The U.S. Navy’s fleet of 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers fared poorly in a series of war games simulating a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in 2026 held recently by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
Even when the United States and Japan successfully defended Taiwan — as they did in most of the 24 CSIS simulations — the Navy lost at least two carriers … sometimes as many as four.
And it happened quickly. “Typically, the United States lost both forward-deployed aircraft carriers in the first turn or two,” CSIS analysts Mark Cancian, Matthew Cancian and Eric Heginbotham explained in their summary of the war games. The plant represented 3.5 days of combat.
While the carriers were blown up by Chinese missiles, the US Air Force’s nuclear-powered attack submarines and heavy bombers largely avoided Chinese attacks, but also managed to sink more than enough Chinese ships to win the war. .
No war game is completely predictable. There are many ways a game can fail to capture the chaos, nuance, and surprise of actual war. Still, it’s not news that the giant supercarriers of the US fleet can be vulnerable to Chinese missiles. Fleet leaders have worried about the missile threat for years.
The U.S. Pacific Fleet typically has two of its seven carriers in the Philippine or China Seas, south of Okinawa and north or east of Taiwan. These ships occasionally sail near the Taiwan Strait – 100,000 tons and $14 billion reminders that the United States intends to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack.
Ironically, these peacetime displays of power put forward aircraft—not to mention their 70 aircraft, a dozen or more escorts, and thousands of embarked sailors—at extreme risk in the CSIS simulations. The carriers were only a few hundred miles off the Chinese coast when the balloon lifted off and the People’s Liberation Army’s missile force fired its first volleys of ballistic missiles, including possibly hundreds of anti-ship ballistic missiles.
The carriers and their accompanying destroyers and cruisers fought bravely. But the math worked against them. “These volleys depleted the ship’s interceptor tanks,” wrote Cancianci and Heginbotham. “Even with the basic assumption that the ship’s anti-missile defenses work very well, there are simply too many offensive missiles to intercept.”
In most of the CSIS simulations, the forward ships sank to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean within the first four days of the fighting, or suffered so much damage that their captains had no choice but to sail out of the war zone…for good. The conflict never lasted more than a few weeks, meaning that a damaged ship was as immediately useful as a sunken ship to one fleet or the other. There is no time for major repairs.
“‘Loss’ for nuclear ships could also mean that radioactivity has contaminated the ship so much that it has become unusable, even if it is still afloat,” Cancians and Heginbotham pointed out.
“In all iterations of the baseline scenario, U.S. Navy losses included two U.S. aircraft carriers and between seven and 20 other major surface combatant ships (eg, destroyers and cruisers),” the CSIS analysts added. “These losses were in part an artifact of American forward deployment aimed at deterring China. . . . It also reflects the vulnerability of surface ships to large salvos from modern anti-ship missiles.”
However, US cruise missiles were vulnerable even when wars did not start within range of Chinese missiles. In some of the more pessimistic – for Taiwan and its allies – simulations, the cautious US fleet took its time to organize a strong counterattack.
In one scenario, a massive U.S. task force of two carriers, 29 cruisers and destroyers, and 10 attack submarines sailed toward Taiwan three weeks after the first Chinese attack. It was one of the most powerful naval flotillas of the modern era – and it was still destroyed by Chinese missiles and torpedoes. “Under the withering fire of Chinese submarines, air [cruise missiles] and surface ships, the American fleet was largely destroyed without saving Taiwan.”
In this astonishing simulation, the US fleet lost four aircraft carriers, hundreds of aircraft carriers and allegedly thousands – if not tens of thousands – of sailors. With fewer and fewer options to relieve the island of fighting, Taiwan was well on its way to losing by the time the war game organizers called it quits.
The loss of four carriers could mean a fatal war for the US. But the Americans could lose two and still win the war in the CSIS games. 50 Navy attack submarines and 150 Air Force heavy bombers, operating on “conveyor belts” from bases mostly out of range of Chinese missiles, maintained a constant barrage of torpedoes and cruise missiles that decimated the carrier fleet supporting the Chinese troops in Taiwan.
In win-win scenarios for US and allied forces, carriers mean little. Submarines and bombers were the winners of the war.
To have any chance of making a significant contribution to the war effort, carriers—including bombers and tankers—had to start the war at a safe distance from the Chinese coast. No closer to China than Guam, 2,800 miles away. “The case of ‘no US show of force’ allows the US team to launch its aircraft carriers, bombers and tankers outside of China’s primary threats,” Cancians and Heginbotham wrote.
If the CSIS games are any indication, a war with Taiwan could effectively bring a late end to the US Navy’s long aviation era, which began with the destruction or damage of eight US battleships at Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Without a generational effort to build new shipyards, the U.S. fleet would never have replaced the two, three, or four shipyards it lost around Taiwan in the CSIS war games. “The lost ships could not be replaced because the shipyard’s current capacity is only sufficient to maintain the current ship strength,” the analysts explained.
But if the Navy loses a third of its carriers without those carriers making much of a difference in a war with China, then the fleet might be better off without huge, expensive and vulnerable vessels.
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China’s warships outnumber those of the US, and this summer it launched its third aircraft carrier, the first to be designed and built in the country. Its defense budget is second only to that of the US. China’s military has more active duty members, around 2 million, compared to just under 1.4 million in the US.
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