Do US Aircraft Carriers Have Guns? Here's How They Defend Against Attacks
Story by Chris Littlechild • 12h
An aircraft carrier is a vast ship (the world's largest aircraft carrier being over 1,100 feet long) that serves as a sort of mobile base for aircraft. They're friendly places to land, to refuel and supply, to rendezvous with other personnel, to provide a base of operations for attacks and a runway of sorts from which they can be launched. By virtue of their status as home for potent military aircraft, then, they have access to great firepower. In Britain, for instance, the Royal Navy's Queen Elizabeth class carrier can accommodate up to 36 F-35Bs and 72 planes overall, while the Nimitz-class carriers of the United States boast room for around 5,000 people and 60 aircraft.
While a full complement of such aircraft may not be available to respond to a given attack at a moment's notice, an aerial attack on one from other fighters or bombers would be particularly risky as a result. As the U.S. Navy's Lieutenant Commander John A. Collet put it back in 1942 (per the U.S. Naval Institute), an aircraft carrier, "with its defending fighter planes ... has a better defense than any other type of ship in existence. One good fighter plane squadron is worth more than all the anti-aircraft fire of an entire task force as an air defense."
The best defense is a good offense, as they say. This doesn't mean, though, that U.S. aircraft carriers lack any equipped guns of their own. Here's how they're defended.
Today's carriers may face direct threats from other aircraft, longer-range assaults from missiles, assaults from the ocean itself (submarines for instance), just as some of the possibilities. With the unpredictable range of dangers, they need to be equally multifaceted in the defenses they employ. The potent Phalanx CIWS (Close-In Weapon System) is one advanced method of doing just that, employed on the Nimitz-class carriers.
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