Times change and it seems to me that aircraft carriers are increasingly vulnerable, which reduces their utility. We have 11 in active service already. Plus we have 2 America-class Amphibious Assault Ships and 7 Wasp-class Amphibious Assault Ships, all of which are more or less small aircraft carriers. I wonder if in this age of unmanned aircraft, drones and missiles we ought not transition away from our Navy being organized around these behemoths. Such as perhaps use the same money to build more submarines and scale up our missile and drone production (because as we see in Ukraine, it’s possible to burn thorugh a lot of these things awfully quickly and the US industrial base is not well-suited to quickly ramp up production after a war breaks out). These are just questions in my mind. What do our Freeper naval experts think?
BTW, the new Ford-class carriers are said to cost $13 billion a pop. Add in the cost of the air wing and escort ships and you could actually build The Wall for less than the cost of one carrier. Personally, I think that spending so much on the ‘forward defense’ capabilities that aircraft carriers provide makes very little sense when millions of invaders are streaming across the border with Mexico. Right now, we need border defense a lot more that we need the capability to intervene in foreign wars.
“aircraft carriers are increasingly vulnerable, which reduces their utility.”
They are welfare for defense contractors—white elephants and target practice in any future serious war against an enemy with modern missile and drone technology.