Those WW2 carriers were named after historic ships, part of the first Continental Navy squadron to see action in 1776. Former merchant schooner and sloop, at that time one can imagine the reference was to their hard “sting” for a small vessel. There have been 10 Wasps and 8 Hornets in the US Navy.
I know ‘some people’ have been saying this. We’ve had this discussion on this board multiple times. But, frankly, I’ve never seen the argument be all that compelling, and the fact that basically, every other power who can actually build carriers are building them sort of says that there is still some value there, at least in their eyes (i.e. this isn’t just some sort of US obsession).
The Secretary of the Navy, pretty much at will, although I am sure the President could make their will known (and see it carried out). Apart from that, they would be restrained only by their own sense of propriety.
For further reading, see:
https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/heritage/customs-and-traditions0/ship-naming.html
No doubt there will be a USS Trump. A fine Garbage Scow that will sink immediately after christening causing widespread pollution. Trump will blame the Roman God Neptune as the democratic conspirator.
True - but ASL_v2.0 was talking about submarine names in the sentence I quoted, so I thought I’d stick with that theme
USS Croaker was recommissioned as an attack submarine in 1953.
That’s not a bad name for a submarine that kills other subs.
Houston-Intercontinental Airport was renamed for his father (George H W Bush) and I think it would be too confusing to have two airports named Bush so we’ll never see an airport named for George W Bush. Perhaps for the same reason, we’ll never see an aircraft carrier named for him?
The Navy managed to have both a USS Franklin Roosevelt and a USS Theodore Roosevelt at the same time (a carrier and a submarine), so it’s conceivable that there would be a non-carrier named for W.
I’ll quibble with “legitimately” here.
Or when the time comes around, maybe after the retirement of CVN77, some future ship is launched as simply USS George Bush, with no differentiator. (Heck, the USS John McCain refers to three generations of fathers and sons.)
Has the Royal Navy named any more ships Invincible, or did that go out of fashion after the battle cruiser Invincible was blown up at the battle of Jutland?
There was an aircraft carrier HMS Invincible (one of them small jump-carriers) at the Falklands in 1982.
However, I myself would say that just simpy naming your vessel “Invincible” has a strong element of tempting fate to it.
Of the other explodey battlecruisers (Indefatigable, Queen Mary, Hood), only Indefatigable has had its name reused, for a WW2 carrier.
Carriers are important for force projection against limited opponents, which is why everyone wants one. But the fact that lots of governments are building them doesn’t fill me with hope for their survival. Everyone wanted battleships at the start of WWII, and they were almost useless. As the old saying goes, we tend to prepare for the last war.
Carriers are likely safe against attack in everything other than a full-scale war, for the simple reason that attacking one would trigger a full scale war.
But if a full scale war breaks out, I am not sanguine about the survival of carriers. What do you think the odds of survival are against, say, 50 missiles coming in at one time? One of the things that saved WWII carriers is that they could be hard to find with the tech of the day, and we didn’t have planes with enough range to hit them umless our own carriers were in the area.
Today we know where every single carrier in the world is, as so do our enemies. And there are a huge range of weapons systems that could target carriers. Everything from long range stealth bombers to drone swarms to cruise missiles to hypersonic missiles to conventional ICBMs. To say nothing of attack subs, underwater drones, and all the classified stuff we don’t know about.
It’s entirely possible that the ‘era of carrier dominance of the sea’ will end with the first shot of WWIII.
I sometimes think that any full-scale war between advanced nations or relatively equal strength will last for 12 hours at most, with everyone launching - and losing - every high-tech weapon system they have at once. So yeah, the carriers will be lost, but so will everything else, on both sides.
On the one hand, this does seem like a reasonable prediction. On the other, people made very similar predictions before WW1 and WW2…
Remember the Armada Invencible? It is better known as the Spanish Armada in English, probably because it never won a single battle. But the sherry casks that ended up in Scottland’s beaches were a major contribution to the taste of whisky as we know it today! So it was not in vain.
I’d been meaning to mention that, too.
A big mistake here is understanding a Navy or even a military to mostly be about fighting the worst-case scenario, major great power war.
At the peak of its time as a great power, Holland had around 2000 ships and colonies that spanned the globe. The vast majority of those ships were never going to be utilized in large great power conflict against another European power.
