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On a purely temporal level: The aircraft carrier became the dominant naval warfare tech in 1942, 74 years ago. 74 years before that was just after the U.S. Civil War. I wonder how many Civil War technologies remained dominant in WWII; probably not much in the navy.

Now that is a very flawed, simplistic comparison. But it makes me wonder if aircraft carriers are obsolete and we just don't know it yet because there hasn't been a naval war since then. And it makes me wonder about other technologies, such as tanks and fighter planes. Many of the technologies used seem to be modernizations of what was used in the last large war, which ended in 1945. Did innovation stop then?

Remember how quickly things changed in around 25 years between WWI and WWII: Tanks, planes, and aircraft carriers, to name a few, either didn't exist or were insignificant in WWI, and WWII ended with bombers dropping nuclear weapons (another platform and strategy still in use today).

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Civil War technologies that persisted to WW2 and beyond: the rifle, trench warfare, howitzers, battlefield surgery.

I agree in general with the article (the tl;dr being that carriers are extremely vulnerable to asymmetrically small threats). It omits the reason the U.S. Navy employs them in the first place: force projection.

Without a carrier group, an overseas nation has no credible opportunity to bombard a far away theater, engage in air sorties, land troops, or any other expeditionary action.

Defense of carriers is a problem that must be solved, or the U.S. would have to accept a military stalemate for naval warfare. This has serious strategic, diplomatic, and economic consequences. Many countries' posturing depends on the U.S. Navy's implied or explicit protection.

In air refueling lets counties drop bombs on the other side of the planet. Aircraft carriers are cheaper but that assumes they are not sitting ducks and we can't find a friendly airfield somewhere.

> Aircraft carriers are cheaper but that assumes they are not sitting ducks and we can't find a friendly airfield somewhere.

This is probably incredibly naïve but wouldn't it help us get a "friendly" airfield if we could say something like "you can allow us to use your airfield or we will move in our ships in N hours anyway". Am I missing something here?

Are you suggesting that it is acceptable to force neutral parties into a war? Or are you trying to negotiate with your enemies for the right to bomb them? I'm not sure I say any reasonable interpretation of that proposal.

It's been done many times. The UK grabbed Iceland in WWII, providing a base for transfer of US aircraft. Germany took a trip through Belgium and got the Swiss to allow trains through.

When things get serious, thoughts like "I would never do such a thing!" are quickly cast aside.

Sort of - the Danish Government in exile was in London and at that time Iceland was still controlled by Denmark. But yes, "Needs Must" as the saying goes.

Belgium tried to uphold its neutrality in WWI - Germany invaded and ransacked the country anyway.

I definitely feel that played a part in allowing Germany in WW2

It's not naive at all. The stakes might have to be high before the U.S. engages in that kind of coercion, but even that's not necessarily true and it's hardly unprecedented for the U.S. to throw its weight around. And the U.S. has other means of persuasion such as aid, access to the largest market in the world, the power to facilitate or stop other diplomatic, economic or political priorities, etc. etc.

One announced U.S. strategy in the Pacific is to spread forces widely rather than concentrate them, and to utilize bases of friendly nations (who don't need U.S. coercion these days with the Chinese government coercing them right into America's arms). The U.S. recently made such agreements with Australia, The Philippines, Vietnam, and Singapore, and of course has long-standing bases in Japan and South Korea. Indonesia is almost the only major nation left in the region who isn't on board.

Air refueling tankers are likely really easy targets to hit and don't scale for large bombing fleets, close air support, or other applications for naval aviation.

Yes, that friendly airfield assumption is one main point of the aircraft carrier.

Airfields are the quintessential sitting ducks: high value targets with have a fixed position that could have coordinates recorded long in advance of any action.

An carrier on the other hand is a thousand foot runway that can move at 56 km/hr.

true and well said

however, airfields are also vastly cheaper to build and maintain, and if they do get "destroyed" they can be rebuilt or replaced (possibly elsewhere) pretty quickly. in comparison to hitting a multi-billion dollar carrier so hard it's destroyed or taken out of service. In a hot war between China and the US, I'd bet China could rebuild/replace airfields faster than the US can rebuild/replace their carriers.

On a related note, I submit that this very issue is why the US and its allies are so against the Chinese trying to build up those little artificial islands, harbors and airfields, in those disputed waters. Not only does it allow China to project force out to greater ranges, with more overlap, and gives them more options in a shooting war, it also gives them more experience in building them up, and learning how to do it better and faster.

