Currently taking place is the 2024 RIMPAC military exercise, which will culminate in the sinking of a decommissioned 40,000-ton Tarawa-class amphibious assault ship. This reminds me of the story of Americans destroying their own namesake aircraft carrier.
The fact that Americans destroyed an aircraft carrier named after their own country seems peculiar, doesn’t it? What’s even more astounding is that the U.S. military took four weeks but still couldn’t sink the USS America, eventually resorting to using explosives to sink it from the inside, showcasing the resilience of American carriers!
The USS America, also known as the America (hull number 66), was the third ship of the Forrestal-class aircraft carriers built in the 1960s. It was the last American aircraft carrier not named after a person and the final conventionally powered aircraft carrier of the United States.
After entering service in 1965, the America served the United States for thirty years. Most of its service time was spent in the Atlantic and Mediterranean seas, but it also deployed in the Pacific and served during the Vietnam War. It also participated in operations like Desert Shield and Desert Storm during the Gulf War. During the Vietnam War, it was deployed to the Pacific three times, conducting over 10,000 flight operations and dropping thousands of tons of ammunition without losing a single aircraft.
The USS America was decommissioned in August 1996 and nearly a decade later, in 2005, the U.S. Navy used it for controlled explosive research to understand carrier resistance to explosions and sinking. The data and findings from the controlled explosion tests aided future carrier designs. Displaying remarkable resistance to explosions and sinking, the USS America now rests at a depth of over 5000 meters in the Atlantic Ocean, serving as a symbol of the U.S. military’s enduring legacy.
Although sinking a supercarrier completely is nearly impossible, incapacitating it is much easier. Mines, bombs, anti-ship missiles, while not sinking the carrier, can render it combat ineffective. In naval warfare, non-contact explosions cause the most damage to warships due to water’s density being 800 times that of air and non-compressibility, efficiently transmitting the energy from explosive blasts. The destructive effects of near-miss bombs on the hull can be even greater than direct hits by projectiles.
Conducting full-ship impact tests on new warships to assess their survival capabilities in wartime is a longstanding practice in the U.S. Navy. This entails planting explosives underwater at a certain distance and depth from the ship, detonating them, and then inspecting the ship’s hull and onboard equipment for their resilience against the shockwaves. The U.S. Navy’s latest supercarrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, underwent three full-ship impact tests in 2021 in June, July, and August. Each test utilized 18 tons of explosives, generating shockwaves equivalent to a 3.9 magnitude earthquake. The August test placed the explosives closer to the carrier.
The highlight of this year’s RIMPAC is the “Sink Exercise” (SINKEX), where the decommissioned U.S. Tarawa-class amphibious assault ship will serve as the target ship to be sunk. The Tarawa-class is slightly smaller than conventional aircraft carriers and similar in size to the Chinese Type 075 amphibious assault ship, possibly signaling to China that the U.S. and its allies can quickly sink Chinese landing ships.
Simultaneously, satellite images captured the destruction of a model of the U.S. aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford in the Chinese Xinjiang desert. While it may be routine for China to conduct attack drills in the desert, destroying the Ford model at this time clearly indicates a propaganda war strategy to counter the RIMPAC exercise. If sinking large warships with live ammunition isn’t feasible, hitting models will do.
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