He says they are powerful, flexible, mobile, sustainable, and provide "power and influence."
All true. I won't dispute a single one.
But the admiral noticeably leaves out one: survivable. He has to leave that value out:
If we truly can fight networked, we will be able to mass effect from widely scattered assets unlike today's carriers which are the pinnacle of needing a single platform to mass effect.
Right now, our carriers with manned aircraft are still a tremendous asset. But as the years go by, cheap precision missiles will erode their value. Several decades in the future, carriers may be too big and expensive to risk entering an enemy's array of sensors that can detect and guide missiles to overwhelm a carrier's defensive systems. Since carriers last five decades or more, the carriers we have now could last through the period of their fighting value and phase out as their vulnerability becomes too great. Should we build large carriers anymore?
I wouldn't scrap our big carriers already afloat. They are still a tremendous asset. But the end of the line for our big deck carriers in fighting a peer competitor is clearly in sight. How do we maintain our naval dominance as that usefulness fades?
