The US solution to this problem is to build a ridiculous number of carriers so there's coverage on both sides.

It's only ridiculous if you assume we'll never lose one (or more) in a real shooting war. That's not an assumption US planners are prepared to make.

It's ridiculous because most countries have one or two at most and the US has eleven.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_in_s...

Yes, but it gets even more ridiculous once you consider the fact that the last 60 years have been relatively peaceful for Naval warfare. During WW2 the U.S. had well over 100 aircraft carriers on active duty.

>> "...the last 60 years have been relatively peaceful for Naval warfare..."

Overwhelming American naval power is a cause of this peace, not an irrelevant/wasteful overbuild. It's peace through superior firepower, Pax Americana.

Arguably it's the threat of nuclear annihilation that's done that.

If anything the aircraft carriers are what the US does to stir up shit around the globe: Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada, Iraq, and Afghanistan among others.

It's not just the nukes. What makes arms races start is a relative parity of force. If you have one carrier and the US has eleven, there's no point in building another one or two without building ten. So you either bite the bullet and build ten, or you don't build any. That's a whole lot of money to shell out, so most countries won't do it.

But let's say you have a carrier and nobody else has more than one. Building a second makes you top dog and opens up a range of strategic options.

That's amongst the superpowers. And even then, "everyone" knows that Nukes are last resort. Carriers allow constant ACTUAL power projection that can respond to events that don't require nukes.

Considering the cold war relatively peaceful at sea is interesting, firstly.

Secondly, I would argue that the reason the seas have been free from "major conflict" over the last 60 years is in no small measure due to the preponderance of naval power wielded by the United States and Russia. If odds had not been overwhelming, do you think there would have been less conflict, or more?

Russia doesn't have much of a navy excluding nuclear submarines and the only reason those are a problem is because of the megaton-yield nuclear weapons they carry.

I doubt anything but nukes kept the US and Russia from going to war. Hell, aside from a few screwups, we almost went to war despite the nukes in 1963.

It was actually 1962 (Cuban Missile Crisis) and 1983 (false alarm) [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...

'62 then. We may have gone to war accidentally in '83, but in '62 it would have been on purpose, with full knowledge of what it entailed.

Because some of those carriers were light/escort carriers that were numbered differently.

How did they have well over a 100 carriers when the recently launched Ford has ID CVN-78 (I.e. the 78th carrier launched)?

Support carriers had a different naming system and a CVE prefix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Navy_esc...

They're much smaller and less sophisticated than the fleet carriers, but the US built a metric shitton of them during WWII and they were essential in projecting air power.

As a side note, to illustrate their lesser "sophistication", they got the following nickname:

Combustible Vulnerable and Expendable (CVE).

Oh wow, I had no idea. Thanks!

Zany already answered it, but yes, some were of the smaller or slower variety:

https://www.quora.com/How-many-aircraft-carriers-did-the-USA...

The US Navy built 78 escort carriers in less than four years during WWII.

http://www.navy.mil/navydata/nav_legacy.asp?id=3

That pace of production is absolutely nuts. The turn around time on these was six to eight months per ship, start to finish.

Escort carriers were basically just merchant ships with a flat deck. They were small enough to build in ports that couldn't accommodate larger warships.

And they weren't really designed for battle - they were designed to protect convoys from submarines (at least the US version). They weren't as fast as fleet carriers, had smaller air wings, little armor, less range, almost no anti-aircraft capability, and not much in the way of damage control. As a pilot you really wouldn't want to be on an escort carrier.

Though it could be worse - you could be on a CAM ship:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAM_ship

In the Battle of Leyte Gulf a handful of escort carriers were responsible for sinking a fair number of Japanese capital ships, so they weren't useless in fleet actions.

Once they got going, liberty ships took an average of like 40 days. As a stunt they built one in 5 days.

The scale of WW2 manufacturing boggles the mind. The numbers from Russian tank factories are pretty astounding too.

All of that with virtually no automation as well. Just sheer brute force of labour: Machinists, welders, forge operators and their tools.

Kind of depends on your definition of automation, I suspect many of those jobs were using much more advanced tools than their grandparents would have. If I were to build a fence tomorrow I'd be using a nail gun and bench saw to automate most of the hard work, as little as a few decades ago I wouldn't have had those tools.

Those aircraft carriers looked absolutely nothing like the ones from today. They were basically mostly normal ships with a flat top, thanks to the fact that they didn't have to deal with jets. Propeller planes needed no takeoff catapults and no landing hooks.

They used an already existing hull.

Also lower standards and total war economy will do wonders for speed of production.

It wasn't lower standards so much as once you'd built twenty of them, building twenty more back to back allowed you to get really good at being efficient.

Today they keep switching things up so much between each iteration.

