“The era of the surface warship is over.”
I don’t think that’s correct, as directed energy (laser) defensive weapons are just coming into their own. I’d be interested to know how current airborne radar and IR sensors perform against this missile - all of which is no doubt classified.
The supercarriers do represent a whole lot of eggs in individual baskets though...
For a number of reasons, the deployed hardware will always have some degree of obsolescence when a major war comes. Its lifetime is measured in decades, or in some cases, half centuries. The capability to kill expensive weapons will evolve faster than defenses can be designed, tested and deployed. This is because a potential adversary can see your advantage in, say carrier groups, and will focus on developing ways to kill them, (hyper-velocity missiles) or deny them access to the areas they need to be in to affect the attacker, (mines.) When the ability to kill your asset is relatively cheap, say ten million per missile, and the asset is expensive, 20-30 billion dollars, not including escorts and operational costs, the asset will have its defenses swamped by cheap attacks. It doesn’t matter if they can shoot down a missile at mach 10 if there are a dozen missiles coming in at the same time.
The battleship was actually rendered obsolete by the British torpedo attack on the Italian fleet. They inflicted substantial damage using biplanes. Neither the biplane or the torpedo were new. They were just being used in a new way. So, in reality, the battleship had been functioning on borrowed time since the first world war. The Japanese took notice. By the time America realized the battleship was obsolete America had lost several with thousands of lives. Yes, they did serve out the war and served an important role, but not the role they were designed for; ship to ship slug fests.
The US Navy is against changing anything. There are lots of reasons. Change is frightening. Having learned how to advance and succeed in the current environment, officers are scared that they won’t survive in a changed political environment. George W. Bush wanted to develop a new class of assault ship which would be highly automated, have the firepower to reduce and entire country to ruin and could submerge to a depth of 300 meters. It wouldn’t need an aircraft carrier or huge numbers of escort ships. GWB had admirals visit Congressmen to pitch the idea. Then, along behind the admirals came senior captains who said it was a bad idea. The idea was killed. Instead, we got the Independence class of littoral assault ships.
Possibly the reason the Navy wanted the idea killed is it would have substantially reduced the size of the organization and the operating costs. The bigger both are, the more personal power the men at the top swing. Change doesn’t happen in the military until it must happen. If it hadn’t been for the wars of the twentieth century, the Army would probably just now be changing over from trap door rifles.