Sea Power

[whitehall]

A Carrier is an awesome weapon that has the capability to instantly engage an enemy with more firepower than we had at Normandy during the 2nd World War. The problem we have is identifying the enemy these days or even the potential enemy so we take incredibly expensive jaunts around the world being "a global force for good" on floating sexual soap operas because of the liberal social experiments. How many expensive tools like Nuclear powered Aircraft Carriers do we need? Why should we keep building obsolete weapons to fight a non-existent super-power?

 

[Auteur]

So what exactly is going to replace the Aircraft Carriers ability to project power? There's always something that can blow up your assets, that's why you have countermeasures, that's why you have CIWS when speaking particularly on Carriers, Carriers never travel alone- ever, EVER.

The link in my post above describes how the advantage of the latest generation of missile systems, and how they could overpower a carrier task force. While it is true that there are always countermeasures for any given new weapon, an imbalance comes in when relatively cheap missiles raise the risk on 100 billion dollar ships. Advances in I.T. and computer systems have skewed the battlefield considerably in recent years.

A crewman tracking 300 ballistic missiles incoming to a carrier group would be faced with some very tough decisions. Of course, there wouldn't really be 300 missiles, likely three or four, trailing decoys. 300 would far outstrip the inventory of defensive missiles in a typical carrier group, so reliance on computer analysis would be critical. Would the few minutes available be enough?

In a more pragmatic scenario, would the carriers even be there? Short of all out war, or life or death critical missions, there would be a temptation to pull back in some situations. The days of simply parking a carrier offshore to provide geopolitical leverage may be far less effective in the future.