Carrier skeptics have been hammering away at the anachronistic cargo cult of the aircraft carrier. The Navy has invested a significant amount of political capital and mountains of budget dollars to maintaining a fleet of these allegedly deadly weapons of war that were recently steaming away with their tails between their legs from the Red Sea where the US Navy (in its own words) experienced the deadliest combat since WWII.
Against a foe with no navy to speak of (largest vessels in the Yemeni fleet are fifty year old patrol vessels).
Now Kat Klarenberg at Global Delinquents penned a brilliant jeremiad against these budget-busting behemoths that destroy dollars more effectively than anything else.
Stop building these things.
Stop funding and re-imagine the martial nature of naval combat in the 21st century.
Similar bombast was present in remarks Sullivan made in an accompanying “exclusive” interview with The Times. He spoke of how in the immediate aftermath of “Oct. 7”, his White House national security team decided strident “military muscle movements that could show decisiveness” were absolutely vital. As such, Washington sought to “over-deliver on speed, and scope and scale of American power protection to reassure the Israelis, and to deter adversaries.” USS Eisenhower’s dispatch was considered the boldest “military muscle movement” possible.
Sullivan expressed delight with the results of Operation Prosperity Guardian, suggesting USS Eisenhower’s “fight” with AnsarAllah in the Red Sea “showed that [aircraft carriers] could still battle effectively at close ranges.” This appraisal was echoed by US Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro. He dismissed “critics” who “predicted the end of the usefulness of carriers”, claiming Operation Prosperity Guardian was a “valuable lesson” demonstrating how US aircraft carrier naysayers had gotten it badly wrong.
Sullivan and Del Toro can put a happy face all they want on the continuing efficacy of carriers but the evidence is now overwhelming that these enormously expensive aircraft ferries are a complete waste of money in the world of 21st century peer and near-peer warfare. These ships will go down ignobly in history as floating coffins that will seal the fate of thousands of sailors trapped in these missile sponges if the inevitable new wars in this century kick off.
A far more rational conclusion to draw from Operation Prosperity Guardian is that US aircraft carriers have been proven beyond any reasonable doubt to be a redundant relic of a bygone, unipolar age. The Empire’s bloated, exorbitantly expensive military machine built in recent decades, exclusively suited to one-sided gang-beatings of adversaries that can’t retaliate, is now unable to meet the challenges of modern warfare. By contrast, the Resistance have effortlessly innovated and equipped themselves for 21st century battle.
If the effusive endorsements of Operation Prosperity Guardian issued by Del Toro and Sullivan are truly sincere, then unambiguous, urgent takeouts from the fiasco evidently have not been heeded. Eerily, such cecity was precisely foreshadowed by the July 2002 Millennium Challenge. Largely forgotten today, it remains one of the grandest war games ever mounted by the Pentagon. Costing $250 million – almost $500 million in today’s money – it involved both live-action exercises and computer simulations. In all, 13,000 real-life US troops participated.
Please read the whole essay because Kit does a great overview of the infamous 2002 Millennium Challenge exercise debacle in which GEN van Riper demonstrated the emperor had no clothes in the Pentagon.
https://www.kitklarenberg.com/p/collapsing-empire-rip-us-aircraft
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me
