Bombers, sure. No way in hell are you going to stage a F-16 out of CONUS and have it do much more than crash in the ocean or bomb Canada. Hypersoar and other bomber projects are focused on getting rapid reaction from the CONUS, but a bomber isn’t a fighter, and it’s always good to have a couple of dozen multi-role fighters near where they are needed. (Shorter reaction times, can fight enemy aircraft if needed, etc.)
Carriers give us options; A little slice of America that we can float wherever needed. Some day, they may not be practical, but that day is far off.
Sooooo, your plan to replace carriers is to fill the skies with refeulers? Where are the refeulers going to land? Can they refuel each other? Can they defend themselves?
Using refeulers launching from friendy bases to support fighter/bombers for a single attack, even a long-range one, is worlds different from having to engage in a sustained air campaign for several days or weeks. For that, you need a reliable base relatively close-by where pilots can rest between sorties and their planes can be re-armed for quick return to battle. Until someone invents the Acme Instant Airfield, carriers are it.
You’re trying to justify your premise, instead of admitting its flaws.
It amuses me that US naval ships are banned from NZ waters because of their refusal to say if a ship is nuclear armed or not.
If a giant US aircraft carrier should attempt to illegaly enter our waters we would send the might of our navy upon them 
(all 3-ish ships)
Yeah I think aircraft carriers have the power of intimidation on their side. So they are desired as much as needed.
Oh by the way…we are friendly, no need to test that.
The demonstration of these limits is the almost farcical situation the RAF had in the Falklands war, with two Vulcan bombers needing 11 Victor refuellers to make it from Britain and back - and IIRC, this even included some Victors having to be refuelled by others.
Why not build aircraft carrier/submarine type of ship?with vertical take-off jets.
I’m sure US has the ability and resources to construct this type of ship.
We would not need then all of the escort ships, just couple of attack subs and that’s it.
PS.In WW2 some navys had subs with aircraft on board in little hangar,used for reco missions.
Quantity is one good reason why, nonpolar. The amount of resources (human and tool-based) to house and maintain a full fighter wing is simply outside the reasonable size of a submarine. For another, every time a sub surfaces it loses its primary advantage over more commonplace ships. In order to train and keep good aerial surveillance of surrounding waters, the vessel would spend most of its time puttering around above the waves.
But you have to agree my idea is not that bad ,and have you seen russian ballistic missile sub typhoon ,it is enormous!
Having couple of underwater aircraft carriers would be devastating for China or Russia who never can afford building one, but USA with all the technicall prowess and cash can.
Except you haven’t shown any significant advantage of a sub-carrier and there are many huge disadvantages. And we haven’t even touched the HUGE costs involved. You also might consider the fact that there isn’t any enemy out there with the ability to attack our current carrier fleet.
As soon as the carrier-sub surfaced to allow its aircraft to take off, it would be in the same boat (heh) as a carrier in terms of needing more than just a few attack subs to keep it protected.
Imagining a military without aircraft carriers makes for an interesting mental exercise, but carriers are, currently, irreplaceable in the advantages they provide.
Well, for the price of a submarine large enough to carry a fighter wing, you could build a normal carrier and assign about fifty nuclear attacks subs to surround and defend it.
I can imagine a submarine that can underwater-launch a remote-controlled disposable drone with most of the capacities of a (very) small fighter, but it’ll lack the flexibility of having a live pilot aboard, and I doubt even a truly huge sub could carry more than a small handful of them, plus launching the drone would reveal the sub’s location plus it’d be too easy to lose radio contact if the sub has to submerge again. If a sub ever launches an aircraft (as opposed to a missile), it’ll probably be a very light vehicle used for surveillance and reconnaisance, not attack.
To devastate China or Russia, the U.S. can already blanket them with cruise missiles and ICBMs. Why postulate a conventional attack using comic-book technology that will gaurantee a very non-comical nuclear reponse?
“The projection of power” doesn’t fully describe their purpose. They are an extension of the supplies and support necessary to project power. NATO’s strategy revolves around standoff weapon platforms. AC carriers are an efficient method of transporting all the equipment needed to support these platforms. To send the equivalent fire power in the form of stealth bombers would be astronomically more expensive.
It would be accurate to say they are vulnerable to attack against an advanced military such as Russia (and to some extent China) because a carrier group can be destroyed with medium range tactical nukes. It would be tough to use short- range weapons because of the envelope that surrounds a carrier.
An aircraft carrier needs much more than a couple of small jets with short legs (if you have neither the space for a catapult nor the geometry for a ramp you need vtol, which severely limits what you can carry - STOVL is the preferred new acronym). A US carrier has an array of different planes for attack, interception (though the F-14’s are now multirole), electronic warfare, electronic early warning, refueling, cargo and anti-submarine helicopters. There are vast machine shops, spare parts, fuel bunkerage required for an effective carrier. The electronics suite is no small part of what makes a carrier a carrier and now you want to submerge it regularly. Plus, your airwing goes down to a very small number of planes because you have no deck park. If you communicate with your planes to coordinate you sacrifice your stealth. If you maintain your stealth you sacrifice early warning of aerial threats and you risk stranding your aircraft, whose presence alerts the enemy that some sort of carrier is around.
Alternatively it could be argued that the US has adopted your suggestion but instead of VTOL aircraft they carry numbers of cruise missiles in vertical launch tubes - unmanned one-use only aircraft that only require minimum compromise to the stealth aspect of the sub.
As to vulnerability - if you keep a carrier battle group loitering within range of land based air power/missiles for long, you definitely risk losing it (assuming an enemy with comparable technology and superior numbers). This was true in WWII as well. Cruising in closed waters can also be a problem with respect to subs. This doesn’t mean that a carrier group cannot control the seas as intended and make raids on land targets as required.
