Aircraft Carriers 

"El Relámpago(LZone) - Humanity First!" (lightningzone) 12/27/2018 at 11:26 • Filed to: None

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Are they overrated? Should the Pentagon find some sort of an evolution? Maybe a nuclear powered flying carrier? 

Deal Killer - Powered by Focus > El Relámpago(LZone) - Humanity First! 12/27/2018 at 11:36

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Worst mistake I ever made, was to suggest to my uncle, a career Navy man, that U.S. c arriers are billion dollar floating targets. He disagreed.

facw > El Relámpago(LZone) - Humanity First! 12/27/2018 at 12:00

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I think they have a lot of value, but there is the question as to whether they are too vulnerable. A lot of people think that long-range hypersonic cruise missiles are making them obsolete, but I think it’s quite possible (and even likely) that advances in defensive technology will limit the effectiveness of those weapons (we’ve already seen that making piloted aircraft ever faster was not the answer).

Fast Attack Craft swarms are still a threat, but are really only relevant in a very small number of places, and even then only as a first strike (Iran maybe could sink one carrier, but once we are at war, we’d just destroy all the boats and their support facilities).

Quiet subs and robotic torpedoes seem like the biggest threat. If you have the capability to sneak up on the carrier, or just wait silently for it to come to you, that’s really hard to defend against (there are some attempts at underwater point defense, but it seems tricky to get right).

In any event, carriers let us project power, and are a lot less politically problematic than setting up airbases all over the world. They are expensive to build and operate, but that would also be the case with having a big fleet of SSGNs, which would be the best alternative to replace to that role. Other major powers are still embracing the carrier concept, so it’s not as though we are following down a path that is obviously obsolete.

The military tech I really wonder about is the tank. It seems like aircraft are really good at killing them, so it feels like a situation where if you have air superiority, you don’t need tanks to kill your opponent’s armor, because your aircraft will do a better job, and if your opponent has air superiority, your tanks are going to be extremely vulnerable (the US has of course invested heavily in making sure we can always control the skies). Maybe there’s room if there is a period of contested control, but it seems like that would just leave both sides’ ground forces exposed to attack from the air. If tanks were invulnerable to ground forces beyond enemy armor, maybe they would still make sense, but the experience in Iraq and Afghanistan shows that that is definitely not the case. So you have big, expensive, logistically challenging armor killers, that aren’t actually that great at killing armor compared to other options.