they’re claiming 99k and not 100k. I mean, even that they’re using “round” US dollars.
That’s pretty common propaganda to claim something is cheaper and more widely available than it really is. It’s why we split our uranium into two bombs in WW2. Because a country might use all of it at once as a bluff. But only idiot would make just two and then use them both days apart. It made it look like we could have a bunch. Not enough to keep up the pace, but how many? 5, 12?
It was more psychological warfare than anything. So is China claiming these are so cheap and mass producible when if that was true we’d see the same cost savings in commercial spaces.
No other country would be able to compete
We split our PLUTONIUM into 2 bombs because one was gadget, the test. Little boy (Hiroshima) was a uranium gun design and fat man (Nagasaki) was plutonium implosion.
Edit: To be clear your point about our bluff absolutely stands. It would likely be months at best before we would be able to drop another fission weapon of any design
Huh TIL the nuclear bombs used two different technologies
Lol like a few months back. Fucking could hardly keep a bunch of “pirate boys” in bathtubs with Detroits held down with a ratchet strap and klashnikovs away from the all majestic aircraft carriers.