I'm not going to bother going through his latest article on that issue. I've done it before and I'm beginning to think I'm taking crazy pills on the carrier issue.
Here's the last time I addressed his arguments, organized around my very basic observation that if it floats it can sink.
And if I may be so bold, even if a carrier is not--or cannot be, as unlikely as that is--sunk, it can be mission-killed.
I think our carriers are too big and expensive to lose, so people go out of their way to simply assume they can't be lost.
I think the biggest problem is that carrier proponents and carrier critics talk past each other by focusing on different things:
Carriers have responsibilities in two areas: power projection and sea control.
Power projection is what we've done with our carriers since world War II. Sail them off the coast of some country that doesn't possess a potent navy or air force, and use it as a floating air base. Without the need to fight for control of the sea, we exercise that control of the sea from the start of a conflict. We've done this a lot. And the carriers have performed superbly.
This history of power projection is what the defenders of carriers point to.
But what the anti-carrier side points to is usually the sea control mission. In this mission, by definition we face a nation with a navy and air force capable of fighting us for control of the seas--or at least denying us full control.
And for nations without carriers, advances in persistent surveillance and guided missiles give them a potent weapon to use against our big carriers.
I don't want to have fruitless carrier debates. I want to have sea power debates. We need to get past the pinnacle of platform-centric seat control and exploit a network-centric naval world.
For the record, when I read articles by people who deny the vulnerability of carriers I don't get why they don't see what I see.
