Does Iran Pose a Real Threat to US Carriers? Debate Finally Answered For Good
In the previous installment we had mentioned one of the most talked-about topics being that of Iran’s final escalatory option of hitting an American aircraft carrier, and whether Iran is capable of doing it or not. To build on that, I’ve decided to dedicate a detailed piece to the more intricate issues involved in such an operation and why Iran may not actually be as capable of it as most people assume to be the case.
So strap in for the most detailed autist-level breakdown of doctrinal anti-ship operations you’re likely to read anywhere today.
We begin by acknowledging that most people have no conception whatsoever of how long range anti-ship missile (ASM / AShM) strikes actually work. They are not even remotely similar to regular precision missile strikes on stationary targets, like Tomahawks hitting a geolocated building somewhere. They are related far more closely to anti-air operations against mobile aerial assets.
The largest misconception most laymen make is that anti-ship operations consist of simply firing some kind of missile into the ocean and that missile somehow magically finding the aircraft carrier on its own and striking it, despite the fact that the target carrier is potentially hundreds of miles away over the horizon—which is the key point.
During the Cold War, the doctrinal theory behind anti-ship operations, specifically against large surface ships and carrier groups, centered around having major airborne reconnaissance assets which are used as the marking vehicles to illuminate the target via radar, and guide the missile to the target. The USSR would for instance use the Tu-95RT maritime patrol and recon variant with below-positioned radar to locate and track large surface fleets and designate targets to missile carriers.
A fleet of Tu-22M ‘Backfire’ strike craft would then take off toward the position, carrying Kh-22 missiles. These Backfires would have their own active radar seekers for discriminating individual ships and locking onto the target at 200-300km ranges. Once their Kh-22 missiles were launched, the planes would still need to provide some level of mid-course guidance for the missiles, which means staying in the air and locked on to the target ships.
The reason is: the missiles themselves obviously have a terminal radar seeker, but anti-ship missiles are known for their low-flying, sea-skimming trajectory for the purpose of evading the radars of the enemy ships which they are targeting. If you are flying low and evading the radars enemy, that means your own radar likewise cannot see the enemy until the final moment, perhaps a dozen kilometers out, give or take.
So, how can the missile get to the required location 200-300km away if its own radar cannot see the target? It must be fed that target data from the airborne platform. Granted, these missiles also have the ability to reach a general area via INS (Inertial Navigation System) and can begin scanning for targets independently after that. But this poses several problems.
Firstly, if allowed to scan for random targets on its own, the missile is not guaranteed to hit the exact ship you want it to hit. Carriers are famous for being protected by a large carrier group, which is a swarm of up to 10 ships which act as the “meat shield” for the “queen bee” or “mothership” carrier. If you do not precisely designate the carrier as the target, the missile in autonomous mode is likely to prioritize any of the other ships it sees, based on a slew of parameters and factors, particularly because of another key aspect of anti-ship warfare most laymen do not comprehend.
This is the fact that surface ships move much faster than you think, with aircraft carriers themselves trained to perform “evasive maneuvers” that can actually juke out of the way of missiles. Many have seen these famous videos:
The problem with using directional guidance is as follows: let’s say the last known position of the aircraft carrier is precisely at coordinate: X: 22.194, Y: 61.776. The missile then heads to that coordinates, but at 200-300km launch range, it takes a Mach 1 missile approximately ~15 minutes to get there. In that 15 minutes, a carrier—at its top secret “emergency bug out speed” (speculated to be 35 knots)—can cover upwards of 10-12 nautical miles. The missile arrives at X: 22.194, Y: 61.776, but there is nothing there: the carrier is now 10 miles away—beyond radar horizon for a low-flying missile—and in that spot may be some other surface ships trailing the carrier. The missile now has no choice but to autonomously target “the closest known object” with a radar cross-section and ends up hitting some insignificant support ship, or perhaps passing oil tanker.
And by the way, that is being generous with a Mach 1 missile: most anti-ship missiles do not even approach Mach 1 speeds; for instance, US’s Harpoon at Mach 0.70, Ukraine’s Neptune (subsonic), Iran’s Qader and Ra’ad missiles both at Mach 0.80, etc. One of the reasons the Soviet Kh-22 was so revolutionary and feared was that it was nearly hypersonic at Mach 4.6+, but that is not a feat most nations can repeat.
So, we established that anti-ship missiles generally need a marking platform to guide the missile to the target at least part or most of the way. Another aspect of why this is important is because it was understood by the Soviets during the Cold War that an American aircraft carrier in particular would require upwards of 70+ launched missiles to bring down, when you factor in air defense and other factors. It was considered that it would take at least 12 direct hits for a carrier to be sunk, and the missiles would have to arrive at a very close intervals to each other in order for this method to be effective:
