AP article: Aircraft carriers gain clout in naval power
Everybody gets one, even the Joneses down the street. I need one of these carriers, too.
Everybody gets one, even the Joneses down the street. I need one of these carriers, too.
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Well, you should have bought HMS Invincible when it was up for sale online!
One of the most sniggering moments of my life was during the sale, the website did in fact say "add to cart" when you tried to pay for the ship. Some kind of cart they must have!
Yeah, a great opportunity lost there to be the regional superpower of Nordnes, Bergen.
Yay for big shopping carts!
Yay for big shopping carts!
I have to say I wonder why... I would think carriers must be incredibly expensive sitting ducks these days, assuming the enemy has any half-decent military.
We'll have to wait until the game is out to find out how easy it is to take out a carrier
Any state wealthy enough to operate a state of the art carrier usually has the means to protect it....usually.
Yes. There is of course a slight difference in size between the Thai carrier and the American ones...
I believe Thailand's motivation for having it is largely prestige and having a good platform for efficient disaster relief. In a real fight against a real navy, I guess it would last about as long as the HTMS Thonburi, and in fact the two ships have very much in common (large, modern, nearly state-of-the-art vessel, without the backup to survive a real fight).
After all with a big enough torpedo, which sure won't cost as much as a carrier, you can sink it with one hit to good place even if it sounds crazy. Too bad that when you have huge hole in your bottom it may suck in a lot of water, more than you can pump out.. So after all what they are? A good way to make your military budget look fat and a good way for enemies to earn prestige by sinking them
After all with a big enough torpedo, which sure won't cost as much as a carrier, you can sink it with one hit to good place even if it sounds crazy. Too bad that when you have huge hole in your bottom it may suck in a lot of water, more than you can pump out.. So after all what they are? A good way to make your military budget look fat and a good way for enemies to earn prestige by sinking them
Well done, you have just rendered the future of aircraft carrier operations pointless. If only the countries with such ships had you in their naval planning boards. Torpedoes are a threat to carriers? I don't believe it... if that was true then surely ships would have hard and soft kill systems for use against torpedoes... WAIT A MINUTE, THEY DO!
In all seriousness, the whole "carriers are easy to destroy" thing is a bit cliché now. They have great survivability either through on-board defence systems or through their escorts.
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Well, the argument "carriers are easy to destroy" is only brought up by little navies who need the argument to bolster their confidence and/or people with an antipathy towards navies that do have carriers.
Carriers can be easy to destroy under the right circumstances. It's only a ship after all. But in all fairness, World War Two gives plenty of examples for situations in which carriers were destroyed, and if you analyze those sinkings, it becomes obvious that while carriers can be destroyed, it is extremely difficult to do so if they are well-protected, and they usually are for precisely this reason.
Saying carriesr are worthless because anti-carrier missiles and torpedoes exist is like saying tanks are obsolete because of the anti-tank missile. It's simply not true.
Yeah, but its really more of a cost issue... a carrier is an utterly enormous investment in money, machinery and most importantly trained men. Losing even one is a disaster. Losing one because of a hit from a land-based missile and realising now you can't bring ANY of your carriers to the theatre means they are a huge waste.
tl;dr: a carrier is a lot more expensive than a tank.
Certainly the loss of an asset as large or expensive as a carrier would be a disaster.
That's completely the wrong conclusion. For one thing, as I and many other people have already tried to explain - carriers are very well-protected against such threats. Second, they are not brought into danger for no good reason. There is no reason to put a carrier in any place where it can be easily be hit by a missile that actually poses a threat, so it won't be. It can move about, that's the whole point. Third, missile sites capable of targeting a carrier would be/are among the first targets to be taken out by long-range standoff missiles in any military operation. Once the threat has been neutralized, or at least reduced, the carriers can move in.
And in any case, the carrier must be found first in order to sink it. How do you find the carrier, if you have no idea where it is?
Germany and Japan sank five of the British pre-war aircraft carriers during World War Two, and while this proved costly, it certainly did not invalidate the concept of the aircraft carrier, nor were they regarded a huge waste. Quite the opposite.
I'm not sure why you don't comprehend the value of an aircraft carrier for nearly any conceivable military operation involving naval forces. If it's purely a cost argument - then it's a question of what capabilities you think your particular navy needs. No other type of vessel can provide the versatility and power of an aircraft carrier (if you count big helicopter carriers in the same class). Sure, if you believe your navy should be content with patrolling its own shores, stopping the occasional smuggler and the like, you don't need an aircraft carrier. The trend, however, points towards interventions in strange countries far away, where having a portable airfield with you is a definite plus for all sorts of reasons, and the chance it will be attacked by a state-of-the-art enemy is almost zero.
The utility of such a platform (I will throw aircraft and helicopter carriers together here for sake of simplicity) is so great, that the German navy has been asking for one for almost two decades now. The current design is attached:
I am not questioning that carriers are useful - only a fool would do that, I'm pointing out that they are going to be incresingly vulnerable as antiship-missiles get better and better, cheaper and cheaper to the point where they will be produced in numbers large enough to overwhelm the carrier's defence, as is the consensus by RAND. You say missile sites would be taken out first - by who? An omnipotent power? they would be taken out if it was possible and how, exactly do you think it would be possible if anti-aircraft measures are seriously concentrated around them and they are deeper inland? What are you going to do against a hypersonic missile that fires from reasonably deep within enemy territory and cannot be intercepted?
And carriers can be found, I have no idea why you would think they cannot. Again, I'm not saying they are useless, but they are becoming increasingly vulnerable. Quite apart from that, the limits or air power are becoming very apparent lately, so even when they do work the pay-off is not always worth it.
The point is, only a couple of things have to go wrong for a country to lose a carrier or two, which is, as you say, a total disaster, especially if their entire power projection is based around carrier use. They are still very useful and powerful, but their relative importance is declining.
And carriers can be found, I have no idea why you would think they cannot. Again, I'm not saying they are useless, but they are becoming increasingly vulnerable. Quite apart from that, the limits or air power are becoming very apparent lately, so even when they do work the pay-off is not always worth it.
The point is, only a couple of things have to go wrong for a country to lose a carrier or two, which is, as you say, a total disaster, especially if their entire power projection is based around carrier use. They are still very useful and powerful, but their relative importance is declining.
Funnily enough, I was thinking that. Thanks for saying it!
I don't think anyone is claiming they are easy to sink, I think people are claiming they are becoming a lot more sinkable than they used to be. Coupled with their huge cost, they are not as good an investment, relatively speaking, as they once were.
Couldn't it be an argument that as the abilities/numbers of anti-ship missiles increase, the escort ships weaponry and self-defence weapon systems can also be increased in ability/number? Carriers are of too much importance to be deployed without adequate defences.