what if the VMF is sent to help Cuba, Venezuela, Argentina or China in & around the Caribbean, S. Atlantic & the SC Seas? The VKS planes will be there anyway as well, & both service branches will then complement each other.
Tu-95/160s longer unrefueled range will reduce the # of tanker planes needed. Besides, there r many older IL-76s that can be converted, like those 4 that Pakistan got from Ukraine.
If the VMF is sent to help cuba or venez or Arge so what... the VMF has no Bears and has no Blackjacks and currently AFAIK don't even have their Backfires which all seem to be under control of the VVS. The Tu-142s of the VMF AFAIK has never carried anti ship missiles like the Backfires and Tu-16s did.
How on earth could the VKS get there in any useful numbers?
Sorry garry but this obsession with carriers is a bit dated. They used F-14s because they had them.
This delusional belief that some magic weapon suddenly makes something obsolete is ridiculous. The whole purpose of long range high speed missiles was because Tupolevs would have been shot down if they had to get closer.
The missiles they have now are a direct result of the US having large aircraft carriers and F-14s and Phoenix missiles... the fact that the US got fat and lazy and the Russians kept making their systems better is no reason to say the aircraft carrier is dead.
If Iran had the new engines of the F14D and modern avionics, radars and missiles it could easily hold its own against modern US jets.. unfortunately that is not possible.
And if they updated all the EW systems so the Americans didn't know them inside out they would be quite effective...
Upgrades would be interesting, but replacing it with an Su-35 would make rather more sense...
If you are trying to say long range super fast missiles can't be intercepted or stopped, what you are saying is that large ships are obsolete... but also small ships are obsolete, also large military airfields and bases are obsolete and so are ports and capital cities and large factories and mines... all fighter planes are obsolete because big long range missiles with nuclear warheads should be able to obliterate everything... so cancel Su-57 and Su-35 because they are useless because anything you need to destroy you just build a land based ground launched scramjet powered hypersonic missile.
Like any platform there were people in the Navy that wanted to keep their beloved Tomcat, heck I think its a cool plane too.
The Aircraft itself is not important... and honestly I don't give a shit what the US does, The US can scrap all their big carriers for all I care... that would make their forces even weaker than their decision to go to the Hornet and AMRAAM missiles for air defence... Russia needs to defend its surface ships and its subs away from Russian controlled airspace... some argue that a helicopter carrier of 30K tons is the biggest ship they should be making so make some Yak-141s or their new equivalent, but as you and others point out short range weak fighters make no difference when your ships have longer range anti aircraft missiles than your fighter planes can reach...
I am suggesting an aircraft carrier bigger than the Kuznetsov (the Russian Navy has said as much itself BTW)... which is clearly too small for Flankers, so their new carriers will need to be bigger to carry Su-57s, which will give them excellent flight range and a range of new AAMs being developed for it will make it rather potent against anything the west can come up with.
Its purpose of course is not to fight WWIII but to escort and protect Russian surface ships promoting and protecting Russian trade with her international partners.
With the US tanker fleet there is really no reason to use F-14s, as long as you don't mind paying $120/gallon for jet fuel (DOD does not mind).
The US does not have the capacity to operate anywhere just using land based aircraft and inflight refuelling tankers.
There is NO REASON a cruiser should be able to see further then a corvette..expecially a largish one.
How many corvettes currently have AEGIS radars on them? And even if they did how close to the water would they be?
AEGIS cruiser AESA radars are not good enough for this century... Russian Cruisers will have enormous radar sets bigger than those for the S-500 system, which will give them exceptional range and performance...
There are planes that can haul 500 KM radar so no reason a corvette cannot haul a powerful radar, and drone recon platforms.
If every Corvette had such a radar they would not be able to do much else... if you specialise your Corvettes to roles then you add the management problem of always needing one available for every mission/fleet...
When laser weapons arise they will be easily installed on smaller ships. The Chinese laser cannon test platform is not very large at all.
Wrong end of the spectrum... you are talking about close range systems to dazzle optically guided anti ship missiles... using such a weapon against Zircon would be like holding up a sheet of paper to stop it.
To shoot hypersonic missiles flying very high and very fast for long enough to do serious damage enough to make it break up and destroy itself in flight is going to have to be rather big and rather more powerful than any laser previously deployed.
If you say 12 zircons can sink 12 corvettes then I would say 1-2 will sink a cruiser. But that assumption is the ships are all defenceless
The difference is that 12 Corvettes on their own will be defenceless against a hypersonic missile because at best they will have short and medium range missiles.... a Cruiser on the other hand has a full set of short, medium, long and anti satellite/anti ICBM type missiles, which means it has much more chance of defending itself.
Yes and with the right recon info they can even strike a carrier group from outside the attack radius of its airplanes. So the carrier can send out F-18s to 5-600KM maybe launch LRASM with 800 km range. They are still shy of Kaliber M maximum range. Anyway a group of corvettes will not be seeking combat with a CBG, the Russians will use airpower and subs and surface ships, but the Corvettes will not be defenceless if HQ provides the proper intel.
I don't care about US carriers... they can scrap them all for all I care. I am talking about what the Russians need going forward and Strategic bombers and inflight refuelling will not be an option to support Russian ships operating away from Russia.
Russia can learn from the clear mistakes of the USN and build aircraft carriers that are not 100K ton... they don't need to be that big nor that expensive. They need to put their best fighter on board, which means a naval Su-57, and a fixed wing AWACS aircraft that also has an inflight refuelling model on board would be ideal.
