The same Royal Navy that can't build usable ships but did build 2 horribly expensive and useless carriers which can be used basically only in gunboat diplomacy and are breaking often?
can be used basically only in gunboat diplomacy
Is that not the point of aircraft carriers to begin with?
Depend when. I think up until 80's they were completely viable weapons for long range combat, but the rocketry and submarine tech advanced after that made them less and less usable. I think hypersonic missiles sended them to museum for the forseeable future. And so, while the smaller ASW carriers still have a lot of defensive usage, the huge carriers can now only be gunboats for terrorising countries that cannot defend themselves.
I was mainly going off the Soviet navy doctrine, which AFAIK specified carriers as "tools of imperialism" (which is also why USSR haven't bothered with them, only making carrier cruisers)
USSR strategically never needed carriers in the first place, their enemy was NATO and by the time soviet could build carriers they had NATO except USA in their land based aircraft and rockets range anyway, and the main theater of sea battle would be North Atlantic. So to reach USA soviets developed the submarine technology more. And US also never needed carriers against the USSR specifically, since they did have Iceland, UK, Japan, Germany, Turkey.
So yes, imperialism and antiimperialism as you can see have big meaning for the military doctrine.
