Retired US Navy captain: The centerpiece of the Navy’s future doubles down on a 20-year-old strategic mistake

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Retired US Navy captain: The centerpiece of the Navy’s future doubles down on a 20-year-old strategic mistake

Aircraft carriers are the ultimate symbol of American military dominance.
Weighing tens of thousands of tons and costing billions of dollars, these vessels allow the US to project power around the world far from its shores.

But according to a retired US Navy captain, the prime time of aircraft carriers may be coming to an end as strategic mistakes committed by the US over the past 20 years has limited these vessel’s capabilities while leaving them open to strikes from new emerging threats.

Retired Navy Capt. Jerry Hendrix, writing in the Center for a New American Security, makes the case that aircraft carriers have steadily lost their utility over the past two decades.

At fault for this are twin mistakes of the US Navy: a steady introduction of aircraft with decreasing flight ranges in addition to a failure to foresee rising military capabilities from countries like China that could target carriers.

“American power and permissive environments were assumed following the end of the Cold War, but the rise of new powers, including China and its pursuit of anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) strategies and capabilities to include the carrier-killing 1,000 nautical mile (nm) range Dong Feng-21 anti-ship ballistic missile, now threatens to push the Navy back beyond the range of its carrier air wings,” Hendrix notes.

Essentially, any carrier that operates within 1,000 nautical miles of Chinese military placements could be open to a strike from an antiship ballistic missile. This would not be a problem, except that the average unrefueled combat range of US carrier air wings operates at half that distance……More Here

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