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.
That, and the future of naval combat is under the surface. The day of the carrier has come and gone long ago. Just like the battleship before it, it’ll take a devastating naval battle or war to convince the admirals and government acquisition people.
Another consideration is just how much the US spends per missile. Each bit of ordnance in the US arsenal is vastly more expensive than any adversary, and, even though America spends a ludicrous amount on ‘defense’ each year, the inventory isn’t very large simply due to cost. Sure, you could argue that the contractors would just make more, but they won’t do it for free, and the industrial base to do it quickly for a near-peer/peer war just doesn’t exist. A huge byproduct of the neoliberal policies of the late 20th century pushing manufacturing overseas is that America just doesn’t have the capacity to fight a protracted war, especially if some of its bank-breaking toys start getting broken. For all of the antiballistic missile spending, the inventory of actual intercept vehicles likely isn’t much larger than what is currently installed, and never will be. Sure, Boeing could convert its 747 factories to make warbirds, but how long would that take, and how many civilian airliner production facilities do they even have? Sure, the shipbuilders can crank out a couple of ships a year, but the shipyard jobs are mostly gone. If an adversary started sinking ships, there just wouldn’t be any more (except the LCS, which is just garbage). The mothball fleet would take at least a year to start putting to sea, and with what ordnance? Of course, this is all ignoring the elephant in the room, nuclear annihilation, but it’s fun to think about.
When Bush was CIA director he lied about the true strength of the Soviet Union in order to justify increasing military spending. It is possible that this war games report is just lies about China in order to justify greater military spending.
You say that but they’re actually planning on making a super duper carrier
Millenium Challenge 2002
