*** I have returned from a long sojourn with my wife to Croatia and will be writing more regularly and trying to address issues arising more contemporaneously than the previous month. We were delayed in returning by Hurricane Milton but finally managed to get home: home is intact but gardening and fencing wrecked, recovery in process. ***
In 2005, the US Navy slow sank a carrier in an exercise to determine vulnerabilities. Since that time, the munitions technology and delivery systems have evolved significantly. Much of the data remains classified but one has to remember that not sinking the carrier is still catastrophic if it can no longer launch and retrieve manned aircraft.The tens of billions of dollars wasted by the US Navy continuing to dump increasingly austere defense money in these things will historically be seen as just as foolish as the planetary navalists obsession with the battleship prior or December 1941.
Dubbed “SINKEX” drills by the Navy, much of the lessons learned about sinking the supercarrier remain classified. Multiple images of the sinking warship were taken. But for operational security reasons, the images are classified. All but one, that is. It shows the great ship submerging bow-first into the whirling sea below. The warship’s size, its double-layered hull, and its multiple compartments contributed to the great difficulty in sinking the America.
So many people took to the internet to opine that the nearly 30 days it took to sink one mothballed supercarrier was proof-positive that carriers were the greatest naval weapons platform ever conceived. By implication, anyone who would dare question the efficacy of continuing to blow tens of billions of dollars on these systems would be insane because they so obviously can take a pounding.
To be clear: these boats can take a beating. One would hope they could have a modicum of endurance, given their size, cost, and complexity.
Yet, it should be noted that the Navy was not intending to sink the supercarrier as quickly as possible—as any attacker would be trying to do in a real combat setting. The purpose of the SINKEX drills were to sink the boat in slow-motion so that the eggheads could glean as much data as possible on the various aspects of sinking a modern carrier.
Even the normal clapping seal narrative of the defense Coprophile Media acknowledges carriers are on borrowed time through this one columnist:
Therefore, all the talk about how the US carriers today are basically unsinkable is a bit ridiculous. And the key thing to understand is that America’s enemies who are deploying A2/AD systems against American flat tops do not need to sink them. All they need to do is damage them—specifically the carrier flight deck—and that would be enough to remove the carrier from the board as it were.
And finally:
For the US to continue to invest in carriers that have decreasing strategic utility in the age of A2/AD is one of the most irresponsible things we have ever done. The sinking of the USS America is not any indicator of how survivable a modern US carrier would be in the face of Chinese A2/AD fusillades.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/4-weeks-explosions-navy-failed-sink-their-own-aircraft-carrier-210673
Stop building these things.
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me
