Sure, they can maybe be sunk if we start a shooting war with China. That leaves all the rest of the potential conflicts where having a mobile base might be nice.

How many of our carriers have actually been destroyed? Until we have some real-world data, your assumption doesn't hold water. Missiles and missile defense are incredibly complex beasts that almost never work quite as well operationally as expected.

In fairness, waiting for carriers to get sunk to generate some empirical data might not be the best route. Everything kind of has to be sorted out in simulation to get the best chance of success

The point is that we do that, and the problem space is just too complex to produce clear answers. We don't know what would happen if someone launched a missile at one of our aircraft carriers. With that in mind, nick is clearly begging the question.

China has developed an entire missile class devoted to destroyong aircraft carriers.

I gander that there's a reason that we're the only country with more than one aircraft carrier.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-21

We can all argue till we're blue in the face over how vulnerable aircraft carriers are, but the reason that we're the only country with multiple super carriers (there are countries with multiple smaller carriers) is that they're expensive as hell and only the US's outsized military spending can support them.

they are very useful outside of a full-on war with a major power.

Of course, in those scenarios a much smaller, less expensive carrier would be just as useful. The difference between a full-on supercarrier and something more modest, like the America-class assault ships (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America-class_amphibious_assau...), is kind of moot when the OPFOR is a bunch of guys in Toyota trucks.

And a smaller carrier would allow the Navy to field more of them at the same cost, which would mean being able to "show the flag" in more places simultaneously without having to run a few ships ragged trying to cover them all at once.

> The difference between a full-on supercarrier and something more modest, like the America-class assault ships..., is kind of moot when the OPFOR is a bunch of guys in Toyota trucks.

I'm not so sure when the more modest carrier is only seems capable of fielding VTOL aircraft:

> The America-class amphibious assault ships...are designed to put ashore a Marine Expeditionary Unit using helicopters and MV-22B Osprey V/STOL transport aircraft, supported by AV-8B Harrier II or F-35 Lightning II V/STOL aircraft and various attack helicopters.

They’re great to muscle little countries around.

In Vietnam conflict, tons and tons of iron bombs were dropped by expensive jets piloted by pilots whose training was very expensive, all to kill a few enemy with ak47 rifles with not much ammunition.

Pretty much our conflicts or wars since Vietnam.