Certainly, the spurt in carrier construction has much to do with what the three countries see as their security priorities, including China’s desire to push out its seaward defenses and protect its “historic rights” over neighboring areas Japan’s desire to ensure that those areas do not include the Senkaku Islands (Diaoyu in China) and South Korea’s desire to ensure that Japan’s efforts to ward off China do not imperil its hold on the Liancourt Rocks (Takeshima in Japan and Dokdo in South Korea). Japan is converting two of its helicopter carriers into full-fledged aircraft carriers, and South Korea has rushed the development of its first. It now has two carriers in service and a third under construction. Yet, over the last decade, China, Japan, and South Korea have all committed to adding aircraft carriers to their fleets. Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld contended that the future lay in “prompt global strike”-using new weapon systems that can strike foes a world away within hours-and less in forward-deployed forces, like aircraft carrier battle groups. By the first decade of the 21 st century, the only active aircraft carriers in the Pacific were American, and even those were under budgetary threat. Thailand left its lone aircraft carrier without fixed-wing aircraft. After the Cold War, Russia dispensed with an aircraft carrier for its Pacific Fleet. Australia decommissioned its last aircraft carrier in 1984. Such a shift in naval warfare would obviously have its biggest impact in the world’s biggest body of water, the Pacific Ocean. They argue that the advent of pervasive sensors and precision-guided munitions would overcome improvements in ship-based defenses to render the aircraft carrier (and perhaps most large surface combatants) obsolete. Many naval theorists have heralded the end of the aircraft-carrier era.
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