Ships are the only way to transport and deploy certain weapons across theaters; as such, there is no simple way to replace them. Your argument could be made in the era of Soviet anti-ship cruise missiles (and that argument was made), yet navies have continued to develop and deploy warships.

>Are ships even defendable in the age of hypersonic missiles?

Well China has been building aircraft carrier mockups on train rails in the desert to test something on them while they're in motion...so I'd say unclear

> Are ships even defendable in the age of hypersonic missiles?

Given 90s-era NATO air defences are shooting down Russia’s newest hypersonic missiles [1], I’m continuing to treat the category as more hype than utility.

[1] https://www.globaldefensecorp.com/2024/11/20/ukraines-patrio...

A ship close enough to hit anything has always been close enough to be hit. Hypersonics are not revolutionary, countermeasures will evolve to address them the same way they have for every preceding weapon system. But ultimately, fleets need to be able to take a hit as they always have.

Pretty much.

25% interception rate on shit tier Kinzhals last year, which allegedly required salvoing all 32 interceptors from patriot battery, a patriot pac3 mse, aka the most advanced operational variant from 10 years ago. It's dropped to 6% now after RU improvement.

Math basically saying ~10 kinzhals can overwhelm typical carrier group with couple flight3 Burkes assuming all Burke VLS was dedicated to ABM, which it's not. Extrapolate to a more performant PRC hypersonic, and interception rate might approach 0. There's nothing in US missile defense tests (staged ballistic trajectories / simple decoys) that remotely suggest they have capable interceptors or the magazine depth to survive even moderate amount of high end hypersonics. Which is going to proliferate, see PRC building $100k commodity hypersonics for potential floor. Bundle that with space ISR and expeditionary navy model is even more dead in 10-15 years.

Hence IMO it's rational USnavy modernization/recapitalization is such a shit show. US legislatively locked in 11 carrier navy with all the supporting surface fleet that entails. Shit needs to be built, by law, but there's nothing competent to build in face of AShM math, so keep grafting and fucking around. It's not like USN acquisitions wasn't shit fucked before Trump.

All of US MIC acquisition behavior makes sense if one accepts that navy is probably fucked (including subsurface), the only thing US really needs for hegemony (excluding PRC containment, which US functionally can't), is 100-200 B21s (naval tacair/rip f/a-xx likely also fucked) to bomb whatever mid sized countries they want with impunity without putting surface fleet at risk (imagine Houthis with hypersonics). Any legacy naval hulls, tacair frames with some modernization will still black magic overmatch vs everyone except PRC for peacetime dick measuring. TLDR USN can't do anything against PRC, but doesn't have to do anything VS everyone else. So USN does whatever it wants, which includes a lot of flailing because it doesn't really know what to do at all.