As for battleships in 1940, it was not vulnerability to air power that doomed the battleship post WWII (post Pearl, the US lost exactly zero battleships to air power or anything else for that matter). It was a combination of the longer effective range of the carrier (“guns” that could fire hundreds of miles from the ship rather than 15 albeit with less boom) and the lack of worthwhile targets for the battleship (which were other battleships, mostly).
Operation El Dorado Canyon was staged out of Great Britain , with the F-111’s having to skirt the coast of France , adding time and distance to the mission, but surprise surprise , the raid also included carrier aviation to suppress air defenses ,to allow the varks to send Kadafy a message.
Declan
I think the thing that will spell the doom of the fleet carrier will be the enormous cost ofrunning them…they need a crewof 5000 + officers and men to run them. While they do represent a base for tremendous firepower, I don’t see why we need 12 of them , after the last rusted-out Russian Naby ship sinks at the pier. China (despite dire warnings) has no intention of challenging the US Navy on the high seas…they will not have a fleet carrier for many years (if ever). Which leaves France (2 fleet carriers)…I don’t seeany realistic scenario for a war with France!
That’s just what they want you to think!
Actually, France has only one (except if you count the copter carrier as a carrier), since the two former ones have been decomissioned and the second new one won’t be build before 2010 or so.
Brazil too has a carrier. And the UK, Spain, Italy and India have minicarriers (carrying a more limited number of VSOL or copters). The UK has a number of them (somebody will certainly know exactly how many), and intend to build regular-sized carriers in the coming years (in all likehood in cooperation with France). So, the USA doesn’t seem to be the only country thinking carriers are still useful.
12 is sorta the ‘magic number’ of CVNs needed to keep 4 afloat around the world at a given time. We can surge more if needed, but given a ‘normal’ maintenance schedule, you need about 12. With only one carrier (DeGaulle, the Foch and Clemenceau have been retired/sold?), France faces ‘carrier-less’ periods when it is in dock, being refitted and repaired. They will be getting more carriers in a joint venture with the British.
ralph124c said:
I don’t understand. Are you under the impression that carriers are only needed to fight sea battles? If not, then why are you judging their necessity by counting the ships in other navys?
Carriers are needed for force projection. They are needed to support ground forces and provide air cover. They are needed to defend airspace where it needs to be defended.
Twelve carriers really isn’t that many, given the role the United States has to play in the world. At any given time, some are always in port, some are needed for training, some are en-route to their destination, and some are on the job.
The need for 12 carriers also grows out of U.S. doctrine of being able to fight a two-front war. If a conflict breaks out in the middle east, you want to maintain your deterrent in the Sea of Japan while responding to the Middle East crisis. If you’re always having to pull your assets off station when there is a conflict somewhere, you run the risk of opportunism sparking a much larger confrontation.
Right. The current US naval doctrine calls for essentially one CVN/CVA per ocean at any given time plus an extra one where anything’s likely to happen. Heck, right after 9/11, a carrier was moved up to help cover NYC.
As to the French carriers, Foch was sold to Brazil, where it replaced the venerable Minas Gerais; Clemenceau was intended to be converted to be used as the training/reserve carrier but budget considerations prevented even that. DeGaulle stands alone but has apparently turned out a wee bit lemony as capital ships go (in fairness, probably a result of being their first try at a nuke carrier after a long, long time in between building flattops). As Brutus said, the plans now are to develop a new set of Fleet Carriers jointly with Britain.
The one other Navy regularly operating a traditional-style multipurpose CTOL catapults-and-arresting-wires carrier is the aforementioned Brazil, which flies modernized A-4s and ASW helos out of the renamed Sao Paulo and even rents out deck time and space to the Argentine Naval Aviation so their pilots and aircraft can stay carrier-rated even though it’s unlikely that Argentina will ever replace Veinticinco de Mayo. Brazil’s carrier is specially useful as a “movable airbase” along their rather considerable Atlantic coastline, for monitoring illegal goings-on and dealing with domestic emergencies.
Russia’s Kuznetsov, which like most of their fleet is in dock more often than sailing and virtually never in actual operations is an interesting hybrid – its wing includes full-size Sukhoi fighters, but it launches aircraft using the ski-ramp feature, instead of catapults.
India had a conventional carrier until the early 80s then converted it to VTOL carrier (cheaper than rebuilding the catapults/arrestors to handle modern AC) and then replaced it with an older Brit Harrier-carrier in the 90s.
Britain dumped its conventional carriers in the 70s, now they have 3 small VTOL-equipped carriers, but they intend to go back to conventional flattops some time soon; Spain and Italy have one VSTOL ship each (Italy is building another). These all launch a smallish wing of Harriers and helicopters. Befuddlingly, Thailand (Thailand??? Huh???) had Spain build them one of their model of carrier; but they have not used it as a carrier but as a mobile disaster-relief platform and Amphibious Assault Ship.
The problem with a one-carrier Navy is that even without enemy action, half the time it’s a no-carrier navy. But OTOH those are some expensive mothers to build, outfit and operate, and never mind the level of training to get the crews to fight succesfully. Many of the single-carrier Western navies seem to operate on the premise that if a truly major blue-water conflagration went up, their carrier group would operate as part of a larger allied fleet. The Brits used 2 of their then-4 Harrier-carriers in the Falklands campaign, but then again the Argies were hampered by their old carrier being out of the action (sub risk + lack of spare parts), the front being at the extreme limit of the range of their land-based fighters, and having only a tiny handful of Exocet missiles in launchable condition.
That’s interesting. I’ve been wondering for a long time why exactly Brazil felt the need to have a carrier, given its geopolitical situation and stance.