Bang. You're Dead

We really must start to look beyond the super-carrier as the core of our fleet, around which all other ship purchases revolve. They are simply too big, too expensive, and too linked to our image as a superpower to survive in a less-than-benign threat environment.  Aviation Week writes:

In the submarine world, carriers, like other surface ships, represent targets. But lately U.S. aircraft carriers have appeared to be growing more vulnerable to threats deployed from under the sea and in the air.

And those threats have to be taken even more seriously, given recent U.S. government reports about the advancements made in some of those weapons and questioning the carrier fleet’s ability to protect itself.

I've been harping on this issue for a while now. Our carriers provided great service in the past, and will have a role for decades into the future, although in increasingly niche roles. We must begin to phase them out and look for alternatives to carrying out the missions they perform. Super-carriers are the supreme platform in a platform-centric fleet. But in a network-centric naval world, they are just just expensive targets.