re: China now claiming they have ability to demolish US aircraft carriers

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They have Phalanx weapon systems.

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Yep, they've had them for almost 50 years. Unfortunately they can't shoot down 100 missiles at once. China knows that too and have built accordingly. This isn't a new development.

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They have Phalanx weapon systems.

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IIRC, those things can fire for a minute or two at most before running out of ammo. They will not be particularly effective against any type of swarm.

And I don't know that they'd be effective against hypersonic missiles to begin with.

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I totally believe everything that China says about their military

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The US Navy acknowledges that carrier groups are vulnerable to large anti-ship missile attacks, especially in confined spaces like the Taiwan Strait or SCS.

Nothing is far-fetched or hard to believe about it.

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However, the Ukrainians did shoot down a few hypersonic missiles with the Patriot missile system,

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Russia has fired a ton of missiles at Ukraine. I don't think the ones they shot down were Kinzals (sp?).

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“The attack is really large-scale and for the first time using such different types of missiles. We see that this time as many as six Kinzhal were used. This is an attack like I don’t remember seeing before,” Yurii Ihnat, spokesman for the Air Force Command of Ukraine, said on Ukrainian television Thursday. “So far, we have no capabilities to counter these weapons,” he added, referring to the Kinzhals, plus six X-22 air-launched cruise missiles that were also launched by Russian forces.

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The US Navy acknowledges that carrier groups are vulnerable to large anti-ship missile attacks, especially in confined spaces like the Taiwan Strait or SCS.

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They've been acknowledging it in briefings that I sat in more than 15 years ago. There's really nothing they can do about it though short of scrapping the entire surface fleet and going 100% submarine. Congress won't let them, building surface ships and their components for the Navy accounts for hundreds of thousands of jobs in almost every district. It's the source of a mountain of pork.

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Russia has fired a ton of missiles at Ukraine. I don't think the ones they shot down were Kinzals (sp?).

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This link says differently. LINK

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The commander-in-chief of Ukraine's armed forces, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, had said earlier that his forces had intercepted the six Kinzhals launched from aircraft, as well as nine Kalibr cruise missiles from ships in the Black Sea and three Iskanders fired from land.

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The commander-in-chief of Ukraine's armed forces, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, had said earlier that his forces had intercepted the six Kinzhals launched from aircraft, as well as nine Kalibr cruise missiles from ships in the Black Sea and three Iskanders fired from land.

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Might I suggest that he is lying.

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hope aircraft carriers have something better than patriot type missle systems to protect themselves. but i doubt it.

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have done pretty good against Russian hypersonic in Ukraine. Pac-3 is not your dad's patriot from the gulf war, they have over 90% shoot down rate. And here's the thing about hypersonic that they don't tell you. Ballistic missiles have been hypersonic since the vet beginning. ICBMs go mach 20 and we can shoot those down.The supposed difference and advantage for what people call hypersonic are they are supposed to be harder to engage because they can maneuver to a degree while in flight, and they move fast enough that it would be hard to get off a second round of you miss. Well that kind of doesn't matter for something like an aircraft carrier that is itself the target, because there is only so much maneuvering the thing can do and still hit you. At some point (a pretty far away point because of the speed) the missile simply has to head directly at you or it can't hit you, you are in motion and are the target. That removes one of the main technical challenges of intercepting them, you know exactly where they are going

Also, the Chinese weapons are glide phase weapons, they have all the kinetic energy they are ever going to have once they are boosted. Every turn or maneuver they make bleeds energy and thus range. If you make them turn enough along the way you can bleed energy so they can't reach their target


Also, let's take what China says with a boulder of salt. They are bigger liars than even Russia when it comes to capabilities. I remembering them claiming they had developed quantum radar that could see through any stealth, yet they had to steal secrets from us just to figure out how to make a crappier version of stealth aircraft we developed 30 years ago.

Also, yes the navy has different stuff than just patriots.

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Pac-3 is not your dad's patriot from the gulf war, they have over 90% shoot down rate

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They also cost about $4-$6 million EACH and Lockheed can only make about 60 of them per year. They're meant to be used against missiles that cost about $50-100k each and can be mass-produced by the thousands. Good luck with all that.

The Japanese destroyed several vessels in a first strike. Didn't end well for them.