And it sends a signal to all the nations in the region, at least as an implied threat. It tells all the nearby nations, and the US, to think very very carefully about whether they want to get in a shooting war with China, whether over Taiwan or Korea, etc. Because while the US might have some very powerful toys in the theater, very modern and sophisticated, they are also very very expensive, and far from home, unlike the Chinese forces, and can easily be outnumbered. They can be attacked from increasingly shorter ranges, and whatever losses the Chinese do take, their losses will be cheaper and faster to replace than the American losses in theater.

Moving is not a major defense if your easy to find, in modern warfare satellites for example are sitting ducks. As the article points out aircraft carriers are like battleships right before WWII. They have been drastically improved, but are untested vs modern weapons.

So sure, if the enemy can't easily sink all your aircraft carriers then they are a great option. Sadly, I don't think that's anywhere close to proven.

> Moving is not a major defense if your easy to find

Based on practitioners and experts I've read, finding ships is very difficult. The ocean is a huge place; remember there's far more ocean than land area. Imagine if you were told that somewhere in North America there's an object the size of an aircraft carrier, and it's moving around. How hard would it be to find it? The Pacific is much larger (though if there's a war over a contested location, the search area becomes much smaller).

Also, there are not nearly enough resources to watch the whole ocean at once. The U.S. military can't even monitor all of Afghanistan, or even all of contested regions in Afghanistan.

Aircraft carriers use active radar which makes them really easy to find. It's much closer to locating Iowa in the middle of the ocean than a boat. And once you locate one they can't really hide very well.

In-air refueling for intercontinental missions really only works for bombers. Having a fighter jock in-cockpit from the mainland US to Afghanistan is a complete non-starter, in terms of time, fuel cost, and amount of force projected over time or fuel-cost.

Much of the flight cost is inspections, and that is based on flight hours.

There is also having a sore butt, sore back, and no place to poo.

Other than that, a "drone mode" would mostly work. Sleep would be pretty uncomfortable, but might work OK enough.

The plane:payload ratio for a fighter is deplorably small, relative to a bomber. And you'd be dealing with a pilot that's probably slept like crap en-route, and suffering the consequences of that in terms of reaction speed and cognitive deficits when he gets on-station. Just no.

Yep. I'm saying it's mostly a bad idea, and that we really should have carriers.

That said, the capability ought to exist. Even if never used in war, the mere threat of the capability is beneficial. It's also usable to move aircraft around, for aircraft sales and to move aircraft closer to an expected future battle.

"drone mode" sounds interesting, are there already systems that let planes that otherwise require humans be flown on autopilot to the next airbase? I imagine that would make deployments much easier.

The other issue is tactical air support. Bombers make sense if you are talking about a preplanned target up to 12 hours, or whatever, in advance. If you have to plan an airstrike 12 hours ahead, and you're on the ground getting beat up right now it turns into a big problem.

> Without a carrier group, an overseas nation has no credible opportunity to bombard a far away theater, engage in air sorties, land troops, or any other expeditionary action. ... Defense of carriers is a problem that must be solved, or the U.S. would have to accept a military stalemate for naval warfare.

That might be lacking in vision. The aircraft carrier is the current means, but nations have engaged in overseas expeditionary actions before and without aircraft carriers. Just because the current solution might no longer be available doesn't mean there is no solution.

Arial bombardment is tougher without carriers, of course, but the U.S. bombed Iraq and Afghan targets using planes that took off and landed in the U.S. And the most likely solution there is missiles, which have become exceptionally accurate and which many think will dominate future battlefields.

Finally, whether or not we feel the carriers are essential, if they are ineffective on the battlefield then another solution will need to be found. Necessity is the mother of invention.

> Arial bombardment is tougher without carriers, of course, but the U.S. bombed Iraq and Afghan targets using planes that took off and landed in the U.S.

[citation needed]

Here's a B-2 that bombed Libya on a round-trip from Missouri. [1]

Of course, doing it this way requires airborne refueling. Lots of airborne refueling. And if you thought the military paid a lot for jet fuel on the ground, wait until you see the markup for providing it in the air.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1368337/Libya-crisis...

