Who can spare a carrier for a distant war?

British carriers were configured and committed for anti-submarine tasks around the North Sea and North Atlantic, not for distant surface-raider hunts. France might have only one carrier available and still needed it in the Mediterranean, while an American carrier would also have to be detached from an existing mission. The Second World War comparison matters because Britain once used numerous cruisers for dispersed raider patrols while preserving carriers and battleships for more demanding tasks. By the Cold War the nominal replacement was an attack submarine, but those boats were required near Soviet waters, making force numbers and deployment geography inseparable from strategy.