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While great against savages and second-tier enemies, against China our carriers are as useless as the Prince of Wales and Repulse were against Japanese land-based bombers.

So would you guys be in favor of sinking all of our navies carriers tomorrow(immediately), you know make artificial reefs out of them?

Gentlemen, that is a yes or no question.

Gentlemen, that is a yes or no question.

So is, have you stopped beating your wife? But that does not make it a worthy question. Nevertheless, I will play along.

The answer is no because carriers still are effective against third world countries and they still project a great deal of power even against China as it exists today. So long as China has doubt carriers have great deterrent value. So we don't sink them all, we scrap them according to an intelligent schedule knowing that we should have some remnant of a carrier fleet for at least 40 years.

Rather than sink them we begin to compensate for their growing obsolescence with other platforms. We take the money that we would have devoted to building two (count them, two!) Carriers at the same time and spend it more effectively. As much as I admire a Bull Halsey and the men who served under him on Enterprise from Pearl Harbor through Okinawa, as much as I respect the first skipper of the nuclear powered Enterprise, we must let go of the romance of the flattop and move into the 21st century.

What Wardaddy said.
Reefs? No.
Useless targets when they are in range of China? Yes.
The next Prince of Wales and Repulse? Yes. Everybody knows it except the heirs of the “Battleships Forever!” crowd.

Billy Mitchell tried to warn the battleship dinosaurs. They refused to listen. Prince of Wales and Repulse proved Mitchell’s point.

I hope we don’t suffer an equally ignominious lesson with our dinosaur flattops. What a waste of treasure and lives that could have been better invested.