Intersting comments.

As to a) destroy whatever is sensing me and b) move my CVN. Are you being sensed by over-the-horizon radar, spacecraft, a Merchant ship? There are number of ways to detect a Carrier that do not result in a causal arrow pointing at the perpetrator. You can't just "run away" because these missiles have guided warheads. The same reason you can't run away from a cruise missile.

The comment " I have yet to see anyone propose realistic ways to allow land-based aircraft to stand in for the carrier" points out a much broader problem. If your land bases are inside the footprint of the missiles, how do you operate short legged aircraft (at least shorter than the threatening missiles) from either one? The primary choices are to invest heavily in a new generation of affordable missile defense (High Energy, to get away from the magazine battle) or dispersal so the enemy has to divide his TBM arsenal into packets you can defend against to make a dent in your combat power.

The notion that a carrier is too useful to be declared obsolete is a testiment to the flexibility of the large deck CSG, but unfortunately usefulness does not beget survivability, and when the useful thing is not survivable in certain environments, all the usefullness in the world is to no avail.

The nature exactly how much vulnerability is "too much" is something that I simply wanted to demonstrate in broad brush strokes, that whether it requires 275 or 10 missiles, the vulnerability exists, and its simply a matter of investment calculus to exploit - not a technological hurdle. It may indeed be expensive, but China has the money to spend. For a well-documented analysis of Chinese moernization see:

http://project2049.net/documents/aer...kes_easton.pdf

On the point of not being able to tell a conventional missile from a Nuke, that is a primary reason we have not developed conventional TBMs. The role we would employ such a missile in would be to attack the bases of an adversary's missiles inside thier boarders, where differentiating a nuclear from a conventional attack has dire implications. Shooting a missile out to sea is very different story. Yes, it might be a nuke, but given the capability of conventional ordnance there is little reason to escalate to that extent.

Also the same argument was made regarding cruise missiles (which can be nuclear armed just as easily as ballistic missiles) but we expect our adversaries to "just take our word for it" that we will not use nuclear cruise missiles without telling them first. For us to tell China that any use of TBMs would be assumed to be nuclear, would likely be met with a response to declare any use of cruise misles on our part to be met with a nuclear response. This is tantamount to going back to the old days when we assumed that we could deter any conventional military action with the threat to respond with nukes. That policy never worked because, as a Chinese diplomat recently quipped "you are unwilling to trade Los Angeles for Taipei". I would add "or a CSG".


So what do we do? Given that the current CSG will have freedom of action inside the Chinese missile envelope given the Chinese choose not to hold it at risk, what is it that the CSG provides that we cannot achieve through other menas? Carriers provide a sortie generation rate of about 100 sorties a day (with occasional surges to maybe twice that) out to say 500 miles from a location unencumbered by politics.

It is as big as it is becasue it carries everything it needs to be essentially self sufficient airbase for manned aircraft for about 6 months. The new Ford class CVN is the most efficient and effective platform to do that ever designed. But it is still limited to having to close within about 500 miles to achieve its effect. That means it is vulnerable. This can be addressed by decreasing its vulnerability (through dispersal or defenses) of by looking at ways to have it stand off at greater than 500nm. IF you integrate unmanned aircraft into the air wing, you can greatly extend the reach, you can extend it even more by utilizing "lillypad" rearm and refuelling platforms.

This is crux of my argument that it is the currently configured CSG that is "obsolete" but necessarily the CVN. It just needs a much different supporting cast to enable it to mitigate new vulnerabilities.