Whether a ship can be sunk is not a measure of its contribution to a war.
While the cause of the July 12 inferno remains the focus of several investigations, Navy officials said late last year that the extensive damage to the flattop’s flight deck, island, mast and lower levels would have required about 60 percent of the ship to be replaced.
Rebuilding and repairing the 22-year-old ship would have cost up to $3.2 billion and taken five to seven years, Rear Adm. Eric Ver Hage, commander of the Navy Regional Maintenance Center, told reporters in November.
I think this supports my position that carrier defenders who claim super carriers are difficult or perhaps impossible to sink miss the point:
I think the notion that something that floats can't be sunk is ludicrous. Some believe that. At least the above defense doesn't go that far. But it fails anyway because even if a carrier truly is unsinkable, that's not the metric to judge carriers by.
In any likely scenario, a mission kill is 99% as good as a sinking. And given the importance of the carrier and the psychological impact of taking one out, you are absofreakinglutely darned right an enemy will make the effort.
Bonhomme Richard didn't sink. But she's out of the navy just as surely as if she had sunk.
