I agree.... I had a thought for a radical, cheap fast attack force...
Take some of the old burke class destroyers, gut them leaving only the reactor and engines... install fast lifting marmac elevators, 1 fore and 1 aft. Convert lower decks into hangar bays. Each ship will carry 4 f35b vertical lift aircraft. Add the laser cannon forward, or the long range gun.
4 of these ships make up a squadron. With one ship carrying 2 helo’s, you have 16 aircraft and 2 helo’s.
That would be one hell of a punch. Pretty hard to take out an entire squadron of these at once.
You could do 8 squadrons of these attack carriers for the price of one big floating target. And these could go where the big boys could not.
1. Not radical. This comes up every generation or so.
2. Cheap? you are keeping the cheapest part of the ship, the outer hull, going to the expense of gutting it and installing entirely new systems.
3. "Convert lower decks into hangar bays". Sounds so simple. But the only people I can think of who ever did it were the IJN with Hiyo and Junyo. And in that case it was an option allowed for in the original design.
4. C3: you can't really share it out.