Report: U.S. aircraft carriers â€˜unchallenged primacy may be coming to a closeâ€™

You argued carriers don't need to enter narrow choke points - when I mentioned the Persian Gulf that seemed to go over your head. That is as narrow a choke point as one can get. A lot of times people don't accept their favorite war machine may become obsolete. I am sure people defended the battleship as the primary weapon of naval warfare right up until airplanes sunk them all.

A nice read on the subject:

http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/all/1/

The War Nerd / April 1, 2009

The War Nerd: This Is How the Carriers Will Die (Updated Version)

Tell me classified stuff on a public forum please? What EXACTLY do we have? May I have one of them too?

Of course no one will actually say anything specific, but you can tell by they way they change the topic of conversation that you are getting warm. Just the mention of:

Tunnels
Rods of God
US Space Command
Lasers
Mercury Plasma
Triangular Shaped Craft
Tesla

Makes them very uncomfortable. You can look up any of this stuff on the web, so I am pretty sure we are not crossing any lines. They are obviously instructed not to discuss any of this stuff and they do a very good job not saying a word.

SOH = Straits of Hormuz

What exactly is your point? That carriers aren't invincible? That enough force marshaled in one spot is problematic?

Fort Pulaski sits astride the Savannah River. It was well positioned to dominate the approaches and to keep out all shipping. Its guns were formidable to about 3/4 of a mile covering channel in both directions. Quite a choke point, yes?

Do you know what happened to Pulaski? Union Parrott guns set up at about a mile away and drilled through the entire fort. When the first round hit the outside of the powder magazine, the fort surrendered.

If I had a choice between a 100-300nm defensive ASCM force or a carrier strike group capable of 500nm strikes, I'd take the carrier strike group all day long. Its a no brainer.

You haven't explained how exactly the carrier is obsolete. Its always been vulnerable to attacks from land, and at much greater ranges than your ASCM force can threaten. It has always been vulnerable in choke points (as are all forces past, present, and future). It has always been a ship capable of sinking. So what has changed? Is the threat posed by modern Russia, China, Iran, etc. greater than what was posed by the USSR in 1980? Not really.

You have also failed to address any possible replacement for the CVN strike groups when it comes to offensive capability.

Surface warships with rail guns may make a comeback for battle cruisers to supplement CVNs, but that day hasn't come yet.

Don’t know about that, but...

I did see a demonstration of a device where they could just get close to a laptop and read data off it, even if it was off.

In the demo the guy walked slowly up an aisle of an aircraft and back with this device the size of a paperback book. He then took this smallish device and plugged it into a laptop and they had basically entire copies of the hard drives of all the computers they passed. When I argued that there was no way they could copy the data off that fast, I was told that it, more or less, took a “picture” of the hard drive, and it’s data, and then reconstructed that data. This was about 10 years ago.

Presume that you no longer have carriers because “they are obsolete”.

Here is a simple question. Iran closes the Straights of Hormuz (SOH) and no neighboring countries will allow you a base of operations. Presuming that opening the SOH is in our national interest, how are you going to do that? The Iranians have modern ASCMs.

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