Photo: Under Her Guns

A lot of people took the opportunity to board the Russian missile cruiser Varyag when it was in town for a port visit last month. It's easy to see that some of the most interesting photos would come from the bow, and so it was unsurprisingly packed with people when I came by and failed to get on. With the flagship of the Russian Navy's Pacific Fleet tied up in Vancouver with a SeaBus sailing practically right under her guns, it's interesting to see the degree things have changed over the last twenty years... in some respects, at least.

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Photo: Mother Russia's Missiles

It was a week ago today that I ate my lunch cold because of the Russians, since I couldn't just let my lunch half-hour go by without figuring out where all the uniformed Russian Navy officers in the Pacific Centre were coming from. As it happened, the Russian missile cruiser Varyag had arrived at Canada Place earlier that day, coming off of exercises near Vancouver Island. While I wasn't able to make it on board, I took as many shots as I could manage from the Canada Place walkway during the days she was here.

Here's the bridge and some of the starboard missile tubes of Varyag - in all, it mounts sixteen P-500 Bazalt/SS-N-12 Sandbox anti-ship missiles. While I was in the lineup trying to get aboard, some guys behind me were debating how much of Vancouver the ship could destroy if it came down to it; they eventually settled on downtown, but I don't know if you can use anti-ship missiles against ground targets. Even then, those missiles can only carry a 950-kilogram high explosive warhead - while sixteen would carve ragged chunks out of downtown, I don't know about total destruction. Besides, they were pointed at North Van, anyway.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

Carrying Carriers to the Future

"Look, pals, the aircraft carrier was the weapon of this war, before Hiroshima. Carriers don't look so good against space ships. Let's build galleons instead; they are cheaper, prettier, and just as useful."
- Robert A. Heinlein, "The Last Days of the United States"

For the last seventy years, the aircraft carrier has been one of the ultimate expressions of power on the waves. Bombers operating from an aircraft carrier raided Tokyo in 1942; Harriers operating from aircraft carriers kept the Falklands British in 1982; Maverick shot down a bunch of MiGs and made peace with Goose's death while flying off an aircraft carrier in 1986. Specifically, the aircraft carrier has been one of the ultimate expressions of American power; of the world's twenty carriers, eleven of them fly the Stars and Stripes. Italy is in second place, with two.

I don't expect this to be a state of affairs that will continue indefinitely into the future, even as the People's Liberation Army Navy of the People's Republic of China puts the final touches on what was once the Soviet aircraft carrier Varyag, built but unfinished in 1992 as a consequence of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Reportedly renamed Shi Lang, the carrier is a powerful symbol of China's rise. Carriers are the cornerstones of a blue-water navy; states do not need them to secure their coasts, which is probably why Canada decommissioned its last carrier in 1970. What a carrier says is "I am in a mood to enforce my state's interests beyond the range of land-based aircraft."

Ultimately, Shi Lang may have more power as a symbol than a weapon of war. Not only because she's outnumbered - but the days of the carrier may be ending soon. In fact, it may be that in the not-too-distant future, surface combatants become as worthwhile to have as men-o'-war.

You start with this, then add about a hundred years' worth of R&D, then maybe weld some bigass VLS tubes onto the side...

The submarine has come a long way in the last hundred years. Before the First World War, their biggest booster was probably Jules Verne; it was the war, and the demonstrable advantages of being able to sink enemy ships while remaining relatively hidden, that propelled a flurry of technological development. Today their roles are focused mainly on hunter-killer and ground strike operations; there's no particular reason this has to stay the same as technology changes.

While I have a few disagreements with George Friedman's The Next 100 Years, one of the aspects of his forecast I found interesting was the rising importance of hypersonic missiles in the twenty-first century. At sufficient speeds, such missiles wouldn't need warheads - their kinetic energy would do all the damage. While Friedman used them to attack ground targets like military bases and power plants, it's not inconceivable that hypersonic weapons could be scaled down enough to be used as naval armament. Specifically as submarine armament.

If that's the case, I would expect modern navies of 2061 to be absolutely submarine-heavy. Aircraft carriers in the modern mold wouldn't exist; they'd be liabilities, too difficult to defend and too expensive to keep replacing. If anything, I'd expect to see things like "micro-carriers" - ships that launch and recover UAV fighters, which can be piloted from anywhere on Earth where there's a secure connection. Or perhaps the pilots would be in a submarine somewhere near the carrier, kept in control of their planes with undersea communication lasers feeding to unobtrusive transmission buoys on the surface.

Sure, there's every possibility that I'm wrong, that this won't be the case - but the fact is that no paradigm lasts forever. The Battles of Tsushima and Jutland only reinforced the notion that big-gun battleships ruled the waves. Today, the only battleships you'll find are floating museums. The potential of a shift is something to consider... and even if the United States doesn't, I'm confident that China will.