I try to always double check my facts, and had a discussion with a navy guy who said they averaged 96 sorties per day throughout ODS, which I thought was pretty impressive when the number was 80.

It appears others are questioning the wisdom of the USN living and dying by the carrier and carrier alone. George Will is always a pretty thoughtful guy, even if more conservative than I.

You’re comparing the normal hazards of operation to actual attacks as if they are equal

That’s not even a little bit true. The BONE can’t launch nuclear weapons anymore. They removed that capability. Hundreds of B52s bombed the crap out of Vietnam and nobody was worried one of them was going to be carrying nukes. Dozens of B52s flew against Iraq in ODS and nobody worried about them carrying nukes. Dozens…

This is a pretty good summation of what I have had many pilots who are familiar with both the Viper and the Hornet tell me. Since we typically won’t be fighting against our own types though, I am more concerned about the two new Chinese stealth jets. I’m less concerned about the Russian types because their quality is…

There are politcal costs and considerations with carriers as well. We can’t station carriers in the South China Sea, nor the Black Sea, and if aircraft have to overfly countries to get to their targets we’re in the same boat as with USAF platforms.

Small countries need these alliances, because even if they spent 100% of their GDP on defense they still couldn’t stand up to a Russian invasion and occupation. Since Russia is the only one doing those unilaterally these days (OIF was done with UN approval) they feel singled out. Simple solution for Russia. Do what…

Only Poland this year joined the four other countries, out of 28 total NATO members, that are meeting the alliance’s goal of spending 2% of their gross domestic product on defense. The other four are the U.S., Great Britain, Greece and Estonia.

The 10th Mountain wasn’t there to provide base security, so no fair tagging them that way. They had their own missions, and the USAF had base security.

Oh boy, more “Massive” ketchup. It’s MTOW is 10,000lb LESS than a Strike Eagle’s.

You are assuming the aircraft carrier is already in position. It can take weeks to get them in position, depending on the demands on them and where they are in their deployment rotations. Anything BUT immediate response. Long range bombers can be anywhere in the world in 24 hours.

I don’t want to nit pic, as this is interesting and bears on the question of when to use carriers, BUT, they used waves of B52s in ODS to harass and atreit the Iraqi Army - although that may have been just at night, I don’t recall. I think a lot of those flights were from Diego Garcia. Obviously it was very effective…

Baghram airbase is every bit as secure as any carrier, as almost 15yrs of operation there has demonstrated. Yes they’ve been attacked, but then so have carrier groups. Airfields don’t sink.

Well, isn’t that special? And what we found out with the USS Cole is all you need to blow a giant hole in a big boat is a rubber dingy and a bunch of explosives. The Sheffield wasn’t a great endorsement for the carrier concept either.

So, if we upped the sortie rate to 300 per day, and it took 8 hrs to turn a BONE on a 150 mile hop, so we ended up with 5 BONES = I carrier, it doesn’t change the economics of the two platforms for lightly contested airspace. It costs hundreds, maybe even thousands of times as much to fight a carrier as it does…

You are correct. In my defense, my numbers also came from Wikipedia, but your [15] hot-link checks out, so I stand corrected. Thanks for the leg work. I enjoy learning something new, even if being wrong sucks. lol

The problem isn’t the aircraft, it’s the carrier. If you just flew the Hornets from land instead of a carrier the sortie rate would be much higher.

I used to be a lot more impressed with aircraft carriers until I read one single statistic.

I believe only the Norwegian Government has that authority. Chill pill still not kicking in?

Don’t change the subject. American boomers present no more of a nuclear threat, even if based in the Black Sea, than Russian nuclear bombers flying right off the coast of many NATO countries.