Iranian missile hits Israeli ship

Back in January, and again in May, I wrote about the danger posed by Iranian anti-ship missiles.

My posts turned out to be pretty prophetic, because last week an Israeli “state of the art” warship was damaged by an Iranian Silkworm missile. (Read the story at Debkafile.)

U.S. Aegis cruisers supposedly have better anti-missile protection than Israeli ships, but nevertheless I wouldn’t want to be stationed aboard one of those if a war breaks out. A ship is a big fat slow sitting duck, while a missile is small and moving very fast.

Do warships still make sense when even third world countries like Iran are capable of manufacturing their own anti-ship missiles?

Comments

[nobody]

Nevermind warships, carriers have a even bigger problem. Its anti-aircraft/missle system might be able to handle a few incoming missiles, but what happens when opposing force launch hundreds of them? A lost of a carrier will certainly change public opinion.

The best they can do is to park themselves outside the effective range of those missile and dispache its fighters to try to knock out as many of those missile as they can.

[cpurick]

Nobody on a carrier is worried about getting hit by anything.

They operate hundreds of miles out to sea, beyond the reach of most missiles. The fighter patrols will not let anyone get close enough to confirm where the ship is. The resulting area of probability is too large to attack.

[nobody]

Cpurick assumes the opposition is some 3rd world power where

1) they don't have a large stock pile of missiles sitting around.
2) the missiles they do have are only the short range types.
3) they don't have long range air/sea/land sensors.
4) they don't have SAMS that can effectively defend their own airspace.

The premise of this post is that the days of carriers might be numbered due to wide spread availability of missile technology. The other boys on the block now have an cheap and effective ways to forcing a carrier group out of their own backyard without the need for a large and expensive navy or air force.

[cpurick]

I think you're seriously underestimating how hard it is to search tens, even hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean for a single, well-defended ship.

An aircraft carrier doesn't operate in anyone's "backyard" -- with airborne refueling systems, the ship can be over 500 miles in any direction from where the airstrike comes ashore.

We're still a long way from the point where any affordable surface-to-surface missile system is going to solve that problem.

[Half Sigma]

The danger from Iran is that any ships in the Persian Gulf are not hundreds of miles out to sea but very close to the Iranian mainland with little maneuvering room.

[Peter]

The danger from Iran is that any ships in the Persian Gulf are not hundreds of miles out to sea but very close to the Iranian mainland with little maneuvering room.

I'm not 100% sure on this, but IIRC the U.S. Navy does not send carrier groups into the Persian Gulf, for exactly the reason you mention. Carrier groups instead remain outside the Straits of Hormuz where there's ample maneuvering room.

[bbartlog]

The general thesis is still correct, even if US carrier groups remain for now an exception. As sensors and missile technology become commodified, it will become more and more difficult to defend large targets. If we're serious about fighting a power with semimodern technology, we will have to counter by flooding enemy areas with cheap distributed sensors and unmanned agents capable of locating and identifying enemy missiles so that we can destroy them before they're launched.