“That was some of the best Top Gun movie quoting I’ve seen to date — right up to the part where you got fined.”
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I grew up near a Marine Corps Air Station. I’m surprised I notice anything in the sky anymore.
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Pretty sure aircraft carriers are still very much a thing when it comes to force projection?
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What’s their stance on glistening, shirtless volleyball?
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Only good for low intensity conflicts anymore. They make a nice, big, radar-friendly, multi-billion $$ target for an IRBM when things get serious.
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Better since the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”.
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Aircraft carriers aren’t intimidating because they serve as a launch point for airplanes that can shoot down other airplanes.
Aircraft carriers are intimidating because they serve as a launch point for aircraft (piloted or unmanned) that can drop terrifying bombs, not to mention the missile systems and other armaments.
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By your definition does that mean that the U.S. has only ever been involved in “low intensity conflicts” since the end of WWII? Korea, Vietnam don’t count because no nukes were exchanged?
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But the only conflicts that have occurred since the end of WWII are the type of “low intensity conflict” you describe.
If things ever got “serious” it would likely be the end of the world, because… nukes. Oh, and now hypersonic nukes.
If somehow we were engaged in a major conflict with China, Russia, or another large military force that has nuclear weapons, and the conflict was kept non-nuclear, yes, the role of aircraft carriers would be in question, I think – at least when going head-to-head against that other major power.
However, if the Cold War and WWII (and others) tell us anything, it’s that not all battles in such a war will be against that other major player. Some will be against their less-equipped allies.
Let’s really hope it doesn’t come to us seeing how any of the above scenarios play out, in real life. IMHO it would likely end poorly for all involved, and even those nations that manage to avoid direct involvement.
There are a lot of candidates. China, India, Russia, Turkey, Japan, Sweden, and Pakistan either possess fifth generation fighters or will soon. Most of those countries also have sixth generation fighter programs. The US technically has the largest inventory of fifth generation fighters, but those numbers are pumped up by the F-35, which seems real marginal as a combat-ready aircraft.
I agree with you about our vulnerabilities, though. We are the country with a bullseye on our back. While our military theoretically plans to fight the whole world, many of our opponents only plan to fight us. Drones are a big concern, as are surface to air threats like the missile system the Turks got from Russia. I also worry about them hacking our aircraft right out of the sky, since we rely so heavily on a networked battlefield.
Here’s a fun read about American military planning hubris: Millennium Challenge 2002 - Wikipedia
Aircraft carriers are giant targets that can be sunk relatively easily by swarms of stand-off missiles. They are also vulnerable, it turns out, to diesel submarines. Even that low-end high technology is levels above what countries like Iran, China, and Russia possess. Low-tech can do it, too, as evidenced by the Millennium Challenge 2002.
On a related note, they require a huge flotilla of ships to protect them, meaning that the costs involved in floating those planes extend way beyond the carrier itself.
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They’re still pretty difficult targets for the kind of forces the United States has been at war with over the last 60 years or so.
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Nobody thought that 19 guys would try to fly four airliners into four different buildings. But there it is. We’re still thinking about how to fight the people we’ve been fighting over the last 60 years, and thinking about it in terms of our own strengths, instead of who we might fight in the next 60 years, and how they perceive our weaknesses. We’re thinking about how lucky were were that the carriers weren’t at Pearl, and how we were able to change our strategy from battleship formations to carriers to win the war, instead of why we were forced to change our strategy once the battleships were sunk.
The Millennium Challenge 2002 is instructive.
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You’re the one who brought up missiles and submarines to take down aircraft carriers. I’m pointing out that the people we’ve been at war with in recent decades, and the people we’re likely to be at war with for the foreseeable future, don’t generally have missiles and submarines.
If guerrilla fighters wanted to take down an aircraft carrier they’d need to do something much more creative, a-la a 21st-century variant of The African Queen.
I do agree that training pilots to fly ridiculously expensive fighter jets in air-to-air combat scenarios seems like a dumb way to prepare for the military threats of the 21st Century.
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Oh wait, that’s Firebirds, the Army Helicopter version of Topgun.
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I confess that as a non-American I had thought mostly along the lines of how not to get flattened in the event that the US is taken over by some kind of authoritarian fascist government that decides to start blowing shit up. What was once idle speculation on my part is now somewhat more alarming.
I’m less interested in how a country might fight the US in a full on war - that is a doomed proposition. Various low tech combatants have shown that the sheer might of the US machine can be fought to a draw (see Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan), but that is at great cost in blood.
What would be more interesting to most countries is how to make themselves a very unappealing target in the sense of making any such adventurism extremely costly bordering on suicidal, while at the same time being utterly unthreatening to anyone else.
A big part of that would involve having the ability to create and maintain a no fly zone over your own airspace. There is zero chance the vastly powerful US military would invade somewhere without total dominance of the air and close air support. So make that impossible. That can be done by competing for 5th and 6th generation aircraft - very expensive and the deck is stacked against you. Or just figuring out how to knock down any and all aircraft that cross your borders - also difficult but somewhat less so in that it opens up more creative solutions. Would EMP antiair bursts work? Would mathematically organized swarms of small disposable drones carrying chunks of metal designed to smash jet engines do it? What about big clouds of helium balloons with small bits of debris? How many scrapped F35s or stealth bombers would it take for the US to stop trying to send them?
Of course I have no ability to do any of this stuff, am nowhere near any decision makers nor any levers of power. So it is a thought exercise, but I strongly suspect that most countries have at least considered how to counter US air power dominance without trying to out-compete the world’s richest country in a game they are completely dominating.
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Correct me if I am wrong, but didn’t they
turn TOPGUN into a joke by
writing it all-caps without it being an acronym?!
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“Man, you can ride my tail, anytime!”
$5 poorer.
I guess if TOP GUN is not quotable, you could always fail back to quoting Hot Shots! or Hot Shots! Part Deux…
Which is probably more appropriate in the 2020’s.
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Cocaine cartels have subs. They merely lack incentive to target capital ships.
I recall an old claim that only two types of vessels exist: submarines and targets. I see no exceptions.
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