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A valid point. When playing Alpha Centauri, I rely on air power quite a lot. But one generally stops having much need for Carriers once Gravships are available.

The thread title says Future Threats to US Carriers.

Correct. The beam of collimated X-rays would shine right through the top deck, and all the decks below it, down into the water underneath. And each of those decks now suddenly has a circular area about the size of a large manhole cover that's just been turned into superheated plasma. Which would...

A nuke-pumped superlaser doesn't "drill" - it's all in one go. By the time the thermal bloom has started, the laser itself is already an expanding cloud of gas. So there's no walking the beam across the target or anything like that. All the aiming has to be done before detonation. And the...

Oh? What about a single ballistic missile where the warhead section is a 20-megaton bomb that's there to pump an array of single-shot X-ray lasers? It doesn't need to get particularly close to the carrier battle group, it just needs to get to where it has line-of-sight on the target. Then BOOM...

The Americans seem often to regard the idea that anything could sink one of their supercarriers as thoughtcrime, even though they in practice avoid letting them go anywhere near harm's way.