China, and allegedly Russia, now has the ability to launch hypersonic missiles at our carriers at a range we can't match. Now, there is a lot of debate about how effective those missiles will be. They are highly accurate, so that's not the issue. The issue is us shooting them down. That duty typically falls on the Aegis cruisers which work similar to how Israel's Iron Dome and David's Sling work. Radar detects the missiles and then fires missiles of its own to knock them out. There are two current problems. The first is nobody knows if our missile defense systems are good enough to handle hypersonic anti-ship missiles. The second is that The Chinese could simply flood us, or fire more missiles than we have the capacity to defend against. If they fire 200 at a carrier and we can only shoot down a max of 150 then they have 50 chances to sink our carrier.

The other issue is Range. Our carriers now have an effective radius of around 500 miles. That used to be okay, but with the advent of long range anti-ship missiles it really isn't anymore. This was first learned during the Falkland's war when Argentina used Exocent missiles to great effect. The reason we didn't pay much attention was that the Exocent didn't have sufficient range and our Aegis systems were considered good enough to combat them (which was all true). But now we are dealing with anti-ship missiles with significant range, around 1500 miles worth, so they can hit us well before we have them in range, and they are significantly faster and more maneuverable. When I was in the service I spoke to flag officers who bemoaned the fact that the Navy didn't have the foresight to develop carrier capable fighters with extended range, although the point may be moot. A hypersonic ICBM will always have more range than a fighter.

Now, carriers will still be extremely useful against basically any country that isn't Russia or China. They do wonders against Iran. But against Russia and China the feeling is that we will have to develop new strategies. The good news is that from what I saw back in 2015 they do have some really good strategies but they still needed to be developed. I'm not in the inside anymore so I don't know exactly what has happened since, but I have high hopes. I could do another extremely long post on drones and the game changer they are, but I need to go to bed.