The B-2 bomber flew from Missouri, bombed the targets, landed on a British island in the Indian Ocean (Diego Garcia) to swap out pilots with the engines still running, then flew home. I'm sure it did aerial refueling along the way too. Basically, the only limit is sleepy pilots with sore butts.

At least one of the times, it visted an airshow along the way WHILE LOADED WITH BOMBS. This was the Air and Sea show, viewed from the beach in Fort Lauderdale, FL. I was there. For such a huge plane, it really is stunningly quiet. Most spectators didn't even notice until the plane was almost in front of the beach.

And many more B-1B, B-52, and various strike fighters dropped bomb loads far exceeding those of the pitifully tiny B-2 force.

> [citation needed]

http://usoonpatrol.org/archives/2014/11/13/b-2-pilot-flew-lo...

Gatling-gun? It essentially ushered in machine gun era, not to mention the current generation of multi-barrel systems like the Phalanx.

http://www.history.com/topics/gatling-gun https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002#Exer...

^ last time war games were exercised in asymmetrical warfare they got beaten so badly they transformed everything in a scriped farce

> I wonder how many Civil War technologies remained dominant in WWII; probably not much in the navy.

The US civil war was not a particularly maritime war, so indeed not much in the navy.

But that war pioneered two interesting logistical elements: first, it was the first war to permit rapid movement of material via rail (a surprising amount of rail was constructed during the war). Second is that it was the first economy vs economy war.

By and large the Europeans ignored the lesson, because they figured the details of what was going on in the US just weren't that interesting (big mistake). WWI was an economy-vs-economy and rail war (one problem is that both sides built rail heads to their fronts, so if they could move forward they couldn't supply their new front while the enemy could). The only European power that paid attention was Russia who therefore chose another rail gauge.

WWII was economy-vs-economy on a global scale: the US poured huge sums (mostly in kind) into the UK & the Soviet Union so Germany had to battle a large economy on both sides. In the Pacific the trigger for Pearl Harbor was the US cutting off Japanese access to raw materials (what are bizarrely called "sanctions" today) in the hope of ending prior Japanese aggression in Korea and Manchuria: again, economic struggle.

Big Napoleonic set piece field battles and ship-of-the-line battles appear to have faded into history, but most of the military spending in the US, Russia and China seems to continue to focus on that obsolete model. These carriers and attack subs aren't that useful in the asymmetric fronts we have today.

By the way another good lesson was the American Revolution, which was mostly won via lobbying/payments in Whitehall. Both sides have conveniently ignored that for their own political reasons :-)

>In the Pacific the trigger for Pearl Harbor was the US cutting off Japanese access to raw materials (what are bizarrely called "sanctions" today) in the hope of ending prior Japanese aggression in Korea and Manchuria: again, economic struggle.

Building on your point about WWII being economy Vs economy and the economic underpinnings of the war in the Pacific, I have a memory of reading a similarly economics-centric analysis of the start of the war in Europe. I do not have a link but from memory Germany had insufficient farmland relative to its population and little access to important resources, especially oil. This set them up to be dependent on their neighbors indefinitely, neighbors who could turn off the food/oil tap at any time. That was not an appealing idea to the Nazis.

Not sure how well accepted that theory is or isn't but it certainly seems to hold a lot more credence than "the war in Europe started because Hitler."

You're spot on, but it actually didn't start with the Nazis; Hitler just adopted it as part of his foreign policy (I believe he even writes about it in Mein Kampf although I haven't looked it up). The official name for this philosophy is Lebensraum [1] and it's widely recognized as having started in the late 19th century, decades before WWI errupted, when Germany had a growth spurt and started to feel the pain of over population. However, how much Lebensraum had to do with the first war is unclear, since the Princip/Ferdinand situation was the huge spark that started it. That said, there was a whole plan assembled during WWI based on it called Septemberprogramm [2] with the goal of expanding German territory for resources.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septemberprogramm

I would hope that theory is accepted because it is what actually happened. The Nazis planned to exterminate all of the Slavs and use their land for growing food (Lebensraum and Generalplan Ost), and the Caucasus for oil.

The former goal failed thanks to the Soviets putting up a good fight, the huge size of Russia, and bad weather. The latter because Hitler really wanted to defeat the Soviets at a city named after Stalin instead of just driving past it. He wasted his entire invasion force (~800,000 casualties) when the Soviets encircled and destroyed it.

