j_hungary
Professional
US CBG was never a wonder weapon, not ever since WW2, when we had the strongest CBG, and to be frank, ask any historian, and they will tell you the Japanese Carrier is a lot better than the American. The reason why we won is that we built more than the Japanese, and we didn't lose crew over a sunken ship (well, not that much). The same can be said when you compare the Sherman and the Tiger tank.
The majority of US military might comes from numbers; yes, technology plays a role, but numbers are the reason why we are ahead. We had 11 CBG (not counting the Assault Group, which is basically a mini-carrier) when the rest of the world can at most come up with 2 or 3; that's where the edge comes from.
On the other hand, when you talk about being hit and rendering it useless, that is a more complex concept than just saying "1 missile, call it a lucky hit or what, and it's gone". If you apply the same standard to literally everything else, then all war will come down to is just a dude picking up a $2000 a piece RPG because one hit of that, and your $4.5 million tank goes down in flames. If this is the case, why don't we just arm 20,000 soldiers with $2000 a pop RPG instead of getting a single Tank? You need to understand the concept of kill chain, and it's ALWAYS in favor of the defender than the attacker, regardless of what kind of kill vehicle you are talking about, be it a $2000 RPG against a multi-million dollar tank or a million dollar a pop cruise missile against a milti-billions Carrier, simply because there are 3 to 5 for everypart of a kill chain while you need all those to be green to hit something, you only need to counter one for the factor in the kill chain to fail.
On the other hand, the entire Joint Operation Concept is to make that kill chain easier to break (Or harder to break, depending on your stance). Where different parts of the equation play a different role for you to break that kill chain, not too familiar with how the Navy works, but let's use the RPG vs Tank example, when you add different platforms into the mix, it increases your "survival matrix" because that's when things operate with each other. Let's start with you have an RPG Team, and I have a tank, and you are attacking, that's the base, it ALREADY favors me to begin with, what if I add a squad of soldiers patrolling around my tank? It makes your RPG team even harder to hit me, and what if I add a helicopter flying ahead? It now makes it even harder for you to put that lucky strike on me. And that's how war works, whether or not you are talking about tanks or aircraft carriers. That's the same; if you are running an Aircraft Carrier, the strength is not from the carrier itself, that's just the objective outcome, the strength of that CBG is from a combined level of Destroyer, Cruiser, Submarine and Naval Aviation, because when you add that, it makes your cruise missile a lot harder to penetrate and hit me.
