im sure you’re right. most people don’t understand the defense system surrounding a carrier. I do understand it and what I think you are not fully considering is the chinese and Russian satellites and anti ship tech are getting better and better while the defensive perimeter around carriers is getting smaller and smaller. so it eventually come to a point where we can no longer guarantee the survivability of an asset that, in a conflict, is irreplaceable. you don’t go into a fight with the idea that if we lose a single asset the battle is likely lost. you have to have backups and contingincies. this makes the carrier too valuable to lose and therefore has to be deployed in a less than effective posture. if we had a 600 ship navy the relative value of each ship decreases and i’d feel comfortable with the balance that would create. heck you could even add more carriers, which would be great.
you say very few, if any, could pull off an attempt to attack a carrier task force. I agree. the problem is I think that list would include china and Russia. two of the top four strategic enemies in the world. no iran, no n.korea right?
I love these discussions and I don’t want to come off as “anti carrier” cuz im not. im just pissed that we’re sacrificing the rest of our navy and creating an unhealthy balance in our fleet which in the long run lowers combat effectiveness.
Satellites are all fine and dandy, but even if they can effectively locate a carrier there needs to be effective integration to systems capable of targeting and hitting it.
Cruise missiles are going to be range limited. And the longest ranged versions will be subsonic and take a long time to reach a target at distance. Over water they’ll be easy pickings for AMRAAMS.
Ballistic missiles aren’t easy to guide once they’re launched. There’ll be a time lag between when the CVN is located, when the missile is targeted and launched, and when it hits. The carrier will be miles away from where it was at that point, meaning that the targeting will require a predictive element on where the carrier will be. THEN the missile needs to survive Aegis, which is proven to work against ballistic missiles. While a ChiCom nuke will be bigger than the Bikini bombs, the Bikini tests (Able Shot, specifically) did show pretty conclusively that anything other than a really near miss is going to be not only survivable but also not a mission-kill.