There’s no way Trump is going to let his name be put on anything unless there’s some sort of branding payment involved.
I think it would be more than fair to say they didn’t get their money’s worth. “Extensively” is a bit much, too. Bismarck was sunk (in part) by King George V, Prince of Wales (which went straight to the bottom later that same year) and Nelson, and Scharnhorst was sunk by Duke of York, and that’s all the Nazi capital ships I can think of destroyed by British battleships. They had more success against Italian ships perhaps, but if you look at the fate of Axis capital ships, over and over again, it’s airplanes.
Battleships were the biggest, most expensive and most complex moving objects built by humans, but while “useless” was an overstatement, “totally not worth it” is definitely accurate.
A light aircraft carrier, Commissioned 1980, decomissioned 2005.
Rather like Arizona not being reissued for a good long time after BB39 got blown up real good. A Virginia-class SSN was announced in 2019.
The Navy also, currently, has a USS Roosevelt and a USS Theodore Roosevelt. And while there had been, as you note, a carrier named for FDR, the current USS Roosevelt is named for both FDR and his wife Eleanor. And yet it is only a destroyer!
The thing is, weapons are a lot more expensive now, not just in absolute terms, but also relative to countries’ GDPs. They’re also much more complicated to make. An F-35 has 50,000 parts; I’d be surprised if a P-51 Mustang had 1/10th that amount, and its parts were much easier to make. There’s no way any country today would be able to pump out planes, tanks and bombs fast enough to cover losses, let alone at the same rate the Allies did in WW2.
That is always a possibility…or, it could be that the next war will underscore their importance. As you said, we just don’t know. Currently, however, there are obvious benefits to carriers that outweigh their perceived vulnerabilities.
I think in a lot of these cases where folks are saying carriers are obsolete they are using a combination of touting the latest big thing wrt the vaunted Carrier Killer(TM…arr) weapons or assertions by nations that they could easily wipe out the US’s carriers, no sweat, along with a healthy dose of hindsight wrt pre-WWII and the reliance on battleships and people ignoring how much deadlier airplanes and air strikes had become. Today, I don’t think anyone is ignoring how much more deadly missiles are, and in fact, the US and others have spent quite a bit of time, effort, and money in planning defenses against them. The same goes for airstrikes and submarines, especially the latter. The fact that so many countries are building aircraft carriers today might be similar to the focus on the old battleships in pre-WWII days, but it also might be that aircraft carriers are still extremely useful weapons. Even if it becomes true that in a real great powers confrontation they are vulnerable that doesn’t preclude their use in less apocalyptic circumstances.
A lot of those weapons systems have actually never been tested in combat and are unproven. No one has drone swarms as you are picturing them, nor anything like a combat system that could be used for attacking a carrier at sea. Hypersonic missiles are in a similar boat, with basically all we have is some flight data and the assertions of the powers that have built them in very limited numbers. Subs and bombers are, of course, very real threats (along with other, less exotic missile systems), but they are threats that the various navies of the world, especially the US Navy, have spent years if not decades looking at and attempting to mitigate.
The thing is the various countries who are building or have deployed carriers know all of this, as well as the stuff we don’t know. China, despite its claims to have Karrier Ciller tech is building at least 3 more carriers that are roughly the size and theoretically the capabilities of our old Kitty Hawk class (with some fairly advanced stuff that is, again, theoretically on par with Nimitz or even Ford). Now, maybe they think that THEY have this advanced tech and no one else does or could, but my WAG is they know the limitations of their own tech and what it would actually take to even damage, let alone sink a US carrier, and they have calculated that having their own is beneficial and worth the risk.
The Germans very much tried to hide the Bismark, and the Japanese with the Yamato. Allied battleships were safer in that they generally operated under a certain amount of air superiority.
The Yamato sat out the war in dock, because the Japanese knew it was a sitting duck. But politics required that a giant battleship not sit in harbor while Japan was losing the war, so in 1945 it was ordered to join the fight on Okinawa.
It never made it. When the allies learned that Yamato was steaming for Okinawa they commenced a search, found it, launched 280 planes at it, and sent it to the bottom of the ocean.
Again, there ARE numeroys benefits to carriers in today’s world. China no doubt wants carriers to enhance its strength in the South China Sea, to threaten its coastal neighbors, to project power to Australia, New Zealand and coastal Africa, Possibly to oppose territorial moves by Russia in the north or protect what it considers to be its territory on the open ocean, for prestige, etc.
None of this has anything to do with their survivability against a peer nation in an all-out war. I don’t think anyone building carriers today are doing so because they think they will be an effective weapon in WWIII. They build,them because they are effective NOW, and their effectiveness might help prevent WWIII.
The biggest ‘safety’ factor for an aircraft carrier is that sinking one would almost certainly result in a massive response. That akes them off-limits to the kind of state that has the capacity to seriously harm one. But in a total war situation, that’s no longer a deterrent.
This is a critical point to be remembered by anyone who thinks we can maintain a small military and just ‘ramp it up’ if a war breaks out. That was true in WWI, less true in WWII but still mostly true, but not true at all today. If a war breaks out, we will have to fight it with the ships and planes currently in inventory. And if your R&D falls behind like it did with the US before WWII, by the time we developed, tested and deployed new weapons systems the war would be long over. A modern weapons system can take a decade to develop and another decade to build the factories to produce them in quantity.
