The trouble came from the air. Bismarck, Marat and Yamato became easy prey for pilots. At Pearl Harbor, the American fleet burned down at anchor. The fragile Swordfish destroyed the Italian heavy cruiser Pola (and indirectly the cruisers Zara and Fiume) in the battle at Cape Matapan. 20 Swordfish-Avosek tore the Regia Marina to shreds during the raid on the Taranto Main Marine Base. The real fun began with the introduction of the Henschel.293 guided bomb for the Germans - one squadron of the Luftwaffe chalked up 40 British, American and Canadian ships.
Everyone knows the sad story of the destroyer Sheffield. Few know how Alpha-6 with USS Enterprise tore the Iranian frigate Sahand to pieces. Another time, the American Stark came under the distribution, having received two missiles from the Iraqi Mirage …
What I have listed is the tip of the iceberg, only a small part of all the stories (for example, Argentine aviation, besides the famous Sheffield, sank 6 British ships, including the Atlantic Conveyor helicopter carrier). In all cases, one thing remains unchanged - the ships died from the actions of aviation. Most often deck-based (which is logical - naval battles take place far from the coast).
The Battle of the Coral Sea was the first naval battle without a single artillery shot, the opponents did not see each other from their decks. Then there was Santa Cruz and Midway, where carrier-based aircraft decided everything.
Cruisers are completely defenseless against deck bombers. The genius Isoroku Yamamoto was the first to guess before, who developed the concept of using aircraft carriers. The Americans learned the lesson of Pearl Harbor and developed the ideas of Admiral Yamamoto. During World War II, the American fleet received 24 (!) Heavy Essex-class aircraft carriers, and none of them was lost in the battles. The Japanese simply had nothing to oppose them. Daring attacks "kamikaze" were powerless: only one out of ten could break through the fighter barrier and the fire of hundreds of anti-aircraft "Erlikon" escort ships. Figuratively speaking, the Japanese went "with a pitchfork to the tanks."
It makes sense to pay attention to the phenomenon of "kamikaze". I will not sing the praises of the courage of the Japanese pilots, I am interested in another moment: these kind of "anti-ship missiles", controlled by the most reliable control system - a man, could not cause serious harm to large ships, despite the rather powerful charge on board. The suicide bomber Zero carried a 250-kg bomb and an outboard fuel tank under another wing. The jet "Oka" carried up to 1.5 tons of ammonal. Very solid. Nevertheless, falling onto a deck full of aircraft did not lead to serious consequences (the only exception was Bunker Hill, which was badly burned out). This is about the survivability of an aircraft carrier.
The veterans of the Essex are tiny in comparison to today's nuclear-powered floating airfields. How many hits do you need and how powerful to disable them?
After all these facts, Soviet admirals insisted with devilish stubbornness that aircraft carriers were weapons of aggression and that the peaceful Soviet Union did not need them. Somehow they didn’t realize that it was not only a powerful strike weapon against the countries of the 3rd world, but, above all, it was the only effective air defense weapon of a naval group. Only the air wing is able to reliably cover the space hundreds of kilometers from the ship.
The unknown about the known
Most sources proudly state that up to 90 aircraft are based on the Nimitz. Of course, the actual composition of the deck wing is much more modest. Otherwise, difficulties arise with the use of aircraft, their placement and maintenance.
Standard Wing Composition:
- two squadrons of naval aviation: 20-25 carrier-based multipurpose fighters F / A-18 "Hornet"
- one aviation squadron of the Marine Corps: 10-12 carrier-based multipurpose fighters F / A-18 "Hornet"
- AWACS squadron (4-6 E-2C "Hawkeye")
- electronic warfare squadron (4-6 EA-6B "Prowler")
- transport group (1-2 transport C-2 "Greyhound")
- anti-submarine squadron (6-8 SH-60 "Seahawk")
- search and rescue group (2-3 HH-60 “Pavehawk”)
The numbers change depending on the tasks facing the AMG. The most frequent guests on the decks are transport CH-47, heavy helicopters CH-53 "Stellen", "Huey" and "Cobra" of the Marine Corps …
If necessary, the composition of the wing can be expanded by accepting another squadron of multipurpose fighters.
There is a constant rearmament of the aircraft wing. F / A - 18C / D “Hornet” are actively being replaced by F / A-18E / F “Super Hornet”. The Marauders will soon disappear altogether - instead there will be specialized electronic warfare EA-18 "Grumpy" aircraft. As you can see, the Americans are moving towards a complete unification of carrier-based aircraft, which should reduce costs and facilitate maintenance. By 2015, the AWACS squadron will be updated - the new E-2D "Super Hawkeye" is already being tested.
