In military history, there are cases when surface warships or submarines in battle sank aircraft carriers, but they belong to the period of World War II, with its detection and destruction ranges, with the then equipment, weapons and tactics.
These cases, of course, are also instructive, and should be studied in our time, however, the applicability of the experience of those years is extremely limited today - today there are radars of various types and ranges, and the range at which the aircraft carrier wing is able to carry out a reconnaissance search is more than a thousand kilometers.
In such conditions, it is extremely difficult to get close to an aircraft carrier at the distance of a missile salvo - long-range missiles, such as the P-1000 Vulcan, upon impact at a long distance, can simply miss the target if it maneuvers in an unpredictable manner. For anti-ship missiles, the seeker of which captures targets already at a distance, this means going into milk. Going to a shorter distance is difficult due to the fact that the deck wing will be able to inflict at least two massive airstrikes on a ship with guided missile weapons while it goes to the launch line, even if the aircraft carrier does not try to break away from the attacking URO ships using its high speed. And if there is …
Recall that "Kuznetsov" is one of the fastest ships in the Navy, with a working power plant, and almost no one really knows how fast American supercarriers can go even in the United States. And there is an opinion that the available estimates of their speed qualities are greatly underestimated.
However, with all these really existing limitations, there are precedents for the release of URO ships (ships with guided missile weapons) at a salvo range against an aircraft carrier trying to both evade this attack and destroy the attacker with aircraft. Naturally, they all took place during the exercises.
In our country, anti-aircraft fleet maneuvers were quite a reality for a significant part of the post-war period - the role of an aircraft carrier, as a rule, was played by some larger ship, most often a Project 68 cruiser. In a sense, an epoch-making event for our fleet - a training battle between two Soviet naval aircraft carrier groups in the Mediterranean Sea, one KAG led by "Minsk", the second led by "Kiev".
However, we are much more interested in foreign experience - if only because "they" have full-fledged aircraft carriers with trained and combat-experienced carrier-based aircraft.
For Russia, which for economic reasons in the foreseeable future will not be able to afford a large aircraft carrier fleet (which does not obviate the need to have a certain number of such ships), studying the possibilities of hitting the American aircraft carrier with ship-based anti-ship missiles is vital. For some, apparently for a long time, we are doomed to use aircraft carriers not as a universal striking instrument, but as a means of gaining air superiority over a very small area of water, and, accordingly, the main striking agent in war at sea in our fleet will be for a long time rocket ships and submarines.
It is worth studying how the surface ships of the URO in the western fleets "destroyed" aircraft carriers in the exercises.
Hank Masteen and his rockets
Vice Admiral Henry "Hank" Mustin is a US Navy legend. He was a member of a family that served four generations in the US Navy and fought in the five wars that country fought. The Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Mustin is named after this family. He was a relative of many "elite" clans in the United States and even the Royal House of Windsor. A career officer and participant in the Vietnam War, he served as Inspector General of the US Navy, Commander of the 2nd Fleet (Atlantic) and Deputy Commander of the Navy in the 1980s. In the Office of the Commander (OPNAV), he served as Deputy [Forward-looking] Policy and Planning and was responsible for the innovative development of the Navy.
Mastin left no memoirs, but there is a so-called "Oral history" - a series of interviews, which were later published as a collection book. From it we learn the following.
In 1973, during the Mediterranean confrontation with the USSR Navy, the Americans were seriously frightened by the prospect of a battle with the USSR Navy. The latter, according to their ideas, would look like a series of massive missile strikes on American ships, delivered from different directions, which the Americans could not particularly oppose.
The only way to quickly and reliably sink Soviet ships was American carrier-based aircraft, but the events of 1973 showed that it simply would not be enough for everything. It was these events that triggered the appearance, albeit for a short time, of such weapons as the anti-ship version of the Tomahawk missile. It must be said that the rocket made its way into life very hard, the carrier-based aviation was opposed to such a weapon landing on American ships.
