Why on Earth Are We Still Building Aircraft Carriers? via New Republic

This is a must read article. One thing that stands out to me.  If the aircraft carrier as a force projection platform is dead, then does that mean a missile equipped "battleship" with tons of CIWS make a comeback???  What would we want in a 21st century battleship?  Tons of long range missiles (both anti-air and land attack).  High speed?  Is it worth pursuing mini-nuclear reactors to power them and the lasers for close in defense?  Does it need conventional guns?  Does it need to be stealthy or are we gonna simply try and jam everything?  Does it need to be bigger than the Burke?  Bigger than the DD-1000?  Real interesting.  The Navy has alot of work to do if its serious about future combat.

via New Republic

Why bother building more supercarriers? Prestige is part of it. Big carriers have been useful for intimidating foreign nations when they behave badly. But carrier-killers call into question how long we can keep doing that. “Historically, the top leadership of military organizations has not abandoned obsolete prestige weapons until compelled to do so by a calamity,” Stephen Wrage, who teaches political science at the U.S. Naval Academy, says in Gregg Easterbrook’s 2021 book, The Blue Age. Easterbrook draws a comparison with the British Royal Navy’s fixation on its giant battleships on the eve of World War I. Told that the Germans were building newfangled underwater ships called submarines, “rather than adjust to a new reality, some in the British admiralty hoped that gliding below the waves could be declared piracy so that captured submariners could be hanged as common criminals.”

Another argument for aircraft carriers is that there are efficiencies of scale in being able to cram up to 90 aircraft on a single carrier, as you can on the USS Gerald R. Ford. But Hendrix told me that the retirement of various aircraft types after the Cold War brought the number of aircraft aboard a supercarrier down closer to 60, and the new planes have much shorter range at the very moment when carriers have to situate themselves farther from their targets to avoid carrier-killers.

The best argument that defenders of aircraft carriers make is that it’s harder to hit one with a missile than you might think. Ford Class carriers have fighter jets that can intercept missiles. They travel with other ships that are armed to the teeth. What assets they don’t have we can give them. James Stavridis, a retired admiral and former supreme allied commander of NATO, reeled off to me a litany of possible improvements: lasers, cyberweapons, drones, deployment of special forces, and so on. Still, he said, in the meantime, we must “only move them close to China … when we are reasonably certain we can provide protection.” In an April appearance on conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt’s podcast, Stavridis went further, predicting that after the USS Doris Miller, the latest Ford Class carrier to begin construction, the Navy will shift to “another class of aircraft carrier” that’s “smaller, so we can build more of them,” with drones instead of manned aircraft.

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