"What if the Aircraft Carrier Had Never Been Invented?" Topic
4 Posts
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Tango01 | 13 Sep 2015 10:31 p.m. PST |
"Aircraft carriers are multi-billion dollar investments—in the case of USS Gerald Ford, some $12 USD billion. They take years to build—in the case of the French ship Charles de Gaulle, twelve years. They take a long time to repair—USS Eisenhower is just back from a two-year stay at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard. And as the US Navy is remembering in its Optimized Fleet Response Plan, training their crews is difficult and costly. As Michael Horowitz wrote in The Diffusion of Military Power (Princeton University Press, 2010), they pose serious organizational challenges to any navy. So what if all these problems had been deemed too daunting back in the 1920s? What if the world had taken a collective pass on the aircraft carrier? The balance of bureaucratic and international rivalries would have produced alternative histories, and some intriguing military-technological trajectories. The aircraft carrier is indeed a challenge—thus today, only Brazil, China, France, Italy, Russia, Spain, and the United States operate fixed-wing aircraft from ships. Brazil's membership in that club is tenuous, as its 55 year-old second-hand French carrier, the São Paolo (formerly the Foch), has been under almost continuous repair for the past fifteen years. Soon enough, the United Kingdom will operate a fixed-wing carrier again (HMS Queen Elizabeth); currently (with HMS Ocean) sits with Japan, South Korea, and Thailand as operating carriers, but only with rotary-wing aircraft. Operating helicopter carriers is challenging too, but the flight deck and hangar bay choreography is not on the same order of complexity…" Full article here link Amicalement Armand |
GarrisonMiniatures | 13 Sep 2015 11:29 p.m. PST |
Bit of a difference in the requirements in 1918 and today… |
PHGamer | 14 Sep 2015 7:48 a.m. PST |
A small error in the article, as the USS Washington sank the IJN Kirashima. |
sjpatejak | 18 Sep 2015 9:40 p.m. PST |
The primary function of a US super-carrier is not sea control as it was understood by Nimitz or Yamamoto. There is no other navy that even approaches the USN in size and power. A CVN's air group is equivalent to the whole air force of a mid-sized country. They exist to attack land targets without having to get permission to base aircraft in a foreign country. About 80% of the earth's surface are reachable by carrier-based aircraft. |
4th Cuirassier | 20 Oct 2015 10:35 a.m. PST |
Given 1914-1918 I struggle to conceive of any situation in which the aircaft carrier does not get developed. Either the historical course of action happens – the RN starts planning a Taranto raid on an enemy fleet too outnumbered to sortie – or the German navy commissions an Ausonia-type of carrier, either to do the same, or to perform the nuisance coastal raiding role the battlecruisers used to perform, so as to lure a portion of the RN south where the High Seas Fleet can cut it off and destroy it. The RN going this way is the likelier, because the resources involved in a German CVK would have been better used in a U-boat program, which by 1918 had already failed. The RN was still looking for ways to take it to the enemy. Once one player has a carrier fleet, everyone else needs one. In a way, the builders of the 1920s and 1930s were remarkably visionary. As the design notes for the 1930s scenarios in the Carriers At War PC games used to say, carrier air strikes aren't very effective yet, which is just as well because neither is your combat air patrol. Despite this they built ships future-proof enough to be able to embark those designs. With battleships, the only way to have speed and armour and hitting power was to go huge in size. With carriers, same thing so I suspect we'd be here either way, probably kicked off by the IJN. |
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