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Posted on 08/25/2025 5:25:00 AM PDT by whyilovetexas111
A single DF-21D warhead striking a carrier’s flight deck would be a mission-kill. It wouldn’t sink the ship, but it would crack the deck, making it impossible to launch or recover aircraft. The carrier, for all intents and purposes, would be out of the fight. Several successful hits could very well sink the vessel, resulting in the tragic loss of over 5,000 American sailors and a $13 billion national asset. It would be a Pearl Harbor-level catastrophe, a blow from which American prestige might never recover.
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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.
ICBMs are still by far cheaper than “rods from the God’s.”
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.
True, but for reasons, having a non-radioactive means of delivering kinetic total devastation from on high has its place.
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.
“...We know we aren’t going to be invaded...”
We HAVE been invaded...by millions of illegal aliens (2020-2024)
Deportation works, but is slow....
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.
“China can’t even navigate the seas properly without running into each others ship. I think the Carriers will be fine”
Don’t forget the Russian navy. I hear they are working on a new generation of rapid tugboats that can bring their warships within range of our carrier battle groups.
The war fare of history is gone. With a few nukes and posioning of the population is all a war will need.
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).
Here is the deal, for a missile returning from space, targeting an object moving its length every 27 seconds with a kenetic ICBM warhead at anywhere between mach 3 and mach 6 means at 60 miles up one has to pick a ship and pull up to 30Gs to hit a flight deck in a time frame of 20 seconds, unlike a sea skimming missile that just covers 12 miles.
If you sink the aircraft carrier, you will have to deal with response of the 2 attack submarines attached to most patrols, and hitting picket to the aircraft carrier the Arlington Burks is like hitting the island on a aircraft carrier. Under the sea, and in small form factors have enough punch back, the navy in leaving your offense capability will be degraded.
Fact is the US treats its aircraft carriers like sovign ground, attacking them is likely to escalate to a point where nobody has a winning outlook. Most nations just deal with it, and do not poke at the whales. Does China not like it, sure. But the US navy guards world trade, and a world economy that China is highly dependent on.
Russias can sail the sea and put their ships anywhere, but they rarely do, and the real large combatants have not really moved since 1992.
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.
And this makes CVNs too expensive to lose. And if something is too expensive to lose, this affects how they are deployed.
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.
Pax American has been very good for the world and for America. It has been a golden age of prosperity and technological advancement.
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