However, Masten, who was then at OPNAV, was able to push through the development of such a missile and its adoption, not alone of course. One of the episodes of this pushing was the exercises on the combat use of such missiles against an aircraft carrier that was part of the US Navy's 2nd Fleet. At the time of these exercises, the Tomahawks were not yet in service. But the missile ships, which were to act against the aircraft carrier, had to act as if they were already armed with these missiles.
Here is how Mastin himself told about it:
The first time we did this, I had an aircraft carrier operating in the Caribbean, in the south, and we had to "go down" to the south, and join him during the naval exercises. The aircraft carrier had to find and sink my flagship, and we had to try to find and sink the aircraft carrier. All said about this: excellent teachings. And we went to Bill Pirinboom's ship and took five more ships with us to complete the task. We moved along the coast in complete "electromagnetic silence." The aircraft carrier couldn't find us. At the same time, we sent out a couple of submarines and they found the aircraft carrier. So they informed about where the aircraft carrier was, and we were still "in silence." The aircraft carrier's wing was looking for us over the entire Atlantic Ocean, but could not find us, because we were very careful along one of the trade routes.
When we reached the launch range of the Tomahawks, we “launched” them focusing not only on the signals of the submarines, but also on the electromagnetic signals of the aircraft carrier that we detected, which we detected from a great distance.
We made the decision to launch six Tomahawks. Then they threw a die and determined that two of them were horrible.
Then we found out what the aircraft carrier was doing at the time of the defeat, and we learned that there were a bunch of aircraft on the deck, refueled and ready to take off, and the like.
The presence on the deck of fueled and armed aircraft at the time of an impact on an aircraft carrier, as a rule, means huge losses in people, equipment, an extensive fire on board, and at least a loss of combat effectiveness. Therefore, Mastin specifically focuses on deck loading.
Further, Masteen informed the then Commander of the Second Fleet, Tom Bigley, about everything, and information about these exercises went to Washington, then it really did not lead to a consensus on long-range anti-ship missiles on surface ships, but in general strongly tipped the scales in favor of missile weapons. …
Mastin, unfortunately, did not provide us with details - the years have affected, both since the end of the events described, and "in general" - the vice admiral gave his interviews at an old age, and could not remember much. However, we do know that Captain Bill Peerenboom commanded the Belknap-class missile cruiser Wainwright from 1980 to 1982. At the same time, Thomas Bigley commanded the 2nd Fleet from 1979 to 1981. So we can assume that the events described took place in 1980 during an exercise in the Atlantic.
This, however, was not the only exercise of URO ships under the command of Hank Mastin, during which they "sunk" an aircraft carrier. A little later, another episode occurred.
In the second half of 1981, the new commander of the 2nd Fleet, Vice Admiral James "Ace" Lyons (in office since July 16, 1981) invited Mastin to participate in the battle between two AUGs, one at the head of the aircraft carrier Forrestal, and the second, led by the latest nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Eisenhower.
… At the time, Ace Lyons was the commander of the 2nd Fleet. He wanted to do a small exercise, carrier versus carrier, when Forrestal leaves Mediterranean. He would like to arrange these exercises so that Eisenhower would participate in them on the way to northern Europe. And he would like me to take my headquarters, fly to Company and take command of the Forrestal air wing. I said, "Excellent," and we flew over to the C-5 and took over command of Forrestal as it left Mediterranean and out of 6th Fleet control into 2nd Fleet and Ace Lyons' area.
I gave instructions to my headquarters: “What we are going to do is to act in complete“electronic silence”. In these exercises, you had to use only those weapons that you had - you could not pretend that you had anything else. “We take our escort ships with the Harpoons, take them [off guard], three of them. We send them north to the Faroe-Icelandic barrier, and from there, in electronic silence, they will shift with trade traffic coming from the side of the barrier to the Atlantic. And we will see if, thanks to electronic tricks, first of all, it will be possible to remain undetected on Forrestal from aviation from Ike, and secondly, if you, “arrows”, mixing with dense trade traffic and not showing yourself, can get closer with "Hayk" at the distance of the "Harpoon" salvo.
