While the Millennium Challenge is a hilarious story, the red forces were able to win primarily because the general in charge of them found all of the loopholes in the rules and exploited the shit out of them. He did this essentially to protest the notion of having a wargame in the first place, because he correctly realized that the military’s real goal in holding wargames was to do propaganda and get funding for more military hardware.
The value of carriers is to provide a platform to launch missiles and aircraft anywhere in the world, the reason we have them and other countries don’t bother is that we’re the one with the global spanning military hegemony that requires that capability. The reason they’re more vulnerable despite being really hard to sink is that we’re pretty good at shooting down anti-ship missiles, but if you wanted to take one out of the fight with an electronics attack or a tiny suicide boat that would be extremely difficult to stop.
whatever happened to those ship-mounted railguns? The ones that were supposed to be able to launch like a 25kg projectile with enough force that it’d hit its target with the energy of a double trailer truck going 65mph, going far to fast to be to intercept or probably even notice before impact.
