Tom Clancy already did this. And he almost had the Nimitz sunk too in Red Storm Rising.

One of my classmates was on board the america back in the first gulf war. He was kinda sad to see her get sunk. He went through his shellback ceremony on her. Apparently the also used to watch porn for about 15 minutes between shifts before the XO would yell at everyone to get back to work. .

Truth.

Star Wars Death Star?

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/chinas-df-26-anti-ship-ballistic-missile-what-does-the-16260?page=2

carrier group gonna be able to stop a dozen or so of these? hell iran got a missile off 1000 yards from one of our carriers

Awesome.


"Our arrows will blot out the sun"


"We fight in the shade"

So the carrier guns it and runs right out of the battlegroup's envelope and into the waiting arms of the enemy's subs? Sounds like a swell tactic.  I didn't know modern ASM's were the dumb kind that only look in a "kill box" and don't have sophisticated tracking sensors to help it identify the target and defeat any countermeasures that are used.

Probably why the Navy is planning on mounting directed energy self defense weapons in the near future.  Last time I heard anything they were no longer just experiments.

The DF-21 is a dumb ASM.

I saw that movie.
If I remember the event made a gentleman with a cigar sweat.

If it lives, it can die, if it flies, it can be brought to earth, if it floats, it can sink.  There are groups and countries crazy enough to not care if they die to accomplish their ends, nor would they care about retribution.  Sinking a carrier would not be easy, but nothing is invulnerable.

FPNI

An enemy can sink anything.

Don't see what all the focus is on sinking one, when all you have to do is render them unfit for flight ops to reduce their number one job. 

Hyper-sonic data linked swarming missiles that explode and rain pop can tabs and cigarette butts all over the flight deck would do that. 

Somewhere, an E-9s head just exploded.

Isn't that the sort of thing that the "Exocet" missile was designed to sink, from a great distance (50-100 miles)? I'm sure that the "Exocet" missile's technology has advanced some since it was first designed and implemented.

Good question.

The answer might surprise you!

Fuck, no.

If someone said 80 years ago the mightiest warship Nazi Germany could build would be crippled by some lowly biplane's it probably would've sounded crazy.

Yet the Bismark is at the bottom of the North Atlantic.

Anything can be sunk.

And they'll probably say "Worth it."

Mathematics and probability.

Each stage of operation has a failure % assigned to it.

The odds of all the threats operating at 100% is not high

They may think that right before their country is turned into a gigantic sheet of glass. That wont make it true though.

It would suck for the Three Gorges to eat a nuke.

Somebody mentioned an entire fleet supporting the carrier...



Easiest option to deal with entire fleet?



Probably nuke it.    I am sure in some way those options have been considered.    Whether air burst from above or below, wipe out the entire fleet at once.

Would it even take a nuke to get that water flowing?

Nope. Nukes are not as powerful as TV and movies make them out to be. 

Ships are pretty survivable based on the tests done post war, which have been referenced in the thread multiple times. 

Not gonna happen. Strike groups don't sail that closely together.

Just the localized seismic forces the water has induced around the dam might be enough.

Erosion control is no laughing matter

OLD CV, post Bikini Atoll nuke.  Sure, it's a mission kill (probably beyond economical repair) and contaminated as all hell, but it's still floating.  A CVN with Zebra set is an incredibly tough beast.

<sniffling> 'And then... those evil bastards... they... <soft sobbing> FOD-bombed us out of the fight!'

Only if they batten down the hatches first.

Indeed, and that's an old (style) boat even for the times. 

Anything newer than the 60's would be pretty damn tough, plus the decks are stronger to bear higher loads. 

The questions that seem to always get missed in these discussions are: How is the enemy detecting and tracking the carrier? That's probably more difficult than actually launching the attack. And what is the enemy's strategic goal? Note that actually sending the carrier to the bottom is not really important to any rational goal.

It's one thing if they catch a carrier in an easily detectable location, i.e. within range of land-based radar, or air-based within range of land-based air power for defense. You would have to think that all of the carriers would rapidly get out of any such locations if a serious threat was suspected, though. What's the plan then? You can't throw any fancy missiles at it if you don't know where it is. Getting a sub-based kill is clearly not impossible, though difficult. But it may be impossible to do in a reliable, coordinated way, which makes it much more difficult to achieve any strategic goal.

Speaking of, do we have a goal for our theoretical enemy? It's hard to see anyone capable of doing so doing it for just shits and giggles. Maybe China wants to protect their trade routes. Pretty reasonable goal, but how do they solve the detection problem once they get out of range of mainland China? If they don't have their own carriers to run airborne radar, they're pretty vulnerable to air attack even with escorts. Maybe some good escorts could break up a strike a bit with SAMs, but I don't see how they can hit the carrier, even with long-range missiles, without some way to get a hard location on it.

Or maybe they want to be able to chase us out of the south China sea at will, the better to bully around their neighbors. This might be hard for the US to deal with without ever getting into range of land-based defenses. And here, a mission-kill of being unable to do air ops is a good as a sinking, probably better if you save the extra firepower for hitting another carrier instead of wasting it on sending one to the bottom. Seems likely they could do it, if they're willing to throw enough resources at it, or get lucky about a few things, and willing to deal with our retaliation. It may be successful even at getting our Navy to back off, but the obvious counter is to threaten their trade routes that they don't have an answer for. At least until they get their own fleet of effective carriers to either escort convoys or hunt our groups on the open ocean.

In my very limited knowledge on the subject I would say it would take a pretty big tactical fuckup on our part for any standing military to take out a carrier.

Even Guam?

Chinese policy is to retaliate with nukes against anybody who takes a shot at Three Gorges by any means, because there's so much potential for damage.  So you might as well ICBM it.

I remember reading Debt of Honor too.

"How fast will she go on two screws?"

That's easy. Nothing is "unsinkable". Next question?

Ask General P.K. Van Riper.

Millennium Challenge 2002

YES!

They're the Titanic's of the oceans!

Are carriers killable? Sure anything is killable.

You just have to beat the AWACS, air wing, Aegis system, rolling airframe missile, CIWS, other countermeasures that I'm sure are hush hush, chaff, flares, nixie, the fast attack boat sneaking around listening for party crashers, and whatever else they've got up their collective sleeves.

Then, assuming you actually get a hit or hits, assuming you get through the physical armor, whatever damage you inflict is on a ship with thousands of separate water/ gas-tight compartments, crewed by thousands of people trained in damage control, some of them DC specialists, plus whoever they can bring over from the support ships.

So yeah, it could be done. Just like I'm sure the crew in Ocean's 11 had a realistic probability of knocking off that casino, in the real world.

Mission kill or mobility kill is more likely, but a hard kill? Oriskany took 37 minutes to sink, after having been specifically prepped to be scuttled, and (obviously) nobody on damage control.

My memory's a little fuzzy, but didn't we shoot down a sattelite in LEO with Aegis and SM-3? Satellite in LEO is moving at, what, 10k mph?

In my opinion, it's not what happens if a carrier is sunk, it's what's going to happen after the carrier is sunk.  

A sand worm could probably take one, after they set off the atomics.

Easy peasy. I sunk one this morning. I thought I sunk a battleship but it took a little more to kill it.

I scored hits on B4, B5, B6, and B7 expecting a kill but nope....I had to drop one on B3 to finish her off. My son wasn't happy but that's the way the cookie crumbles.

We did. And those satellites are going about 17,450 mph.

They don't break them up, but sinking them whole is just as good.

Crossroads Baker sunk bigger shit than that.