I remember there had been previous leaks of a wargame simulation of an invasion of Iran by US forces had an outcome where there were a lot of ships sunk, and then the simulation was scripted (by "not allowing so as not to produce a result which would be offensive to the Pentagon. After a few such rule changes, the Iran team pulled out because the war game was a complete farce.
Today;'s New York Times has that says one of the 16 ships sank in the simulation was actually the aircraft carrier. The USS Kitty Hawk, the last non-nuclear aircraft carrier in the US fleet, is to be decommissioned this year and replaced with the new USS George H.W. Bush. Nine of the eleven current carriers ore Nimitz Class. A Nimitz Class carrier has a loaded weight of 104,000 tons, a crew of about 5,600 personnel and is powered by two 104-megawatt nuclear reactors. The other two are Kitty Hawk (82,000 tons) and the Enterprise (94,000 tons).
Only six carriers have been sunk in the history of the US Navy, all by Japanese enemy action. Five of these were in 1942 in the early stages of the war and the sixth, the USS Princeton, was sunk at Leyte Gulf in 1944. All of these were small carriers, with weights of less than 20,000 tons. The Shinano, the largest carrier ever sunk, had a weight of 72,000 tons.
Although this apparently was known before about the carrier, this should be even bigger news than just its implications in a conflict with Iran. It indicates that carriers might not have the longest life expectancy in the world when used in waters near a well-equipped land enemy.
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