usmbguest5318
Gold Member
I’ve ask this question several times in the past without any satisfactory answers coming from anyone on a political forum, old Navy vet friends, or letters to my congress critters.
it takes over 2000 crew mwmbers for a single carrier.
Well, did they answer your question? I can't imagine they did because the answer, at least at the level you've framed it, is on the Internet. Congress members and their staff aren't generally given to being someone's, even a constituent's, research service.
- What It Takes To Successfully Attack an American Aircraft Carrier
- Essay: The New Strategic Realities of U.S. Carrier Operations - USNI News
- Here Is Every Aircraft Carrier in the World
- Naval Tactics and the Introduction of the Aircraft Carrier
- The crew required for battleships was also ~2K.
- In the 21st century, there's no sneaking up on an aircraft carrier as the Japanese snuck up on Pearl.
- Planes can reach targets farther away than can 16" guns, thus a carrier has a far larger sphere of influence.
- While the carrier itself need defending, the aircraft carrier strategy is not to defend the carrier but to attack the enemy.
- While airspace is "owned" by the nations whose land it covers, the oceans are not "owned" by anyone.
- A mobile island is far harder to find and hit than is a base on land and it doesn't required a host country's complicity.
Sure, a terrorist (group) may take out a "flashy" target here or there, but that will not effect the demise of the U.S., not by a long shot. That leaves the U.S. vulnerable in any real way to weapons coming in from outer space. I think at the end of the day, if one is going to engage in a war, as opposed to the asymmetric conflicts in which the U.S. has engaged for decades, it's more important to win than it is to complain about how much it cost to do so because losing costs more.
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