[Smokin' Joe]

Missiles will become more elusive and accurate — and could be nuclear-tipped.

While it took a while for the writer to get around to this, some second tier actors in the world would likely use that capability.

The author makes sense, especially considering every major naval conflict was fought and won with new technology in the 20th century. When the Bismarck and Tirpitz were brought out, it was air power that resulted in their sinking. Ditto the Japanese Navy. The battleship era had ended during the war.

Now, considering carrier forces duked it out during that war, it makes sense that in the next major (global) naval conflict, it will be a different technology which prevails. Be that rail gun frigates, drones, submarines, or a combination of all of those, the numbers appear to doom the carrier to a support airfield which can be moved to the vicinity of land conflicts, much as the battleship became self propelled floating artillery.

YMMV

[hosepipe]

Mobile airports will never become obsolete..
rail guns and lasers is the next wave..
https://www.dropbox.com/s/or5nnq764wyjbkg/HighPlaces.avi?dl=0

[nickcarraway]

The battleship era had ended during the war.

The battleship era was probably over by 1920. Only a few knew it then.

[lentulusgracchus]

, it makes sense that in the next major (global) naval conflict, it will be a different technology which prevails. Be that rail gun frigates, drones, submarines, or a combination of all of those, the numbers appear to doom the carrier to a support airfield which can be moved to the vicinity of land conflicts, much as the battleship became self propelled floating artillery.

Considering that 1) such airfields will continue to be highly useful for force projection and 2) the MSM urinated all over Ronald Reagan for calling the battlewagons back to duty (it was the optics they hated, the politics and the demonstration of cojones), and yet Reagan's successor, who planned to retire all four of them in order to gift blue-haired Park Avenue ladies with nice, fat tax refunds but suddenly found he needed a couple when it was time to break some of Saddam's toys and excavate his bunkers (using 1937 fully-amortized ammunition, thank you), it begins to appear that the opposition to the maintenance of the battleship divisions was always either tax-cut politics or defense-blowdown politics, and in this article we see both sorts of arguments used on just about every weapon system and ship type in the Navy's Order of Battle, by what I'm increasingly confident is a snarky, pimply little 'Rat "oppo" scribbler or a Russian opinion troll pretending to be a typical American 'Rat.