The U.S. Navy’s Big Mistake: Building Tons of Supercarriers
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.<p>Now that is a very flawed, simplistic comparison. But it makes me wonder if aircraft carriers are obsolete and we just don&#x27;t know it yet because there hasn&#x27;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?<p>Remember how quickly things changed in around 25 years between WWI and WWII: Tanks, planes, and aircraft carriers, to name a few, either didn&#x27;t exist or were insignificant in WWI, and WWII ended with bombers dropping nuclear weapons (another platform and strategy still in use today).