summarizing
The military summary of the article is as follows:
aircraft carriers are capital ships.
capital ships are extra KEWL!
Us needs KEWL capital ships to conquer!
And two major problems with that:
One, the UK once used to have the world's best collection of capital ships. It also had a world-wide empire at the time, and most of those colonies and possessions didn't have their own navies, and barely had armies. I used to read the British comics - as well as the US ones - in PNG in the seventies when I was a kid there. There was one that was way over the top and happy to be nothink more than themselfs - perennial British Cockney humour; but there were some really sad ones in the magazines that were in mourning for the loss of Empire and seemed to exude the feeling that we wuz robbed!!!
The British Empire is no more, and the world doesn't seem to have minded. Britain is now part of Europe. The Rest of the World is much more worried about the Senile Dementia USAmericana; I'd much rather not get involved in that.
Two, making something obsolete is a matter of making something cost too much in relation to its value. HMS Dreadnought - the cost of the big guns outweighed the cost of the many smaller guns pre-dreadnoughts sported. The cost of the HMS Dreadnought's steam turbines outweighed the cost of the multiple-stage reciprocating steam engines. But the HMS Dreadnought could outrun and outgun any other capital ship in any other navy, so their cost was outweighed in relation to their value. And the process of weapons standardization meant that the British Empire could manufacture Dreadnought-class capital ships much, much cheaper than anyone else could manufacture pre-dreadnoughts.
Battleships' value was eroded and then demolished by much cheaper aircraft, which could do what they could - sink capital ships - and do what they couldn't - attack Beyond the Horizon targets.
Now, capital ships' value has been eroded by cheap missiles and cheap boats. The US can afford the massive support structure for supercarriers, though it seems the Pentagon is doing its damnedest to bankrupt the US.
In short, what use are they (these carriers), and why are they needed? NATO? That would be believable, except it's nowhere mentioned. US military adventurism? Why? One Boer War should've been one too many for us - why join the US in making BoerWars to order?