Looks good, well beyond my supermarket Italian though.

I think we can be sure that was by design.

Like Alex says a full airgroup makes for a tight fit on CdG so this is giving more space, flexibility for more ease of operations, endurance, and UAVs in due course. Two half-sized ships for the same budget would be very compromised. The medium carrier has always been something of a chimera.

Fascinating read, both in terms of the actual case but also as an example of history/historians with research of different fields and time can provide resistance or critique. Thanks for sharing, this is well beyond my subjects, but really interesting to me, I should have read this earlier.

What exactly the role is beyond looking good and having all the latest gear - both being legitimate objectives - is something that needs establishing. It is a bit of everything at the moment when each thing could be delivered by a different platform perhaps more effectively.

It's a political statement as much as a strategic tool. After the early days 🇫🇷 did make the CdG work for its needs and in the last decade got a lot out of it. The cost and timeframes here though would be a concern even if the state has a tendency to be able to see core longterm projects through.

To quote the President 'They'll be the fastest' - you want to make it fast, over 35+ kts then then you'll need some powerful machinery. I suspect if you built a Ticonderoga with 50%+ VLS capacity, powerful sensor fit, a big powerplant for speed and DE weapons you get to 30k easily.

The best primer piece on the programme, or more accurately the idea:

www.twz.com/sea/what-we-...

There was that episode. The term Kanonenbootdiplomatie deserves its own discussion and how it is nuanced slightly differently to gunboat diplomacy. Very much wrapped up in early Cold War decolonisation discourse and the era of scholarship into the (imperial) navy as a vector of global imperialism.

Behind the scenes there is a lot of discussion of terminology and capabilities early in the Cold War between the foreign, defence ministries and Chancellery. Which mirrors in a sense the same discussions during the Weimar Republic down to 1932.

Nothing wrong with Bavaria!

A Carry On film already went there.

It's the same in English in that sense. Though in every epoche, Imperial, Interwar, Cold War cruisers, and the term specifically, has weight in German political and public discourse around seapower, the navy as an instrument of power and a reflection of Germany's place in the world.

'Kreuzer' in the naval sense has both imperial undertones in the German context and because it was one of the regulated types of the interwar years as a measure of 'great navy' status in German perspective - that is me being overly academic though because I doubt anyone makes those links today.