The Rise of Hypersonic Weapons

This review of the book just says it was briefly re-activated from time to time, which I don't believe anyone disputes.

> Speaking of heartless and barbaric, Schlosser covers Richard Nixon’s “madman theory,” which he and his close adviser Henry Kissinger developed after Nixon took over the presidency in 1969...

> How to show the world he was a “madman”? Nixon and Kissinger came up with a plan in 1969. They ordered the Strategic Air Command to go on airborne alert for two weeks. “Ignoring the safety risks,” Schlosser notes, “B-52s loaded with hydrogen bombs took off from bases in the United States and flew circular routes along the coast of the Soviet Union. Neither the Soviets nor the Vietcong was fooled by the bluff.”

https://vva.org/arts-of-war/history/command-and-control-by-e...

That occurred after the Thule airbase accident that prompted the end of continuous air alert in 1969.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chrome_Dome

There's another option as well: have enough redundancy to have substantial forces survive even a massive first strike, absorb it, and then retaliate at leisure. This seems to be the US's approach:

https://www.armscontrol.org/act/1997_11-12/pdd

I imagine other countries with smaller arsenals may not have that option. Even your B may not necessarily be an option, if their command structure relies on centralized control and would be vulnerable to a decapitation strike.

I'll crosspost the link here, too: [0]

In short, over-the-horizon radars are not exactly precise. AFAIK no OTH radar to date can be used to provide a firing solution, they all are warning/detection radars. They can also be jammed or destroyed, as they are huge and can't be moved or hidden easily. Finally, it's not enough to provide an initial targeting, you also need to guide the missile during its flight as carrier moves and evades. This is a huge problem, given that any signal can and will be jammed.

I think you underestimate how silent the carrier can be.

[0]: http://lexingtoninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/aircraft-ca...

A quick summary for posterity.

On locating a carrier:

"Few if any nations today possess an assured capacity to track carriers continuously. All of the relevant methods — radar, electronic eavesdropping, electro-optical and acoustic sensors — have major drawbacks such as high cost, vulnerability to preemption, and inability to precisely discriminate. While that may change over time, aggressors will still face a daunting task in penetrating the layered defenses of a carrier battle group."

"The areas in which carriers typically operate are so vast that adversaries would be hard-pressed to find them even in the absence of active countermeasures by the battle group... The most practical way to conduct surveillance over such expanses is with satellites, which have a much wider field of vision than sensors operating inside the atmosphere. However, China does not presently possess military reconnaissance satellites capable of finding a carrier, and the commercial satellites to which it might turn take days or weeks to task and deliver imagery -- making them useless for finding a continuously moving vessel."

On tracking it:

"In order to keep up with the carrier's movements, an attacker must establish a continuous track of the vessel using some combination of land-based, sea-based, space-based and airborne sensors. Moreover, the track must be sufficiently precise so that it can provide targeting coordinates to weapons when they arrive in the carrier's vicinity. As of today, even the United States has difficulty accomplishing such a feat, and no other nation is close to having the requisite capabilities."

"Space-based or airborne radar with the capacity to track moving ground targets (such as the Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System, or JSTARS) has the greatest potential for providing reliable targeting information, because it combines precision with a capacity to operate day or night in all kinds of weather. However, few prospective adversaries are likely to have such systems before the end of the next decade."

Summary: Note that this article is circa 2001, so when they say "few prospective adversaries are likely to have such systems before the end of the next decade", I read that China and Russia could potentially have them now.

So I think there's a strong case for carriers being hard to track historically, but it sounds feasible that large nation-states have gained the ability to do so in the last 5-10 years, and it seems likely that that capability will be democratized further by low-cost commercial imaging (E.g. see SkyBox for the state-of-the-art in civilian high-resolution low-delay satellite imaging).

There were a few phases of the battle. There was also a wave of suicide attacks by small boats, and that's what I was referring to. The cruise-missiles seem slightly more reasonable for overwhelming defenses.

The closing speed makes the difference. Which is also complicated for the little boats on the probably rough open seas where they'd encounter the carrier group. Carrier groups travel in miles-wide formations. Even if your first warning was your support-ships getting hit you'd still have minutes to react to the incoming threats. Time to get multiple aircraft up, set the guns to the right mode for targeting ships, etc.

It sounds like its the result of arbitrary rules letting you to attack someone by moving into their hex, etc. I don't think you'd get this result with a real-world battle exercise, where soldiers had to drive the boats tens of miles off-coast in radio silence for a coordinated attack on a hyper-aware enemy.