This makes it really hard to plan, and almost necessitates that you maintain a military much larger than what you need for the strictly peacetime role.
Surely you didn’t mean to say a ship bearing the Trump name should be hauling garbage…
I agree with most of what you were saying here, but I disagree with the assumption that they wouldn’t be effective weapons in a major conflict between world powers. Certainly, they are built to try and prevent WWIII, but we simply don’t know how effective or not they will or won’t be in the event of a major powers conflict. So, I DO think that they are being built today both for the numerous benefits you mentioned AND because nation-states think they will be useful in major conflicts too. They could be wrong, of course, but that hasn’t been proven…and, hopefully, won’t be. I don’t think anyone wants to see a major power conflict where we can test this out.
Well, no…that’s a different thing though. You mentioned effective weapons in a major power conflict above, then shift to deterrent value. Obviously, if a major power conflict starts then ALL of the weapons have failed from the perspective of deterrence. That doesn’t mean they will or won’t be effective in the conflict, however. It would depend on exactly what that conflict is after all. A fight in the South China Sea or invasion of Taiwan (both I think are possible, maybe even likely at some point) will be a test of these weapons systems in such a conflict. A total nuclear war…well, nothing we have will be very effective, conventionally, in that conflict except the nukes and delivery systems. There is a pretty large range there.
Reminds me of a Benny Hill Show sketch where Capt. Skuttle (Hill) is planning to enter the space race in his new rocket, Indestructible II!
"What happened to Indestructible I?"
“It fell apart, sir.”
I wonder if someday we’ll see carriers with names like Nixon, Harding or Hoover.
I forgot which book I read it but Japanese battleships were just poorly used overall during the war If the Japanese had deployed more battleships during Guadalcanal for example, they very well could have annihilated the Allied forces there.
In fact it might have even been the very Decisive Battle they had planned for all along, with Yamato, Nagato and the four Kongos fighting the North Carolina, Washington, South Dakota and the rest of the US fleet when proper air superiority was still not firmly established. The Japanese just repeatedly blinked in the face of growing American naval superiority.
AIUI, carriers would generally be “last responders” in a war, not first responders. The first responders would be assets like SSGNs, barraging the enemy with hundreds of cruise missiles to take out command-and-control, air defense, etc. Then stealth bombers would continue to kick in the door. Finally, the carriers (who might take 1-3 weeks to arrive anyway) would come on scene as mop-up duty to finish off what remains of the enemy.
And you think the enemy won’t be doing the same thing? And that some of those enemy missile won’t be targeting American carriers?
Well, it would be docked in a Freudian slip.
Depends on the war scenario. I don’t see carriers being last responders (such a strange turn of phrase 
), especially if the US is involved, as I can see carrier air strikes being pretty much at all stages of a conflict in, say, Taiwan or the South China Sea. Certainly, you are going to get waves of missile strikes from China if that’s the conflict, but you are also going to get waves of airstrikes and a pretty nasty sea battle at some point…and that’s not going to be at the end, but somewhere in the middle of the conflict. Subs are going to be important as well, but, again, I don’t see them confronting the carriers in the end/mop-up phase, I see them pretty much in the conflict from the beginning until…well, either the end or when so many are lost they become combat ineffective.
The US has carriers that are far closer than 1-3 weeks, and so does China…and even in the 1-3 week timeframe, you are talking about a long time until this thing is done. Even if the US doesn’t participate the Taiwanese will hold out longer than that. Hell, the softening up period that China is tossing a lot of those missiles at Taiwan is going to last longer than that, and it’s going to take the Chinese longer than 1-3 weeks to establish air superiority and clear enough of the Taiwanese navy out of the way to even contemplate the next phase.
The second half of 1942 is a fascinating period for the US Navy in the Pacific War, but unappreciated by many. One greatly overlooked fact is that more sailors died around Guadalcanal than Marines on the island while the US was learning how to fight with surface ships against the better trained and prepared Japanese.
The Japanese certainly could have done more damage to the airfield with their battleships, but they could not have enjoyed the Decisive Victory they were hoping for. Their belief was that they could destroy the US fleet in one shot, forcing the US to sue for peace.
Unfortunately for them, it would not have played out that way. Even if the Japanese did get a battleship against battleship victory, the US had plenty more ships online. All the needed to have done was to sit back and wait for more ships. They would not have given up just because they lost a couple more BB.
Canada is currently planning to build new fighter jets. They will in all likelihood be F-35s; the low end guess for total cost is $25 billion. The estimated fleet would be 100 aircraft, tops.
That is a greater cost - even accounting for inflation - than the total cost of all the P-51s ever built by the United States during the entire existence of that aircraft. And they built more than 15,000 of them.
This isn’t entirely true. Yamato was Yamamoto’s flagship during Midway, and it saw a bit of action at Phillippine Sea and Leyte Gulf (where her sister ship Musashi was destroyed.)
The USS Albacore has been on permanent display in Portsmouth NH since 1986. It’s interesting to visit but much of the time I kept thinking of a giant can of tuna.