The Era of the Aircraft Carrier Is About to End

National Security Journal ^ | 8/23/2025 | Harry Kazianis

[nathanbedford]

Trump’s policy, if successful, will push Europe into becoming a responsible and capable member of an alliance.

The likelier person to thank for the awakening of NATO members is not Donald Trump but Vladimir Putin. The Europeans themselves believe that Trump is extricating the US from NATO, and not without reason.

[nathanbedford]

Does your predictive analysis account for the residual petroleum to be had in America even as supply diminishes that might extend the life of diesel domestically?

Does it account for the ongoing progress in extending the capacity of batteries?

Does it account for the reported revolutionary design advances in engines?

[nathanbedford]

I think my point was that we were vulnerable to invasion because of our internal vulnerabilities.

[Thud]

The aerial defenses of a CVBG have to be turned on to have any effect. TeasGator, Svartalflar noticed I said "surprise attack", i.e. multiple no-notice drone TOT launches against multiple world-wide targets as the first indication that it ain't peacetime no more.

As a practical matter, a single Chinese freighter or container cargo ship can launch enough 50km range, 45kg warhead, drones to mission kill any CV and, for a container cargo ship by itself, to mission kill a whole CVBG except for the SSN. In a surprise attack at the onset of war.

But it's worse than that. I am familiar with the San Diego, California, area. There are thousands of places within 20km of the naval base from which panel trucks or truck-hauled cargo containers could launch drones in a surprise attack. The Ukrainians recently did such an attack thousands of KM deep into Russia against Russian strategic bomber bases.

The estimates I've read of the total numbers of undercover Chinese special operations personnel in the US range up to 50,000, though IMO 5,000 - 10,000 is more credible. Even a few hundred of them could do a mass launch of a thousand drones at Naval Base San Diego, which is enough for mission kills on all warships there plus putting a serious hurt on the base.

It is much, much, easier for drones to do mission kills on warships than to sink them. The USN's complete lack of a wartime capability of repairing battle damage to warships means mission kills will be constructive total losses.

And, if you aren't steamed enough, look up "non-nuclear EMP" and "Flux Compression Generators" (not to be confused with "Flux Capacitors").

Then consider what those can do to an SSN in dock, or a Minuteman ICBM silo, or most any warship, or even aircraft on the ground in hardened shelters. Plus what I just said about how vulnerable Naval Base San Diego is.

[Forward the Light Brigade]

Russia needs to fix up their one carrier, even if they must put in a new power source that doesn’t use cheap smoky oil. Just get her to sail under her own power as a symbol, Have it go into the Med or Pacific even if all they can launch is helicopters. A new paint job and she will serve Russia even if she is a target for rockets and drones. Just don’t sail her anywhere close to the Black Sea! She can serve until they can build a real carrier.

[Owen]

Not sure what you mean by residual petroleum, but it likely means oil in rock pores that didn’t flow. Can it be made to flow? Yes. For sure. That’s what water drive does, and has been doing in KSA for years. But you won’t hit 13 million barrels/day by squeezing out remnant oil.

The question maybe folks might ask is how much less oil per day could we consume with no impact on society?

Folks have thought about this for a while. Waste. Is there waste? Significant waste? The Indy 500 is waste, but it’s not much. Jetskis are waste, but it’s not much.

The big consumers are food production and transport, day to day life commutes, airlines. You can’t cut the first, you can cut the 2nd and probably endure a GDP hit, and airlines . . . there is waste there, but they are not huge consumers.

The military, surprisingly, low consumer.

How about cruise lines? AI: Surprisingly difficult calculation. A cruise ship will burn fuel in one week in excess of a single passenger’s lifetime consumption. But of course the cruise ship is carrying 1000s of passengers. Suggestion is a cruise ship burns the same amount of fuel in a week than all the passengers aboard would have burned in sum, at home.

Overall, if there were an easy answer to all this, the debate would not exist.

[EnderWiggin1970]

While you point out many examples of aggressive invasions and expansionism by the American state pre-WWII, that begs 2 questions:

1. I said the US was not vulnerable due to isolationism - those examples do nothing to contradict my contention that we don't need to be attacking around the world to feel "safe." We didn't need to be repressing Seminoles in the 1820's or conquering Cuba to be safe.

2. Those examples just reinforce my belief that expansionism is just plain evil and contradictory to the founding American ethic of liberty. Conquering Canada, etc., cannot be squared with liberty either for the foreign citizen being conquered, nor with the draftee forced to fight for elite interests driving the war effort.

Our greatest enemy as Americans will never be in Moscow or Beijing or Tehran or anywhere else but the banks of the Potomac. Your dreams of empire rest atop innumerable corpses and have produced vast amounts of evil, the propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding.

[nathanbedford]

I suppose I'm asking whether as peak oil gradually tapers off, will not technology, as well as rationing, compensate for oil shortfalls?

Technology takes all forms, many of which we cannot even foresee, but surely atomic energy is at the top of the list. That raises questions about batteries or some other technology that rendered the power of nuclear energy transportable. For example, might hydrogen, in the absence of petroleum power, become more economic and safe as transport means of atomic power?

I can foresee huge problems if we can't manufacture fertilizer, what about plastics?. Perhaps technology will come to the rescue.

Meanwhile, should we anticipate the shortfall will be immediate or rather more gradual, allowing time for innovation and compensations?

