[kosmic_k]

Airfields are the quintessential sitting ducks: high value targets with have a fixed position that could have coordinates recorded long in advance of any action.

An carrier on the other hand is a thousand foot runway that can move at 56 km/hr.

[syngrog66]

true and well said

however, airfields are also vastly cheaper to build and maintain, and if they do get "destroyed" they can be rebuilt or replaced (possibly elsewhere) pretty quickly. in comparison to hitting a multi-billion dollar carrier so hard it's destroyed or taken out of service. In a hot war between China and the US, I'd bet China could rebuild/replace airfields faster than the US can rebuild/replace their carriers.

On a related note, I submit that this very issue is why the US and its allies are so against the Chinese trying to build up those little artificial islands, harbors and airfields, in those disputed waters. Not only does it allow China to project force out to greater ranges, with more overlap, and gives them more options in a shooting war, it also gives them more experience in building them up, and learning how to do it better and faster.

And it sends a signal to all the nations in the region, at least as an implied threat. It tells all the nearby nations, and the US, to think very very carefully about whether they want to get in a shooting war with China, whether over Taiwan or Korea, etc. Because while the US might have some very powerful toys in the theater, very modern and sophisticated, they are also very very expensive, and far from home, unlike the Chinese forces, and can easily be outnumbered. They can be attacked from increasingly shorter ranges, and whatever losses the Chinese do take, their losses will be cheaper and faster to replace than the American losses in theater.

[Retric]

Moving is not a major defense if your easy to find, in modern warfare satellites for example are sitting ducks. As the article points out aircraft carriers are like battleships right before WWII. They have been drastically improved, but are untested vs modern weapons.

So sure, if the enemy can't easily sink all your aircraft carriers then they are a great option. Sadly, I don't think that's anywhere close to proven.

[hackuser]

> Moving is not a major defense if your easy to find

Based on practitioners and experts I've read, finding ships is very difficult. The ocean is a huge place; remember there's far more ocean than land area. Imagine if you were told that somewhere in North America there's an object the size of an aircraft carrier, and it's moving around. How hard would it be to find it? The Pacific is much larger (though if there's a war over a contested location, the search area becomes much smaller).

Also, there are not nearly enough resources to watch the whole ocean at once. The U.S. military can't even monitor all of Afghanistan, or even all of contested regions in Afghanistan.

[Retric]

Aircraft carriers use active radar which makes them really easy to find. It's much closer to locating Iowa in the middle of the ocean than a boat. And once you locate one they can't really hide very well.