No, but they belong into a bigger command chain, they pass and receive orders and data. That can be done with unmanned platforms as well. Do you suggest AWACS crews take orders from nobody?
The more interconnected links of communication you have constantly transmitting information back and forth... well you might as well broadcast heavy metal and paint a target sign on your ass..
If you think every command decision has to go to Putin...
A carrier group has a clear chain of command and some pretty obvious and clear goals and the advantage of AWACS as opposed to AEW is that there are fewer delays and decision making needed.
Against hypersonic weapons as explained there is no time for humans picking up phones, it has been stated by Russian sources that the highest end systems do not actually need humans and in fact are better off without them.
And a flying target takes off from an airfield in an unfriendly country and starts heading towards your position... shoot it down right?
The Americans gave their ship commander and first officer a medal for murdering just under 300 civilians in Iranian airspace, but how do you justify that if you come from any other country?
I am just transmitting what I have read, I am not against humans overseeing the operations and issuing at least the final order to fire, though they fail too, as we have seen recently.
So you were only following orders... I see...
No idea where your are taking this conclusion from what I said. I just said that UAVs are getting more and more capable, and having such huge advantage in persistence, it makes a lot of sense to use them more and more, to the point that maybe VMF does not actually need a new "classical" manned AWACS like E-2 or Yak-44 and can have more surveillance platforms of smaller size and much longer persistence to cover more space much cheaper than it would do with conventional AWACS. It is just a possibility, we will see, but I would not be surprised if they go directly to unmanned RLD aircraft.
Because we have already identified... range is key... range of detection and flight endurance... so the bigger the aircraft carrying the biggest radar with the most fuel and the ability to refuel in flight is best isn't it? Using drones is nice and all, but when they can do everything a drone fleet can go out and do all the jobs needed so there wont be any navy at all essentially.
Using drones makes sense but drones like HALEs are easy kills which means they are expensive for what they are... or is there a long range radar design with datalink and processing equipment you can think of that is so cheap it becomes expendable.
Don't confuse AEW or AWACS drones as being cheap and expendable because it is something they can never be by definition.
It is like the western idea that rocket artillery is long range and can be guided so it can replace all tube artillery too.
Drones have lots of very useful features, but replacing AWACS platforms is not one of them.
In fact I would go the other way and say manned naval AWACS planes would actually sell rather better than much bigger much more expensive land based versions like the A-100 because while they will not be actually cheap, they offer a high percentage of the performance of the big planes at a reduced cost that matches smaller budgets in smaller air forces... buy a few of them and save even more, because having quite a few of them would be useful.
A bit like what the Russian AF might be doing with Su-35 upgrades of their Su-30s perhaps to operate as mini AWACS platforms for smaller fighters like MiG-29M2 or MiG-35.
The difference is that the much more powerful 360 degree radar of a Yak-44 equivalent means the one plane could carry a dozen R-37Ms under its wings for long range self defence and it could probably control 24 or perhaps even 48 defending interceptors at a time against multiple enemy air borne threats.
I am in favour of carriers using long range/persistence UAVs of the Helios-RLD type, which have 30 h flight time vs. 5-6 on an AWACS like E-2. The issue of the data traffic needs clarifying, there are many ways to allow the carrier to minimize the possibility of being located by its emissions:
The platform needs to operate from the carrier... most HALEs wont fit on the deck lifts. Folding them up reduces strength and increases weight which also reduces performance.
Carrier based AWACS could use inflight refuelling to remain on station for longer periods... being able to stand up and having a toilet and galley on board can improve comfort for the crew and operators and make it more autonomous. (if they do it for strike aircraft they can do it for these planes)...
Russia and the Soviet Union have experience with carriers... with dinky little Kiev class ships with VSTOL fighters... and their conclusion was that bigger was better... they designed and built two kuznetsov types and decided that a bigger carrier with catapults would be even better... hense Ulyanovsk carriers were designed and commenced building... and surprise surprise... the British carriers are in a similar weight class... does anyone thinking dinky little carriers with VSTOL fighters could save some money think they are idiots?
- On the one hand, carriers coordinating operations of an air group are not going to be completely in silence, since the fleets command is at the ship and not in the AWACS and there are necessary comms to coordinate landings etc. So that is an existing underlying limitation, also with AWACS. The position of AWACS gives away the carrier too, BTW.
You are missing the point... AWACS platforms will be continuously scanning for air threats... up high, down low and everywhere between... the entire force will be using the Sigma battle management system discretely sharing information between platforms as information is collected by active and passive sensors and equipment.
In comparison the orders given to ships and aircraft will be rare and brief and not voice communications but broad band burst transmissions.
Having 20 drones flying around the place is just going to say search here for the carrier group isn't it?
