On April 26th, 2017, the shipyards of Dalian, China were buzzing with activity. The Chinese Navy was about to launch a new warship, one that would cement China’s status as a major naval power. As nearby vessels blew their whistles in celebration, a Chinese official smashed a bottle of champagne against the gray hull, blessing it in the mariner’s tradition. China’s national anthem played as confetti and streamers shot into the sky surrounding the 66,000-ton ship—tentatively known as Type 002. This past summer it conducted sea trials in the Yellow Sea.

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There's cause for celebration: Aircraft carriers have been the dominant weapon at sea since the carriers Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown helped the US win the battle of Midway, and they “remain critical to projecting power around the world,” says Robert Farley, Senior Lecturer at the University of Kentucky and an expert on naval warfare. Yet even as other countries —including the United Kingdom, Japan, and Italy—continue to build the vessels, they could be sailing into the sunset.

Aircraft carriers are expensive, and potentially dangerous: The total loss of just one Ford-class carrier would result in twice as many deaths as what the U.S. Navy suffered during attack on Pearl Harbor. And they’re ill-equipped to handle a new generation of weapons, including high-speed torpedoes, anti-ship ballistic missiles, and hypersonic weapons—which could make them extinct within a generation. And already, experts have some intriguing ideas about what might replace them.

Today’s Carriers: Costly and Outdated

Pundits have been predicting the demise of aircraft carriers since as early as 1945, just nine years after carriers ended the era of the battleship. Nuclear weapons, it was reasoned, could sink entire fleets and make carrier-related forms of warfare obsolete. That hasn’t happened yet, but carriers still have drawbacks that make them less than ideal for modern and future warfare.

Carriers and the aircraft that fill their decks are arduous to build, expensive to construct, and cost even more to operate. The USS Gerald R. Ford cost an eye-watering $13 billion as a standalone vessel: The 74 aircraft that make up its air wing, from Super Hornet fighters to MH-60R Seahawk helicopters, cost an additional $5 billion. Carriers also run the expense of flying the aircraft onboard, which ranges up to $44,000 per hour for the F-35C. The latest carrier-based fighter jet, the Lockheed Martin F-35C Lightning II, costs $107.7 million to build.

In addition, adversaries are developing faster and more powerful weapons that could kill carriers. China has developed the DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile and DF-17 hypersonic weapon, now paired with the DR-8 supersonic drone. These weapons, shown in Beijing’s October military parade, represent an unprecedented threat to American aircraft carriers. In the event of war, Chinese air and naval forces would locate American carriers with drones and launch coordinated attacks with both the DF-21D and DF-17, attempting to overwhelm the carriers’ defenses.

Unmanned Powerhouses

Traditionally an “aircraft carrier” is thought of as a type of ship. But it’s really a partnership between the aircraft and the carrier vessel. If history is anything to go by, this is what might help carriers dodge obsolescence.



For example, the Midway-class carrier Coral Sea was built during WWII, but served into the 1990s by swapping out propeller driven F-8F Bearcat fighters for F/A-18 Hornet fighter jets. By switching from piston to jet engines, Coral Sea’s aircraft went from a top speed of 455 miles an hour to more than 1,400 miles an hour. The aircraft’s torpedoes and bombs have been exchanged for nuclear weapons. As warfare changes and technology fields more effective aircraft, carriers may simply swap old planes for new ones.

But those planes may not have pilots. In 2017, the late Senator John McCain published an alternative plan for the U.S. military that recommended building smaller, more affordable aircraft carriers and investing in unmanned combat aircraft vehicles (UCAVs). It's likely these UCAVs will eventually replace manned aircraft, says Farley. “Drones don’t need to return to base after being launched, don't need to keep a human pilot alive, and don't worry about being shot down over enemy territory,” Farley says. “In many risky operations, it will be impossible to justify the expense of a manned, reusable aircraft, even if we can only use the drone once.”

Removing the pilot would also reduce aircraft complexity and cost, allowing the military to buy more drones. The Navy first flew a drone from a carrier in 2013 and the first deployable drone, the MQ-25A Stingray tanker, will join the fleet in 2024. The U.S. Air Force is currently testing the XQ-58A Valkyrie high speed combat drone. The Valkyrie has a range of 1,500 miles, is designed for stealth, and can carry up to two GBU-39 “Stormbreaker” all-weather glide bombs inside an internal weapons bay.

Today’s carrier aircraft, manned and unmanned, take off and land from a manned flight deck. In the future we could see runway-suited UCAVs coupled with larger versions of the U.S. Navy’s Sea Robin drone, which launches from a torpedo or missile tube and flies into the air. According to undersea warfare expert H.I. Sutton, author of the Covert Shores web site, the use of drones could lead to minimally crewed aviation ships, complete with deck robots to substantially reduce the number of personnel needed to maintain, operate, and fly aircraft.

Unmatched Stealth

As for the carrier itself, Sutton suggests a semi-submersible vessel that uses ballast tanks to raise or lower itself in relation to sea level. A semi-submersible carrier could sit “barely two meters (six feet) above waves during flight operations in normal sea states or bad weather but ballast down further when not engaged in flying operations,” Sutton tells us. He envisions sleek, low-profile vessels, similar to a submarine sailing on the surface of the ocean, with elevators and a flight deck for UCAVs.

Another option is to submerge the ship all the time, building a large, nuclear-powered submarine capable of launching UCAVs from silos embedded in the hull. “A submarine platform for launching drones would stand a better chance of surviving in hostile, anti-access environments,” said Farley. “While an aircraft carrier can take advantage of its speed and mobility to avoid missile attacks, it can't match the stealth of even a large submarine.”

Drone-launching submarines may sound like something from a Hollywood blockbuster, but a model for this ship already exists: America’s four Ohio-class cruise-missile submarines. The subs, built to carry submarine-launched ballistic missiles, were cut from the Pentagon’s nuclear force due to arms control agreements with Russia. Rather than retire them, the U.S. Navy modified the submarines Ohio, Michigan, Florida, and Georgia to carry Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles.

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The result is something very much along the lines of a submarine carrier. Each Ohio-class cruise missile submarine can carry 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles or Sea Robin drones, theoretically giving the ships the ability to scout for and then attack targets—one of the aircraft carrier’s core missions. Each of the submarines packs as much firepower as an aircraft carrier while operating with a crew of just 155—far less than the 4,550 sailors that call Ford-class carriers home. And Ohio-class submarines have also reportedly never been tracked during a patrol.



Much of the tech needed to develop drone-launching submarines—such as creating a large submersible or controlling drones at sea—has already been mastered. When someone ties it all together, we could see (or rather, not see) a naval event where carriers from both sides are totally underwater.

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