The Soviet commander in charge of the defense of Stalingrad, Zhukov, escaped Stalin's purges because he was stationed in the middle of nowhere, and soundly defeated the Japanese in Mongolia when they tried to invade in 1939. Japan gave up it's plans to invade the USSR for resources (permanently, as communicated by the spy Sorge, which allowed USSR to transfer all of their soldiers to the European front), and instead invade European colonies instead, which directly led to Pearl Harbor.

> Not sure how well accepted that theory is or isn't but it certainly seems to hold a lot more credence than "the war in Europe started because Hitler."

I've read a lot of WWII history. Especially focused on the ETO and Germany. In my mind, it seems beyond clear that Hitler was the reason that war broke out, the single prime key motivating force, his desires, his influence, his decisions, his cult of personality, his charisma, his quirks, his obsessions, etc. He existed and acted within a framework of other facts, within a certain context, and there were plenty of others who failed to act against him, enough, early enough, when it would have been more effective. But I've been confident of the "because Hitler" idea for a long time.

If you can point me at a history book or analysis which you think contradicts that, definitely share it with me, I always love to learn different angles. If I were to give you just one that aligns with "because Hitler" I'd recommend Shirer's Rise & Fall.

I haven't read as much on the topic as you, but I've always heard that WWII was effectively a continuation of WWI; the root cause being the punitive measures in the Treaty of Versailles.

I'd therefore assumed that Hitler was just a product of the era and there was a certain inevitability to WWII.

In many ways yes, it was one long war from 1870-1945 that flashed very hot a few times.

I've never been a fan of the "great man" view of history -- easy to teach but barely illustrative -- but there is no question our actions have consequences. The importance of taking the large view is that you can see the larger forces that someone can harness (or that can thwart them). But the claim "if not Julius/Napoleon/Hitler than someone else" is at best hard to prove -- what someone else did would have been quite different. Most likely it would instead have been the usual muddle -- the default state is muddle, with from time to time some demagogue able to weave some strands together and cause general excitement.

This is no different from, say, science. What would Newton have done had he been born 100 years later, or earlier, or 1000 miles east? On the other hand it's easy to see that if he'd not been born we'd have much of the same physics as today.

Germany's interest in certain land masses was based in oil, but that was only one of a suite of rationales. Given the basic nature of the Nazis as a group, it's not likely that was the only reason.

WRT Japan, this was called an embargo in response to the Rape of Nanking.

Ship-of-the-line has faded, but fleet-in-being was invented(?) around battle of Jutland and has remained important aspect to stifle the enemy from maritime trade.

I don't have time to go into much detail but this

>>But that war pioneered two interesting logistical elements: first, it was the first war to permit rapid movement of material via rail (a surprising amount of rail was constructed during the war). Second is that it was the first economy vs economy war. By and large the Europeans ignored the lesson, because they figured the details of what was going on in the US just weren't that interesting (big mistake).

Is basically all wrong. The Crimean war was fought before the American civil war and contained all these modern elements and was in many ways the first WW1 style war.

Before WW1 two majors wars were fought in Europe, the Austro-Prussian war and the Franco-Prussian war which pretty much set the stage for WW1.

The crimean war was indeed quite an industrialized war, used rail, and was a siege war; but personally I don't see it of the same magnitude as the us civil war (but there's no need to have a long argument about in in the HN comments!). I'll just say that the magnitude was _significantly_ lower than USCW and WWI; certainly it was not total war economy-vs-economy -- if best it was one of the first modern technology-vs-technology wars (I assume that was also a factor in the iron/bronze age, and in the colonial wars too).

But to paraphrase Stalin, magnitude has a quality all its own. Which is why I don't consider the brief Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars, while of incredible political significance, to be of great significance in the discussion I raised. Neither mobilized an entire economy much less both sides'.

(Big exception to what I just wrote: they did prove the value of the Prussian General Staff model).

Disclaimer: I do have a degree in European military history, but my scholarship, for what little it might be worth, is over 30 years out of date.

I really don't have time to discuss with you, but I just have to ask, magnitude of what? Magnitude of economy? How do you measure that?

How could you possibly compare the total, unprecedented industrialized warfare of WW1 with the American civil war?

It bears no resemblance whatsoever.

Ironclad, steam-powered ships?

Another good counter argument is that there were lots of wars between the US Civil War and World War II between first-class opponents of relatively similar capabilities, including both of those conflicts, World War I, the Franco-Prussian and Russo-Japanese wars. Since World War II, only arguably has the Korean War pitted two relatively equal foes against each other, and even then China had a huge advantage in manpower while the UN forces had a huge technological advantage.

