Aircraft carriers are a couple acres of movable sovereign territory. There is immense influence to be had using one to shape behaviour of adversaries in times

Aircraft carriers are a couple acres of movable sovereign territory. There is immense influence to be had using one to shape behaviour of adversaries in times of less than war. Historically, every time a foreign nation has allegedly managed to get a submarine inside a carrier battle group’s defensive bubble has made the news. Personally, I think the future of warfare will see a shift away from a carrier “hub and spoke” model to a decentralised/distributed model. But it will require a new platform that can match or exceed the force projection capability of a carrier in terms of: Radius of weapons/sensor delivery away from platform Throw weight of weapons delivery Repeatability/persistence of weapons/sensor delivery Perhaps the future is more amphibious assault ships like USS America carrying a dozen F35s(fewer eggs, more baskets). Perhaps the future is arsenal ships loaded with missiles and drone ships loaded with recoverable drones. Perhaps the future is C17s , C5s , C130s acting as airborne drone carriers. But I suspect the age of the aircraft carrier is approaching it’s end, but we will only know for sure if a short sharp large scale conventional war occurs between peers and near peers or if a major lasting economic disaster compelled them to be mothballed.