Key Points and Summary: Aircraft carriers have reigned supreme in naval warfare for over a century, constantly evolving to incorporate new technologies.
-From biplanes to jets, nuclear weapons to drones, the carrier’s simple flight deck has allowed it to adapt and remain relevant.
-Despite facing threats like nuclear weapons, guided missiles, and submarines, carriers have integrated these advancements into their own arsenals.
-While modern carriers like the USS Ford are expensive and carry large crews, their ability to project air power globally remains unmatched.
-The future may see further radical changes, potentially even submerged carriers, but the core concept of a mobile airbase at sea is likely to endure.
Beyond the Flight Deck: How Aircraft Carriers Adapt to New Threats
The aircraft carrier, now just over one hundred years old, is one of the most resilient weapons of the modern era.
More than a thousand feet long, nuclear-powered, and home to more than seventy aircraft, carriers are unmatched in presence, versatility, and firepower.
Like every weapon system, the aircraft carrier will someday become obsolete, but that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.
Aircraft Carrier History
In 1922, the world’s first purpose-built aircraft carrier, Hosho, entered the Imperial Japanese Navy service. Although other ships in navies worldwide had operated aircraft, Hosho was the first to be purpose-built as an aircraft carrier.
Hosho’s construction signaled that the Japanese Navy believed naval aviation had a future, or at least enough of one to warrant the construction of a 552-foot-long warship.
Hosho had all the classic features of an aircraft carrier, features that stand out to this day. It had a raised island for directing flight operations, arresting gear to recover landing airplanes, a voluminous hangar for storing and maintaining aircraft, and elevators for shuttling aircraft and ordnance from the hangar topside. But most important of all, it had a full length flight deck, a simple flat surface that extended from bow to stern, that mimicked the runway of a conventional airfield.
This simple feature set assured the carrier’s future for the next century and beyond.
In the 1920s, aircraft carriers, including Hosho, the Royal Navy’s Argus, and the U.S. Navy’s Langley, were equipped with biplane fighters and reconnaissance aircraft. This reflected the common attitude towards carriers as scouts of the fleet, using their aircraft to scour vast stretches of ocean in search of the enemy’s main battle fleet so that battleships and cruisers could engage in decisive battle.
By the time of the Second World War, carriers would also add torpedo-dropping aircraft and dive bombers, boosting their firepower against surface ships and land targets.
What Makes Aircraft Carriers Special: Attack from Range
In the hundreds of miles, the range of carrier aircraft eclipsed the range of even the largest ship-based guns. This meant aircraft carriers could fight over much greater distances than battleships, bring greater firepower to bear against them without putting themselves within the range of enemy guns, and attack targets farther inland.
By the 1930s, the writing was clearly on the wall that carriers had surpassed battleships as the dominant naval platform. It took the Battle of Midway in June 1942, fought almost entirely with aircraft carriers, to confirm the U.S. Navy battleship losses at Pearl Harbor had ultimately been irrelevant and that the age of the flat-top had arrived.
Why All the Hate on Aircraft Carriers? They Can Adapt
Once the carrier had risen to the top, its demise was repeatedly predicted. A single nuclear weapon could sink a carrier. Jet engines meant bombers could close with carriers faster, reducing their defensive reaction time. Guided missiles made attacks on carriers more accurate.
Each time, the carrier absorbed the threat and made it part of its arsenal, making it more capable. Carriers shifted to nuclear power, increasing the ship’s ability to avoid attack, and added nuclear weapons to its list of aircraft-delivered munitions. Prop-powered planes gave way to jet-powered planes, and carriers fielded aircraft-launched guided missiles of their own.
This ability to absorb and adapt was due to the carrier’s most mundane feature: a large, flat surface to launch and recover aircraft. Radar, anti-ship and anti-surface weapons, anti-submarine weapons, electronic warfare, aerial refueling, stealth, and even nuclear weapons are all a function of the aircraft, not the ship.
An aircraft carrier could simply change and embark on the latest technology by swapping out its aircraft, embarking with newer, more capable planes. Thanks to the flight deck, an aircraft carrier can endlessly reinvent itself in the future, adding such new tech as lasers, drones, artificial intelligence, advanced communications and networking, and perhaps even tech that we can’t envision today.
Carriers won’t stay in their current form forever. Carriers today are too expensive, with the newest ship, USS Ford, coming in at a whopping 13 billion dollars. Ford also embarks too many people, approximately 4,000 sailors, ensuring a national calamity if it were somehow sunk. They are arguably too large and vulnerable, and many experts argue the submarine is now the dominant platform at sea. That might well be true, but carriers could once again co-opt the threat to their dominance by simply absorbing it. A warship that can submerge to avoid detection and surface to launch and recover drones might well be the next step in the evolution of the aircraft carrier.
The aircraft carrier’s greatest strength is its ability to reinvent itself endlessly. While carriers might eventually lose even their flight decks, the concept of a mobile, seagoing platform for projecting air power will live on. The aircraft carrier has allowed the United States to maintain a dominant position at sea for over eighty years.
There is every reason to believe the aircraft carrier can survive for another eighty years, but to do so, it must continue to embrace change, not buck it.
About the Author: Kyle Mizokami
Kyle Mizokami is a writer on defense and security issues and has been at Popular Mechanics since 2015. If it involves explosions or projectiles, he’s generally in favor of it. Kyle’s articles have appeared at The Daily Beast, U.S. Naval Institute News, The Diplomat, Foreign Policy, Combat Aircraft Monthly, VICE News, and others. Kyle is also a Contributing Editor for 19FortyFive. He lives in San Francisco.
