The British are selling off one of their small carriers:
Just two weeks after the aircraft carrier was decommissioned at its home port of Portsmouth Naval Base, Hampshire, the Ark Royal has been advertised on the edisposals.com website.
So when I first say this news, although my first reaction was that it will eventually enter PLA Navy service after it is bought by China "for a nightclub or school," my second thought was that America should buy that ship!
Seriously. One, it would keep it out of Chinese hands so it can't be turned into an amphibious warfare vessel or small carrier.
But more important, it could be a valuable test bed to see how effective a carrier this small could be for missions we need to complete. At only 22,000 tons, it is about half the size of our amphibious warfare carriers.
I think we should experiment with tradeoffs between more smaller vessels and the capacity of fewer large ones, as well as the benefits of having more targets for an enemy to deal with even if each one is easier to sink than a larger ship. With network-centric warfare, we can mass effects from widely separated platforms, I imagine. Why build these platform-centric super carriers if they can't survive?
And we could test Ark Royal with unmanned combat aircraft. Smaller craft on a smaller carrier might even things out, eh?
Anyway, buy that ship!
UPDATE: Actually, I imagine it would be more likely that India would buy the ship. They have the motivations to stop China from getting it; and it is likely to work out better than the Russian piece of garbage up on cement blocks in Russia's front yard, leaking oil, that India hopes will one day be delivered to them.
