[openasocket]

Not at all an expert, but is having lots of smaller ships really more cost effective? The thing about a carrier is you can mount aerial strikes against targets thousands of miles from the ship itself. Those smaller ships would be cheaper, but I imagine they would be armed with artillery and maybe cruise missiles, so they won't be able to project power over as large a range. I'd be curious what the relative square-mile-protected/dollar is.

[linkregister]

The difference between aerial strike capability and littoral presence is significant. A major tenet of controlling territory is maintaining a presence in it. In this case, the desired mission diverges from the old cold war strategy. Under the WW2 / cold war strategy, the Navy needed to strike targets and prevent troop transports and enemy carriers from reaching their destinations.

The new mission is more reminiscent of the traditional Navy mission; inspecting vessels, supporting anti-insurgency efforts, and performing patrols. These are all missions of a littoral navy with smaller vessels.

[Grishnakh]

Performing patrols is slow and inefficient with boats of any kind; planes are far faster and can cover much more ground. Of course, fighter planes are horribly inefficient too, but this would be a good case for using carrier-launched drones: they're very efficient and can stay aloft for a whole day at a time IIRC, and have limited weapons capability.

Sometimes I wonder if it'd make sense to try to build a capital ship where the giant "carrier" launches not only planes, but also small littoral boats. Steaming a littoral combat ship across oceans can't be that fuel-efficient, and also makes the boat require more size to maintain a sufficient crew for so long; maybe it'd be better to have smaller, shorter-range patrol boats that are kept inside the carrier until it gets to a place where it wants to launch them. Of course, you'd need a really huge carrier for this, but you'd get efficiencies of scale here, by being able to power the whole thing with nuclear reactors, and only burn fossil fuels for the shorter ranges the patrol boats operate at. The drones, combined with the carrier-launched patrol boats, would be able to handle all those operations within a pretty large radius of wherever the mega-carrier drops anchor, with the drones doing surveillance and strikes if necessary, and the patrol boats motoring in where needed, as directed by the drone surveillance.