The US Navy operates a total of 11 active aircraft carriers, far more than any other power in the world, with China in second place with only three such carriers. Despite the enormous capacity, the US General Staff has faced the problem of not having enough warships, which is the cause of ongoing conflicts around the world. The United States currently has five warships stationed in the Pacific, and their mission is clearly to monitor and suppress the growth of Chinese power.
The biggest concern now is the Atlantic region, where there is simply no longer enough capacity to defend the US East Coast due to increasing conflicts.
There is a tendency among policymakers in Washington to try to meet all needs.
“This inevitably creates a situation where certain areas are not getting enough attention, and where the Western superpower is most vulnerable,” said James Holmes, a professor of strategy at the U.S. Naval Academy. At the beginning of the year, the naval port of Norfolk, on the Celtic coast of the United States, was home to a total of six aircraft carriers, but that number has now fallen to five. The real problem is that all warships are currently performing some other mission or are not in deployable condition due to maintenance tasks. The situation is expected to change in the future, as the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, which is serving in the Middle East, will be replaced by the destroyer USS Theodore Roosevelt. The exchange will take three to four weeks, which is critical at a time when the Houthi rebels are at the entrance to the Red Sea, one of the world’s most important trade routes.
According to Elizabeth Dent, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Middle East Policy Institute, the problems have several causes. For one thing, the United States operated a much larger fleet of aircraft carriers in the 1980s, enough to service the problems of most regions of the world. The other is that Washington's allies are not building the world's largest warships at a reasonable pace, so the Western superpower is forced to be present in as many places as possible. The US Navy is currently awaiting the arrival of three aircraft carriers, but there are also plans to build a fourth ship.
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