Stop the madness.
Stop deploying carriers
Stop building them.
Just stop.
I won’t be getting Christmas cards this year from the Aircraft Carrier Industrial Base Coalition
I am not alone in these notions and the late Captain Wayne Hughes did yeoman’s work on these ideas along with the terrific analyses from CDR Jeff Vandenemgel, author of “Questioning the Carrier: Opportunities in Fleet Design for the US Navy”, which should be on every amateur navalist’s bookshelf.
All of these gentlemen have great ideas although I do think they neglect the vast broken design and infrastructure process for shipbuilding in the US that would not support a wholesale re-imagining and implementation of rational fleet design in this century.
Although the Navy wants to achieve and maintain in coming years a fleet of 381 manned battle force ships, including 12 aircraft carriers, force-structure studies done by the Navy that eventually led to the 381-ship goal showed future Navy force structures that included 8 to 12 carriers, to be supplemented (in the case of the lower end of that range) by up to 6 light aircraft carriers (CVLs). The Navy does not currently operate CVLs. The Navy in recent years has experimented with the concept of using an LHA-type amphibious assault ship with an embarked group of F-35B Joint Strike Fighters as a CVL.28.
It gets worse:
The most criminal event occurred in 2019 when it was obvious there were serious problems with the Ford design that may be un-fixable. Admirals pressed Congress to fund two more Fords earlier than planned, as though they wanted to get them under construction before Congress and media learned about problems.
And stop the surface stealth tilting at the military windmill. I can assure every military on Earth that your stealth technology will be decoded and broken shortly after deployment. The ridiculous F35 willfully baked in payload limitations (both radar cross section (RCS) concerns and internal loading for the former) on a conceptual design that beggars engineering description.
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me.
