The primary problem with killing carriers is, has been, and will be, finding the things.[1]
Drone strikes on oil refineries work because, with few exceptions, the refineries rarely move. You can literally program a drone to go x miles in a specific direction and then drop a bomb.
It's also considerably harder to hide things like drones in big empty spaces.
If loitering drones became a serious threat (as opposed to the, you know, literally super sonic missiles the navy has spent the last 40 years planning for) itms pretty easy to imagine anti-drone planes/ships/drones sweeping a large radius around your carriers.
[1] Satellites can definitely do things, but they're not magical and people can track where they're looking and just... sail in a different direction. Also if someone was actually using satellites to target american carriers with munitions the americans would probably just destroy the satellites.
Despite the nuclear reactor, aircraft carriers won't stay in the fight long if their supply lines are disrupted. And also it's not likely that a carrier group could fend off a wave of 10,000-20,000 drones launched from a container ship that happens to be sailing near it.
At the end of the day, we rely more on nuclear weapons and MAD to deter these kinds of major hostilities between powerful countries. Talking about how conventional weapons match up is a bit of a red herring. The only thing that would change that would be very reliable nuclear missile/warhead interception systems - and I don't think any country even has a roadmap to such a thing.
Why not just put a nuke in their instead? Like, how is this supposed to work, china just has a totally not suspicious container ship sitting in every major port not moving or carrying cargo or letting anyone inspect it and nobody notices that its full of weapons???
> And also it's not likely that a carrier group could fend off a wave of 10,000-20,000 drones launched from a container ship that happens to be sailing near it.
If there's a state of war, you don't get to just sail your container ship next to a carrier, that's uh, not how that works.
Like, if this was a tom clancy novel maybe china could do some kind of super clever first strike where they attack a bunch of carriers at the start of a war with their super secret attack ships, but at that point why don't they just sneak their ninja assassins on to the carriers and take them over for the glory of china.
something like a spiderweb container isnt going to be visible just looking at the ship
you wouldnt think ukraine would be able to drive its semi trucks right up to russian nuclear bombers, but they did
Actually, exactly like that. It looks completely normal. Container ships are super massive, and generally containers are only searched after they're offloaded, before leaving the port. So they don't get searched if they remain on the vehicle.
> you don't get to just sail your container ship next to a carrier
A lot of drones have surprisingly long range.
To sink an aircraft carrier you really need like 10 direct hits with hypersonic missiles. Or a couple of hits with a torpedo. If you are lucky, maybe even a single torpedo hit. People underestimate how hard it is to sink a ship. You really have to attack it below the water line, from the bottom. A single torpedo is more effective than 100,000 drones when it comes to sinking big ships.
What drones could do, is damage the runway and radars and other equipment that would constitute a "mission kill" -- e.g. the carrier has to withdraw for a period to fix the damage to equipment on deck.
But now think a little bit -- the drones have limited range. They have to be launched from somewhere. So just launch missiles from that location. You get the same thing -- a mission kill. You don't need a million drones. And the missile will have much larger range than the drones, and will cause more damage.
So the bottom line of all of this is no US aircraft carrier would venture near Chinese shores in the event of a war with china. That is probably because those shores would be lightning up with mushroom clouds anyway, as would ours. So what do you need the drones for?
Also, while you're completely right about the ruggedness of the ship itself, image recognition electronics are dirt cheap nowadays. You can buy COTS camera-IR modules from under $100 and train them on whatever you want. If I were opposing an enemy that had carriers while I had only drones, I'd target specific parts of the superstructure rather tha the hull.
lightning up with mushroom clouds anyway
I think you are wildly overestimating the appetite for using tactical nuclear weapons. Whoever deploys those first in an offensive capacity is going to gain instant pariah status. The US is torching a lot of its traditional alliances as is, deploying a nuclear weapon in anger would result in international criminal status and probable internal collapse soon after. nor do I see any likelihood of China using them against Taiwan since that would undermine the entire purpose of a military undertaking.
Missiles are also an option, though carrier groups have some ability to defend themselves against them (less capability against hypersonic missiles, of course). The Chinese container ships are reported to have up to 60 vertical launch systems, which may be insufficient to overwhelm a carrier group and remove the carrier from service. It's reported that carrier groups can defend against "dozens to 100+" missiles.
