Re: Submarine palaces for marine fauna
Milton: "Against a weak adversary who cannot project power against you (think of every country the US has waged "war" against since 1980) the aircraft carrier is useful and will usually remain unsunk."
An excellent and well reasoned comment, but I'd just add that the rising belligerence of Russia (and to an extent China over the South China Sea) makes proxy wars more likely, and both could cascade moderately advanced assets into war zones, in the manner of Russia's behaviour in eastern Ukraine. In addition to weapons transfers, there's a number of unaligned, politically unstable countries with some advanced capabilities (mainly Iran, Nork, Pakistan, but others exist and will emerge).
So for example, a modest shooting war in the Gulf that involved Iran is always possible, but the relevant thing for this argument is that Iran has not only a range of non-conventional forces and tactics, but it also has a range of moderately advanced largely home grown missile capabilities to sink carriers. In the 2011 Libyan engagement, all the strategically important vessels had to be kept out of the range of sea skimming missiles. There's also the possibility of technology cascade by the unaligned countries - for example last year when Iranian technology was used by Houthi rebels to cripple a Saudi frigate using a speedboat as an expendable drone.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
