Commander Jeff Vandenengel begins his book, Questioning the Carrier, by arguing, “The U.S. Navy has the most powerful fleet in all naval history. The large nuclear-powered aircraft carrier is the most powerful surface warship in that fleet and in all naval history. The U.S Navy should stop building them immediately.”1 That blunt opening captures the crux of an expansive debate raging among maritime strategists: whether the aircraft carrier, much like the battleship before it, has been overtaken by technological developments and has reached tactical (and strategic) obsolescence.2
Absolutists still insist on the carrier’s preeminence, but contemporary literature abounds with analysis demonstrating that hypersonic missiles, drone swarms, autonomous submarines, and land-based antiaccess/area-denial (A2/AD) defenses all spell the end of the carrier strike group (CSG) as a means of waging war.3 Critics claim the future of maritime warfare belongs to disaggregated, modular, flexible fleets—so-called systems of systems capable of achieving both numerical mass and a mass of effects.4 The carrier, having fallen out of the line of battle, must seemingly fall out of fleets entirely.
Despite its prevalence, this interpretation neglects other functions of navies, leading to an undue emphasis on warfighting, to the detriment of other equally important historic understandings of the purpose of sea power. Indeed, privileging a battle-centric focus ignores many foundational truths established by classical maritime theorists. Just as Admiral Raoul Castex observed that sea control and command of the sea “was at best relative even for the most powerful navies,” achievable only through the art of maneuver, Ken Booth emphasized the equal importance of diplomatic and constabulary duties alongside warfighting in his “trinity of naval functions.”5 Even Alfred Thayer Mahan—the assumed evangelist of decisive battle—understood that achieving command of the sea was fundamentally different from exercising it over “the great common.”6
What these theorists understood—seemingly lost amid the clamor over the supposed end of the carrier—is that there is a marked distinction between the act of securing sea control (perhaps through decisive battle, perhaps not) and the exercise of this control in some limited capacity after the fact. Julian Corbett made the point most explicitly, arguing for a “battle-fleet” to secure command of the sea and a separate means to exercise this control.7 Such was his conviction in the distinction, he coined the maxim: “On cruisers depends our exercise of control; on the battle-fleet depends the security of control.”8
The Hypersonic Age
Taking this conceptual distinction as a point of departure, one can accept that the aircraft carrier is no longer capable of fighting on the frontlines in a totemic blue-water, peer-on-peer conflict. In the struggle to achieve comparative military advantage, the evolution of arms has, broadly speaking, amounted to the progressive extension of reach. Just as slings gave way to bows, which in turn gave way to muskets and then cannons, the CSG has been surpassed in range and lethality by hypersonic missiles. Carriers superseded battleships because the former had greater reach and speed—it is increasingly clear that advanced missiles now afford the same advantages over carriers. Critics are dangerously quick to argue this renders CSGs obsolete, as if an aircraft carrier’s only purpose is a climactic oceanic clash. Disaggregated, modular fleets may win future battles, but they cannot be expected to win the peace.
Unlike during World War II in the Pacific or the Cold War contest in the Atlantic, modern navies “must operate under a pervasive and dangerous antiaccess and area-denial (A2/AD) umbrella of cruise and ballistic missiles” with a reach that can extend more than 1,000 miles from the coast.9 Confined waters such as those of the eastern Mediterranean or South China Sea can, in a peer-on-peer conflict, “be considered ‘dead ends,’ at least from an operational point of view.”10
Land-based Russian and Chinese missiles are an increasing threat to naval forces, with Beijing’s in particular developing at an alarming rate.11 While currently “unable to combine maritime-, air- or land-based sensor and shooter platforms,” China’s varied and geographically extensive capabilities hold navies at considerable risk within the first island chain.12 This domination of Beijing’s near-abroad is complemented by novel capabilities such as the DF-ZF hypersonic glide vehicle, which is capable of striking as far west as the Bay of Bengal and as far south as the Straits of Malacca at speeds approximating Mach 10 and thus can defeat even the most complex air-defense systems.13 Even more conventional capabilities, such as the DF-26 ballistic missile, are capable of “reaching the central region of India . . . and Guam in the Pacific Ocean,” while also diminishing the capabilities of aircraft carriers by putting them at risk inside the second island chain.14 With recent developments allowing for these weapons to be disguised as passenger planes—adding critical seconds to target acquisition and denying a CSG “the time to react with its own aircraft and defensive missiles”—the ability of CSGs to win sea control seems to be increasingly, if not irretrievably, diminished.15
The Enduring Relevance of Carriers