[nathanbedford]

When I was in high school in the 1950s my history professor was a great fan of Pres. Polk who was the architect of the Mexican war that led by way of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago to the massive accretion of the American Southwest. He did not regard Polk to be a fascist or an imperialist but as a hero.

Today, Pres. Polk is entirely out of favor, regarded to be nearly a war criminal in the dark corners of our Frankfurt schools.

I bring this up because you have introduced a moral judgment into the discussion that is perfectly proper, but should be acknowledged as a new criterion. I suppose we sometimes think that the only choices informing foreign policy are either Bismarck or Jimmy Carter, Polk or Neville Chamberlain.

My point is that the danger is conducting foreign policy by reference only to application of a label. This is appeasement, or, that is imperialism. The true goal is to assess and discern today's realities and make those difficult choices appropriate to the time and place.

Forming a decision by rationalizing it with labels is the path to disaster. Equally, conducting foreign policy by aligning it with the flavor of the week is a recipe for disaster.

So I agree with you, the enemy is on the Potomac but that enemy wears two faces. In one crisis it leaves us defenseless and in the next it leads us into quagmire.

Like the military we must beware the danger of preparing to fight the last war or in foreign relations terms to pursue the opposite of our last policy.

[wardaddy]

Agree
My army son thinks more tanks is better than esoteric 100 million dollars apiece tanks too

[rottndog]

Maybe, but if drones take over you still need a way to move them to a fight thousands of miles away, and then they need a base to launch from and return to...

SSGNs are more than up to that task.

[Mr. Blond]

They’re still needed for disaster response.

[SuperLuminal]

😎

[daniel1212]

If America wants to expand and build an empire by occupying foreign lands and stealing their resources, then we need boots on the ground and a lot of power projection.

That era is over for the West. just beginning for China.

We know we aren’t going to be invaded. Our citizens have too many guns.

Sincerely, how do you think China will be stopped from controlling trade in the S. China sea, and Taiwan, then bullying the Philippines, etc? and threatening the Aussies?

And deterring Russia, Iran, N. Korea and China from being a combined threat? Rod's from God? Of course, the real issue is that of most of the West also being at war with God.

[Owen]

This is a subject that was huge in 2008 as the decline was reality. Everyone knew there was oil in shale, but no one expected it to be . . . printed by the Fed.

So the conversations of 2008 are historical and probably going to reassert themselves.

The first of them started . . . Look, if we see we are going to starve, we are going to do something! We aren’t going to just let it happen.

That evolved into several maneuvers. The first and foremost of them was to visit every oil field that could not produce oil profitably. Visit it with the Army. Put guns to the heads of the oil workers and tell them to drill, profit or no profit. Followed closely behind with other Army guys planning to confiscate oil where it could be found (Saudi Arabia then, probably Venezuela now).

Then that evolved away from the distaste of that theft imagery . . . into nationalizing the oil industry, run the necessary fiscal deficit and pay those workers to work as govt employees, without the rifle barrel to the brain. Those who didn’t want to perform their civic duty and work the oil fields as govt employees would be fined, maybe jailed. This got attention because in the days of $120/barrel oil, many Dem Congressmen told the oil CEOs that society could not tolerate that price and they better fix it or be nationalized. So, precedent.

The non political types just nodded along with all this and eventually noted that these maneuvers would buy a year or two. Max. Empty means empty. You can squeeze the rock but you can’t force it to have oil.

Everyone and his brother is going apeshit right now over legacy declines in the Permian and even eastern New Mexico (who quietly caught up to NoDak). Various buzzphrases — drill the best targets first. Okay that was 10 years ago.

But suppose we route our horizontal laterals in between previous ones? That’s called intercommunication, oddly. Cannibalizing oil from rock that would have eventually drained into adjacent laterals. So you get production from that new well, and the legacy well dies a lot faster.

This is powerful reading: https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2010/3102/

Synopsis, NPRA (National Petroleum Reserve - Alaska) had a USGS assessment in 2002 and talked in terms of 15 billion barrels of oil under that huge swath of land west of ANWR.

Test drilling was done. Then redone. Then done again in a panic of sorts.

Results, oil estimate was changed. It was reduced by 93% to well under 1 billion barrels. The hydrocarbons were gas, not oil and not as much of them as hoped.

Alaska of course is going to ignore this and try to make money being paid to drill, regardless of what is found. There will be plenty of folks who actually understand things who will urge them on.

[minnesota_bound]

Place lots of missiles in the countries around China. It is surrounded by countries that do not like them. See map.
https://tinyurl.com/3s4bhsfr

Their navy would soon cease to exist.

[noiseman]

SSGNs are more than up to that task.

Don’t forget, we’re not just talking about little glorified hobby drones with RPG warheads duct taped to them, as Ukraine has used. When it comes to future U.S. capabilities, we’re talking more about large, sophisticated pilotless aircraft that will initially augment manned fighters and attack aircraft and eventually possibly replace them (though for many reasons, I think that is much farther away than most assume).

Those types of drones can’t be launched from submarines; they have to have runways of some kind.

[BDParrish]

You did exactly that using the trigger term “isolationism”, though it does nothing for me to say so because you will now define the term to be synonymous with your opposition.

I noticed you dropped the term in several substantive comments.

This has been a good thread with much to think about, so thanks everyone,
BrianD