If we had light carriers, cruiser carriers, escort carriers, cruisers and destroyers with guns and torpedoes, not just rockets, the Chinese would have a fight on their hands. With today’s automation they could be staffed at 1/4 the rate of the old ships.
Carriers are just big targets. They are fighting the last, last war.
I tend to agree. Many missions the US Navy has could be carried out with smaller. cheaper, special purpose ships, even if said smaller craft would not be as useful against a major world power (such as China and Russia would like to be seen as) as larger, general purpose vessels like a super carrier, a SSNBM, or a heavy cruiser designated a ‘destroyer’. Other countries’ navies use them, and in multi-national war games they sometimes do shockingly well against bigger, higher tech, major units. Plus, a flotilla or squadron of small, cheap ships is harder to take out with one lucky (or high tech) shot than a single capital ship target.
But what do I know? I'm ex-Army, and only served on Navy ships for about 6 months. (Alto’, BTW, none of the current Navy's 280 ships could have worked with the Mobile Riverine Force, an ad-hoc collection of re-worked WWII ships, boats and small civilian craft, which I served with in 1969.)