However, to assume an inability to secure sea control in a peer-on-peer conflict renders CSGs completely obsolete is a gross misreading of both maritime history and theory and neglects the functions of fleets in all situations short of total war. As nuclear strategist Bernard Brodie notes, in a nuclear world, “great-power rivals occasionally prefer to test each other’s strength and resolution with limited rather than unlimited commitments to violence.”16 CSGs retain a profound and enduring utility below the threshold of great power war. Indeed, a disaggregated fleet strictly designed to win the opening salvoes of conflict ultimately gives adversaries every incentive to operate below that level. Ships designed entirely around missile systems can only “fire” or “not fire.” They lose the capacity for latent violence that so influences a potential adversary.17
In any situation short of total war, there is a need for vessels capable of winning the peace by practicing naval statecraft to shape “the environment in which security, diplomacy, and economics interact.”18 In the global struggle for influence, it is already proving difficult for Western navies to define, let alone conduct, defense diplomacy, and associated influence campaigns.19 With the exception of the carrier, modern navies have “limited options for operations below the level of armed conflict” and are “ill-equipped for great-power competition in the gray zone.”20 Yet aircraft carriers have consistently demonstrated themselves capable of “power projection and diplomacy,” offering novel options for collaboration and defense engagement.21
In hosting allied forces and disembarking its airwing to allied airbases ashore, a CSG opens access to key bases and extensive goodwill. Ship’s tours and port calls, underpinned by a press and photography narrative, demonstrate a CSG’s convening power. The United States should continue to take advantage of the fact that it remains the only nation able to deploy multiple aircraft carriers to any given region of the world.
Even during a great power war, CSGs retain a paramount role beyond simply fighting for sea control. Given that one of the foundational tenets of maritime theory is maneuver—to engage adversaries under favorable circumstances—it is poor strategy to build a fleet expressly for the purposes of fighting “directly against China’s A2/AD system” within the confines of the first island chain, a location suitable for stealthy surface combatants, submarines, and unmanned systems at the most.22 Instead, given the advantages of sea power lie in the ability to “paralyze or at least restrict the enemy’s links with foreign countries,” and to “dictate the enemy[’s] intercourse with neutrals,” the evolving role of CSGs must be to engage in strategic interdiction and strategic signaling outside the immediate theater of conflict.23
CSGs remain unmatched in projecting power in regions without a peer adversary. They alone can provide the localized air dominance necessary to conduct various activities, from power projection ashore to maritime interdiction. The sea continues to offer decisive access to the “crisis zones of today and tomorrow,” access that can be exploited only by a CSG’s versatility.24 Consequently, while it is undeniable that carrier strike groups are no longer suitable to serve in the front lines of battle in an engagement with Russia or China, there are other adversary nations against which CSGs remain a powerful force—nations on which Russia and China may depend for raw resources and military matériel.25
Navies are not tools to be lined up for fixed set-piece battles, but facilitators capable of presenting adversaries with multifront strategic problems and using the sea to seize opportunities as they present themselves.26 Carrier strike groups remain ideally suited to fulfill this function. The United States must not sacrifice the ability to compete aggressively in peace to build a bespoke war-winning fleet whose very success is measured by it never being used. Short of war there is a need for diplomacy, military operations against non-peer powers, and strategic signaling. As post–World War II history demonstrates, this is the realm in which the aircraft carrier excels. CSGs must therefore remain a part of a balanced fleet.
1. CDR Jeff Vandenengel, USN, Questioning the Carrier: Opportunities in Fleet Design for the U.S. Navy (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2023). Vandenengel later clarified his use of “immediately” as meaning “years or decades.” See Jeff Vandenengel, “Questioning the Carrier,” The Proceedings Podcast, 15 December 2023 at 07:20.
2. Vandenengel, Questioning the Carrier, 9.
3. Brandon J. Weichert, “The Age of the Aircraft Carrier Is Over,” The National Interest, 29 February 2024. See also James Holmes, “The Aircraft Carrier Faces An Uncertain Future,” The National Interest, 5 March 2024. As Holmes acknowledged, while aircraft carriers can still perform a range of peacetime missions, their “prospects are doubtful” in an operational environment.
4. Chris O’Connor, “The Dreadnaught After Next,” CIMSEC, 1 August 2023. On whether modularity can (or should) apply to missions, rather than auxiliary capabilities, see Emma Salisbury, “Beware the Allure of Mission Modularity,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 149, no. 5 (May 2023).
