Carrier fleets must plan for wartime losses

Carriers and other aviation ships remain in service for decades and cannot be replaced quickly after a loss. Force design therefore has to ask whether enough hulls exist to absorb wartime attrition, rather than looking only at today's peacetime tasks. Several contemporary fleets tacitly assume they will lose nothing, an especially risky premise for scarce high-value ships. If a navy accepts such a small carrier pool, it may need more escorts and other protection to keep that assumption from determining the campaign.