According to Business Insider, Captain Paul Campagna, commanding officer of the carrier USS Dwight D. “In today’s world, with hypersonic missiles, with significant long-range fires coming at us from all domains, if…everybody knows where you are, you’re vulnerable.”Ī Naval War College professor who asks not to be quoted by name tells me, “The Chinese have made operations in the Western Pacific a dangerous place with the panoply of weapons that they can bring to bear.”īut active-duty American naval officers sharply disagree with the idea that their ships would wither under a missile or other assault. They knew exactly what we’re going to do before we did it.” Lesson learned: The U.S., he said, would have to change its long-standing war-fighting doctrine. According to Defense One, he reportedly said, “An aggressive red team that had been studying the United States for the last 20 years just ran rings around us. That was according to the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs Air Force General John Hyten, commenting after the war game. forces “failed miserably” in its battle simulation of a confrontation with China. In fact, China has practiced targeting its anti-ship missiles at mock-ups of aircraft carriers. strengths with a preemptive strike specifically on U.S. rival, which he characterized as “a paper tiger.” In what Sarah Kirchberger, head of the Center for Asia-Pacific Strategy and Security at the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University in Germany, describes to me as a “Pearl Harbor 2.0” scenario, Luo, a deputy secretary-general of the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences, called for the “puncturing” of U.S. In a widely reported speech on December 20, 2018, retired People’s Liberation Army Major General Luo Yuan laid out a plausible war strategy for dealing with its U.S. The key to Chinese success, say its military planners, lies in the vulnerability of U.S. Invading Taiwan, however, would almost certainly result in an American response, quite possibly leading to rapid escalation of violence between nuclear-armed nations. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has openly stated his nation’s intention to achieve “reunification,” by force if needed, with Taiwan, island home to the Western-leaning Republic of China, by the time of the People’s Republic’s 2049 centennial. At present, several analysts believe that American carriers and other big ships operating in the littorals of the East and South China Sea would not last in the face of such an attack.ĭisturbing to contemplate, the two rivals seem increasingly on a collision course over Taiwanese independence and freedom of the seas in the South and East China Seas, which China claims for itself. In a single salvo, China could shoot swarms of hundreds of state-of-the-art hypersonic missiles traveling at multiple times the speed of sound and with ranges over a thousand miles. It now possesses a vast arsenal of land, sea, and air ship-targeting cruise and ballistic weapons. For the past two decades, China has been building up its maritime defenses. That gnawing worry focuses especially on Chinese ship-killing capabilities, which are far more advanced than anything Ukraine used to destroy Moskva. nuclear aircraft carriers (with another on the way), now costing $13 billion-plus even before they go to sea, at risk? Are American or allied ships and, most worrisome, the 11 U.S. Navy-to relatively low-cost, numerous and technologically advanced cruise missiles.” The world’s shores now teem with such ship killers. The sinking, he contended, “is a stark reminder of the vulnerability of surface ships-including aircraft carriers, the heart of the U.S. They’re guarded by smaller fighting ships, surveillance systems, fighter jets, tracking satellites, and submarines, nearly all of them on hand for the sole purpose of protecting the mother ship from just this sort of assault.īut down the three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar ship went.īut, writing in Bloomberg, Stavridis warned that Western forces should not gloat. Big ships, including Russia’s, carry a panoply of high-tech defense systems to ward off missile, bomb, torpedo, and cyber attack. After the Moskva sank, a palpable shudder went through not just the Kremlin but also the Western naval affairs community, from the analysts to the admirals. Like darts popping a balloon, the weapons sent the paragon of the Russian navy to the bottom of the sea. But on April 14, with just two relatively low-tech, shore-launched Neptune cruise missiles, Ukrainian forces punched big holes in the side of a heavy Russian missile cruiser, Moskva, the flagship of Moscow’s Black Sea fleet. That is the indelible image of the unstoppable power packed by the great navies of the world. Few sights are more majestic, even breathtaking-and ferocious-looking-than a massive warship, gray and bristling with weapons, flanked by other equally badass vessels in a naval flotilla, bounding through the high seas.
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