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.

Then, there is the problem of relative cost. We do not know how much the Oreshnik costs to build, but analysts have usefully compared it to the Russian Yars ICBM, which cost around $30 million in 2011 (around $40.3 million in 2023). Estimates for building a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier range from $6.2 billion to $11.2 billion in 2023 dollars. This means that for every aircraft carrier the United States builds, the Russians can build between 154 and 278 Oreshnik missiles. When looked at from a relative cost basis, even if the Russians had to fire off fifty Oreshniks to hit a single aircraft carrier, the cost would be well worth it. In reality, as we have already discussed, one would likely be enough.

Russia’s Worst-Kept Secret

The meta-problem with the aircraft carrier is straightforward enough. Every new development in missile technology makes it harder and harder to claim that aircraft carriers are worth the ticket price. Even if a hardened defender of aircraft carriers can make an argument that even fifty Oreshnik missiles have no hope of taking out an aircraft carrier, we can only assume that as time goes by these missiles will become more powerful, faster, and more accurate. Meanwhile, due to the very nature of the beast, an aircraft carrier will always remain a very large, very slow-moving hunk of metal floating in the ocean. If it ceased to be this, it would cease to be an aircraft carrier.

Intriguingly, however, the Russians have quietly developed a technology that fulfills the mission role of an aircraft carrier but would not suffer from these drawbacks. This technology would not be fully immune to new missile technology; a case can at least credibly be made that it is resistant to it. Moreover, this technology has been ignored and understudied by Western defense analysts for years—yet it is widely known to them and effectively hides in plain sight.

The technology I refer to is the Lun-class ekranoplan. This was first designed in the Soviet Union by visionary engineer Rostislav Alexeyev and was in service for a few short years between 1987 and the early 1990s, after which it was mothballed. The “Caspian Sea Monster,” as it was affectionately named by Western analysts, was rotting in the sea it was named after before it was tugged to the city of Derbent in the Russian republic of Dagestan in 2021, where it now sits as a museum piece.

Ekranoplans may look like aircraft—albeit extremely weird aircraft that are clearly not aerodynamic in the traditional sense—but they are more akin to ships than planes. Ekranoplans are “ground effect vehicles” (GEVs) and are, therefore, part of the family of hydrofoils or “hovercraft.” Ground effect is a term that is only familiar to engineers and to pilots. It refers to the phenomenon that fixed-wing aircraft experience when they are flying near the ground or the ocean. When a fixed-wing aircraft flies very close to the surface, it experiences a significant decrease in drag and a significant increase in lift. Pilots typically describe this as being as if the aircraft is floating just above the surface of the earth, and they utilize the ground effect to assist them with take-off and landing.

GEVs like the ekranoplan do not only utilize this ground effect for take-off and landing, however. Rather, they utilize it to “float” across wide open spaces—usually an ocean or a sea. The Lun-class ekranoplan floats roughly thirteen feet (four meters) above the sea and looks like a plane skimming along the surface of the water. Unlike a normal water vessel, the Lun-class ekranoplans can go at very high speeds that are closer to those of a plane than of a ship—up to 297 knots per hour (342 mph). The Lun-class also has an extremely large capacity of around 100 tons, and because it flies low to the surface, radar detection is extremely difficult. 

The idea behind the ekranoplan should now be obvious: the vessel utilizes its extremely high speed and low detection profile to engage in quick attacks against enemy positions and vessels. When the Caspian Sea Monster was first launched, it was equipped with six P-270 Moskit anti-ship missile launchers—suggesting that back in the 1970s and 1980s Soviet engineers thought that it might be a carrier killer.

Back to the Future

It is not actually clear why the Lun-class was scrapped. The most likely explanation is that it was a highly experimental and idiosyncratic technology that was brought online at almost the same time as the Soviet Union collapsed. With budgetary pressures rising, the highly experimental gear was likely the first to go. The general concept seems credible: an ekranoplan could skim along the sea surface at high speed, park itself near a carrier, release a volley of anti-shipping missiles, and then race off. But there is no need to relitigate the original role that the ekranoplan was designed for here. This is because, with new emerging missile and drone technology, the potential applications for the ekranoplan are much more numerous than in the 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps history will record that Alexeyev’s wild ekranoplan design was simply half a century ahead of its time.

The three key problems that we have highlighted with aircraft carriers may be summarized as size, speed, and cost. Aircraft carriers are too large and slow to evade missiles, and their cost renders them economically redundant when faced with this technology. Ekranoplans do not suffer from any of these problems. If, for example, an Oreshnik were fired at an incoming ekranoplan, it would have a very hard time hitting it as it skimmed across the ocean at 297 knots. We do not actually know how much an ekranoplan would cost to build, but logic dictates that the cost would be more like a large fixed-wing jet aircraft than it would to an aircraft carrier. Perhaps a useful point of comparison would be the enormous Russian cargo plane, the Antonov An-124 Ruslan, which costs between $50 million and $90 million. Taking this as a rough estimate, for the cost of one Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, anywhere between sixty-nine and 373 ekranoplans could be built.

This is where the aircraft carrier enthusiast might jump in and point out that an ekranoplan cannot carry nearly the capacity of an aircraft carrier. A Nimitz-class aircraft carrier typically carries almost 100 aircraft. A Lun-class ekranoplan might be able to carry one, perhaps two. This is where new developments in drone and missile technology come into the picture. We will not go into an in-depth analysis here, but it seems increasingly likely that missile and drone technology—due to their low cost—will increasingly take over the role of manned aircraft. In addition to being much cheaper—and, in the case of missiles, much faster—drones and missiles are also much lighter and much smaller than manned aircraft. What if an ekranoplan loaded with such technology could take over the role of the aircraft carrier altogether?

Today, an aircraft carrier moves slowly toward its target, sits off the shore, launches aircraft that attack the target in question, and then sits around until the aircraft returns before sailing off slowly over the horizon. Imagine if, instead of this, multiple ekranoplans loaded with missiles and drones charged up to the target at high speed, briefly parked off the shore, and unleashed a volley of attacks—note that with missiles and drones, the vessel does not even need to wait for them to return from their mission—and then sped away. Multiple ekranoplans engaged in this sort of attack could be much less easy to hit with a missile than an aircraft carrier. And because there are multiple targets, even if one or two ekranoplans were hit, the losses in terms of men and materiel would be nowhere near the losses if an aircraft carrier were severely damaged or even sunk.