“It’s an asinine strategy,” said Bryan Clark, a former senior aide to the chief of naval operations and now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. “The Iranians don’t perceive carriers and a threat to their ability to project power because they project power through gray zone activities and terrorism — the kinds of things that carriers aren’t very good at dealing with."
“And when they are inside the Persian Gulf, the Iranians perceive them as being an easy target. They can range the entire gulf with shore batteries along the coast in caves and other terrain where it’s hard to root them out," he added. “So the Iranians see the carrier as a way to get the Americans to spend a lot of money on a show of force that doesn’t really impact their strategic calculation.”
And that's on top of the problem of maintaining two carriers forward with the existing force, as the author notes, too. I have less of a problem with that in the short run.
I am very thankful that somebody else is raising the vulnerability issue I've been banging my drum about for a long time--inside the Persian Gulf the carriers (or any capital ships) are conveniently located targets!
This is my latest salvo about the risks after reading about our 2-carrier plans.
And I'll ask again, if we need a carrier air wing in the Persian Gulf, why can't we send elements of a carrier air wing to operate from land bases without the carrier?
And that's without asking why the Air Force shouldn't provide the planes.
One thing that doesn't bother me is that carriers in CENTCOM aren't available for INDOPACOM. I'd rather have carriers facing Iran than China with its robust missile and air power targeting our carriers.
Of course, if we hold the carriers back out of range so Iran isn't tempted to strike first, the carrier strike groups are a potent addition to our combat power in CENTCOM if the balloon goes up. But we can't keep them poised for long without harming the ability surge carriers at sea in the future while the maintenance backlog is cleared up.
