John Chuckman
COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY JOSEPH MCGRAW IN CHECKPOINT ASIA (ANTI-EMPIRE)
“Who Is Going to Risk a $13 Billion Aircraft Carrier in Combat?
“The price tag makes the carrier useless in peer-to-peer combat”
The headline is certainly accurate, but of course the US uses its aircraft carriers to intimidate countries which are not "combat peers."
It will be able to continue the bullying until the day that some of the best anti-ship missiles - Russia's or China's or good knock-offs - become available to such countries.
Iran, too - quickly advancing impressively in missile technology - may develop a first-rate anti-ship missile that could be made available to vulnerable countries the way it seems to have shared some technology with Yemen.
Iran has an anti-ship missile, but we don't know how good it is. It was thought enough of a potential threat recently for America to keep its carrier in the area a few hundred miles away from Iran's missile-lined shores for a time.
Technology does change everything.
By the way, the cost of carriers is immensely more than just a contractor's bill for building one.
Necessary escort and supply ships plus the maintenance of a crew on the order of three to five thousand on one ship, a crew that makes them even more of a target.
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I cannot avoid the thought of the Polish General Staff maintaining its colorful 19th century horse cavalry and sending it against the invading Wehrmacht in 1939.
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Response to another comment:
Sorry, no, I don't know of any myth on this subject of the Polish cavalry.
There was the incident of 1939. It is a memorable anecdote, and it serves I believe as a real lesson about generals and fighting the last war.
The classic, horrifying large-scale example of the same military thinking is represented by the trench warfare in WWI.
That was half a century after the same trench warfare was used in the American Civil War with ghastly consequences.
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Response to another comment:
We can only hope that America’s bullying is coming to an end, but I see little sign of that happening "fast."
Stubborn people possessing immensely powerful weapons can go on making misery for a long time.
Witness America's pointless ten-year holocaust in Vietnam.
Or America's pointless eighteen years of blowing up peasants in Afghanistan to no gain at all.
As for China and Russia "not letting" America carry on gunboat diplomacy against relatively defenseless countries, I can't agree.
Neither of those sensible powers would risk major war with the US over such matters.
But they will work with many different chess moves toward obstructing or blunting America, as we've seen in Venezuela and Syria and now, perhaps, Iraq (where the government, frustrated by America’s refusal to leave the country, is exploring the purchase of either Russia’s S-300 or S-400 anti-aircraft missiles).