9 circles of hell
The basis of the AMG air defense is combat air patrols, patrolling 100-200 miles from the group. Each includes an AWACS aircraft and 2-4 fighters. This gives the AMG exceptional capabilities in detecting air and surface targets. Any, even the best, shipborne radar cannot compare with the Hokaya radar, which is 10 kilometers above the surface. When the threat increases, the defense can be echeloned by pushing the aircraft even further. On the deck there are always duty fighters with different types of weapons to promptly eliminate any threats.
If the fighter barrier is breached, the Aegis systems of the escort destroyers will be used. There are many questions to this system, for example, the AN / SPY-1 radar does not see the target at its zenith above itself. The declared detection range of two hundred miles applies only to objects in the upper atmosphere. Nevertheless, she is quite capable of finishing off single targets that broke through the fighter barrier. Nobody demands more from her, the AMG air defense depends to a greater extent on deck interceptors.
The last line of defense is the self-defense systems of ships. Mk15 "Falanx", SeaSparrow, SeaRAM - a variety of structures capable of hitting targets at ranges from 500 meters to 50 km.
The stories about the flights over the decks of the aircraft carriers of the Soviet and Russian Tu-95 and Su-24 have no practical value - the planes flew in peacetime. Nobody was going to shoot them down, and AMG has no other means of counteraction in peacetime. The Tu-22M3 pilots admitted that they had little chance of hitting the AMG in the North Atlantic, outside the range of their fighters. Missile carriers will have to get too close to the grouping and enter the range of carrier-based interceptors.
The AMG's anti-submarine capabilities are modest; it cannot do without external help. On the transoceanic crossing, the group is covered by the R-3 Orion base patrol aircraft, loitering at heading angles in the direction of the AMG. The Orion works simply: it sets up a line barrier of a dozen sonar buoys at intervals of 5-10 miles, then circles around the area for several hours, listening to the sounds of the ocean. When anything suspicious appears, "Orion" sets up a ring (covering) barrier around the triggered buoy and begins to "work" in detail with this zone.
In the near zone, PLOs are provided by LAMPS helicopters and a multipurpose nuclear submarine, covering the dead zones under the bottoms of the ships. Nuclear submarines are mandatory included in the AMG after the incident with K-10. In 1968, during Typhoon Diana, a Soviet submarine secretly escorted the aircraft carrier Enterprise for 12 hours. The storm did not allow the carrier-based aircraft to take off, and then there was no one else to cover the AUG.
In general, the conclusion here is that the AMG anti-submarine defense is quite reliable - over 60 years of continuous tracking of the AUG (AMG) by Russian submarines, only a few cases of successful interception have been recorded. I have always wondered what practical value is the passage of a nuclear submarine to the center of an aircraft carrier order. It is useless to use torpedo weapons against these monsters (for example, in the battle near Santa Cruz Island, 12 torpedoes hit the small USS Hornet, but it stayed afloat until it was finished off by Japanese destroyers. The Nimitz is 5 times bigger than the Hornet - do it output yourself). During a conversation with Russian submariners, the following became clear: it is not necessary to sink an aircraft carrier - it is enough to tilt it a little, which will complicate the work of carrier-based aircraft. To my question that the roll can always be corrected by flooding the compartments of the other side, the guys just shrugged their shoulders: “This is all we can. We will perish, but we will not surrender."
The strike capabilities of an aircraft carrier and a non-aircraft carrier are incomparable. Heavy atomic missile cruiser pr. 1144 throws 15 tons of explosives at a range of 150 … 600 km. At the most conservative estimate, the deck wing is capable of throwing 30 tons at a range of 750 … 1000 km in ONE FLIGHT. With the use of tanker aircraft, it is possible to ensure the defeat of sea and ground targets at a distance of up to 2000 km.
Given the developed information support and support for electronic warfare aircraft, any naval target becomes an easy target for aviation. Two or three groups of deck attack aircraft, attacking from all directions under cover of interference, will drown anyone. In turn, AMG remains invulnerable - its "arm" is so long that the enemy will not have time to reach the range of using his weapon. The idea of a cheap "mosquito" fleet to counter AMG is untenable - AWACS planes see the boats at a glance. An example is the "Ean Zaquit" - MRK pr. 1234 of the Libyan Navy, sunk in 1986. The small rocket ship did not have time to leave Benghazi, as the Hawkeye discovered it and pointed at it by deck attack aircraft.
Issue price
Usually, denying the need for aircraft carriers, Soviet theorists scare the "exorbitant cost" of aircraft carriers. Now, in front of your eyes, I will dispel this myth.
The Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier costs $ 5 billion. A fantastic amount for any of us. But … the cost of the promising Russian frigate, project 22350 "Admiral Gorshkov" is 0.5 billion dollars. The displacement of the frigate is 4500 tons. Those. instead of an aircraft carrier, you can build only 10 frigates (mind you - frigates, not even destroyers!), with a total displacement of 45,000 tons. From this, one more curious conclusion can be drawn - the cost of building a ton of an aircraft carrier is much less than any cruiser, submarine or frigate.