That's why I'd imagine that it might be easier for a single container ship to disable a carrier group using 10,000+ drones instead of 60+ missiles. Especially as you wouldn't need fiber-optic cables, against ships a COTS AI targeting system would be sufficient (still robust against jamming, but allows for longer range than fiber-optics would).
you are applying arbitrary constraints to a thing thats just "put an rc controller on it"
ukrainian drones are doing something like 700 miles to hit the oil ports in primorsk. its not the 2500 miles that a missile might do for hitting diego garcia, but nothing says you could get one to. after all, a b2 bomber can go on long flights. put controller on it, and control it via a satellite, and the b2 becomes a drone
I know nothing about this really, so forgive my ignorance.
Assuming a carrier is found and tracked by a satellite in the ocean, how could it possibly escape the satellite's detection before being targeted by a drone or some other type of munition? If the ship starts sailing in a different direction, the people (or AI) tracking via satellite would notice and adjust, right?
https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Ty...
I don't know how many military satelites China has, but I would have assumed it would be sufficient to cover the pacific sufficiently to find an aircraft carrier. (the obvious caveat here being clouds, which are fairly common over the ocean)
What?
> unless they're on the equator
What?
> because otherwise they have to be moving
What?
The pacific ocean is over 60 million square miles. A full sized carrier group probably takes up like 100 square miles when it's fully spread out, but that's a very, very, small percentage of the available search space.
And beyond that, you need to actually see the carrier with something, a laser sensor, a direct radar hit, even the human eyeball; you can't just fire a bunch of missiles in the general direction you think the carrier is at and expect them to hit anything (for one thing there's a whole bunch of other ships that will distract the targeting sensors).
Like, I cannot stress this enough, even if you knew the exact location of a carrier at a given moment, down to like 4 decimals of lat/long, and you knew which direction it was sailing, if your missile launcher is 1000 miles away you can't just program it in and fire it off and expect it to fly 1000 miles and then hit the carrier. Even with some kind of amazing on board sensors, there's a dozen other ships just existing near by, the carrier itself is moving unpredictably, not to mention the actual decoying/spoofing systems specifically designed to interfere with targeting sensors.
And this is the problem, you now say "oh well just use a platform that's closer to the carrier so it can get accurate targeting data for a weapon to hit the specific carrier", which is technically possible... until the carrier destroys your targeting platform because why wouldn't it? Whatever distance you have to be within to "lock on" to the carrier will be, pretty much by definition, in range of the carrier to shoot back at.
Hell, as far as I know, they could put literal anti-satellite missiles on carrier aircraft and just fly straight up and shoot down targeting satellites. I don't know if that's something they're currently planning/practicing, but I don't know if any reason they couldn't.
All that protection didn't stop the Swedish diesal-electric HSMS Gotland seamlessly torp'ing the Ronald Reagan in 2005.
France pulled a similar score 2015, Canada "got" a UK carrier in 2007, IIRC even Australia's taken out a US ship or two in various fun ways over the years.
But I do wonder what the starting conditions for those exercises were. The sub's underwater range is limited (although Swedish subs seem to be better than others) and the have to come up every once in a while, at which point they're vulnerable. There's plenty of places to hide near coasts, but I can imagine that on the open ocean, it might be a lot harder for a sub to get close enough.
I haven't studied the HSMS Gotland incident in any great detail, but just in general for wargames, ships are required to be in certain locations at certain times, stay inside sea lanes, use transponders, ignore certain other ships and in general not completely mess up the existing sea commerce traffic that is trying to go past the exercise area.
If your carrier group is literally 1000 miles away from any piece of land and you have full authorization to sink anything that looks even slightly suspicious, it probably becomes considerably more difficult to sneak up and torpedo a carrier.
But yes, carriers will get sunk, modern warfare is in large part attritional, but if you send out, dunno, $100m worth of subs and sink a $10b carrier, that's a great return on investment, but doesn't help you in the slightest if you're now out of submarines and the enemy sails two more carriers into range.
