Does the Navy have a lot of geographic concealment already in place to operate within China's anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) envelope?
Hey!
The Tomahawk has long enough range to where it can be fired from within the complex littoral geography of the Japanese and Philippine home islands and into a variety of Indo-Pacific maritime spaces. This could allow U.S. forces to circumvent maritime buffers or fire upon them from their littoral margins, which are mostly allied territories. This concept is somewhat similar to the Cold War-era concept of hiding carriers within Norwegian Fjords to launch strikes against the Soviets.
My old notion does have a basis in fact.
I have on the shelves [a book] about how NATO planned to use the shield of Norway's mountains to operate aircraft carriers in Norwegian waters closer to the Soviet bases on the Kola Peninsula where we could hit the Soviet military units at home and strike Soviet amphibious assets trying to outflank NATO land defenses in northern Norway.
After Norway started to feel out on a limb in the late 1970s as Soviet power pushed NATO's forward line of defense back to the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom gap well south of Norway, demonstrating that we could include Norway in our defensive perimeter was important.So it occurred to me that maybe our Navy could operate closer to China behind the shield of Taiwan's mountains, which conveniently loom over the eastern coast the length of Taiwan.
I wondered if even carriers could gain protection. Although I wondered if missile sensors had gotten good enough to see through the ground clutter.
But this might actually be an option across a wider area extending to Japanese and Filipino territorial waters.
Add in missile reflectors in the general neighborhood to decoy missiles away, and the sanctuaries might be numerous enough to really confuse China's kill chains.
UPDATE: The pining is real:
Russia's Embassy in Norway on Tuesday harshly criticized a planned visit by a U.S. aircraft carrier to Oslo as an "illogical and harmful" show of force.
UPDATE: Ah, my fjords defense for carriers may work for long-range anti-ship missiles but gravity bombs defeat that obstacle. Is the new concept just a repeat with nothing new to recommend it?
So I retract my suggestion. If the suggestion has a major flaw back then it is flawed now.
Also from that initial post, the Navy has been reticent to admit carriers can even be damaged. I've never fallen for that delusion.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