If the NBA was dissolved and Golden State periodically faced college teams, 75 years from now they would probably still have a small-ball 3-point-shooting lineup. That's the state of military doctrine today. Outright defeating a nearly-equal opponent is impossible in the nuclear age, so the only remaining problem is how to curb-stomp much weaker opponents as humanely as possible.

Also in between the time period you mention, and arguably still true today is the varying tactics that are used in war even with opponents of equal numbers of forces/capabilities on paper. If one side couldn't sufficiently protect its population (economy), that could be used to coerce an end on favorable terms to the other side.

>Outright defeating a nearly-equal opponent is impossible in the nuclear age, so the only remaining problem is how to curb-stomp much weaker opponents as humanely as possible.

I think this is true as of today, but I don't know if this will remain true in the future because people will still seek out the ability to apply asymmetric means on another all else being equal, in ways that would probably be hard to combat.

However, such would depend on how one defines what such outright defeat would look like and I posit that the closer that one defines that with something that doesn't look like what usually is conjured up in minds when war is brought up, the more successful one is probably going to be (assuming one would want wage war to achieve some ends and is open to the option of winning such without leaving any trail of bodies in the wake).

Not a question for you, but for everyone who's interested, but what would outright defeat look like in the cyber-warfare today and tomorrow as the domain considered to be cyberspace continually expands to compose how we relate with one another and the world, where there will be economic incentive to place nanomachines in living organisms (things that "we" are doing now in research labs) that can communicate/execute complex logic manifested in the behavior of said organisms orders of magnitude faster than humans can even perceive (and have a really hard time even finding/observing now with the most expensive of equipment)?

> : The aircraft carrier became the dominant naval warfare tech in 1942, 74 years ago. 74 years before that was just after the U.S. Civil War. I wonder how many Civil War technologies remained dominant in WWII; probably not much in the navy.

Fighter planes are that old too. And machine guns, and grenades, and even night vision goggles. But the aircraft carrier of today is very different from the aircraft carriers of WW2, and so is the rest of that equipment. Except the grenade.

The M2 50-calibre machine gun is still very heavily used by the US Army and the US Navy and is a WW II-era design. In fact, I think a lot of the M2 currently in use were manufactured during WW II.

Carriers are obsolete, but very few nations can field the weaponry needed to kill one reliably.

> And it makes me wonder about other technologies, such as tanks

In the current, more urban, modern war, tanks were actually demonstrated to be pretty useless. I once spoke to a veteran of the Iraq war who mentioned the thousands of tanks in country sitting useless because they couldn't really be used in a city. Turrets too long, too slow, too easy to disable, big slow moving metal boxes.

The military tried to use Bradleys instead, but they were also far too slow and prone to ambush. Thousands also sat mostly unused.

The workhorse for years was the so called "uparmored" Humvee (HMMWV), a beast totally unsuited to its task, but just about fast enough, and just about able to be A-Team MacGuyvered into a suitable urban assault rig.

The "big armor" was the Stryker, which was designed to be armored, armed and fast. But by the end of the war was surrounded in anti-RPG cages so wide they could barely fit down a major road. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/Stryker_...

However, all of these were fairly useless against IEDs and nobody quite knows what the next workhorse armored vehicle is going to be, but I believe they're probably going to be something out of the MRAP program.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRAP

The Humvee is being replaced by 2 or 3 purpose built vehicles.

Important to this is that all of the vehicles are built using lessons learned during a very long, mostly urban war. The next time a war starts out in vast open plains, the tanks will probably come into their own again, but to be honest, lots of their mission has been taken over by a variety of flying platforms that can deliver payload more reliably and at less risk.

>But it makes me wonder if aircraft carriers are obsolete

It is not quite the same as being obsolete but I suspect that they are far more vulnerable than we realize. Every day missiles get both technically better (faster, longer range, harder to detect) but also cheaper making it more affordable for someone to acquire ever larger stockpiles of them for deployment en masse.

Meanwhile developing countermeasures that can deal with barrages of incoming missiles that are getting progressively more numerous and faster seems like a very difficult, expensive proposition.

> it makes me wonder if aircraft carriers are obsolete and we just don't know it yet because there hasn't been a naval war since then.