I don't know about the CVE, but the earlier Liberty ships were not particularly well constructed (brittle steel that resulted in some of them breaking in half in the middle of the Atlantic under cold conditions).

But for the few that broke in half, several more were sunk by U-Boots. They weren't expected to last many more years after the war (life span of only 5 years) and it didn't matter that much given the short term necessity of the war.

The escort carrier is by design definition created with lower standards. It sacrificed speed, carry capacity, armor and offensive weaponry for the sake of pumping them out as fast as possible. I mean, when the base is a civilian ship, its clear that they're not working with some massively high standard to start with.

Most countries haven't made the commitments the US has. I'm all for reducing the size of the US navy, but first (or at least coincident) we have to reduce our commitments.

One of the problems is we're the guarantor of Japan's security, and we can't do that without at least three carrier battle groups (one on station, one under refit, one in transit). If we stop, Japan will feel compelled to build its own carriers (and not just "helicopter carrying destroyers"), which could kick off a regional naval arms race.

That's the theory, anyway. The Chinese are already building a first-class navy as quickly as they can, so the neighbors are starting to consider their options. And then there's the Norks...

> t's ridiculous because most countries have one or two at most and the US has eleven.

+10 assault carrier ships with vtol aircrafts on them (harriers, F-35).

One US aircraft carrier has the combined fire power of all of the other world Navy's combined. And we got 11 of them. That is how superior the US Navy is to anything else I the world.

This isn't even close to being true. The Russians alone have more than enough to destroy a single US carrier.

With a $1 trillion military budget the US can lose half of them and still have more left than the rest of the world combined.. :-/

That's not even counting the half dozen under construction.

One. There's only one under construction with and additional one planned.

The way a carrier group works you shouldn't be cramming it all into a canal.

The primary size constraint of US ships is the Panama canal.

The Suez restriction is due to politics and tolls, not size.

Not for a USN Carrier since 1945- USS Midway exceeded (then current) PANAMAX.

The new Suez canal has been transited by at least one U.S. nuclear-powered carrier, the USS Theodore Roosevelt [0].

[0] Speeded-up video of the transit: https://sploid.gizmodo.com/cool-video-of-a-us-aircraft-carri...

these ships can't use the Suez canal in peace-time under the currently negotiated treaties. if they really truly must go through the canal, who's gonna stop them?

Egypt could scuttle a ship or two if they wanted - at both ends, trapping the fleet inside.

Seems to me that canals make rather sitting targets for warships, at war time at least.

>Egypt could scuttle a ship or two if they wanted - at both ends, trapping the fleet inside.

See the Yellow Fleet, trapped in the Suez Canal for 8 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Fleet

A carrier battle group is more than powerful enough to control both ends of the canal for the duration of the trip, and I seriously doubt that Egypt (or any other country) would want to cripple an economic engine as large as a canal unless they were directly involved in the war in question.

how are you going to stop someone from scuttling a ship? sink it?

> how are you going to stop someone from scuttling a ship? sink it?

Yes. A carrier group is able to project military power for a great distance around itself. Long range missiles, submarines, aircraft, you name it. Presumably it would monitor the canal along its entire length, and destroy anything that approaches by land or sea before it is able to create or become an obstacle.

They can't stop a team in a small boat from boarding a merchantman, positioning it cross-ways in the canal, then sinking it. Do this once at each end, and your carrier group just lost it's mobility and much of it's ability to project force.

Admittedly there are edge cases and military planners like nothing more than dreaming these up and devising countermeasures. The Suez and Panama Canals are not small, so it's not as if all the ships have to crowd together and be trapped in a small area. But yes, there are threats and their probability of success is never 100%.

Here's an interesting lesson from WW2 which shows the danger of previously unknown coastal torpedo batteries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Drøbak_Sound

Then Egypt has declared war on the United States and is going to have much bigger issues to deal with.

If the US sent in it's fleet when Egypt says no, that's the US declaring war through the act of invading a foreign country.

If you sink it anywhere which isn't directly in front of the canal then the scuttling is a failure, right? A typical anti-ship missile has some 150 km range, seems pretty easy to sink that ship long before it reaches the canal.

Really? Multiple carrier groups, plus ground contingents from the Army and Marines, plus the Air Force are unable to "control" Iraq or Afghanistan...

I am no military genius, but Iraq and Afghanistan sound larger, more complex, and not as commandable by sea as a typical canal.

Perhaps you are unaware of the events of 1956 when the combined forces of Britain and France failed to hold the Suez Canal?

Perhaps you're unaware of the power that a US Navy carrier group has in 2017 :)

It's all relative, no?

Anybody with an anti-ship miss that they can launch from shore. Gary Brecher/War Nerd wrote an article, that I can't find at the moment, about how vulnerable the US Navy is to attack by shore-based missles where the Navy doesn't have a good stand-off distance.