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.
But we don’t want that, do we?
We know we aren’t going to be invaded. Our citizens have too many guns.
So, we’re not afraid of invasion are we?
How about bad guys far away and we want them to stop doing bad things. How can we convince them to knock it off? I say: Rods From God are about all we need at this point. Heavy deterrence, non-nuclear. No boots on the ground. I think we need to approach military matters very differently.
Drones baby! Big ones, little ones, ones that drop bombs and ones that go booooom. The battlefield of tomorrow is going to be littered with the bits of Autonomous Fighting Vehicles.
I suspect defensive lasers may change that equation.
China can’t even navigate the seas properly without running into each others ship. I think the Carriers will be fine.
Advice to foreign nations: do that to one of our ships and your country will no longer exist.
Despite questions about use against China proper, aircraft carrier task forces are tremendously powerful against a wide range of targets and adversaries.
American taxpayer investment in a Ford class carrier is more like $50 billion when you count R&D, maintenance, the airwing and personnel. $13 billion gets you a rolling chassis.
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 (assuming larger drone aircraft and not the much smaller drones like Ukraine has been using). And we’re a very long way away from just replacing human pilots with AI. Drone swarms and augmentation of manned aircraft by “loyal wingman” autonomous combat aircraft will always require humans in the loop, for rapid decision-making and ad-libbing in the chaos of battle, and for making the critical decision to release ordnance (“AI”, despite the hype, will never achieve a level of computation that will replace human thought and intuition, and we’re certainly nowhere near letting it make the final decision to drop bombs or fire missiles).
Honestly, I think its been over for a while and we just didn’t want to acknowledge it because we’ve got so much investment tied up in them. Aircraft Carriers are simply too vulnerable in the modern threat environment.
All surface ships are headed in that direction but for now more smaller and cheaper surface ships would make some sense. What would make a lot of sense is significantly increasing the submarine fleet. Submarines will be the last warships on earth. We also need to dramatically increase our capacity to build submarines.
What will they do with the old carriers?
They’d be kick-ass houseboats.
Simply make sure it is completely understood an attack on an American aircraft carrier will cause a counter attack of a magnitude minimum 35+ on the enemy country and their heads of state.
Only for dopes. This gen will be long gone before that happens.
Warships go in harm’s way.
The prospect of harm or damage/degradation from enemy action, even significant or catastrophic damage, or putting an entire ship out of action, has never been the deciding factor for entirely ceasing production of a class of vessels.
Hypersonic systems have made carrier battle groups obsolete. There is no AD. TThis this thread if full of blind cope.
Nuclear powered lasers hooked up to the reactors?
The silicon chip has made naval surface combatants, land armored vehicles and most piloted warplanes obsolete death traps.
Their mission and modes of employment will change substantially but they provide capabilities that are critical and simply cannot be replaced
It’s always about what they can do to us.
It’s never about what we can do to them.
Mmmm no. There’s always been the ability to take out an aircraft carrier with a couple of good shots. That’s why they don’t travel alone. Carrier groups are there in large part to protect the carrier. But the carrier still has the greatest ability to project power of anything out there. Yes we have drones and such. But they don’t beat the ability to plant a carrier group somewhere and know you own a 200 mile circle around it.