Are Aircraft Carriers Obsolete?

It's fashionable to ask if the aircraft carrier is obsolete: small uncrewed aircraft can operate from smaller ships or extremely-far land bases, long-ranged anti-ship missiles put them at risk, and they're extremely expensive to build and operate. My opinion is that the carrier is still valuable as long as it can re-focus the carrier strike group for range and endurance.

USS Yorktown CV-5 demonstrating that carriers are not invincible

The Rise of the Carrier

Why did aircraft carriers replace battleships as the most powerful naval unit? One word: range. The primary armament of the Iowa class battleship (e.g. the USS Missouri) was nine 16-inch guns. These fired gigantic 2,700-pound armor-piercing shells out to 24 miles. An aircraft carrier that found itself in range of a battleship was having a Bad Day: the Japanese plan for the Battle of Midway was to lure the US carriers into range of the Japanese battleships.

An aircraft carrier in World War II could deploy torpedo-bombers and dive-bombers against ships well over 100 miles away, with enough ordinance to sink multiple ships in one strike. In addition, aircraft carriers were uniformly fast ships because they needed to provide "wind over deck" to help their aircraft take off. So aircraft carriers had a massive range advantage and the speed to dictate the range of an engagement. For example, at the Battle of Midway the US Navy sank (or mission-killed and forced the Japanese to sink) all four opposing carriers, but then turned to keep the range open against the oncoming Japanese battleships. At the same time, the Japanese battleships had to turn back or risk receiving a three-carrier airstrike with no remaining fighters to intercept it. The aircraft carrier's extreme range and versatility cemented its role, and any notional replacement would need to demonstrate an ability to put more explosives on target at a longer range.

The Case Against the Carrier

Aircraft carriers are expensive, which means that given a set of resource constraints fewer of them will be made than smaller alternatives. Nimitz class (no longer produced) and Gerald Ford class carriers cost (in late-2010s/early-2020s dollars) $11-13 billion each per Wikipedia. I could speculate about a post-carrier ship's cost and capabilities, but luckily there is already a ship in service that is capable of extreme-range shots through launching one-way uncrewed aircraft in large salvos. I refer of course to the Arleigh Burke guided-missile destroyer armed with Tomahawk missiles. The Burkes cost $2 billion per ship for fiscal year 2024 and carry a mix of anti-aircraft and anti-surface weapons in 96 vertical-launch missile cells as their primary armament.

A navy that committed to replacing every Ford in the budget with ~6 Burke destroyers ($13B each vs. $2B each) would match up this way:

	Strike range	Explosives delivered (Nothing held back for air-defense or strike protection)
Carrier navy	570 miles (unrefueled)	350,000 lbs (12,040 lbs / aircraft * 62 aircraft * 945/2000 explosive weight in Mark 84 bomb)
Destroyer navy	1,000 miles (Tomahawk E land-attack)	576,000 lbs (6 ships * 96 cells * 1,000 lb warhead)

In this super-simple comparison, the destroyer navy has 60% more destructive power over 70% more range. This isn't fair to the aircraft carrier for a few reasons:

• After this alpha-strike, the carrier's aircraft return home, get refueled and re-armed, and are ready to do it again the same day or the next. Everything the carrier launches can be replenished at-sea. The destroyers have fired every missile they have and might have to return to port to reload.
• The carrier might use some of its aircraft to refuel others and extend the range of the strike. Or its aircraft might carry air-launched cruise missiles which will fly even farther. The Tomahawks have no such option.

To support a post-carrier navy, the destroyers would need built-in surveillance capabilities (currently provided by E-2 Hawkeyes from carriers or fighters flying reconnaissance missions) to enable accurate targeting of their missiles well over the horizon. A carrier air wing can be launched in the general direction of an enemy fleet and hope to hit it; a missile cannot. In addition, these ships are not nuclear-powered, and so would need a fleet of fuel tankers. Most importantly, they would need a massive industry to feed them missiles as quickly as they can fire them, and another fleet of reloading ships to enable the destroyers to stay on-station between battles.

