Sunday, August 19, 2018

What Happens If A U.S. Navy Aircraft Carrier Is Sunk?

Top to bottom: USS Kitty Hawk (CV-63) alongside Nimitz class carriers USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) & USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76). Pinterest

Henry Holst, National Interest: What Happens if a Navy Aircraft Carrier Is Sunk?

Are carriers too big to fail? If so, U.S. policymakers need to break themselves from the assumption that carriers are the end product of the evolution of naval technology. The United States must maintain its leadership role in military innovation; not fall into the age-old trap of other great powers by absconding modernization and relying instead on time-tested dogma and tradition. In the future our carriers and Navy servicemen may pay the ultimate price due to our complacency and failure to innovate.

Various defense pundits, scholars, and journalists have spent a considerable amount of digital ink debating the various threats to America’s carrier fleet while avoiding a more central question.

In the cliché phrase of our time: Are carriers too big to fail?

Read more ....

WNU Editor: If a U.S. aircraft carrier is sunk I do not see the U.S. buckling down and crying uncle .... I see the opposite. And what I see is hell, wrath, fury, and revenge.

5 comments:

jac said...

If an aircraft carrier is sunk, it would not be the first. The DF21D is not the biggest threat to the carrier, which is poorly qualified, that are the submarines. I don't know if the A/C is obsolete, why not?, but we have to replace it by what? What surprise me is the Chinese's are building A/C knowing they are vulnerable....may be they know that's not really the case.

Anon #87 said...

It's not the carrier that matters, It's just a chunk of replaceable metal.
It would be the 1,000s of casualties.

Anonymous said...

Agreed@Anon87
There's usually a couple thousand souls on one of those puppies.. it'd be like 9/11 in terms of casualties AND you'd have the military almost immediately ask for counter strike (if assailant is known/a country).. I agree with WNU.. that country - no matter if Russia or China (or Iran lol) - will have a bad day.

Anonymous said...

Only China and Russia are capable of sinking a carrier. If they do it’s WW3.

Roger Smith said...



I can't imagine a situation other than wartime when a carrier would be sunk. Other than the usual muzlum suspects who would be so suicidal?