Re: Bad idea
"As sensible as building a Dreadnought in 1970".
Exactly, Or, come to think of it, as sensible as building HMS Hood in 1918. That cost just about as many lives as a sunk modern carrier, and with as little justification.
Hood was the culmination of a series of fundamentally pointless ships, starting with Jackie Fisher's bright idea of a big cruiser fast enough to catch enemy cruisers and armed with battleship guns to sink them. (If it could hit them, which turned out to be very doubtful indeed). Fisher apparently didn't consider what would happen when the enemy (oh, what the hell, when Germany) started building its own battlecruisers which were better armoured and which (for whatever reasons) shot a lot more accurately.
The main thing Fisher overlooked was that a Captain RN commanding what was always called a capital ship - and which was actually bigger than any battleship - could not, in practice, refuse battle against an enemy battleship. Unfortunately the enemy battleship could take a few hits from Hood, but not vice versa. It seems possible that Hood was actually sunk by the German cruiser Prinz Eugen - if true, the ultimate in black irony as cruisers were the one thing she was designed to defeat.
There seem to be a few lessons there for the advocates of carriers today. Filling in the details is left as an exercise for the student.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