Either way 20 drones would be easier to shoot down because their radars will be smaller to fit on a drone... high or medium altitude drones have huge wingspans and simply would not have the power to weight ratio to get airborne from a ski jump ramp... which helps all the fighters get airborne... so it would not only need catapults to reliably get airborne landing will be an issue too because those things are all wing so you would need clear decks and no ski jump for takeoff (meaning a reduction in performance for fighters who benefit from the ski jump takeoffs) but also with landings the entire rear of the carrier would need to be kept clear in case a long thin wing of a drone clips them during landing and results in a crash.
Actually an old Soviet design of a plane with two wings... ie a biplane, where when the aircraft was on the ground had good lift for low speed takeoffs and landings, but once up in the air the undercarriage and the bottom wing folded up into the fuselage and top wing respectively to create a single wing much faster fighter...
Some creative thinking like that could allow a high lift takeoff and landing plane that can operate from an aircraft carrier but in flight it can turn into a low drag shape able to fly higher and slower for long periods of time.
Hell.. a Yak-44 with a small nuclear reactor and electric motor to fly for years.
Or an airship made of modern materials with fuel cell technology and solar panels and nuclear batteries and perhaps even a tether to a ship for power and communications... there are plenty of solutions...
- Modern AEW UAVs will not need to transmit raw data, they can simply send asynchronous situational updates and commands / events
Processing the data on board like an AWACS aircraft does means more weight and reduced endurance... might as well put people on there to create the orders instead of transmitting it to a ship for someone else to do the same.
- There are satellite communications which are supposedly the ones you proposed for VMF ships to get targeting info to be able to attack USN
Target info, not live real time tracking...
- Once you have many interconnected nodes in the air with fighters, UAVs etc, there are many ways you can relay the information in the best way to make it robust and difficult to intercept, and to make more difficult to locate the center of command, since the network has a distributed structure.
Their network system is already in place on new and upgraded ships... but using drones means more communications traffic.
My bad, I didn't realize you were just giving your personal opinion.
It is not my personal opinion... I am not an engineer... there is no way I could possibly come to the conclusion that they need rectangular air intakes on my own.... that is patently absurd...
Well, they are not ballistic and intercepting them implies some ability both kinematically and in terms of guidance against manoeuvring targets, see the pictures above.
They are ballistic, but are designed to manouver to hit their targets... they were never intended to evade defences... MARVS are not new.
Continuing the analogy I started the difference is that between 4 x 500kg dumb iron bombs being carried by an Su-24 and dropped one at a time on a string of targets along a flight path that is calculated to fly over all four targets, and that same Su-24 having four Grom glide bombs flying a path that would allow all the glide bombs to reach their targets from a single release point.
The difference of course is that the bus that carries both sets of payloads is a ballistically launched vehicle... the MIRV model has fuel and manouvers... but nothing like a cruise missile or ballistic missile... to release its warheads on a ballistic path to hit specific separate targets. The MARV bus is also a ballistic vehicle that does not need to manouver for each warhead... it just gets all the warheads to a specific point in its ballistic flight path where it can release all the warheads and each warhead can manouver its own flight direction and speed to fall on the target it is supposed to hit... it does not fly like a cruise missile... it has course correction ability but it is not flying like a plane or a cruise missile... it is falling like an artillery shell, but it has the capacity to steer itself like a laser guided bomb... ie copperhead or Kitilov, or the Gran 120mm mortar round...
The maneuvering of MARV is exclusively to attain higher accuracy against targets, as the ability to accurately hit hardened bunkers and silos were crucial in defeating them. MARV technology is almost half a century old, and their maneuvering is not to avoid interception. The first proper hypersonic maneuvering weapon didn't appear until the late 90's (Topol-M).
MARV technology is for extreme precision and also to hit targets that were further off the trajectory of the missile it is released from.
For a MIRV bus to hit a target the whole bus has to manouver so the warhead released will hit the target.... then it has to manouver again to get the next target on line etc etc... it is a lot of manouvering and depending on the flight path of the missile some targets would not be an option.
For instance launching a missile from Moscow towards London you could hit lots and lots of targets on the way... because there are a lot of big cities between Moscow and London, but some at the north and some at the south might not be reachable by that MIRV armed missile... a MARV armed missile can release warheads earlier and they can turn further and reach a much more spread out grouping of target centres and because each are powered and are designed to manouver for accuracy they can hit hard targets, as opposed to MIRVS which can get point targets but not as precisely as MARVs, and MRVs which are more your city killers.
Yes, I know MARVS were mainly intended to hit targets and not to dodge AD, but if the original argument is that current SAM can only take on exclusively ballistic hypersonic targets, then it needs to be said that is not exactly true...
The manouvering a MARV does is generally early in its flight to get it onto a collision path with its target... it wont do a lot of manouvering closer to the target except fine tuning its path to get a more accurate hit on a small point target... such minor corrections are not enormously difficult for SAMs to allow for...
The S-300V is designed to shoot down Pershing II missiles which while not as fast as an ICBM will likely manouver rather more than any MARV would...