Ep 034 "CG Excursions: Deep Six the Carrier Force: Naval Power in the 21st Century"

Chasing Ghosts: An Irregular Warfare Podcast

Excursions is a new addition to the CG universe to cover adjacent conflict issues to the irregular warfare fight.

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In the future near-peer and peer fight, salvo competition will be the preeminent means by which one country will kinetically overwhelm the other in a fight. I discuss the way the West is in an existential hazard of being woefully under-prepared to meet the threat if Western forces go toe toe with regional hegemons in the East or West.

Let’s anticipate the disasters now that are the Spanish in the English Channel in 1588, the British Royal Navy at Jutland in 1916, and the discovery in WWII all these battleships were not really capital ships, or had adequate armaments, yet their political dimensions compel not only their continuous construction but are the most devastating when lost.

The aircraft carrier has been a signature component of US naval power and prestige for more than a century. The utility has continued to diminish since the end of WWII. The tremendous disadvantage of putting so much manpower and treasure into these single use leviathan systems in the modern world of distributed missile and PGM systems, emerging near-peer & peer adversaries and concentration of power in vulnerable systems is a recipe for future disaster.

References:

Gerry Doyle Carrier Killer: China's Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles and Theater of Operations in the early 21st Century

David Lee Russell Early U.S. Navy Carrier Raids, February-April 1942: Five Operations That Tested a New Dimension of American Air Power

Jeff Vandenengel Questioning the Carrier: Opportunities in Fleet Design for the U.S. Navy

Jeff Vandenengel interview on Midrats with CDR Salamander

Ivan Gogin Fighting ships of the PEOPLE LIBERATION ARMY NAVY 1949 - 2023

Jerry Hendrix Retreat From Range: The Rise and Fall of Carrier Aviation

My Substack:

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Email at [e-mail].