The queens of the fleet are too big to fail
, Russia’s sole aircraft-carrier, spluttered north through the English Channel belching thick black smoke. She was returning from an ignominious tour of duty in the Mediterranean. One of the 15 warplanes with which she had been pounding Syria had crashed into the sea; another had lurched off the deck after landing. When she finally docked near Murmansk a 70-tonne crane smashed into her deck.
Americans like their aircraft-carriers large, like their cars and restaurant servings. They also insist on them being good. This makes them very expensive. When it was commissioned in 2017, the 100,000-tonne, the first in a new class of carriers, became the priciest warship in history at $13bn.
It is one thing to be expensive. It is another to be expensive and fragile. In 2006 a Chinese Song-class diesel-electric submarine stalked the, a carrier, so silently while she was off Okinawa in the East China Sea that the first the Americans knew of it was when it surfaced just about 8,000 metres away. Getting that close would be harder in wartime, when the ships, subs and aircraft around a carrier would be more alert to undersea lurkers. But China is fielding ever more submarines.
This does not mean the age of the carrier is over. “A lot of these [carrier-killing] systems are essentially unproven,” says Nick Childs, an expert at the International Institute of Strategic Studies, a London think-tank. A missile that can fly the distance required is only one part of such a system. You also need eyes that can keep track of the prey. Ground-based radar cannot see targets hundreds of kilometres out to sea.
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