> The problem with killing a carrier is not finding it. They're not difficult to spot and not very stealthy. They're massive. The only real problem with killing carrier is getting close. They're constantly protected by a fleet and a small air force whose primary purpose is to protect the carrier.

The pacific ocean is over 60 million square miles. A full sized carrier group probably takes up like 100 square miles when it's fully spread out, but that's a very, very, small percentage of the available search space.

And beyond that, you need to actually see the carrier with something, a laser sensor, a direct radar hit, even the human eyeball; you can't just fire a bunch of missiles in the general direction you think the carrier is at and expect them to hit anything (for one thing there's a whole bunch of other ships that will distract the targeting sensors).

Like, I cannot stress this enough, even if you knew the exact location of a carrier at a given moment, down to like 4 decimals of lat/long, and you knew which direction it was sailing, if your missile launcher is 1000 miles away you can't just program it in and fire it off and expect it to fly 1000 miles and then hit the carrier. Even with some kind of amazing on board sensors, there's a dozen other ships just existing near by, the carrier itself is moving unpredictably, not to mention the actual decoying/spoofing systems specifically designed to interfere with targeting sensors.

And this is the problem, you now say "oh well just use a platform that's closer to the carrier so it can get accurate targeting data for a weapon to hit the specific carrier", which is technically possible... until the carrier destroys your targeting platform because why wouldn't it? Whatever distance you have to be within to "lock on" to the carrier will be, pretty much by definition, in range of the carrier to shoot back at.

Hell, as far as I know, they could put literal anti-satellite missiles on carrier aircraft and just fly straight up and shoot down targeting satellites. I don't know if that's something they're currently planning/practicing, but I don't know if any reason they couldn't.

Despite which US carriers are frequently "sunk" during war games.

All that protection didn't stop the Swedish diesal-electric HSMS Gotland seamlessly torp'ing the Ronald Reagan in 2005.

France pulled a similar score 2015, Canada "got" a UK carrier in 2007, IIRC even Australia's taken out a US ship or two in various fun ways over the years.