Well, it worked with a bang. The aircraft carrier versus aircraft carrier exercise in the past looked like a bed of guys who revealed their positions in front of each other, carried out an attack against each other, and then said: "Haha, I packed you in a body bag …"
The Ike planes could not find us on the Forrestal. We didn't fly. We just "drifted" off the coast. They were looking for us at the exit from Mediterranean, but not on the side of the Faro-Icelandic barrier. And they were looking for a battle group, not a few single contacts disguised in heavy traffic. So, before they found us, two of the three "shooters" with "Harpoons" went out to them and launched "Harpoons" into the aircraft carrier, point-blank, in the middle of the night …
Ace Lyons delayed sending the exercise report to Washington as long as he could. And then a scandal erupted over the fact that a pair of not the most expensive and advanced URO ships attacked an aircraft carrier. And again, at the moment of the "launch" of the missiles, the deck of the Eisenhower was filled with aircraft ready for combat missions.
After that, Mastin almost flew out of the Navy, which was dominated by pilot-pilots, but in the end he found defenders who saved him, and the tactics of missile combat became the "norm" for the US Navy. True, Operation Praying Mantis forced the Americans to reconsider their approaches to such a battle and move away from anti-aircraft missiles to anti-aircraft missiles as a more suitable weapon for such a battle. But the fact is that by the time it began, they knew how to conduct a missile battle.
The US Navy was no longer dependent on aircraft carriers to such a critical extent.
John Woodward attack
In the same 1981, the British Royal Navy under the command of the future war hero in the Falklands, Admiral John "Sandy" Woodward, made a military campaign in the western Indian Ocean.
In his book on the Falklands War, Admiral Woodward details his joint exercises with the Americans:
Together with my headquarters, I flew to Italy, to the historical base of Naples, and arrived at the Glamorgan. … We turned east and north along the Gulf of Aqaba for a short official visit to Jordan, then went down the Red Sea, conducting exercises with the French in the Djibouti region. We then laid down a course towards Pakistani Karachi, a few hundred miles to the northeast, to meet a US aircraft carrier strike group in the Arabian Sea. The heart of the US aircraft carrier strike group was their attack aircraft carrier, the Coral Sea. He carried about eighty aircraft on board, more than twice as many as on a Hermes-class ship.
The carrier was an amphibious air force commanded by Rear Admiral Tom Brown, and I must say that her activities in the region had far greater impact than mine.
At that time, the situation in the Persian Gulf was very volatile: American hostages were still being held in the Middle East, and the bloody war between Iran and Iraq continued.
Admiral Brown was busy with very real problems; he was ready for any trouble. However, the admiral agreed to work with us for two to three days and was kind enough to allow me to plan and conduct the last twenty-four hours of training.
For me, the tasks that we had to work out were clear.
The US strike group, with all its guards and aircraft, was on the high seas. Their task was to intercept my forces, which were breaking through the guard of the aircraft carrier in order to "destroy" it before we "destroy" them. Admiral Brown was quite satisfied with this plan. He could detect an enemy surface ship at a distance of more than two hundred miles, calmly follow it and strike at it at a convenient distance with any of its six attack missile carriers. And this was only the first line of his defense. By any modern military standard, it was almost impregnable.
I had the Glamorgan and three frigates, plus three ships from the Royal Auxiliary Fleet: two tankers and a supply ship. All frigates were anti-submarine ships and could not cause serious damage to an aircraft carrier, except to ram it. Only the Glamorgan, with its four Exocet missiles (firing range twenty miles), could do real damage to the Coral Sea, and Admiral Brown knew it. Thus, my flagship was his only threat and his only real target.
We were to begin no earlier than 12:00 noon and no less than two hundred miles from the American aircraft carrier. It was located in the center of a vast expanse of clear blue water, under clear blue skies. Actual visibility is 250 miles. Admiral Brown was in the middle of a well-defended exclusive zone, and I didn't even have the advantage of local cloud cover, let alone fog, rain, or rough seas. No cover.
