> Ford-class carriers have high-end radars with similar capabilities as the radars of guided-missile destroyers.
Well, yeah. They have an air wing to keep track of.
> the emissions from these radars make them easier to detect, track, and target…
Is finding a US Navy battlegroup a challenge in the modern era? And won't the nearby escorts still have their radars on?
> The helicopters add significant cost, weight, and crew to the ship.
Sure. And capabilities.
> Is finding a US Navy battlegroup a challenge in the modern era? And won't the nearby escorts still have their radars on?
A challenge for our likely opponents?
Per your article:
> China appears to be working hard to deal with this problem, and it’s very possible that they can locate the carriers reasonably effectively, but they have dozens of satellites and large, expensive over-the-horizon radar systems, which any other power is unlikely to be able to match.
Seven years after this article's writing, "dozens of satellites" doesn't seem like that high a bar given Starlink's many thousands. (And we've seen huge bandwidth increases, too, which makes real-time imaging and analysis looking for ship wakes etc. far more doable.)
Since we haven’t had a war against a peer in like 80 years, we have basically no idea what it’d look like, right? I mean, everybody has a bunch of satellites up there right now, and nobody wants to kick off Kessler syndrome. But if two sides with serious navies started fighting and everybody’s carriers were getting spotted by satellite, is it obvious that nobody would start running that calculation?
In any major near peer conflict the satellites will obviously be among the first casualties. The USA and China have been quietly engaging in an ASAT arms race for several years.
At some point the ICBM nuke exchange happens, as well.
This adds a sort of weird bit because, of course, it isn’t really clear why we’d care about carrier performance against China, if we assume it would be an ICBM war anyway.
Maybe a proxy war or some sort of limited thing could be envisioned… but it seems really risky. I hope we don’t do it obviously.
> nobody wants to kick off Kessler syndrome
Except the Trump administration, you mean.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/07/space-pollut...
Satellites require uplinks. You don't have to destroy anything in orbit if you can destroy the control station on the ground.
Plus if we can hack into it and force it into graveyard while expending all it's fuel that's obviously the opening move.
The count and function of China’s satellite fleet is no mystery. We see their payloads go up, same as they see ours.
Very much the same way they see our boats leave port, in fact.
This starts with the false premise that the adversary needs to search the entire ocean.
In reality, the comings and goings of our ships are as public as it gets, and our peers quite easily track and maintain awareness of the locations of all our battle groups.
There's a huge difference between knowing the general location of a ship and generating a track good enough for weapons guidance. And much of the searching is done by reconnaissance satellites, which are highly vulnerable and likely to be destroyed in the opening moves of any major conflict.
Well they don't just know the "general location" of a ship. The article addresses the problem of terminal guidance (using out of date information) but it seems to treat targeting issues as fatal flaws, rather than acceptable risks. It doesn't matter if it the hit rate is 25%, they're going to fire ten of them. There might be collateral damage due to misidentification? Boo hoo, you're in an all out war.
I get it, you're convinced ASAT warfare is inevitable. The reality is it's akin to MAD. No one's going to start that war because it's lose-lose.
Nah. The whole "Kessler Syndrome" thing is overblown. No one is going to refrain from shooting down satellites if it will gain them a temporary military advantage in a hot conflict. This is not even remotely close to MAD.
The idea isn't to remove the radar entirely but make do with something not much better than what the Nimitz class has. Without launch tubes with SM-3s no need to track things out past the atmosphere.
And we do precisely that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/SPY-6
> AN/SPY-6(V)1: Also known as the Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR).[21] It is 4-sided phased array radar, each with 37 RMAs... planned for the Flight III Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.
> AN/SPY-6(V)2: Also known as the Enterprise Air Surveillance Radar (EASR).[23] Rotating and scaled-down version with 9 RMAs estimated to have the same sensitivity as AN/SPY-1D(V) while being significantly smaller.
Same tech, just fewer modules.
Is a creme de la creme radar really required for air traffic control? They can launch E-2s anyway, they're a carrier.
Carrier radars are not "just for air traffic control." The CVN needs its own way of being able to see its surroundings and cue its own self-defense weapons. Technology evolves, and the means to do this evolve with it. The reason carriers are getting SPY-6 is to replace other radars that are older and have the same job: letting the ship see what is around it.
As another poster mentioned, redundancy is a thing. Suppose you don't have an E-2 up and you need to launch a fighter alert. Someone needs to direct that intercept and it's better not to have a single point of failure. Better for those fighters to have the ability to be directed from an E-2, or the CVN, or the shotgun cruiser . . . whatever makes sense at that time.
And the Navy trains for emissions control or EMCON for short. There are tactics, techniques, and procedures not appropriate for discussion here about how ships and formations of ships are expected to do their business when it doesn't make sense to be radiating sensors.
What CVN self defense weapons need full SPY-6? It got Sea Sparrows and RAMs which are not very far range and not many of them. DDGs have long range stuff that really need SPY-6 capabilities.
My guess is SPY-6 was put on Ford just for commonalty reasons.
The Fords don't get "full SPY-6". It's a modular radar, made of 2x2x2 foot modules; the Burkes have 37 modules, the Fords have 9.
https://www.rtx.com/raytheon/what-we-do/sea/spy6-radars (see "A closer look at the SPY-6 variants")
> commonalty reasons
Probably, though CVN-78 doesn't have it. It's an odd duck.
Looks like Raytheon convinced USN that everyone rocking SPY-6 was going to save a ton of money due to commonalty but Ford was already commissioned so it's got old system. Probably will install it during it's next yard time.
If you invent a creme-de-la-creme radar, there's not much reason to avoid using its components wherever you need one. E-2s get shot down; escorts get sunk. Jamming makes it so you can't get data from the E-2s, and ships can pump a lot more electrical power into their array.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/SPY-6 does indeed have variants for carriers that are smaller and cheaper; the ones going on the Burkes have 37 radar modules to the carriers' 9.
The assets that leave the ship could get shot down, so the ship needs to be self-sufficient, too.
Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. Ford class EMALS systems have redundant power supplies, for example. That's a huge expense in both weight and operations.
Not saying this is smart or 'right', but I imagine that's the logic behind the decisions for this stuff.
In general the US carrier force in ww2 was well known for having excellent redundancy and damage/fire control. Its a doctrinal thing, and a legacy they're quite proud of.
For example, USS Yorktown (CV-5) - took bomb and torpedo hits, with flooding and fires. Limped to pearl harbour, Was repaired in !!3 days!! and sent right back out to battle, where she was extremely heaviliy damaged again, but kept afloat through several days of bombardment before sinking.
USS Enterprise (CV-6) - hit by several bombs, a large fire in multiple compartments started. Fire control and damage repairs got the flight deck partially operational for launcing and recovering flights within an hour
USS Franklin (CV-13) - took almost 600 casualties, and had massive fires and ammunition explosions and fuel explosions. Despite extreme damage, she limped back to home port. Her survival is considered one of the greatest acts of shipboard damage control in naval history.
there are several more. A part of this is a difference in their design - british and french carriers used thick armoured flight decks, wheras the americans sacrificed these for speed and internal machinery space
From my reading of naval strategy, the carrier wouldn't want to be sending out that much radar for SigInt purposes. Radar can be detected much further away than what can be detected by the carrier. That's one reason why they use the E2s. The E2s can fly off and see over the horizon, and then just link their data back to the fleet.
So why would the carrier need this additional expense?