Why missions still drive carrier size

Will distributed maritime operations and distributed lethality make smaller carriers the future?

Generally no. Smaller carriers require reduced or alternating missions once the necessary aircraft and coordination demands are counted.

Carrier size follows the aircraft and missions the navy expects it to sustain. Coordinating a strike from one flight deck and one command node is generally simpler than assembling it across several ships. Hangar dimensions also depend on how many aircraft fit abreast, so modest changes in width can alter useful capacity substantially. The illustrative air wing allocates about eighteen aircraft to strike, eighteen to air defence, another eighteen to ASW, and four to six to airborne early warning. Those assumptions already require roughly sixty aircraft. With twenty-four aircraft, a carrier could sustain a regular combat air patrol and produce occasional strikes, or concentrate on strike while keeping alert fighters on deck. Choosing the smaller air group therefore means accepting limits on simultaneous missions.