[YZF]

Missiles out-range carriers but the cost of hitting a target in Yemen with a Tomahawk missile launched from afar (2 million dollars, range 2500km) is much higher than the cost of dropping a bomb (~ 16k dollars) from a jet on said target. Even after amortizing all the other costs. The firepower an aircraft carrier brings with it to any location it gets to is really hard to match with missiles. More than the "bandwidth" and cost of that, there's also latency. Drones are another thing to compare to.

[simonblack]

much higher than the cost of dropping a bomb (~ 16k dollars) from a jet on said target

If you can operate a jet fighter-bomber for less than (say) $200 K an hour* I'd be very surprised. And that doesn't take into account the servicing time on modern 'hangar queens' to get them ready for their next sortie. And what's the cost per hour of operating a carrier??

Try to include ALL your costs in working out the cost-efficiency.

* Let's be really generous and say you get 10,000 hours of service life out of a fighter jet. (The designed service life is only 8,000 hours.) The F-35 costs around 130 million bucks so over 10,000 hours that cost comes out to $13,000 per hour in just amortising the purchase cost, without adding in the operating costs themselves.

[YZF]

A jet can also carry a lot of bombs and you might need the jet for other missions anyways.

I agree completely but I think the economics still favor the jets, especially if you need any precision or control, if you just want to lob explosives as cheap as possible maybe the equation is a bit different (though lobbing a lot of them over very large distances is still expensive).

[bbor]

Yeah I am far from an expert in actual academic military studies (?), but I think there’s a lot of theory still riding on “big boat capable of deploying a variety of aircraft”, even if they’re not used exactly how they were in past wars, cold and hot. Just, like, from a million miles up: planes and drones are a lot more useful than missiles alone, and the economic angle you highlight is just one of the basic differences in tactical affordances.

…”weaponry studies”? Now I’m curious to what extent there exists an academic commentary on stuff like this, separate from internal researchers/stakeholders…