Supercarrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower at Naval Station Norfolk
The Houthis have threatened to sink the 100,000-ton US aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower within the Red Sea and even claim to have hit it with drone or missile attacks. These threats haven’t caused much of an uproar, as there isn’t a major counterweight between the ragtag force on the one hand and the ultra-modern nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and its escort fleet on the opposite.
The concept that the Houthis can seriously damage and even sink an aircraft carrier seems far-fetched, but before we dismiss the threat, let’s take a more in-depth have a look at the facts.
Houthi forces
The Houthis are the epitome of an improvised force, counting on garage-built drones, truck-mounted missiles and unmanned kamikaze speedboats. They are extremely difficult to attack of their rugged mountain and concrete strongholds; a protracted Saudi air campaign didn’t stop them from launching drones. As expected, repeated air and missile strikes by Western powers have didn’t stop their campaign. Attacks on merchant shipping.
Cargo ship Rubymar sinks after being attacked by Yemeni Houthi forces in international waters … [+]
However, they’re difficult to drive away, which doesn’t make them an efficient offensive force. In addition, armored warships with missile defense and damage control are much harder to sink than merchant ships.
The commander of the USS Eisenhower, Captain Christopher “Chowdah” Hill, mocks the Houthis’ claims and calls them “almost comical” in a current interview with AP News. Be Twitter/X-Account takes an irreverent, optimistic approach and responds to threats of destruction with enthusiastic posts concerning the famous Taco Tuesday and pictures of USS Eisenhower’s morale-boosting dog Nemo.
Hill has reason to be confident. Aside from its aircraft squadrons and destroyers, the carrier itself is a particularly difficult goal. Modern warships are designed for damage control and have separate bulkheads so that they can’t be sunk by a hull breach, unlike their World War II counterparts.
How many missiles does it take to sink an aircraft carrier?
Commentators have quickly dismissed the concept that the Houthis could sink an aircraft carrier with a lucky shot.
“Ultimately, we can see what the people tasked with destroying the Soviet aircraft carriers thought about what it would take to successfully destroy them: 12 missile hits,” commented Zach the German side Defense Archives on Twitter/X.
Zach quotes from a Document from the Cold War era They provide information concerning the missile load of the Russian naval squadrons. From this it may possibly be concluded that twelve missiles could be needed to take out an aircraft carrier.
Another Russian source at Topwar.Ru from 2019 gives a good higher number, suggesting that 1 to three missiles would cause superficial damage that might be easily repaired, 6 to eight would cause severe damage, and at the very least 20 missiles could be needed to destroy it.
Taiwanese boats launch anti-ship missiles. These are sometimes fired in salvos, as several … [+]
Others have tried to search out a rule of thumb to calculate what number of weapons are needed to sink a ship of a certain size. Veteran Chuck Hill conducted an in depth evaluation based totally on World War II data and concluded that “On average, to have a high degree of certainty in sinking another ship, one must drop one pound of bombs or shells on the target for every ton of the ship’s weight.”
A typical rule of thumb is Cube root rule which higher reflects the indisputable fact that a ship ten times larger will not be ten times harder to sink. According to this rule, the cube root of a ship’s displacement in hundreds of tons gives the variety of thousand-pound warheads needed to sink it.
Applying these rules to the USS Eisenhower, it might take between 5 and 100 warheads to sink the carrier. This seems to present enough leeway that the occasional lucky hit wouldn’t be an issue.
Reality bites
That’s the speculation. History tells a special story, because one of these evaluation fails to take note of that the best risk to a ship is fire, not sinking. The US Navy 5 large (fleet) aircraft carriers lost in World War II: only certainly one of them was completely sunk through the first attack – the others fell victim to fireplace.
Starting a fireplace doesn’t require large amounts of explosives.
HMS Sheffield burns after being hit by an Argentine missile off the Falkland Islands in 1982
An Argentinian He will fire a rocket which hit the British destroyer HMS Sheffield within the Falklands War in 1982, didn’t detonate. However, the remaining fuel within the missile ignited and led to a fireplace by which 20 crew members were killed and lots of more injuredmainly from burns and smoke inhalation. Some analysts imagine the fireplace also ignited missiles stored on board, causing further damage. The ship was badly damaged by the fireplace and sank six days later while being towed.
According to the cube rule, 720 kilograms of explosives – about 4 Exocets – would have been needed to sink the Sheffield.
More recently and much more current, Ukraine hit the Russian cruiser Moskva with two Neptune missiles. If it was over 9,000 tons, based on the cube root rule, it might have required over 2,000 kilos of explosives or about 6 Neptune with a 330-pound warhead to sink the Moskva. Again, uncontrolled fire occurred and a few have suggested that the stored ammunition might have been ignited.
Image of the Russian guided missile cruiser sunk by Neptune missiles, from 2013
The Russian Defense Ministry stated that the Moskva was damaged but was towed to port and sank the following day in bad weather. Since the damage was attributable to fire, it could have only taken one missile in the appropriate place to begin the fireplace that destroyed the Moskva.
The lesson to be learned from this is basically the identical as within the case of the small FPV drones that caused Russian tanks to disintegrate in a ball of fireplace: it will not be the scale of the attacking warhead that determines the damage, but the danger that the stored ammunition seems to be a self-destruct load.
Dangers and distractions
The USS Eisenhower is designed to stop the spread of fireplace. The stored fuel and ammunition are well protected and there are adequate fire-fighting provisions. The Navy has learned these lessons the hard way from accidents in war and peacetime. But as with the Sheffield and the Moskva, good preparation may be undone by bad luck.
It is extremely unlikely that the Houthis will damage a US aircraft carrier. But history has repeatedly shown that defenses that appear unbeatable on paper can fail attributable to human error, comparable to the series of errors that led to the destruction of the USS Stark. Hit by Iraqi Exocet missiles in 1987.
Confidence is justified, complacency will not be. And bringing even probably the most powerful supercarrier into an area where it might be attacked will not be without risk.
There is one other consideration. While the Houthis’ attacks may be easily detected and repelled, they’ll still disrupt air operations. Military planners, especially those that construct drone fleetswill need to understand how many small drones is likely to be needed to stop a carrier from operating effectively. They is likely to be way more fascinated by unspectacular neutralization of a carrier than achieving the wonderful victory the Houthis dream of. And that threat might be way more serious in the long term.