A guided-missile destroyer navy is the ultimate expression of the "uncrewed aircraft / drones will replace crewed aircraft" school. Like an aircraft carrier's air wing, the missile armament of the destroyer is upgradable and easily re-mixed depending on the mission. With its missile cells spread across multiple smaller platforms, the fleet is harder to target and more resilient to attrition than a single aircraft carrier.

The Case For the Carrier

As mentioned above, the aircraft carrier has more staying power than a task force of destroyers: its primary propulsion is nuclear-powered (we'll treat aircraft fuel like "ammunition" here since the air wing is the weapons system) and the carrier has ammunition reserves for several launches so it can sustain operations longer than the destroyers. Although its air wing might use advanced missiles and consume spare parts, missions that call for "dumb" bombs - or even less-capable systems like JDAM GPS-guided bombs or APKWS laser-guided rockets can use them, lessening the strain on industry and resupply ships. To strike beyond 5-inch gun range, a guided-missile destroyer needs big, expensive missiles for all missions.

The greatest advantage the carrier has is its large aircraft. Unlike a destroyer navy, the carrier can launch its own aerial-refueling assets (e.g. MQ-25 or fighters with refueling stores) and airborne radars. Until the US Navy can deploy KV-22 Ospreys and airborne radars and scout aircraft that can launch and recover from destroyers, the aircraft carrier has a massive advantage. All of those Tomahawks require precision targeting information, and that information comes from large aircraft getting close enough to get sensors on the target. It's plausible to make a missile-cell-compatible recon drone (extra cameras, etc. and a satellite antenna in place of a warhead on a cruise missile), but an aerial radar would need to be used frequently and retrieved each time, which is not plausible without launch and recovery systems like an aircraft carrier. The Royal Navy experimented with a helicopter-based aerial radar and they're very unhappy with the result.

To support a carrier navy, the air wing needs to double-down on its best capabilities: sensing and acting as a force-multiplier for other naval units.  This means long-ranged scout aircraft, electronic warfare platforms, aerial radars, aerial refueling (with compatible land-based aircraft), and cargo transport. The offensive air wing needs to have enough range and firepower to spend time hunting enemy targets ("We think the enemy fleet is in this general area") and sinking them in a single sortie. This needs to happen at extreme range from the carrier to mitigate its own vulnerability. The current air wing is short-legged compared to its predecessors and full of general-purpose aircraft which would struggle to replicate the specialized knowledge and capabilities of previous air wings. Driving the air wing back towards a dedicated attack aircraft would restore balance. This enables various search-and-destroy missions that require human judgement to determine if a target is legitimate or not; in a peer-to-peer conflict we cannot assume that uncrewed systems will be able to "phone home" to get human feedback mid-mission.

My Conclusions

The aircraft carrier is not obsolete, but it is at risk. If the carrier can offload some missions that don't use its unique capabilities (fighting in the Arabian Gulf or Caribbean Sea where we have tons of land-based aircraft are an example, or deep strikes against well-known targets) to focus on those that do (force-multiplier systems, attacks against targets with many unknowns), it is still a valuable system. Extending the air wing's unrefueled range is critical, as is adding non-carrier refueling options. The air wing also has room to grow: post-Cold War budget cuts shrank the number of aircraft for each aircraft carrier, which reduced its striking power. Buying more aircraft to expand the wing is expensive but poses no technical challenges and the hangars already have the space.

If "Artillery [or the guided-missile destroyer] exists to launch large chunks of budget at an enemy it cannot actually see," then the carrier air wing needs to act as the eyes of those destroyers. Given the disparity in ranges between anti-aircraft missiles and cruise missiles, could we even see F-35 or F/A-18 fighters escorting a salvo of Tomahawks? If we are not willing to embrace the uniqueness of the aircraft carrier in open-ocean operations, then we should embrace the age of the destroyer and replicate aircraft-carrier capabilities with land-based, vertical-takeoff, and missile-cell systems.