The world’s most powerful conventionally armed warships are, by a very wide margin, the US Navy’s fleet of aircraft carriers. There are currently eleven of them, including a new one that is over budget and beset with problems.
The other ten, all Nimitz-class carriers, are a different matter. Over 100,000 tons each, heavily armed with aircraft and helicopters as well as defensive systems, and tried and tested over the past two decades. Moreover, each is at the centre of a flotilla of warships drawn from the navy’s cruisers, destroyers, frigates and attack submarines, the whole cluster supported by supply ships. It is no exaggeration to say that a single US carrier battle group has more combined firepower than all but a very few of the world’s navies.
Until a couple of weeks ago, the navy had four carrier battle groups at sea, two deployed in the Middle East because of tensions with Iraq and two more in the west Pacific, there to keep a watch on China and its territorial ambitions in the South China Sea.
