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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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'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.
>> "...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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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?
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%.
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.
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.
turn of the century, think 1900-1910 ships, suffered severely from lack of development in boiler technology. Four, five, and even six, in a row could be found. One or two even had parallel rows. For many ships, mostly battleships, which went under modernization programs after WW1 the most common noticeable change was reduction in the number of funnels as boiler count was halved or reduced by two thirds. It wasn't uncommon to take a battleship or even a cruiser apart as it was still cheaper to do let alone easier to get the budget for.
with regards to this new carrier it probably was a good idea to not go nuclear when your experience with it at this scale is not sufficient plus just the inherent costs of doing that.
one would think the age of CVs has passed similar to how the age of BBs passed even prior to WW2 but naval commands are very loathe to acknowledge a shift in tactics until half their fleet is sunk
It doesn't make it clear unless you know what that means. "HM" is understood to mean Her Majesty, but the "S" could mean anything to those not familiar with the abbreviation.
HMS, HMAS (Australia), HMCS (Canada) are fairly well understood and widely used in the press.
As a Brit, we generally understand that USS George H.W. Bush is a big ship, not a person. This seems to be the same case from the other side of the Atlantic.
With twice as many towers the enlisted personnel on Royal Navy carriers will have twice as many people pissed off at them when there's a minor slip up.
> The captain has a day cabin just behind the bridge for use at sea but as is usual on a carrier, his spacious main cabin is down aft with the other officer accommodation. There is a small lift that allows him to quickly get up or down from the bridge to the operations room which is situated seven decks below.
> The Commander Air, “Wings” gets a day cabin in the aft island but does not have his own lift, like the Captain up forward.
I know there's a perfectly good practical reason for the Commander Air not having a lift, but i do love the idea that we British are still playing silly little status games even at sea!
In all seriousness, symbols of status are important in the military, and not just to stroke the top guy's ego. They reinforce the notion of hierarchy, which is something without which you lose battles you might have won.
Besides, if there's any people who know how to prepare for and execute surface warfare, it's you British. Clearly you've done something right over the years.
The reason is very simple : after the Falklands war the Royal Navy adopted a design rule which states that all surface ships must have two islands. You can see it in the 45, 23 and 26.
My guess is that this is because of the fires which took Sheffield out of combat, the initial damage from the Exocet warhead was substantial, but what killed Sheffield and Coventry was the fire afterwards. The investigations afterwards showed that a split superstructure would have allowed continued operation including withdrawal from the combat space and low allocation of rescue resources.
I think/guess that this would have been critical should aggressor forces been slightly more substantial; it would have been very easy to get into a situation where the capability to manage the rescue and recovery of struck ships would have been lost, and this would have led to a substantial escalation in casualties and probable collapse of the fighting capability of the formation - hence to a strategic opportunity for aggressor forces.
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_in_s...
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?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
https://www.quora.com/How-many-aircraft-carriers-did-the-USA...
http://www.navy.mil/navydata/nav_legacy.asp?id=3
The scale of WW2 manufacturing boggles the mind. The numbers from Russian tank factories are pretty astounding too.
Also lower standards and total war economy will do wonders for speed of production.
Today they keep switching things up so much between each iteration.
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.
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.
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.
Combustible Vulnerable and Expendable (CVE).
Overwhelming American naval power is a cause of this peace, not an irrelevant/wasteful overbuild. It's peace through superior firepower, Pax Americana.
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.
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.
+10 assault carrier ships with vtol aircrafts on them (harriers, F-35).
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...
Seems to me that canals make rather sitting targets for warships, at war time at least.
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.
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
See the Yellow Fleet, trapped in the Suez Canal for 8 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Fleet
[0] Speeded-up video of the transit: https://sploid.gizmodo.com/cool-video-of-a-us-aircraft-carri...
with regards to this new carrier it probably was a good idea to not go nuclear when your experience with it at this scale is not sufficient plus just the inherent costs of doing that.
one would think the age of CVs has passed similar to how the age of BBs passed even prior to WW2 but naval commands are very loathe to acknowledge a shift in tactics until half their fleet is sunk
But HMS Queen Elizabeth is a ship and the islands are the two towering structures on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_Majesty%27s_Ship
Headlines are inherently not exhaustive in their explanation, that's kind of the point.
FTFY
If "HMS" is ambiguous, than [surely "carrier" is too](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier).
HMS is ambiguous until you add carrier, which gives it just a hint of context.
As a Brit, we generally understand that USS George H.W. Bush is a big ship, not a person. This seems to be the same case from the other side of the Atlantic.
> The Commander Air, “Wings” gets a day cabin in the aft island but does not have his own lift, like the Captain up forward.
I know there's a perfectly good practical reason for the Commander Air not having a lift, but i do love the idea that we British are still playing silly little status games even at sea!
In all seriousness, symbols of status are important in the military, and not just to stroke the top guy's ego. They reinforce the notion of hierarchy, which is something without which you lose battles you might have won.
Besides, if there's any people who know how to prepare for and execute surface warfare, it's you British. Clearly you've done something right over the years.
My guess is that this is because of the fires which took Sheffield out of combat, the initial damage from the Exocet warhead was substantial, but what killed Sheffield and Coventry was the fire afterwards. The investigations afterwards showed that a split superstructure would have allowed continued operation including withdrawal from the combat space and low allocation of rescue resources.
I think/guess that this would have been critical should aggressor forces been slightly more substantial; it would have been very easy to get into a situation where the capability to manage the rescue and recovery of struck ships would have been lost, and this would have led to a substantial escalation in casualties and probable collapse of the fighting capability of the formation - hence to a strategic opportunity for aggressor forces.
http://www.savetheroyalnavy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/H...