The Navy Times offers a piece on aircraft carriers by Geoffrey Norman.
The sight of an aircraft carrier up close, even at dockside, linked to land by umbilicals, is overwhelming — more than 1,000 feet long, displacing 100,000 tons, 30 stories tall from waterline to the ship’s island.
The sense of power is undeniable. Each of the 90 planes operating from its deck carries a heavier bomb load than the largest bomber of World War II (not counting nuclear bombs).
It takes no imagination to appreciate the sense of impotence a carrier can instill in a hostile power. Nobody wants a piece of this monster.
The carrier is the ultimate refinement of a weapon evolving from oar-powered galleys to wooden vessels that carried acres of sail and three decks of iron cannons to steel-hulled dreadnoughts that fired guns at ranges requiring corrections for the curvature of the earth.
No other warship can launch supersonic aircraft against targets hundreds of miles away, recover them and launch them again, over and over. Capable of making 800 miles a day, it can quickly project power across the globe.
And the carrier is a particularly American man-of-war.
You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:
https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2019/10/16/aircraft-carrier-ship-of-fear/
Note: The top photo is of the USS Ronald Reagan. The above photo is of my old ship, the USS Kitty Hawk, circa 1971.
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