Detection would not begin at visual range.

An E-2D Hawkeye airborne early warning aircraft orbiting tens of thousands of feet above the fleet would likely identify such contacts long before they approached engagement range. Its AN/APY-9 radar system is designed to track small, low-flying targets against complex backgrounds, feeding data through Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) networks that unify the entire strike group’s sensor picture.

In practice, this means a destroyer dozens of miles away could generate a firing solution using data it did not directly collect. The carrier group functions less as separate ships and more as a distributed, synchronized combat system.