Are light carriers less effective than super carriers?
Light carriers could show up [instead of super carriers under Secretary of Defense Esper's fleet plan], but they wouldn’t be capable of fighting and winning a conflict of any significant scale.
The Navy has accumulated extensive evidence over the years attesting to the drawbacks of light carriers. Secretary Esper says he is trying to fashion a future fleet that has greater lethality, survivability, adaptability, ability to project power and control sea lanes, and capacity to deliver precision effects over long distances.
The author then fails light carriers on all those criteria. I won't go over them given that the author has a real attachment to big-deck carriers that I don't fathom. He's generally good. But this is mind boggling to me.
On his specific question, yes, the math makes light carriers less efficient. It makes no sense to build light carriers for sea-based air power instead of big carriers. Light carriers only make sense if you use existing amphibious carriers as light carriers.
And if the Marines are essentially abandoning large-scale opposed amphibious landings, we have some of those amphibs to spare from the primary mission the ships were built for.
But asking if light carriers are more or less effective than our large carriers is not the right question.