Aircraft carriers probably made the difference in the Falklands war.

> Tanks, planes, and aircraft carriers, to name a few, either didn't exist or were insignificant in WWI

Tanks played a critical role in the closing years of WWI. Planes were significant (though for reconnaissance rather than attack).

> WWII ended with bombers dropping nuclear weapons (another platform and strategy still in use today).

Bombers dropping nuclear weapons is barely a strategy that exists today. Some countries retain the capability because if you already have a heavy bomber and a nuclear warhead it doesn't cost a whole lot to make them compatible with each other, but the only serious delivery mechanisms for nuclear weapons are missiles.

>the only serious delivery mechanisms for nuclear weapons are missiles.

And merchant ships docked in your enemy's ports. And trucks.

And terrorists.

WWIII will start as a cyberwar. Western systems of all kinds are insanely vulnerable to cyberattack.

You may not be able to force a Western country to surrender by bringing down its banking and civilian comms systems, but you can certainly make it much less able to fight any other kind of war.

How much money is being spent on cyberdefences?

> Aircraft carriers probably made the difference in the Falklands war.

British carriers are much smaller and cheaper than American supercarriers, though.

True - although I've also seen soldiers claim that full-size carriers would have been much more useful, and perhaps that the invasion would not have happened if Britain had still been operating the Ark Royal.

(Most immediately the sinking of HMS Sheffield might have gone quite differently if the British had been capable of operating fixed-wing AWACS)

I agree that aircraft carriers, tanks, and fighter planes are obsolete in some sense. They fit badly with todays conflicts.

Thankfully many engineers don't want to work with innovation in this space. We don't have the global notion in society of competing for resources required for survival against other nations anymore, which would have been a strong motivator in the past.

It's not about engineers.

The theory of international relations still maintain that diplomacy between nations is essentially anarchy. The reason why the seven seas are so peaceful today is that the top dog (U.S.) has been favorable to free trade.

The reason why regular citizen doesn't have that "global notion of society competing for resources" is twofold: A free trade works. B pax Americana related propaganda has been broadcasted for what, 7 decades now.

Ask the RN if they think carriers are obsolete given their experience in the Falklands war.

And no having planes flying in form half a content away is not the same as having local assets.

During the Falklands war, we didn't have very good naval SAMs worth tuppence - the obsolete Sea Slug, and the then-modern Sea Dart, which still wasn't all that good: 40 mile range, can't hit anything below 30 metres altitude, such as sea-skimming missiles, or even low-flying aircraft.

We now have Aster 30, which has a range of 120 miles, and can hit supersonic sea-skimmers, ballistic missiles, anything you like.

Those ranges are still much shorter than the ~500 mile combat radius of a Sea Harrier or an F-35B, admittedly. But since destroyers are a third the price of a carrier, you can have several and spread them out.

Arguably, the submarine survives even today from the Civil War. Other than that, I agree that that's pretty much it.

Have to go back about another 100 years before the American Civil War for military useage of submarines.

Also, rifled bullets/artillery shells, breech loading rifles, cartriges and semi automatic (repeating) rifles first came in mass use during the American Civil War. Trench/defensive warfare was also adopted towards the end of the war for some of the major seiges (Petersburg for example).

There's other examples I could list, but I would say it's an understatement to say that the only direct use of 18th to 19th Century weaponary we still use to day is subs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_(submersible)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus_(1800_submarine)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_repeating_rifle

The iron-clad.

Trench warfare well pre-dates the US civil war. They were used at least as far back as the War of the Spanish Succession (1700s). The Maori also used trenches when fighting against the British, two decades before the US civil war.

Vauban [0] designed his first handbook for trench warfare after the Siege of Maastricht in 1673. Prior to that, siege mining and sapping had been used by Rome and Warring States China since about the 4th century BCE. This also marked the first purported use of poison gas in warfare, when the tunnels were intentionally filled with smoke.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9bastien_Le_Prestre_de_V...

Military change tends to be quicker when hot wars are fought. We haven't seen much of that in the last few decades. (Comparatively.)

From a historic perspective, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/1177358... makes similar arguments. But looking at the time from around 1200 to 1914, and comparing Europe with India and China.

> But it makes me wonder if aircraft carriers are obsolete and we just don't know it yet because there hasn't been a naval war since then

That's what the article is about. Well, that they're obsolete, and also that they're incredibly expensive.

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