You really make the best point here. End of the day, the 1986-style WW2++ strategy is dead. Manned air superiority outside of the third world is dead.
The Russian failure is the exemplar. They were re-waging WW2, and they have little more than a lot of cooked tankers to show for it. Now we’re rolling with throwing prisoners into trenches to stop the maneuver warfare, because they can’t maneuver.
The US is probably in as bad of a condition. Given the poor performance of air power in Ukraine and the Trump/Putin driven destruction of world alignment, US naval power is questionable. Aircraft carriers will become ineffective as modern SAMs are sold on the market. Our submarine platforms are old, manufacturing is barely operational, and we’ll probably fire key individuals if we haven’t already.
Aircraft carriers were always a joke in a US vs. Soviet conflict. A carrier will help with third-world enemies that cannot threaten it. However, the Soviet Union had capable submarine forces as well as ship-launched (e.g. from Kirov class cruisers) as well as air-launched anti-ship missiles which in numbers can overwhelm the carriers air defense screen.
In WW3 the role of an aircraft carrier is to launch its airplanes exactly once, before it is sunk.
The Russian failure is the exemplar. They were re-waging WW2, and they have little more than a lot of cooked tankers to show for it. Now we’re rolling with throwing prisoners into trenches to stop the maneuver warfare, because they can’t maneuver.
The US is probably in as bad of a condition. Given the poor performance of air power in Ukraine and the Trump/Putin driven destruction of world alignment, US naval power is questionable. Aircraft carriers will become ineffective as modern SAMs are sold on the market. Our submarine platforms are old, manufacturing is barely operational, and we’ll probably fire key individuals if we haven’t already.