“When word of a crisis breaks out in Washington, it’s no accident that
the first question that comes to everyone’s lips is:
‘Where’s the nearest carrier?’”
–Bill Clinton

80 years ago the idea of an aircraft carrier was a novelty, to be scoffed at by any real blue water sailor. But a decade later the fate of the world was determined, to a large degree, by the aircraft carrier. In the years since World War II, the carrier has represented the pinnacle of international power, a force greater than the entire air force of many nations that could go anywhere, holding capitols as well as navies at risk.

But all organizations and institutions are subject to wrenching change, and perhaps the number one driver of large scale change is technology. And in laboratories around the globe, engineers are getting closer to an effective Anti Ship Ballistic Missile.

Some people want to downplay it. Some people want to panic. But this is the dawn of the ASBM era. Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles WILL at some point make it difficult if not impossible to operate large warships in littoral or regional waters. (Those of you saying “yeah, they’ll develop ASBMs and we’ll just develop effective defenses”, let me ask you something. We’ve had ICBMs for fifty years. How’s that defense coming?). The important thing to realize about a warfighting technology like ASBMs is that, once developed,in very short order most blue-water powers will have them. So it is not ONLY the case that the US will be constrained from operating in foreign waters, but other nations will be constrained from operating in US waters. Our inability to attack them will be mirrored by their inability to attack us. It could still be argued that the resulting balance is disproportionate because it is the absolute air dominance that allows the US military to operate in such an unfettered manner. You can’t mass troops or bring up armor or effectively manage logistics when you can’t use aircraft and the US can use as many as she wants.

Of course, it is very difficult to determine precisely when these weapons will exist in a form that works reliably. The extreme difficulty of targeting a ballistic missile with a CEP small enough to reliably hit an underway blue water warship is hard to even think about, and testing under operational conditions is as hard as it is expensive. But all that said, it seems likely that ASBM technology will be deployed, and the very existence of a reliable, over-the-horizon standoff antiship capability with a high probability of kill very much changes seagoing nation’s ability to project power, just as it places effective limits on global freedom of navigation.

Of course, nothing is certain. It’s possible that you just can’t achieve that kind of accuracy against a moving target with a ballistic missile. For that matter, the greatest limitation on developing and deploying directed energy weapons is the huge power requirement, and a carrier can generate plenty of power. So it isn’t inconceivable that by the time the threat is real, there will be effective defense options. But real-world outcomes usually fall somewhere between the extremes, so it would be reasonable to assume that options for power projection and expeditionary interventions will be greatly reduced in the coming decades. Overall, this may turn out to be a good thing. Just as the destructive power of nuclear weapons made the major powers more hesitant to engage in large wars, advances in missile and drone technology may make even smaller actions difficult or impossible. Humans aren’t likely to swear off killing each other any time soon, but reductions in the scale of that killing would certainly be welcome.