The interesting thing about drones is the ability to attack from many directions at the same time, overwhelming the short-range defenses. IIRC no fewer than 5 naval drones attacked the Moskva missile carrier at once, and successfully sank it eventually. Naval drones are compact, barely visible, and, unlike torpedoes, highly maneuverable.
Aerial drones are also highly maneuverable. Large navy ships are pretty tough on the outside, able to withstand a blast of a moderate-size shell or bomb. But they have smaller, harder-to-reach vulnerable areas. This is the kind of target drones are apt to attack precisely.
Most anti-air weapons are pretty expensive to fire, because they were intended against high-value targets like planes or cruise missiles. They are insufficient and wasteful to fire against hundreds of small, inexpensive targets.
It's like having a shotgun and a sledgehammer, but fighting against a swarm of hornets. Despite a large advantage in damage-dealing capacity, you quickly become incapacitated.
That's a hallucination, Moskva was by all accounts sunk by a couple of conventional anti-ship cruise missiles.
Finding the things is not trivial. Finding them twice is even less trivial.
Yeah, except missiles are better at it and the navy has spent the last 30+ years innovating ways to defeat missile attacks. What exactly do you think is the difference between a "drone" and a missile here?
> Once the big valuable vessel is found, it can be reasonably tracked from orbit.
Satellites orbit. They move. They have a limited area they can see at any given time and that area is constantly shifting.
Something with the budget of the US Navy can do the math to figure out where the satellite can look and then move. If your sat is orbiting the earth every 4 hours, a carrier group could be 100+ miles away by the time it comes back around.
And, even if you manage to get a satellite picture that shows that at 8:32pm the carrier group was at lat 32/long 42; you can't exactly just open up your missiles and program that in and sink a carrier.
At minimum they travel with 6 or 7 ships and leave a wake a mile long and they only go tens of miles an hour, it isnt a speed boat.
Here is an Indian carrier (formerly Russian) on google maps and the US ones are large https://www.google.com/maps/place/14%C2%B044'30.3%22N+74%C2%...
I think people forget how many satellites are pointed at all parts of the planet. They are used for crop reporting and weather and all sorts of shit. It isnt the 1960s where only the super powers have them and they drop rolls of film.
Which is why you get things like this https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/05/satellite-firm-planet-labs-t...
An aircraft carrier is not that fast, if you see it once you know roughly what radius of circle it is going to be in for a while (ignoring the fact that they are likely going somewhere for a reason its not their job is to say out of sight)
edit: aha that company literally lists it on their website https://www.planet.com/industries/maritime/
Never mind that the Starlink radio arrays are, well, radio arrays that quite effectively cover the whole planet. If you think of each satellite as a radio telescope, its resolution is crap and probably cannot disambiguate a carrier group from anything else (at least according to disclosed specs). But it would be quite interesting to build a synthetic aperture array out of multiple satellites. This would rely on emissions from the ships themselves, but I bet it could be done and could locate ships quite nicely.
Both the US and China have newer more advanced capabilities than a 50 year old system...
> [SOSUS] was the primary cuing system that antisubmarine forces used to localize and potentially destroy targets for over forty years, but secrecy largely kept that fact from the fleet. The lack of strong fleet support was a factor when budget cuts after the Cold War fell heavily on the surveillance program.
Driving cars down every street in every advanced country to take photos seems ridiculous, but Google did it (StreetView) and the US DoD has more money than Google...
Iran pushed our carrier group far outside of striking range without midair refueling (very dangerous to do in an active war zone). This is because they can blow holes in the ships from the shore.
In the Vietnam War (“the resistance war against america to save the nation” as the vietnamese term it officially), American carriers were stationed 90mi off the coast at point yankee because there were not sufficient anti ship capability. This resulted in the horrific pounding of the country (Operation Linebacker I, II for example). Things have changed (for the better).
The only thing I can come up with is “war crimes”, but, as Iran pointed out, if you can afford an aircraft carrier, you have trillions of dollars of easily hit civilian targets, so you pretty much automatically lose if the other side retaliates in kind.
What makes you think they can't?
Ignoring some kind of dedicated anti-drone missile systems that they could equip (if you're just hitting drones you could probably carry like 500 tiny missiles or something, who knows), you can just go and destroy whatever platform is carrying the drones, since your carrier aircraft is pretty much going to outrange it by definition.
