Garrison Davis

A Nimitz class aircraft carrier has this many planes and so it can unleash this amount of firepower on a target in this amount of time.

And that's a bad way to predict combat performance because it ignores the human element.

The USS Gerald R. Ford, a Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier, is what's commonly known as a supercarrier.

It can travel for 25 years before its nuclear reactors need refueling, and it has a complement of more than 4,500 men and women.

It is a small city at sea.

And I've talked in the past about how hard these things are to actually sink.

During the Ford's deployment to fight the Houthis, there were viral rumors stoked by AI misinformation that it had been seriously damaged or even destroyed by a Houthi ballistic missile strike.

Now, I pointed out at the time that this was fanciful.

The defense systems on a boat like this cost billions and provide excellent proven protection against most missiles, drones, and aircraft it's likely to encounter.

The entire naval battle group it travels with exists to protect and enhance the carrier's capabilities.

And even if it were stripped of all those things, these boats are just so damn tough to fucking sink.

In 2005, the US Navy conducted a live fire test to sink a retired Kitty Hawk class super carrier.

Per an article in Forbes, the carrier endured nearly a month of intense weaponized testing and was finally scuttled via internal explosive charges.

It should be added that the warship had been decommissioned nearly a decade earlier and was in poor material condition.

There were also no damage control efforts to save the ship.

In February of this year, just days before his own death, Iran's former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, threatened the U.S.

carriers operating in the Persian Gulf in a post on Twitter, because it's fucking 2026.

Quote, "'The Americans constantly say "'that they've sent a warship towards Iran.

"'Of course, a warship is a dangerous piece "'of military hardware.

"'However, more dangerous than that warship "'is the weapon that can send that warship "'to the bottom of the sea.'"