Introduction
The United States Navy calls its Nimitz class aircraft carriers
4.5 acres of sovereign and mobile American territory and
highlights their importance to American strategy by noting that an
aircraft carrier doesnt just launch aircraft it projects
power. The aircraft carrier has an ability like no other war
vessel to deploy aircraft and serve as a base of operations for a
wide variety of military activities. As a result, the US
Navyforms entire
battlegroups or fleets around the use of these vessels and
regularly deploys them abroad to meet their strategic objectives.
Given that air power is a relatively recent development in the
grand scheme of military history, the speed of contemporary
development in aircraft carriers is
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However, these
two were not alone in this endeavor and the Japanese were creating
a fleet of their own; the importance of the
aircraft
carrierwas about to be established permanently with the attack
on Pearl Harbour. Leading up to World War Two, the US Navy did not
believe the aircraft carrier could ever fulfill a role greater than
support to battleships and employed them in this manner, it was
after all the age of the
battleship.
This argument may have been rooted in the fact that many aircraft
could not effectively engage a battleship owing to technological
limitations and the aircraft carrier itself was lightly armed, if
armed at all, in order to accommodate the aircraft. History would
eventually demonstrate how wrong these strategic decisions were and
arguably without World War Two there may not have been a number of
key developments that contribute to the modern-day aircraft
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The first of
which was the sinking of the HMS Courageous in 1939 by a German
U-boat. An old aircraft carrier at the beginning of the war and a
converted battlecruiser, the vessel was tasked with providing
escort to merchant ships by providing anti-submarine protection in
a convoy with other destroyers to provide protection to the
carrier. Despite this, a single German submarine was able to
successfully engage and sink the HMS Courageous, escaping without
harm from the depth-charge wield escorts to report the success back
to Germany. This highlighted two key strategic weaknesses of
aircraft carriers, the first being their need for anti-submarine
escort and their vulnerability to small, relatively cheaper
instruments of war. HMS Courageous was escorted by four destroyers
who were armed for anti-submarine warfare who, in theory, should
have been able to safely escort the vessel from this very threat.
Furthermore, aside from the resources tied up in escorting the
carrier, the air planes which were meant to excel in this field
were equally ineffective in defending their own air base. Shore
based aircraft had the distinction advantage of being able to
return to a relatively safe air base that was very likely to be
there when they returned, unlike carrier-based aircraft. The
advantage of extending the range of
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