I agree with most of your argument up to here.
I would argue that CVNs would still be suitable for westpac missions.
While a ski jump in theory will allow a carrier to launch fighters with a respectable load, the mission of a carrier in this scenario should not ideally be limited to only launching relatively lightly loaded fighters with A2A payloads. Specifically, heavier loaded aircraft that a carrier may want to launch which may be vital to the westpac mission you describe, include:
- fixed wing, organic carrier borne AEW&C, which will rely catapults to reliably launch. Relying on land based AEW&C 1000+km from Chinese shores is a far from optimal proposition -- if a carrier is able to maintain its own robust unit of AEW&C that would be far preferable for the carrier formation itself. In fact I would argue that fixed wing organic AEW&C is one of the most important capabilities that a carrier can offer to a naval formation.
- large, flying wing UAVs/UCAVs (this will be somewhat in the more distant future perhaps post 2030, however I think such aircraft will play a very important role for increasing a CSG's ISR capability). Such aircraft would likely require catapults to reliably launch.
- other heavy loaded fighters for certain missions such as for buddy refuelling, or if the carrier becomes enveloped in an unexpected combat situation that requires it to launch its fighters on a strike sortie etc, which will obviously necessitate catapults
While such westpac deployments may be short, the benefits of nuclear powered carriers lies not only in the endurance of the carrier itself but also in the amount of additional space it has for aviation fuel (compared to a conventionally powered carrier which has to carry fuel for its own propulsion as well), as well as in having less need to refuel as often as a conventional powered carrier.
There's also the matter of sortie rate. My understanding is that the sortie rate of a carrier has a relationship to the size of the carrier and the size of its airwing, however the relationship is not exactly linear because of efficiencies of scale.
This blog post puts out a good thought experiment on the number of hypothetical CVLs needed to equal the sortie rate of a single CVN (
). I think the idea can be extrapolated reasonably to our Kuznetsov proposal, where I would estimate you will need at least 2-3 Kuznetsovs to match the sortie rate of a CVN (holding crew experience and so on all equal) -- and this is all with the fact that the STOBAR Kuznetsovs won't be able to launch fixed wing AEW&C, heavy UAVs/UCAVs, or heavily loaded buddy tanking or strike loaded fighters if necessary.
Finally, I would say that comparing 2-3 Kuznetsov-pattern carriers to a lone CVN is not quite fair, because of differences in total manpower, total tonnage, and possibly even cost (and this is even leaving out the question of how many escorts we would need for 2-3 Kuznetsov pattern carriers vs a lone CVN to achieve the same level of security for each formation!).
So I would argue that in theory even if 2 or 3 Kuznetsov pattern carriers are able to carry the same number of aircraft as a single CVN, it would be more cost efficient to have a single CVN instead.
After all, in terms of the overall manpower costs, overall logistics costs, overall additional escort costs that 2-3 Kuznetsovs will require vs a single CVN, I think it may be possible that 2-3 Kuznetsovs may actually be more expensive than a single CVN to achieve something near the same capability. This is leaving aside the question of procurement costs, where I would argue that 2-3 Kuznetsovs may even cost more than a single CVN if the CVNs are ultimately mass produced.
Additionally, the CVN will naturally be capable of launching a much wider variety of important aircraft (force multipliers like fixed wing AEW&C, future large UAVs/UCAVs etc) that your STOBAR Kuznetsovs cannot, which will all be very important for the westpac mission environment that you described.
because China is moving to CATOBAR carriers which address many of the issues.