Aircraft Carrier

An aircraft carrier is a warship built around a runway. Everything else about the ship, the 100,000 tons, the reactors, the crew of 5,000, exists to launch, recover, and rearm aircraft far from any friendly airfield. The US Navy's Nimitz and Ford classes embark an air wing of about 70 aircraft, which is more combat aviation than most countries own, movable at 700 miles a day, answerable to no host government.

That last property is the point. Basing rights are political and revocable. A carrier in international waters is neither. When Washington asks "where are the carriers" in a crisis, it is asking what strike power can arrive without asking anyone's permission.

Not all carriers are equal

Design splits on how aircraft get off the deck. CATOBAR ships, catapult launch and arrested recovery, are the expensive route. Steam or electromagnetic catapults throw fully loaded aircraft to flying speed, which means heavier fuel and weapons loads and supporting aircraft like the E-2 radar plane. The US operates eleven, France one. STOBAR and ski-jump ships, including China's first two carriers, Britain's Queen Elizabeth class, and India's, launch with a bow ramp and accept lighter takeoff weights in exchange for mechanical simplicity. China's third carrier, Fujian, jumped to electromagnetic catapults, a statement about where Beijing thinks the competition is going.

A carrier never sails alone. The strike group around it, typically a cruiser, several destroyers, an attack submarine, and a supply ship, exists mostly to keep the carrier alive, layering air defense radar and missiles, anti-submarine screens, and hundreds of vertical-launch cells around the flattop.

The vulnerability argument

Critics have pronounced the carrier obsolete since the 1950s, and the current version of the argument has real teeth. China's DF-21D and DF-26 anti-ship ballistic missiles were built specifically to hold carriers at risk out to thousands of kilometers, and a $20 million missile trading against a $13 billion ship is ugly arithmetic. The Navy's rebuttals are mobility, layered defense, deception, and the growing reach of the air wing itself, including the MQ-25 tanker drone extending strike range. Nobody gets to test the question short of a great-power war, which is precisely why both sides keep spending.

Who operates carriers today?

Eleven countries operate something in the class, but capability tiers matter. The US operates eleven nuclear CATOBAR ships. France's Charles de Gaulle is the only other nuclear CATOBAR carrier. China has three and is building more. The UK, India, Italy, Japan, Spain, and Turkey operate ski-jump or V/STOL ships flying Harriers or F-35Bs, and Japan's converted Izumo class shows how a "helicopter destroyer" becomes a carrier with a coat of deck paint and a political decision.