No hiding place. And no own air support …
I ordered my ships to separate and take up positions in a two-hundred-mile circle from the aircraft carrier by 12:00 and then attack it as quickly as possible (a kind of naval attack by a light brigade from different directions). Everything would be fine if, three quarters of an hour before the moment when we were supposed to start, an American fighter jet had not appeared, found us and hurried home to inform the boss: he had found what he was looking for. Our place and course are known!
We couldn't "knock him down" - the teaching hadn't started yet! We could have played the teaching before it even started. All that remained was to wait for an American air strike on Glamorgan as soon as they could deliver it.
Regardless, we must continue to act, and we have no choice but to take our best shot. This forced me to change course eastward and go as fast as possible in an arc of two hundred miles in the opposite direction. Three hours later, we heard American strike aircraft heading for an area about a hundred miles west of us. They found nothing there and flew back. However, during the day, they found all my ships one by one, except for one, the Glamorgan, and it was the only ship that needed to be stopped, since it was the only one capable of sinking an aircraft carrier.
Finally the Americans "struck" my last frigate. When the sun went down across the Arabian Sea and night fell, the Glamorgan turned into a two-hundred-mile zone. Twilight gave way to total darkness, and I ordered all the lights on the ship and all possible lanterns that could be found on the ship. We set out to create the appearance of a cruise ship. From the bridge we looked like a floating Christmas tree.
We rushed towards the American Coral Sea in the tense night, all the while listening to international radio frequencies.
Naturally, in the end, one of the commanders of the American destroyers on the radio asked us to identify ourselves. My homebrew impersonator Peter Sellers, already instructed in advance, responded with the best Indian accent he could muster: “I'm a Rawalpindi cruising from Bombay to Dubai Port. Good night and good luck!" It sounded like a request from the head waiter from an Indian restaurant in Surbiton. The Americans, who fought the "limited war," had to believe and let us go on. Time flew quickly until we, with our Exocet missile system, aimed at the aircraft carrier, were exactly eleven miles away. They still continued to regard our lights as the lights of the Rawalpindi going about its harmless business.
Gradually, however, they began to be overcome by doubts. Signs of confusion became visible when the carrier's escort became too agitated and two large destroyers "opened fire" at each other above our heads. All we heard on the radio was their splendid swearing.
At this time, one of my officers calmly called an aircraft carrier to unleash terrible news on Tom Brown - we are ready to send his ship to the bottom of the Indian Ocean, and he can no longer do anything. “We launched four Exocets twenty seconds ago,” the officer added. The missiles had about 45 seconds to fly before "hitting" the aircraft carrier. That was about half of the time Sheffield had six months later.
Coral Sea did not have time to stage the LOC. The Americans, like us, knew that the aircraft carrier was already incapable of combat.
They lost such a "critical" ship for their mission, along with the air force on it.
In all fairness, four Exocets could hardly have sunk an American aircraft carrier. Damage, yes. Disable for a while, for several hours or even days to interrupt flights … In a real war, however, this blow would have gained enough time for some other forces to reach the lost AUG aviation. One way or another, Woodward's missile attack succeeded.
Some conclusions
So, from the experience of these exercises, what is needed to get close to an aircraft carrier at the distance of a missile salvo?
First, the ability to disguise. The Americans were hiding in trade traffic. The British pretended to be a cruise ship. These tricks work at the beginning of the war, when this very traffic is there. Then they no longer work, there is no civilian shipping. In addition, today American (and sometimes non-American) aircraft have night optics, and they do not look at the lights, they can see everything perfectly well at night. There is also AIS, the absence of a signal of which automatically identifies a "contact" as hostile. However, the first point is disguise. It is necessary that there was an opportunity to "get lost" - either civil traffic, or a coastline cut by channels and fjords, burned but not sunken ships drifting at the site of battles, and the like. Otherwise, the planes will find the URO ship faster.