5. Michael Shurkin, “Admiral Raoul Castex: The Naval Strategist for Non-Hegemons,” War on the Rocks, 13 March 2024; James Tritten, The Influence of French Naval Thought on the U.S. Navy (Suffolk, VA: Naval Doctrine Command, 1995), 8; and Kenneth Booth, Navies and Foreign Policy (London: Routledge, 2014). For the incorporation of Booth’s theories into modern doctrine, see Kevin Rowlands, “Decided Preponderance at Sea: Naval Diplomacy in Strategic Thought,” Naval War College Review 65, no. 4 (Autumn 2012): 97.
6. H. Kaminer Manship, “Mahan’s Concepts of Sea Power: A Lecture Delivered at the Naval War College on 23 September 1963,” Naval War College Review 16, no. 5 (January 1964): 15–30; and Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660–1783 (New York: Dover Publications, 1987), 88, 138.
7. Julian Corbett, Principles of Maritime Strategy (New York: Dover Publications, 2004), 112.
8. Corbett, Principles of Maritime Strategy, 113.
9. Brent D. Sadler, “Rebuilding America’s Military: The United States Navy,” Heritage Foundation Special Report (No. 242, 18 February 2021), 23; and Mark Episkopos, “Russia’s Dangerous ‘Kalibr’ Cruise Missile Could See Range Doubled: Report,” The National Interest, 12 January 2019.
10. Thibault Lavernhe, “Naval Action in the 21st Century, or the Fifth Age of Combat at Sea,” La Vigie, November 2022, 3.
11. Justin Bronk, “Modern Russian and Chinese Integrated Air Defence Systems,” RUSI Occasional Paper (January 2020), 22.
12. Bronk, “Modern Russian and Chinese Integrated Air Defence Systems,” 31.
13. Ankit Panda, “Introducing the DF-17: China’s Newly Tested Ballistic Missile Armed with a Hypersonic Glide Vehicle,” The Diplomat, 28 December 2017; see also Thangavel K. Balasubramaniam and Ashok Kumar Murugesan, “China’s Rising Missile and Naval Capabilities in the Indo-Pacific Region: Security Implications for India and Its Allies,” Air University Online, 8 June 2020.
14. Balasubramaniam and Murugesan, “China’s Rising Missile and Naval Capabilities”; for “hiding,” see Nick Danby, “Carrier Strike Groups Should Be Ready to Go Dark in Conflict,” War on the Rocks, 29 August 2023.
15. Stephen Chen, “To Shoot or Not to Shoot: Chinese-Developed ‘Golden Veil’ Could Make Deadly Missiles Look Like Passenger Planes,” South China Morning Post, 22 December 2023; and Robert Haddick, “China’s Most Dangerous Missile (So Far),” War on the Rocks, 2 July 2014.
16. Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age, 5th ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 308.
17. Thomas C. Shelling, Arms and Influence (Newhaven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), 3.
18. CAPT Brent Sadler, USN (Ret.), “A New Naval Statecraft to Compete with China,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 148, no. 8 (August 2022).
19. Si Horne and Ian Gurney, “Diplomacy through Defence: Passing Judgement on UK Defence Engagement,” RUSI Commentary, 12 March 2024.
20. Sadler, “Rebuilding America’s Military,” 30.
21. LCDR Jeff Zeberlein, USN, “The Expeditionary Air Wing: A Diplomatic Role in Peacetime,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 148, no. 9 (September 2022).
22. Robert Farley, “Could the U.S. Military Defeat Russia and China at the Same Time?” The National Interest, 15 May 2021.
23. Raoul Castex, as cited in Milan Vego, Naval Classical Thinkers and Operational Art (Newport, RI: Naval War College Joint Military Operations Department, 2009), 10; and Sidharth Kaushal, “Navies and Economic Warfare: Securing Critical Infrastructure and Expanding Policy Options,” RUSI Occasional Paper (January 2023), 37.
24. Lavernhe, “Naval Action in the 21st Century,” 7.
25. Andrew Kendall-Taylor and Richard Fontaine, “The Axis of Upheaval: How America’s Adversaries Are Uniting to Overturn the Global Order,” Foreign Affairs, 23 April 2024.
26. Beatrice Heuser, The Evolution of Strategy: Thinking War from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 292–94; and Robert C. Rubel, “Defense of the System: Changing the Geometry of Great Power Competition,” in Peter Dutton, Robert Ross, and Øystein Tunsjø (eds.), Twenty-First Century Seapower: Cooperation and Conflict at Sea (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014), 165.