Another example? The cost of the Orly Burke-class Aegis destroyer exceeds $ 1 billion. Currently, the US Navy has 61 ships of this type, with a total value of over $ 60 billion! The cost of an aircraft carrier seems ridiculous against the background of this amount.
The next important point is that the service life of aircraft-carrying ships exceeds 50 years, and taking into account not the most complicated modernization and replacement of an air wing, 50-year-old ships are in no way inferior to their more modern sisterships.
In an effort to neutralize the threat of AUG, the USSR created the following designs:
- 11 nuclear submarines, project 949A (underwater displacement of each - 24,000 tons)
- 4 TARKR pr. 1144 (full displacement - 26,000 tons)
- 3 RRC pr. 1164
- missile systems P-6, P-70, P-500, P-700, P-1000
- Marine space reconnaissance and target designation system (MKRTs) "Legenda-M"
- bomber T-4 (did not go into production)
- anti-ship missiles X-22
- dozens of airfields of naval missile-carrying aviation, with Tu-16, Tu-22M2 and Tu-22M3 based on them
- ekranoplan "Lun" (!)
- titanium nuclear submarine pr. 661 "Anchar"
- 45 submarines pr. 651 and nuclear submarines pr. 675, armed with anti-ship missiles P-6
All this tremendous amount of equipment had only one goal - to counteract AMG … and, as we see from the first part of the article, in general, it was not skillful to do this. It is easy to imagine the cost of these systems.
Miser pays twice. The USSR still had to create strange designs called "heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser" - four huge ships, each with a displacement of 45,000 tons. They cannot be called aircraft carriers, tk.their main armament, the Yak-38, could not provide the main thing - to provide air defense of the naval group, although as an attack aircraft, the Yak was probably not bad.
With the birth of TAVKRs, another myth was born: "aircraft carriers without an air wing are rusty targets, and our TAVKRs can stand up for themselves." A completely absurd statement is like saying: "A hunter without a weapon is not a hunter." It is clear that they never go hunting unarmed. Moreover, the armament of the same "Kuznetsov" is not much different from the self-defense complexes "Nimitz".
As we can see, the USSR had enough funds to create a full-fledged aircraft carrier fleet, but the Soviet Union preferred to spend money on its useless Wunderwaffe. The economy must be economical!
Vitality
On January 14, 1969, a fire broke out on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Enterprise. Dozens of aerial bombs and missiles detonated, 15 fully fueled aircraft burned down. 27 people died, more than 300 were injured and burned. And yet … 6 hours after the fire, the ship was able to send and receive planes.
After this incident, all aircraft carriers are equipped with a forced irrigation system for the decks (when it is turned on, the ship is similar to Niagara Falls). And the deck crews responsible for moving the aircraft received armored tractors to quickly push the emergency aircraft overboard.
To increase survivability, duplication, dispersal and redundancy are used. The design of modern aircraft carriers includes steel armor with a thickness of 150 mm. Critical spaces inside the ship are additionally protected by layers of 2.5-inch Kevlar. Fire-hazardous compartments, if necessary, are filled with hydrogen peroxide. In general, the first rule of American sailors is "the second specialty of a sailor is a firefighter." The battle for the survivability of a ship is assigned a significant preparation cycle.
The importance of repair work during the battle, the Americans realized during the Second World War. During the battle at about. Midway, Admiral Nagumo reported that he destroyed 3 American aircraft carriers. In fact, not a single one. Each time the Japanese bombed the same attack aircraft carrier Yorktown, but the emergency crews rebuilt the ship on the high seas and, like a Phoenix, rose from the ashes. This story shows that on a huge ship, damage can be easily repaired.
The kamikaze attacks once again confirm the paradoxical conclusion - the explosion of even one ton of explosives cannot seriously harm the aircraft carrier. It is unclear what the Soviet designers were hoping for when they created the P-700 Granit.
Not the saddest conclusions
To date, the US Navy's multipurpose (strike) aircraft carrier groups do not pose a threat to Russia. The main objects are out of the range of carrier-based aircraft. It's crazy to use AMG in the Gulf of Finland or the Black Sea. For example, it is much easier to use the Incirlik airbase in Turkey to defeat the bases of the Black Sea Fleet. For the protection of the bases of the Northern and Pacific fleets, coastal airfields with naval missile-carrying aircraft and cover fighters are quite suitable (but a land airfield cannot move 1000 km per day, many of them will have to be built).
It's another matter if Russia wants to enter the world ocean, the creation of aircraft-carrying ships will become a necessity. It is high time for the military-political leadership of Russia to understand that there is no cheaper and more reliable means to combat AMG (and any other land and sea targets) than its own aircraft carrier.
