Missiles and drones post big risks to these huge, lumbering platforms.
Key Point: Aircraft carriers are powerful, but they are also costly investments that are too big to fail. Would smaller, but more numerous carriers ensure they could survive and win a war?
One of the great conceits of admirals in the interwar years was their dogmatic embrace of the nostrum that battleships won naval wars. Officers such as those of the Imperial Japanese navy proved particularly susceptible to this dogma, a thought process that found itself manifested in so called super battleships such as the IJN Yamato, which one Japanese commentator ranked alongside the pyramids and the great wall of China as one of history’s great white elephants. Indeed, even after British carrier borne aircraft had demonstrated their value against the Italian navy at Taranto and Japan’s own carrier wing had achieved a spectacular tactical success at Pearl Harbor, Japanese admirals held firm to the view that the shee