Same for the British Royal Navy at the peak of its power.
Seeing a trend? Since at least the 1500s, having a globe-spanning Navy has been almost synonymous with great power status simply because it is what allows projection at a distance. All of the true hegemonic Great Powers since that time have had large, globe spanning Navies. Many of the Great Powers that aspired to some sort of hegemonic status (and failed)–the Russian Empire, German Empire and Austro-Hungarian Empire, in no small part failed to attain their lofty goals because their Navies were never up to the job.
During the Cold War a significant disadvantage the Russians had was their much weaker Navy. In the growing Cold War between the United States and China, China is rapidly building up its ship count. There’s a great book that came out in late 2020 by a retired U.S. Naval Captain, Naval historian with a Doctorate in War Studies–Henry J. Hendrix: https://www.amazon.com/Provide-Maintain-Navy-Americas-Strategy/dp/0960039198/
He talks at length about this concept, and he actually argues that we need to stop retiring ships, spend money retrofitting many of the ships we have now to get another 20-30 years out of them, and focus on growing the total size of the Navy again.
This sloppy thinking of “all these ships will be gone in the first missile silo” misses the point, as he would tell it–a big Navy is about the ability to maintain free navigation of the seas, for your natin’s trade and traders and those of your allies. The various American combatant commanders around the world have daily requests out for ships that stand at around a need for 130 ships at sea; we only really keep about 90 ships at sea at any given time, and many of these requests go unfulfilled (while we have around 290 deployable vessels currently you can’t have all of them out at once for logistical reasons etc.)
It’s a shift in how one thinks about a Navy, a traditional, Grand Fleet of WWI style thinking or Mahan style thinking is that the only real purpose for a powerful Navy is to orchestrate a large, decisive battle with the enemy’s navy, to knock them out, and then to utilize the resulting Naval supremacy to pummel the enemy into submission. Note that this actual philosophy didn’t really function as intended in either of the World Wars in which a huge percentage of the Naval commanders and planners were adherents to the Mahan school of thought–not that Mahan was necessarily wrong in the context of his times, but it shows that you can’t really predict what’s going to be decisive in the next war.
But we don’t have to predict what will be decisive in the next war to understand the ongoing, continuous value a Navy provides even outside of war time, and it isn’t just the money spent on the ships, it’s about maintaining that large core of sailors and officers ready to sail wherever America’s interests require. Scaling back a Navy is easy, scaling one back up is not so easy.
The point that Hendrix makes about not scaling down, but actually growing total ship count, is that many of our current ships slated for decommissioning actually are more than enough for the sort of force projection, trade protection etc missions we need ships for all over the globe literally every single day, with retrofitting. The Navy is not where we should be forcing budget cuts and expectations that we do more with less, we should be looking to do more with more.
Americans don’t like it put in such blunt terms, but we’re essentially the leader of a global empire of free countries that are roughly allied, that roughly believe in free trade and democratic norms etc, that empire needs continual maintenance of naval power to be sustained. It is possible if a terrible, cataclysmic war breaks out between us and China much of both navies will be swept away in the fury–and that’s fine, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea to maintain a strong Navy for all the other things it’s used for every day.
I’m not sure why this is aimed at me, since I don’'t disagree with any of it. In fact, I said the same thing - that nations don’t want carriers to fight WWIII, they want them to project power around the world and to support lower level conflict.
Carriers are extremely valuable for force projection - especially for the U.S. since they are separated from their rivals by oceans.
Whether they would be of any use or exist for very long in an all-out war against a peer or near-peer nation is another question. My guess is that they would only survive if the conflict had yet to escalate to unlimited war, as attacking a carrier would undoubtedly bring a massive counter response.
But if all the chips are on the table (perhaps short of nukes), the carriers just might suffer the fate of WWII battleships - withdrawn from the fight, and hiding to prevent destruction.
WW2 battleships weren’t hiding to prevent destruction though, the British used battleships extensively to crush the surface fleets of the German and Italians navies, and the Americans used their slow battleships for shore bombardment and their fast battleships for anti-air defense of their carriers.
In fact no matter what happened a German victory at D-Day was impossible simply because of the fact the Allies had so many battleships in the area that any concentrated push to sweep the Allies off the beaches would have been annihilated.