They can take the gloves off too... a hypersonic missile designed to fit in their internal weapon bay with a range of 3,000km at a speed of mach 10 and a nuclear warhead as standard is what they need to make it clear it is for US and HATO targets and they wont be playing nice if the brown stuff hits the air conditioning appliance.
R the IrAF F-14s real danger to the USAF B-1B/52s?
Do USAF often overfly Iran with B-1Bs and B-52s?
The F-14 is now obsolete... technology has moved on... if the USN had any brains a naval carrier capable F-15 would be something they should be looking into.
The Tu-22/95/160s can can also use nuclear tipped CMs to knockdown/vaporize swarms of Ash/LACMs long before they reach anywhere close to their targets.
Those planes will be busy doing other things. Any US carrier group or HATO group of ships detected will be engaged with MiG-31s armed with Kinzhal missiles or Tu-22M3Ms with Kh-32s and perhaps Su-30s with Kh-32s... many of which will likely be nuclear armed as a matter of course... there would be nothing left to lose by that stage...
Nuclear cruise missiles means carrier have no more value and US will use its own nuks. Its totally stupid to include nuclear weapons when comparing conventional weapons. And you are comparing a war scenario involving all the stuff when I compare f-14 use against tupolevs with f-18/35 use against them. There is no point in doing so.
To be fair if US carriers are threatening Russia directly I don't think they will be nice... not taking out the carriers means strike aircraft launching standoff munitions at Russian targets. Most would be stopped by ground based air defence I would expect and also land based fighters would also make things hard, but I suspect the carriers and the ships operating with them will be dealt with using MiGs and Kinzhals and Backfires with Kh-32s.
It is what they are for.
I disagree: they r still cheaper than the CV/Ns & can be used to defend them!
Nuclear armed cruise missiles cannot support Navy operations around the world like aircraft carriers can.
the US had 2 SSBNs in the Indian Ocean during the Desert Storm ready to nuke Iraq, & now have low yield nukes on at least 1 SSBN to counteract Russian hypersonic CMs/IRBMs.
Which just shows you how retarded they are... the Russians wont reduce the power of their nuclear weapons to make them more acceptable to use.
The problem is, with the KH-22 the standoff range exceeded the detect, deploy and no escape range of the F-14, so it was essentially useless for its primary purpose of fending of air attacks on the CBG from the USSR. This is why they turned it into the Bomcat.
The original Kh-22s had a range of about 460km which did not exceed the range of the F-14 and Phoenix. The Kh-22M had a range of about 600km and a flight speed of about mach 3.
It is only the Kh-32 with its 1,000km range and its mach 4.5 flight speed at 40km altitude that is a problem for the F-14/phoenix comb to deal with, which is no great surprise because they spent very little money improving the F-14 once they decided they were going with the Hornet and F-35.
It would not take a huge amount of money to upgrade the Phoenix... even just a solid rocket booster on its rear end to get it to climb to that altitude and take on the target. The ABM models of the Standard SAM should also offer some problems for the missile.
You can expect all kinds of chicainery to be part of an attack on a CBG, it is still the most formidable naval target.
And the point is that the inclusion of a carrier makes a group of surface ships much much harder to defeat than getting rid of all large ships and replacing them with Corvettes.
BTW the most powerful navy in the ME must be the Iranian navy with all its bog hammers, and the americans called them. Problem is that the easiest solution to a swarm of such targets is ship launched ATGMs like Hellfire or Kornet and they are not a problem any more.
Most likely mode of attack will be by planes backed up with submarine launched ASMs. Perhaps the air attack will draw out the planes and the subs will launch once they are a few hundred KM out, At this point the bombers will pull back and wait for sattelite intelligence on the strike. They will fall back and refuel form tankers, and then head back and unload. There are endless permutations of this type of tactic.
They are, but the options for that carrier group are just as large... they will have plenty of anti sub helicopters and subs of their own and any ship that strays in range can be shot down because of its suspicious activity... as long as war is declared that carrier group can go hunting for anything it likes... and all the communications needed to organise the sort of attack that would be needed to be successful would also be easy to detect and they can start attacking your forces before you even form up ready to attack.
You can say aircraft carriers are obsolete, but aircraft are not obsolete and ships without aircover are vastly more vulnerable than ships with air cover.
Nothing is invincible, but compared with the cost of all your cruisers and destroyers... buying two new aircraft carriers and putting modern aircraft and weapons on them is good insurance to keep your ships safe and ensure you can do what you need to do where you need to do it.
If the UK had a fixed wing carrier in the Falklands instead of those piece of shit fishing boats, they likely would not have lost any ships at all. With Phantom fighter jets and AWACS and Buccaneer strike aircraft they wouldn't have needed the very long range very risky Vulcan raids to disable the airfields on the islands so the Argentines had to operate their fighters from Argentina.
Equally if Argentina had a longer ranged fighter with BVR missiles the British would have failed. Even just MiG-23s with R-23R and R-23T AAMs and R-60s, the Brits would have been seriously on the back foot.
What are you smoking ? You really have an issue with nuks. They are not normal weapon and you don't use so easily.
We are talking about attacking a US carrier group and potentially Russian carrier groups expanding and promoting Russian interests around the world... if Russia is attacking US carrier groups or the US is attacking Russian carrier groups then nukes are not far away.
BTW I find it amusing that carriers are dead because the US has shit air defences and have hobbled their own fighter options for their carriers... Russia can put their best fighter and all their best air defence systems... missile gun laser and EW equipment on these ships and aircraft but they are automatically obsolete too?