>Like battleships, they are a big dumb target. The same way carriers and their aircraft made battleships obsolete modern anti-ship missiles have made carriers obsolete in a theoretical war between superpowers.
Yeah, except that's not actually true unless the war goes nuclear. Carriers are very well defended from air attack. The entire battle group is there to defend the carrier, which means aircraft-launched AA missiles, hundreds of SM-2s, plus point defense. Plus ECM and EM-type weapons.
And that's assuming US forces aren't able to destroy any launch platforms, which is probably not a good assumption at this point. It's much harder to pull of a surprise attack than it used to be.
>That's why the Russian idea is to just bombard them with missiles until enough they poke enough holes in them to sink or disable them. It seems like a reasonable strategy to me.
Yeah, that's pretty much the strategy everyone's been using since they switched from boarding actions to guns in the 1500s.
The Russians can't actually mount that kind of attack any more without telegraphing it in a big way, since it would take nearly every remaining conventional bomber and naval asset in the Russian military to ensure success. Nobody else is capable at all unless the scenario posits a US carrier in shallow water off the coast of Shanghai.
I'm not saying carriers are invulnerable. They're not. People make mistakes, and sometimes they're fatal. There are always variables that are impossible to evaluate without knowing the absolute latest top secret stuff. But a carrier group in the open ocean is a tough nut to crack, especially from the air, and attackers make mistakes too. It's far from obsolete.