The Age of the Aircraft Carrier Is Over

Please somebody tell the Pentagon, which is building three new ones.

For the past three decades China has been conducting a sort of natural experiment on the question, “If you were building, from scratch, the world’s largest navy” (China’s is now bigger than our own), “how many aircraft carriers would you need?” China’s answer is three. We have 11, including the USS Gerald R. Ford (above), the biggest warship in the world, and we’re in the process of building three more Ford Class carriers. These floating cities cost about $13 billion apiece to build, and they aren’t exactly easy to hide from the enemy after fighting breaks out. Indeed, one reason China isn’t keen to build a lot of supercarriers is that it knows how easy they are to hit with a missile; China itself developed two different types of missiles to do precisely that. The obsolescence of the big aircraft carrier is the topic of my latest article for the print New Republic. You can read it here.