“Supercarriers are great against an enemy that can’t shoot back but against a legitimate military they are sitting ducks. There will be a repeat of the British losing the Repulse and Prince of Wales off Malaysia.”
I some what doubt that a Nimitz or Nimitz II Carrier battle group will have NO air cover or integral air defense.
War is boring - often has nice pics but much of its analysis is at best faulty.
For example, in a clash with China, we would do well to sweep the seas and seize or force the internment of all commercial vessels and require neutrals to respect a US embargo and blockade of commerce with China and seizure or shut down of all Chinese commercial properties overseas. Carriers would be ideal for such duty and to apply leverage because several carrier task forces could control the oceans around both Africa and South America.
Personally, in the event of a war over Taiwan or China's island building in the South China Sea, I think that seizing everything China has overseas and cutting off all commerce and then offering a return to the status quo would be a better approach than all out combat in China's backyard.
Tell me what can we do to be completely invulnerable?
I’m convinced that the next paradigm will be shipbased drone swarms as the leading edge. The ships will be drones that are submergible nucs that can launch swarms of smaller airbased drones that are similar to tomohawks in that they can be programmed to arrive at a GPS location following a certain route at a certain time, but instead of just detonating they will launch their arms and then return to the ship or another location for refurb/refuel.
Personnel and maintenance costs would be much less, need for logistics is greatly reduced, and the ships and drones can be engineered to perform at specifications that would not be possible if they were manned. It’s coming.
“Supercarriers are great against an enemy that can’t shoot back but against a legitimate military they are sitting ducks. There will be a repeat of the British losing the Repulse and Prince of Wales off Malaysia.”
They may look like sitting ducks but our carriers are always in a task force protected by destroyers, subs and cruisers, all with the most modern missile technology.
If the writer of this article wanted to convince me that we don’t need that many Supercarriers anymore, this is one thing he could have said. One day we’ll have the U.S.S. Clinton and U.S.S. Obama. At that point, he would have had me sold. No more carriers!!!
It’s easy to become too focused on what the enemy can do to you.
He has to also consider what you can do to him.
And this isn’t softball. War is all about death and destruction. Yep, he might be able to sink an aircraft carrier. It might cost him all his industry and transportation infrastructure to do it.
In the Falklands War in 1982 the British lost the HSM Sheffield destroyer to an Exocet missile fired from an airplane 20 to 30 miles away. The missile’s warhead didn’t even explode but the destroyer eventually sank.
This was about 23 years ago. Since then much development in missile technology has occurred. A modern destroyer costs well over 10 billion dollars to build while a modern cruise missile costs about 500 thousand dollars. Unless my math is wrong, that means a country could build around twenty thousand cruise missiles for the cost of one destroyer. Today, missiles can be launched from land, aircraft, small ships, submarines, underwater platform, and even relatively small fishing boats. For the cost of one destroyer and enemy could fire twenty missiles at each of the twenty-or-so escort ships shown in the photograph above and still have over ten thousands missiles to sink the carrier. Time changes things.