Quoted: Want to stop a US aircraft carrier dead in it's tracks? Sink the supply ship carrying toilet paper and let the supply ship carrying beans and franks get through....

Thats a war crime, buddy.

Quoted: Wanna talk about the emergency toilet paper VERTREP a det from my former squadron flew to a CVN following that ship's port call to Chennai (then called Madras)?

Kharn

I spent 5 years on USS Midway CV-41, She was the first class built too big to fit through the Panama Canel. She was commisioned in 1946. I served on her 1981-1985.

Nuclear ships are not the best answer either. They cost an outrageous amount of money to build and maintain and plant operations are labor intensive.

The battle nowadays is in the littorals, the waters close to land. Very few nations have blue water navies and most of the countries that would be our adversaries have no navy to speak of. I'm currently attached to Naval Coastal Warfare and that's where the new battle ground is. Small fast boats with 4-8 man crews locking down a coast line. The trend towards small multi-mission ships that support the close in fight is where it's at.

The carrier battle group will always have a force projection mission and as the mission gets bigger, the carriers will continue to grow. It also provides a huge forward operation base that our enemies can't attack easily. The lack of our enemies having a blue water navy that can fight 100+ miles offshore is the best defence that our CV battle groups have.  

A few years back Popular Science featured an idea for building big square concrete sections that were basically floating cities that could be towed anywhere in the world and tied together to form an airfield as big as any modern land-based airport. According to them, the idea was feasible and the things could be towed anywhere in the world fast enough to be strategically effective. No estimate on what they would do to the defense budget, though.

Carriers are pretty much self sufficient when it comes to fighting a battle. Whenever there has been a crisis, carriers are sent off to engage the crisis while the support ships comeup when they can.
Obviously the speed that carriers can attain puts them in that sort of situation. During the Pueblo incident, the Enterprise sped there on its own, doing an unbelievable speed I might add.


www.restoretherepublic.org

Don't believe everything you might read, the Enterprise and the other carriers aren't speed demons.  Yeah they can pick them up and put them down, but the Leahy's could be as fast  and the Belknaps a skosh faster.  Let's just say from personal experience, I know how fast a Belknap fresh out of the yards with a clean bottom and optimal weight and trim can go.  (Standing watch in Main Control and seeing the actual turns we were getting out of the plant. And also seeing the nav plots)

The amount of power required to push a carrier at over say 36 or 37 knots is close to or more than twice  that required to push it at 28 knots.  You start getting higher than 38 or 39 and the drag factors are unbelievable with a clean bottom, worse with a dirty bottom, and the carriers weren't docked all that often.