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.