I don’t believe the leverage of hypersonic missiles is widely understood yet in changing war.
Concur. Consider hypersonic carrier missiles for other “smart weapons”. A missile that carries 6 air to air missiles for example could target a bomber formation or transport formation with a high probability of success from a 1000 miles away. Detect a group of bombers forming up after take-off and launch and within a few minutes you have destroyed most of them or cluster bombs and you get them on the taxi or roll-out on an airfield. They are that fast and you have no real defense against them.
I was an Army officer (in the 90’s) and its hard for me to wrap my head around what the future battlefield will look like. What we are witnessing in the Ukraine is only giving us a glimpse of the future even as it devolves into trench type warfare. This is why I feel strongly that we should NOT invest so heavily in large items such as aircraft carriers. I love the history and I am a nerd/fan, but its not wise to concentrate tens of billions worth of stuff into a single target that is vulnerable to a missile that costs a few million or smart long-range drone torpedoes that can sit on the bottom of the ocean waiting for a signal.
The Army knows that deploying company or battalion sized units of paratroopers using transport aircraft in a modern conflict against a near-peer adversary is too risky but our Navy still wants to put 80 plus 100-million dollar aircraft and thousands of personnel in a single hull that has little defense against such weapons. I love the force projection and they are cool, but too much risk. Perhaps we would be better off with Jeep carriers or smaller multi-use aerial platforms using drones?
Thank you for your well- considered post.