Secondly, the suddenness of the volley is needed. Woodward emphasizes that Coral Sea did not manage to set the dipoles. And what if they spotted a missile from many tens of kilometers (like some "Granite" descending for an attack)? Then she would have gone to the LOC. This is a very important moment - after 1973 there were many missile battles, but not a single anti-ship missile hit a ship covered by interference! All went into hindrances. And this imposes a lot of restrictions on the attack - the rocket must go strictly along the low-altitude profile, or be so fast that no interference could trigger. The latter, even for a hypersonic missile, means the need for a point-blank launch, albeit further than just a supersonic one.
Thirdly, therefore, it follows from the previous point - you need to get close. A launch to the range limit will most likely do nothing, or the rocket should be inconspicuous, subsonic and fly only at low altitude.
Fourthly, you need to be prepared for losses. Woodward lost ALL ships except one. In the event of a real strike on the Coral Sea, the British destroyer would also have been sunk by escort ships later. Mastin could have been hit by the Eisenhower planes on the Forrestal. Then the Forrestal would have been "sunk", and then the URO ships would have "leveled the balance."
This is how Woodward writes about it:
The moral is that if in such conditions you command a strike group - be prudent: in bad weather conditions you can be defeated. This is especially true when you are facing a determined enemy willing to lose several ships in order to destroy your aircraft carrier. The enemy will always be like this, since all your air forces are on the aircraft carrier. With the loss of the aircraft carrier, the entire military campaign will probably be over.
Woodward is right - the enemy will always be like that, if only because there is no other way - to expose some ships under attack, so that others will probably have to strike this blow.
Fifth, the aircraft carrier has an advantage. Anyway. The presence of dozens of aircraft, high speed, the possible presence of AWACS aircraft or, at worst, AWACS helicopters, allows an aircraft carrier to detect URO ships before they reach the range of a salvo and drown them. The only thing that in the battle of ships URO against aircraft carriers works against an aircraft carrier is the chances that the headquarters of the aircraft carrier group "will not guess" the correct "threat vector" and will look for ships URO not where they really will be. And such a situation in some cases can even be "created", but you should not hope for this, although you should do everything possible for this.
Sixth, ships going on the attack need AWACS helicopters. The helicopter may well be based on a cruiser or frigate. The helicopter can theoretically have a radar operating in a passive mode or radio reconnaissance means that allow detecting the operation of enemy shipborne radars, at least from several hundred kilometers.
Do URO ships have advantages? Unlike the times to which the described examples relate, there is. These are modern air defense systems.
To quote Mastin:
We had the first two exercises with ships equipped with the Aegis system. And there has been a long debate about how to use these ships - away from the aircraft carrier, for what was called the outer air battle, or near the aircraft carrier to intercept missiles coming to the target. My point of view was that if we keep the ships close, then we do not have "Aegis" -ships, but ships with SM-1. So they had to be used to control the air battle because, as we determined, to deal with the massive Backfire raids, you have to attack these guys a couple of hundred miles [from the attacked ship].
That is, the appearance of the "Aegis" made it possible to repel massive air attacks from a long distance … but the same Project 22350 frigate has comparable capabilities, right? And cruisers 1164 and 1144 have a long-range air defense system and still a pretty decent missile. And it is technically feasible to make them "fight together." So in some cases, you just need to deliberately put yourself under attack if the total power of all air defense systems in the KUG is sufficient to repel a massive one (from 48 aircraft in the event of a strike from one aircraft carrier, which means about 96 missiles of different types - subsonic anti-ship missiles and supersonic anti-missile systems, plus decoys) of the airstrike. However, “playing war” in the format of a single article is a thankless task. But the fact that non-deck aircraft are the main means of AUG air defense is worth remembering.
Practice shows that URO ships are quite capable of being at a missile launch distance from an aircraft carrier. However, the number of restrictions and requirements that a naval strike group will face when performing such a task makes it an extremely risky and very difficult undertaking, which in modern conditions is hardly feasible without large losses in the ship's composition. In addition, the chances of an aircraft carrier to fight off such an attack are significantly higher than the chances of attacking URO ships to successfully complete it. Nevertheless, the destruction of aircraft carriers by URO ships is quite possible and should be practiced in exercises.
