The ice is breaking on the stonewalling of the defense community and external observers to have an honest conversation on the aircraft carrier; they may be getting the message on how indefensible and anachronistic this extraordinarily expensive weapons system is.
The Aircraft Carrier Industrial Base Coalition has already removed me from their Christmas card list.
More and more of the Coprophile Media is reluctantly waking up to the apparently intuitively obvious conclusion. The defense journalism industry, like the cultural critics in Hollywood, tend to be sycophantic and are very careful with criticism because then they lose the public relations contacts and open doors to the trillion dollar defense industry.
Thank goodness for the Congressional Research Service (CRS) and General Accountability Office (GAO) documentation and data palaces that show the keen observer what is really going on (even though I think the ground truth tends to be far worse than we even imagine).
I do wish a foundation with deep pockets or even Elon Musk would create a clearinghouse/analytical cell that goes through these mountains of data and evidence to show just how bad the American (and by extension, the Western) military establishment is. The US is not prepared to conduct a peer or near-peer war much less more than one conflict at the same time. And the trillions of dollars unaccounted for is another issue altogether.
Hence, America’s obsession with expensive and cumbersome aircraft carriers. The United States has not only committed to this weapons platform, but it has become a cultural symbol. That is why the cult of flat tops has taken hold to such a degree that to even point out that great state rivals, such as China and Russia, as well as the proxies for these nations, such as Iran or North Korea, have developed highly effective countermeasures is considered unpatriotic or worse, heretical. But this fixation on the carrier as more than just a weapons platform, as a cultural icon, is precisely what makes it such a terrible weapon to rely upon.
And then they say something in the major media that you dear readers know already.
Thus, Washington’s current war plans play right into China’s and Russia’s anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) strategies. If actual war erupts between the United States or any of its major rivals, these forces will do what they must to win the war—and that means going-for-broke and trying to sink US carriers before they can become a serious threat to their forces and interests.
One way or another, thanks to the advent of hypersonic weapons and anti-ship missiles, such as China’s DF-21 series, American aircraft carriers will not be as effective against targets defended by these A2/AD systems.
In the history of human warfare, large exquisite platforms always attract plenty of attention from the Roman destruction of Gallic fortresses before the birth of Christ to the use of longbows to defeat very expensive heavy horse at Agincourt to the Maginot Line and battleship dead-ends in the twentieth century.
And everything in between throughout history. The carrier is the crossbow and chariot of the 21st century.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/aircraft-carrier-age-could-end-disaster-us-navy-209915
The U.S. Navy’s other Pacific-based carriers are in port or in their maintenance availability period. Out of six carriers in the Pacific, the USS Carl Vinson recently participated in RIMPAC 2024, the USS Nimitz recently completed a six month planned incremental availability period for maintenance, the USS Ronald Reagan recently completed a homeport shift to Naval Base Kitsap, and the USS George Washington will remain in San Diego until the crew and equipment swap from USS Ronald Reagan is complete.
https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2024/08/no-u-s-navy-aircraft-carriers-deployed-in-the-pacific/
At least the carriers in port will be sunk in shallow water.
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me
