Is the Age of the Aircraft Carrier Coming to an End?
The aircraft carrier has reigned supreme on the naval battlefield since December 7, 1941, when a fleet of Japanese aircraft carriers struck the American base at Pearl Harbor. Seventy-five years later, are carriers finally about to be displaced as the dominant weapon at sea? And if so, by what? Those are some of the questions The Strategist asks in a recent article.
All dominant weapon systems are inevitably displaced by superior technology. The longbow and crossbow gave way to the firearm, the horse and rider gave way to the tank, and the battleship gave way to the aircraft carrier. Eventually, the aircraft carrier will give way to something else, and that's something weighing on the minds of leaders at the U.S. Navy, for whom aircraft carriers form the centerpiece of naval superiority and naval strategy. The United States currently has 12 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, ten more than the next country, and is deeply invested in carriers as a tool of power projection.
U.S. Navy carrier battle groups are some of the most powerful military formations in the world, amassing more firepower than the armed forces of entire countries. Self-deployable into almost every major body of water on the planet, they are capable of a range of operations including full-scale war, anti-terrorism ops, shows of military force, and humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.
Critics, however, contend that the ships are a vast expenditure of resources better spent elsewhere. The new carrier USS Gerald R. Ford is set to cost $13 billion-not including its complement of 40-50 fighter planes, each of which cost $75 to $100 million. We haven't even gotten to its cruiser, destroyer, and submarine escorts, which cost a billion or more.
Carriers have been declining in capability-modern carrier air wings are smaller and have a shorter striking range. Not insignificantly, an aircraft carrier packages 4,300 navy personnel into a single hull. The loss of a single carrier would be one of the deadliest days in American military history. At the same time, countries such as China are working to form "anti-access, area denial"-that is, no-go zones that are too dangerous for carriers to sail into, a problem exacerbated from the American perspective when the enemy's weapons have much longer ranges than yours.
Could advances such as unmanned aerial vehicles, longer-ranged planes, or even making carriers smaller and cheaper save the platform? After all, a carrier is basically a floating air base-its real strength is in the aircraft it carries. Unlike the battleship and other weapons slam-dunked into the dustheap of history, it may be in the end that the carrier is adaptable enough for the wars to come.
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