Several billion dollar target groups of the most advanced technology in the world. Still vulnerable to that rogue missile, swarm or targetable ICBM carrier killer that comes from straight up.
They are a projection of power against an enemy without the means to respond. One good nuke makes them flotsam.
We would be so much better off if we had no carriers, the AF no planes and the Army no armor. Just sitting ducks. /sarc
Stupid anti A/C Carrier armchair admirals of Free Republic. Thank God nobody is listening to these lunes.
A good case can be made that we’d be better off with 25 or 30 25000 ton carriers operating 60 aircraft each opposed to 10 supercarriers operating 90.
Carriers PROJECT FORCE into anywhere you want them to. That’s what they are built for.
Yes, they can be vulnerable, but that’s the tradeoff for the ability to project force quickly, without established bases.
Fix wing naval aviation from A/C carriers will become obsolete when the concept of air superiority over huge swaths of ocean becomes obsolete. I.E. NEVER.
Correct!
History Repeats itself, for anyone who doubts me, here is an excellent Segment in the Documentary Battleship
I encourage everyone to watch the whole think.
https://youtu.be/aoHzFfW0jhY?t=4m40s
We have made it to where our Navy (or Air Force) can't incur any loses without it severely damaging us.
Britain’s carriers were essential during the Falklands War, so I would not scrap ours just yet.
A ChiCom monitor reading this thread would be astonished at the A/C Carrier mentality shown here.
Great for nation building, humanitarian aid, and migrant rescue operation. Aka our foreign policy.
The first question a president asks (well, maybe not this one...) when there is an international crisis is “Where are our carriers?”. Bad idea.
I believe this is incorrect...the RAF had attacked Italian battleships at Taranto prior to Pearl Harbor
I believe most of our carriers are equipped to defend themselves with electronics and other devices that are light years ahead of the competition. If the Chinese were so good at this military business, why do their newest aircraft look like American planes?
The weapon that will take us out is spiritual decline into primal decadence. All while our fleet is sitting sound and ready in the water.
I could offer numerous reasons why this article is incorrect. However, I will offer this one salient point. If Supercarriers are such a drag on our Navy, why did the Chinese buy an aircraft carrier off of Russia to train on? And if they are so bad, why are the Chinese currently building aircraft carriers?
Now, you can make an argument that we don’t need super carriers like they are building now and perhaps build more smaller versions. I can see that as a discussion point, but to say carriers are obsolete is just plain ridiculous. When we can build planes that fly from America to anywhere in the world without in air refueling and be there in 1 hour to drop it’s payload, then perhaps we don’t need them. Until then, they are needed.
As for Lord Nelson’s quote about a ship attacking a fort, I wonder if he would change his mind if he had an aircraft carrier. They and submarines changed the whole character of naval warfare.
I beg to differ!Repulse and Prince of Wales were lost because The Royal Navy was sailing too close to Japanese shore-bases.The”Mistake”wasn’t in the building of the Super Carriers;the”Mistake”is not using the proper tactics to employ their vast powers!!The bombing-campaign against The Nazis didn’t “Win The War”The war was won because we CRUSHED our enemy!!!If all we are going to do is”Pin-Pricks”against our enemies of today,we will (eventually)be”Bled-White”of treasure and RESOLVE!!!!We need to utterly VAPORIZE our enemies wherever(and whenever)they crawl out from under the rocks they invariably retreat to!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That, and the costs to defend them will increase massively. pickets of destroyers to ward off subs, air-defense platforms, anti-missile systems, etc....
As a child in the late 1930s, I remember my godfather, a captain in the navy and Annapolis graduate, telling my father at the dinner table that airplanes could never sink a battleship. They just had to point their guns straight up to shoot down the planes. He was captain of a destroyer that was sunk by a Kamikaze plane during the war.
Today there are relatively cheap supersonic cruise missiles. All wars start with the obsolete concepts learned from the last war.
Here’s the problem for battleships: they usually lose against an airplane attack. Carriers have their own planes and can repulse planes far away from the carrier.