The U.S. Navy is betting $42 billion on a new class of aircraft carriers, the world's biggest and costliest warships ever, even as the Pentagon budget shrinks and China and Iran arm themselves with weapons to disable or destroy the behemoths.
The Navy says the new carriers — rising 20 stories above the water, 1,092 feet long, moving at 35 mph with almost 5,000 Americans on board — can project U.S. power around the globe.
The ships' rising costs are drawing scrutiny from lawmakers at a time when the military faces cuts in personnel and funding for new weapons. Critics see the new Gerald R. Ford-class carriers as big targets for rival militaries expanding their arsenals of ballistic and cruise missiles, undersea mines, submarines, drones and cyber weapons.
"Our future adversaries are developing a set of capabilities specifically for the purpose of attacking our aircraft carriers," Mark Gunzinger, a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said/.../
While the Ford carriers are going to be "very formidable," the ships "may not be able to get close enough to a future enemy that has precision-guided anti-ship cruise and ballistic missiles," Gunzinger said.
China is fielding DF-21 anti-ship missiles that may force U.S. carriers to operate 1,000 nautical miles or farther from an enemy's coastline early in a conflict, according to Gunzinger. Carrier-based jets with a heavy load of weapons are designed to strike at about 300 nautical miles without refueling, Polmar said.
China also is developing weapons to attack satellites and computer networks, disrupting long-distance U.S. military sensors and communications networks, Gunzinger wrote in a report last year for the Washington-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Iran's arsenal includes ballistic missiles that can reach targets across the Persian Gulf region, Gunzinger wrote. Iranian officials have threatened to use anti-ship cruise missiles, smart mines that can sense their targets and swarms of small, fast-attack craft to exert their control over the Strait of Hormuz and Persian Gulf shipping lanes, he wrote. The strait is about 21 miles across at its narrowest point, with the shipping lane in either direction only two miles wide, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Gunzinger said carriers should be equipped with stealth drones that can be launched undetected from greater distances to find and attack their targets/.../