This, though, is quite likely the case:
>The huge distances involved in the Pacific mean that the Pentagon must give
>additional priority to "long-range power projection", the report says.
>
>This means putting fresh resources into airlift capacity to enable the US to
>move troops, vehicles and weapons many thousands of miles from bases in
>America to the frontline in Asia at short notice.
>
>The report says the threat from hostile missiles is likely to become so
>serious
>that the US can no longer afford to risk its largest and most expensive ships,
>the Nimitz class aircraft carriers, in forward positions. As a result, the
>navy
>will be told to stop building big ships and to concentrate on speed and
>manoeuvrability, including a new generation of smaller carriers, to avoid them
>becoming targets.
With the advent of cheap, highly accurate (within 100 meters) intermediate range surface to surface missiles (as the Chinese proved off the Taiwan Straits a few years ago), the age of the massive carrier task force - first pioneered by the Imperial Japanese navy and brought to its wartime apogee by Admiral Halseys' Pacific task force - has probably drawn to a close. A country that could mass produce tens of thousands of such missiles can effectively exclude these sitting ducks 200 miles out from their shoreline, thereby also effectively negating the chief utility of massed carrier task forces - the focused projection of mass air power into a theatre of military operations. Likewise, their cheapness and speed of manufacture allows these missiles to overrun any slow, expensive and unreliable improvement in (still projected, still on the drawing board) "missile defense".
So the premier symbol of US conventional military supremacy is passing form the scene, or so the Guardian report has the Bush Administration all but admitting. There are further problems: It is difficult to see how "long range" projections of ground troops are going to succeed without massive air cover, and it is hard to see how this air cover - which must consist of shorter range fighters and fighter-bombers, not long range bombers - can be provided from islands thousands of miles away, or from light escort carriers scattered about the Pacific, carriers that will still be vulnerable to the missiles - unless they are under 100 meters in size.
-Brad Mayer Oakland, CA