The U.S. Fleet Could Lose Four Aircraft Carriers Defending Taiwan

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, that the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. recently organized.

Even when the United States and Japan successfully defended Taiwan—as they did in most of CSIS’s 24 simulations—the Navy lost at least two carriers … and sometimes as many as four.

And it happened fast. “Typically, the United States lost both forward-deployed carriers within the first turn or two,” CSIS analysts Mark Cancian, Matthew Cancian and Eric Heginbotham explained in their summary of the war games. A turn represented 3.5 days of fighting.

While the carriers were getting blasted by Chinese missiles, the Navy’s nuclear-powered attack submarines and the U.S. Air Force’s heavy bombers not only were dodging Chinese attacks for the most part, they also were managing to sink more than enough Chinese ships to win the war.

No war game is perfectly predictive. There are a lot of ways a game can fail to capture the chaos, nuance and surprise of an actual war. Still, it’s not news that the U.S. fleet’s giant supercarriers might be vulnerable to Chinese missiles. Fleet leaders for years have fretted over the missile threat.

The U.S. Pacific Fleet usually keeps two of its seven carriers in the Philippine Sea or China Seas, just south of Okinawa and north or east of Taiwan. These carriers occasionally sail close to the Taiwan Strait—100,000-ton, $14-billion reminders that the United States intends to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack.

Ironically, these peacetime shows-of-force put the forward flattops—not to mention their 70 aircraft, dozen or so escorts and thousands of embarked sailors—at extreme risk in CSIS’s simulations. The carriers were just a few hundred miles from the Chinese coast when the balloon went up and the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force launched its first volleys of ballistic missiles, including potentially hundreds of anti-ship ballistic missiles.

The carriers and their escorting destroyers and cruisers put up a valiant fight. But the math worked against them. “These salvos exhausted the ships’ magazines of interceptors,” the Cancians and Heginbotham wrote. “Even with the base-case assumption that shipborne missile-defense works very well, there are simply too many attacking missiles to intercept.”

In most of CSIS’s simulations, the two forward carriers either sank to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean within the first four days of fighting, or suffered so much damage that their skippers had no choice but to sail out of the war zone … for good. The conflict never lasted more than a few weeks, meaning a damaged ship was as immediately useful as a sunk ship was to either fleet. No time for major repairs.

“‘Loss’ for nuclear ships might also mean that radioactivity had so contaminated the ship that it became unusable, even if still afloat,” the Cancians and Heginbotham pointed out.

“In all iterations of the base scenario, U.S. Navy losses included two U.S. aircraft carriers as well as between seven and 20 other major surface warships (e.g., destroyers and cruisers),” the CSIS analysts added. “These losses were partly an artifact of U.S. forward-deployment aimed at deterring China … It also reflects the vulnerability of surface ships to large salvos of modern anti-ship missiles.”

But American flattops were vulnerable even when they didn’t begin the war within range of Chinese missiles. In some of the more pessimistic—for Taiwan and its allies—simulations, a cautious U.S. fleet took its time organizing a powerful counterattack.

In one scenario, a huge American task force with two carriers, 29 cruisers and destroyers and 10 attack submarines steamed toward Taiwan, three weeks after the initial Chinese attack. It was one of the most powerful naval flotillas of the modern era—and Chinese missiles and torpedoes still wrecked it. “Under withering fire from Chinese submarines, air-launched [cruise missiles] and surface ships, the U.S. fleet was largely destroyed without relieving Taiwan.”

In that startling simulation, the U.S. fleet lost four carriers, hundreds of carrierborne aircraft and presumably thousands—if not tens of thousands—of sailors. With dwindling options for relieving the embattled island, Taiwan was on track to lose by the time the war-game organizers called it.

Losing four carriers might signal doom for the U.S. war effort. But the Americans could lose two and still win the war in CSIS’s games. The Navy’s 50 attack submarines and the Air Force’s 150 heavy bombers, operating in “conveyor belts” from bases mostly beyond range of Chinese missiles, maintained a steady barrage of torpedoes and cruise missiles that whittled away the transport fleet supporting Chinese troops on Taiwan.

In the winning scenarios for U.S. and allied forces, the carriers barely mattered. The subs and bombers were the war-winners.

To have any chance of making a meaningful contribution to the war effort, the carriers—bombers and tanker planes, too—had to begin the war at a safe distance from the Chinese coast. No closer to China than Guam, 1,800 miles away. “The ‘no U.S. show of force’ excursion case allows the U.S. team to start its carriers, bombers and tankers outside of China’s primary threat rings,” the Cancians and Heginbotham wrote.

If CSIS’s games are any indication, a war with Taiwan actually could bring to a belated end the U.S. Navy’s long carrier era, which began with the destruction or damaging of eight American battleships at Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Barring a generational effort to build new shipyards, the U.S. fleet never would make good the two, three or four flattops it lost around Taiwan in CSIS’s war games. “Lost carriers could not be replaced because the current shipyard capacity is sufficient only to maintain the current carrier force,” the analysts explained.

But if the Navy loses a third of its carriers without those carriers making much difference in a war with China, then the fleet might be better off without the huge, expensive—and vulnerable—vessels.