As the era of carriers loitering off the coasts of small powers unable to strike the carrier ends--we are officially in the era of great power competition--there are questions about the value of the carrier in this era:
The new chief of naval operations, Adm. Michael Gilday, was confirmed quickly by the Senate last week, but lawmakers made clear that the cost and growing vulnerability of aircraft carriers to ever-faster and evasive missiles will be among the issues he’s expected to tackle when he officially takes the reins.
I have been on this issue for a long time. And as I write in the preface to that old article that was purchased but not published:
I won't bother to go over the arguments made in defense of the carrier. Suffice it to say that the problem of arguing the merits of power projection apples versus sea control oranges is continued to the detriment of a real seapower debate.
What I will do is post an entry I submitted to the United States Naval Institute back in 2000 when the Ford class was but a gleam in the Navy's eye. It was accepted for publication but never published. Based on my experience since then I clearly made a rookie mistake of not prodding them until they published it. I recently got my rights to it back from USNI and was thinking about modernizing it. But I doubt I will get around to it any time soon.
So here it is (with end notes removed), my two-decade-year old support for the desire to downgrade the big deck carrier as the queen of the fleet. If you have followed this blog, you will no doubt recognize the arguments made in pieces over the years (here's a post with a selection of post links on the subject).
I have no doubt that the Ford-class carrier is the pinnacle of carrier design--once the kinks are worked out. But that's not the question.
Basically, carriers are valuable for bombing small countries that don't have the capability to strike the carriers. That is a power projection mission. Absolute control of the seas as we exercised for much of the post-Cold War world allows this.
To control the seas, networked missile-armed ships, subs, land-based missiles, and land-based planes backed by persistent surveillance are the best solution.
Carriers can support the latter but they have to be used cautiously lest they get sunk or mission killed.
Carriers can be used for the former after the sea control mission is won.
And sure, if we keep our carriers away from China, they can fend off Chinese naval strikes--even the vaunted yet unproven DF-21. I've addressed that missile and ways to defeat it. But the notion that the carrier is safer today than in World War II when recon was primitive and precision nonexistent is whistling past the graveyard, as far as I'm concerned. Too often the idea that the carrier can survive if kept away from threats becomes faith that the carrier can sail into harm's way and survive.
So let's have that seapower debate I have wanted for so long.
