I found, a bit late, this article from February this year:
It says that using carriers for strikes against ground targets only happened during WWII on any scale during the last months - after the Japanese air force and navy air force were defeated. Otherwise the main purposes of carriers are fleet air defence, defence against submarines and attacks on an enemy fleet. Because USN has mostly been acting against countries with limited air defence strikes against ground targets has become a major occupation and during the last quarter of a century the original purposes have nearly been forgotten. USN will need to relearn these old purposes.
Clearly these old purposes will be the main, perhaps the only, ones to be trained for by the PLAN carriers and J-15 will need to be able to carry the relevant weapons.
Not true at all.
From the very first days of the war, the US Navy conducted strikes against ground targets...even when they only had two carriers to cover the Pacific, and even for a short time when they were down to one.
The USS Enterprise, within weeks of Pearl Harbor took strike campaigns against Japanese held Islands, trying to avoid the Imperial Fleet, and yet inflict damage on Japanese held islands.
I would suggest getting and reading the book, "The Bog E," which documents the entire war effort bu the USS Enterprise, from the days before the war, to Pearl Harbor when she was one her way to port the morning the Japanese attacked...and some of her aircraft were flying into Pearl to take up what was going to be training and relaxation time at shore bases, only to have those same bases shoot down some of our own aircraft as they came in right during and between the Japanese waves.
It then tracks every single action the Enterprise took.
Of course they were used for strikes at sea...but they conducted as many missions, throughout the war, and as I say from the first weeks after Pearl Harbor, attacking Japanese islands and ground installations.
Of course one of the best known was the launch of the B-25s by the USS Hornet against Tokyo...but that was largely symbolic, letting the Japanese leadership know that the US could still reach their capitol.
The first major attacks against Japanese islands occurred well before that attack by Doolittle in April of 1942. The Enterprise and the Yorktown went into the Solomon and Gilbert Islands and attacked on February 1st, 1942, about seven weeks after Pearl Harbor, the Enterprise attacked Roi and Kwajalein islands that day.
They did this throughout the war in between sea actions. Sometimes to soften up targets before Marine landings, but most often to hit Japanese installations precisely where the Imperial fleet was not to inflict as much damage as possible.
Any idea that the US carrier aircraft did not attack ground targets until late in the war after the Japanese had suffered attrition is just plain wrong.
I can give you a dozen books about world war II that focus on the US Navy aircraft operations during the war and they tell a completely different story.
As I say, "The Big E," is probably one of the best books to make this point clear.
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