Originally Posted by
LowObservable
Well, nobody has suggested that carriers are invulnerable
Agreed. HH clearly implied otherwise.
On the other hand, it makes no sense at all to spend tens of billions on a ship and air wing, with >5,000 people on board, and have only 11 of them, unless you think that it has an extremely high probability of survival in the sort of conflict for which it is designed.
Why are there "only 11" super carriers? Certainly not because of their alleged vulnerability. They are at least two big reasons: 1) they are very expensive and affordability raises its ugly head. 2) Congress has given USN a specific set of tasks to do and USN has stated they can do them with nine carrier air wings which in turns drives the need for 11 carriers. On the other hand Congress is notorious for making the "need" and the tasks fit the budget that they set usually with little or no consideration for the actual threats/risks that exist. But the bottom line is that the number of carriers that are built is not determined by the perceived vulnerability of those carriers.
And the "near-century track record" is less significant than you think. When carriers were attacked repeatedly by peer opponents they were sunk quite frequently (five in one engagement).
Indeed. That being said, what was proven to be the most effective carrier killer? Another carrier. Once Japan lost her carriers she stopped being a "peer opponent" on the high seas and the US carriers were able to act with near impunity there after. With the result that Japan lost all the territories she grabbed in the 30s and early 40s and had her homeland nearly completely destroyed..
Since WW2 there has been no peer-level attack on a carrier. I don't think that any sensible person would argue that a regiment-strength Backfire attack on a carrier group wouldn't have been a damned close-run thing at best, and I can think of at least one contemporary weapon system that had a firing solution on a CVN in a serious exercise.
All this is true, and indeed no "sensible person" has made the argument you posed. What is also true is that post WWII no carriers were sunk, no carrier was denied the ability by an opponent to accomplish whatever mission it was given, and in no way was any carrier made "obsolete" by any of the weapons and combination of weapons that have been described/listed here.
Of course carriers are vulnerable. That goes without saying. But so is EVERY weapon platform and that vulnerability makes NONE of them "obsolete".
Comparing carrier vulnerability to land bases is misleading in the extreme, to the point of being dishonest. Land bases are obviously easier to hit, but are very hard to sink; and there are places where one hit on a carrier will prevent it from operating aircraft pending dockyard repair.
Misleading in the extreme because carriers sink and land bases don't? How many carriers have been over run by enemy troops? How many land based airfields? How many Japanese island bases were bombed into oblivion by carrier aircraft and/or isolated and then choked to death by sea power? How many land bases were abandoned because the fight moved beyond the effective reach of that airbase? Carriers have this odd habit of moving to where the fight is. And sometimes it's on the other side of the globe. I'm not arguing that carriers are "better" or less vulnerable than land bases. But neither are they necessarily more vulnerable. Just like carriers, land bases have their strengths and their vulnerabilities. What I'm arguing is that carriers' vulnerabilities do not make them "obsolete" any more than land based airfields' vulnerabilities make them obsolete. Or to put it another way, most anything that would make a carrier obsolete would make a land based airfield obsolete. And so far, no weapon nor combination of weapons have made EITHER obsolete.