In this file photo, ships and submarines participating in the U.S. 3rd Fleet-coordinated Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercise sail in formation in the waters around the Hawaiian islands, July 27, 2012. (U.S. Navy photo by Chief Mass Communication Specialist Keith Devinney)
Michael Peck, National Interest: New Study Warns Aircraft Carriers May Be Obsolete (Thanks to Russia and China)
Inexpensive Russian and Chinese weapons, such as cyberwar and antiship missiles, threaten the West’s reliance on expensive arms such as aircraft carriers.
“China and Russia appear to have focused many (but not all) their efforts on being able to put at risk the key Western assets that are large, few in number and expensive,” reads a recent study by the Royal United Services Institute, a British military think tank.
“Western governments have become acutely aware of the problems of this financial imbalance in the counterinsurgency context, when they found themselves using weapons costing $70,000, sometimes fired from aircraft that cost $30,000 an hour to fly, to destroy a Toyota pick-up vehicle that might be optimistically valued at $10,000,” the report went on. “Missiles costing (much) less than half a million pounds [$642,000] a unit could at least disable a British aircraft carrier that costs more than £3 billion [$3.9 billion]. Indeed, a salvo of ten such missiles would cost less than $5 million.”
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WNU editor: I also fail to see how these aircraft carriers will be able to survive in a major war.
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