Philip Pilkington
When Russia’s Oreshnik missile delivered its multiple payloads to Ukraine’s PA Pivdenmash plant in Dnipro, the guardian angels of aircraft carriers around the world wept. While some defenders of the use of aircraft carriers will no doubt claim that the jury is still out on whether advanced missile technology has rendered them militarily redundant, this is becoming an increasingly difficult position to maintain.
The PA Pivdenmash plant is approximately 1,834 acres (744 hectares), or 2.87 square miles, in size, and while we do not know how much of this area was hit by the multiple warheads of the Oreshnik, the video evidence suggests that it was quite spread out. An Oreshnik loaded with a MIRV (Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicle) containing conventional munitions is the hypersonic missile equivalent of a shotgun: point it in the general direction of a target, and the target gets sprayed with shot.
Considering that the Oreshnik seems able to achieve a high degree of accuracy—it hit the PA Pivdenmash plant, after all—this “saturation effect” by a hypersonic ballistic missile loaded with conventional warheads surely means that these weapons could be fired at the general area of an aircraft carrier and achieve a hit. The top speed of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier is approximately thirty knots (34.5 mph), while the top speed of an Oreshnik missile is anywhere between Mach 10 and Mach 11 (7,610–8,450 mph). The idea that an aircraft carrier could outrun such a missile is laughable – and since the saturation effect of the multiple warheads means that it does not need to be perfectly accurate, it is very difficult to make the case that an aircraft carrier would be operational after such an encounter. The missile would not need to sink the aircraft carrier, only damage it enough to render it operationally useless, after which it would be forced to limp back to base.
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