Aircraft carriers 'are the most survivable airfield' and they may soon be even harder to kill, top Navy admiral says

https://www.thisisinsider.com/top-na...to-sink-2019-2

* Adm. John Richardson, the chief of naval operations, said Wednesday that the
"the carrier is going to be a viable force element for the foreseeable future."

* He said the US carrier fleet — the most powerful naval force — is adapting to
meet threats from rivals, such as China, that are openly talking about sinking
them.

* The admiral emphasized that carriers are hard to kill, calling them the "most
survivable airfield."

US aircraft carriers are a "tremendous expression of US national power," and
that makes them a target for adversarial powers, the US Navy's top admiral said
Wednesday.

"The big thing that is occupying our minds right now is the advent of long-range
precision weapons, whether those are land-based ballistic missiles,
coastal-defense cruise missiles, you name it," Adm. John Richardson, the chief
of naval operations, said at the Atlantic Council, adding that the systems
wielded by adversaries are "becoming more capable."

Chinese media has recently been hyping its "carrier-killer" DF-26 ballistic
missiles, which are reportedly able to hit targets as far as 3,500 miles away.
China released footage of the Chinese military test-firing the missile last
month.

The purpose is to send "a clear message to the US about China's growing missile
capability, and that it can hold at risk US strategic assets, such as carriers
and bases," Adam Ni, who researches China at Macquarie University in Sydney,
recently told the South China Morning Post.

"There's two sides, an offensive part and a defensive part," Richardson said
Wednesday, stressing that the Navy's carriers are adapting to the new threats.
"The advent of some of new technologies, particularly directed energy
technologies coupled with the emerging power generation capabilities on
carriers, is going to make them a much, much more difficult target to hit."

Speaking with the crew of the new supercarrier USS Gerald R. Ford on Tuesday,
Richardson said, "You are going to be able to host a whole cadre of weapons that
right now we can just start to dream about. We're talking about electric
weapons, high energy laser, high-powered microwave [and] very, very capable
radars."

The expensive $13 billion carrier is expected to be deployed in the next few
years.

"Rather than expressing the carrier as uniquely vulnerable, I would say it is
the most survivable airfield within the field of fire," Richardson said
Wednesday in response to questions about carrier vulnerability. "This is an
airfield that can move 720 miles a day that has tremendous self-defense
capabilities."

"If you think about the sequence of events that has to emerge to be able to
target and hit something that can move that much, and each step in that chain of
events can be disrupted from the sensing part all the way back to the homing
part, it's the most survivable airfield in the area," he said.

Richardson said the carrier is less vulnerable now than at any time since World
War II, when the US Navy was putting carriers in action, and those carriers were
in combat taking hits. "The carrier is going to be a viable force element for
the foreseeable future."

US carriers are particularly hard, albeit not impossible, to kill.

"It wouldn't be impossible to hit an aircraft carrier, but unless they hit it
with a nuke, an aircraft carrier should be able to take on substantial damage,"
retired Capt. Talbot Manvel, who served as an aircraft-carrier engineer and was
involved in the design of the new Ford-class carriers, told Business Insider
previously.

US carriers "can take a lick and keep on ticking," he said.



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