They're a neat idea in contrast to battleship fleets and I think CVNs could be a remarkable humanitarian platform if it was demilitarised. A floating international airport with a reactor that can power a city and desalinate water for it. That'd be great as climate change intensifies natural disasters hitting poor coastal regions. As a military platform, they were made obsolete as soon as hypersonic flight and nuclear torpedoes were developed. It's six thousand people concentrated in one place with a bunch of carcinogens, fuels, magnesium, and bombs. Damage control is the one area outside of combat medicine I'll give the Navy genuine credit for, but even then the USS Forrestal fire was a minor incident compared to what battle damage would mean. While the risk of that is mitigated by the carrier fleet's screener ships, 7th Fleet is the one where all the ships keep having major accidents. Its op tempo is so high that nobody can train or fully man units or maintain the ships to the standards of other fleets. The planes and helicopters we're supposed to be launching from those carriers/the surrounding airbases are noted for being the ones that fall out of the sky.
As long as every war is Desert Storm, damn impressive. If it's a Vietnam War decided by exhaustion, a carrier can enable more sorties and air superiority but you just run into the same problems as the WW1 howitzers and the WW2 Norden bombsights. More volume of an ineffective thing won't win you the war unless your goal is being king of ashes. If it's a modern war and drones and specific counter-weapons exist, they're floating radioactive sarcophagi.
I love how the aircraft carrier is basically just the same idea as Pearl Harbor, but behind enemy lines.
"Hey guys, let's put $600billion worth of hardware onto a slow moving target the size of a town."
They're a neat idea in contrast to battleship fleets and I think CVNs could be a remarkable humanitarian platform if it was demilitarised. A floating international airport with a reactor that can power a city and desalinate water for it. That'd be great as climate change intensifies natural disasters hitting poor coastal regions. As a military platform, they were made obsolete as soon as hypersonic flight and nuclear torpedoes were developed. It's six thousand people concentrated in one place with a bunch of carcinogens, fuels, magnesium, and bombs. Damage control is the one area outside of combat medicine I'll give the Navy genuine credit for, but even then the USS Forrestal fire was a minor incident compared to what battle damage would mean. While the risk of that is mitigated by the carrier fleet's screener ships, 7th Fleet is the one where all the ships keep having major accidents. Its op tempo is so high that nobody can train or fully man units or maintain the ships to the standards of other fleets. The planes and helicopters we're supposed to be launching from those carriers/the surrounding airbases are noted for being the ones that fall out of the sky.
As long as every war is Desert Storm, damn impressive. If it's a Vietnam War decided by exhaustion, a carrier can enable more sorties and air superiority but you just run into the same problems as the WW1 howitzers and the WW2 Norden bombsights. More volume of an ineffective thing won't win you the war unless your goal is being king of ashes. If it's a modern war and drones and specific counter-weapons exist, they're floating radioactive sarcophagi.