Xeraphim1,
I greatly appreciate your points of debate. Shows you have a clear understanding of the issues at play.
Here is my “counter counter point”.
I don't agree with your sentiment nor do other countries. Russia is spending heavily to update their one carrier while China and India are building their own. Since they're all spending billions of dollars, they must think they are still worth having.
First is about Russia and China building their own carriers. Luckily for us, I see this as incredibly misguided. It is a huge waste of resources for both of them, and I am glad they are doing it. It is roughly the equivalent of the German Kaiser building a hugely expensive battleship fleet prior to WW1, which was not only almost worthless, it diverted resources away from the German Army.
Every time there is a technology shift, there is a big debate. The big ship proponents in the US and Japan didn’t slink off into the corner until after Midway (if at all). There was plenty of prewar evidence of the ascendancy of the carrier, yet both countries continued to build huge battleship fleets. Heck, think of the waste of the Yamato and Musashi for Japan (what if they had built another 4-6 carriers instead, which is what they could have done with the resources put into those behemoths).
Fortunately for us, the Russians and Chinese are building carriers instead of building modern diesel electric submarines, which would be MUCH more cost effective for them. They have fallen into the trap of building what we have built (like the Kaiser trying to match the British battlefleet), rather than what would be best for them.
While anti-ship missiles have gotten better, so have the counters to them. The most important is aircraft which can engage the launch platforms before the missiles are in range of ships. Also, SAMs have gotten much better, especially with the SM-6 using the sensor from AMRAAM missiles and cooperative engagement meaning they can can use targeting information from other sources and even be controlled by them, including F-35's.
Missiles can deny access to a certain area but they can't control that area. They are also expendable weapons. Aircraft are reusable, are much more flexible in their employment and much more versatile in the targets they can hit.
Next, about missiles. They used to be wildly inaccurate and cumbersome. Now they are not. They can indeed make it so nothing that floats goes anywhere near a concentration of them. Yes, aircraft are more versatile, but they are also hugely more expensive. And they because of this, there are not that many of them available in the air at any given time.
Yes the counter to missiles (SSMs and ASMs for surface to surface and air to surface missiles) are better. But the tactic is to overwhelm the defense with more targets than it can handle at once. The idea is to fire HUNDREDS of SSMs at once. Even if you take out 80% of the incoming, 20% still hit. And the reason I used the Falkand’s experience is to point out that even a single missile hit is catastrophic for a modern warship. They have no armor.
Next point is that the defense against the missiles requires many many aircraft airborne at the time of the attack. Keeping huge numbers of aircraft on station is very difficult as it requires late wartime effort (when you actually have huge numbers of aircraft on hand). It also requires radars working optimally and the targeting working well. This gets into a whole lot of radar vs countermeasure debate that is way too deep for this forum.
I will just point out that every time there is a new major war, both sides are pretty unprepared for what is going to happen as the militaries do not understand the implications of their new weapon systems.
In the US Civil War the militaries were trained in how to fight with muskets, which are wildly inaccurate past about 80 yards. Instead they were armed with rifles that were deadly accurate to 300-400 yards. Result: Unimaginable carnage. In WW1, they were trained in how to fight with rifles, but had machine guns and rapid fire, past line of sight artillery. Result: Unimaginable carnage. WW2 was much closer to WW1 timewise, but there was still difficulty in dealing with the aircraft (especially against ships), massed tanks, and coordinated submarines.
We now have MUCH greater acceleration of weapon technology between WW2 and now than ever before. The debate over what “modern warfare” looks like will not actually end until a year or so into WW3. Until then, there will not be enough hard evidence to end the debate.
But I am pretty confident that things will look quite different from WW2.
Lastly, the DF21 threat is not a fact, it is conjecture. However, the USN has stated that it doesn’t have a good response. I am not sure how the anti missile tracking and interception would work at the speeds involved. But I agree that a couple of dozen SSM hits would make any carrier pretty inoperative anyway.
That article is a bit hysterical. There is a similar launcher for NSM which can be added to any ship with the room for it. You still have to have sensors capable of finding the target and personal to operate the launchers. They're not going to be hidden away on commercial freighters.
Lastly, I would agree that the article is a lot of hyperbole. But it is what I could find quickly that had pictures of the missiles. The point to take away though is that while you needed a big ship to have viable anti ship weapons in WW1 or WW2, you can now put the weapons on any floating platform. Yes, they have to be controlled by something with good target acquisition, but the idea here is that you have a way to put hundreds of these things into the air simultaneously, and from multiple vectors against your intended target.
All of this is of course the debate I alluded to at the start of my original post. This debate will continue well into the next war. But I think the repetitive lessons of history will support what I am suggesting.