War is Boring/National Interest: The U.S. Navy’s Big Mistake—Building Tons of Aircraft Carriers
The Pentagon behaves as if aircraft carriers will rule forever … they won’t.
“History,” it has been written, “does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.” Today it’s rhyming with Gen. Billy Mitchell. In the 1920s, Mitchell challenged conventional thinking by advocating air power at sea in the face of a naval establishment dominated by battleship proponents.
The hubris of the “battleship Navy” was such that just nine days before Pearl Harbor, the official program for the 1941 Army-Navy game displayed a full page photograph of the battleship USS Arizona with language virtually extolling its invincibility.
Of course, the reason that no one had yet sunk a battleship from the air — in combat — was that no one had yet tried.
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WNU editor: Aircraft carriers do have a purpose, especially in conflicts when you need to project power and influence in a conflict zone. As to sinking and/or severely damaging aircraft carriers, the only countries that have a real chance of doing that are Russia and China. But if they are sinking U.S. aircraft carriers, in my opinion we would be quickly seeing nuclear weapons being used, and in that situation the lost of aircraft carriers will be on the bottom of everyone's concerns.
