You can't win with stand-off strike capability. You can't seize and control territory, you can't keep strategic choke-points open, you can't change regimes.
But you can definitely lose by spending two or three multi-million dollar air defense interceptors per incoming projectile that costs 10x to 100x less. Especially when your supply chain can only produce hundreds of interceptors per year and your adversary makes that many missiles per month and 10x that many drones per month.
To be clear, there is zero historic evidence—going back to the Blitz—that strategic bombing has ever been able to do any of these things.
Except the one about choke points. That isn’t strategic. It’s tactical. And using artillery or airpower for shaping operations absolutely works.
> you can definitely lose by spending two or three multi-million dollar air defense interceptors per incoming projectile that costs 10x to 100x less
Agree. Fortunately, the MIC seems to have recognized this. None of it fundamentally changes the value of carriers. It just means they need to be defended differently from before. Sort of how you can’t sent lone carriers out into the ocean, they have to be escorted.
I'm also not aware of a single case in history where a massive bombing campaign from a hostile country resulted in an immediate populist uprising and a regime change that favored that aggressor country. Having your city bombed for weeks on end tends to cause people to shelter where they can, worry solely about how they will survive the wreckage, and bond with their fellow citizens.
The fact that an air campaign and magical thinking was the complete game plan from trump and hegseth shows how utterly unqualified they are for the positions they have.
Not quite. It is hard to build an airplane, it is easy to build a drone. So if the battle comes to who is going to send more drones, then a big carrier will lose: it doesn't have a factory to build drones.
The real economics of battleships (and their precursor ships of the line) were:
Given expensive armaments (cannon), it is cheaper to concentrate these on a mobile platform that can geographically reposition itself than build / deploy / supply equivalent power everywhere, and the former allows for local overmatch.
Sufficiently cheap and powerful unmanned guided munitions (drones, cheap cruise/ballistic missiles, UAV/USV/UUVs) are a fundamentally different balance of power, especially with enough range.
What does make sense is a return to cheaper escort carriers, where the carrier should be as cheap as possible (preferably unmanned) as the platforms it hosts are no longer exquisite.