Your claim that a tiny fleet of "mega-carriers" supported by numerous "mini-carriers" being superior to traditional supercarriers is based on a
fundamental misunderstanding of naval warfare.
Your argument fails by thinking that expendability = efficiency. But naval warfare isn’t about throwing cheap ships into battle like infantry in a trench (as you seem to imply). Even the "mini-carriers" require trained crews, aircraft, fuel, munitions, and escorts to operate each and every one of them - All of which consumes precious time, effort, material and money, especially when they are getting procured in large numbers. This means that their loss still represents a significant drain on the finite manpower and resources available to the navy at any given time.
You cannot just equate and scale ships up or down like infantry, because they are NOT the same.
There's also the angle of actual combat effectiveness. A single large-sized carrier/supercarrier is capable of fielding 70+ aircraft, generate 100+ sorties per day (for missions at above 500 kilometers from home carrier), and provide organic AEW&C, EW and aerial refueling (buddy-tanking) capabilities for the allied fleet. 10 such "mini-carriers" might collectively carry a similar number of jets, but have you ever thought of the
complexity and
challenges of planning and coordinating such massive fleets of warplanes which are spread across multiple ship and distances? This is the same whether the warplanes are for CAP, interception, strike or reconnaissance missions.
Like, have you ever done coordination roles in events of substantial scales before? It's
anything but easy and straightforward.
Plus, to add on to
@BoraTas -
There are fixed costs and requirements to operate aircraft from a carrier, and those fixed costs mean that the navy should get as much carrier capabilities as they can reasonably get in order to maximize the value for the fixed costs. This is the same calculus that results in most cargo or cruise ships being practically mammoth-sized today, with their resent constrains only due to the sizes of shipyards, port facilities and canals.
Every aircraft carrier needs X amount of propulsion system crews, X amount of aircraft maintenance crews, X amount of strike planners, X amount of hangar and flight decks handlers, etc etc. The size of these crews don't scale nearly as high with a higher number of aircraft. On the other hand, the so-called "mini-carriers" are the worst of both worlds - It carries very few aircraft, but still needs this same amount of crew and equipment to maintain that handful of aircrafts deployed onboard, let alone the fact that such smaller carriers needs to cramp all those people in small hulls. Hence, your "distributed mini-carrier fleet" don't work as magical as you think it might.
In fact, let me stress this one -
Distributed warfare only works when each unit is effective by itself and be able to contribute well to the overall effort - Of which your
so-called "mini-carriers" certainly aren’t. They are absolutely going to succumb to anti-ship missiles way easier than large-sized carriers and supercarriers, while simultaneously failing to deliver the concentrated firepower needed to both conduct and win battles at sea.
Last-but-not-least - If anything, the USN did come up with ideas and proposals of going back to smaller carriers during the height of the Cold War, which is similar to the so-called "mini-carriers". They are the Sea Control Ship and VSTOL Support Ship, with full-load displacements of ~10000 tons for the former and 20000+ tons for the latter. So how about go figure out why they neither of them made it into the shipyard drydocks?
TL; DR -
Your idea is not 1 + 1 > 2, but 1 + 1 < 1.5.
