Richard
05-15-2011, 15:53
One for the navalists - is this how a superpower, suffering relative economic decline, keeps up its global power projection at a reasonable cost.
And so it goes...
Richard :munchin
Twilight of the $UPERfluous Carrier
USNI Proceedings, May 2011
Part 1 of 3
[I]With smaller and lighter unmanned aircraft coming into the mix, the United States can also deploy smaller and lighter—and less expensive—ships to carry them.
We can’t know for sure in what ways future adversaries will challenge our Fleet, but we can assess with some certainty how technology is affecting their principal capabilities. Judging from the evidence at hand, future Fleet actions will place a premium on early sensing, precision targeting, and long-range ballistic- and cruise-missile munitions. Increasingly sophisticated over-the-horizon and space-based sensors, in particular, will focus on signature control and signature deception. Thus, we must ask ourselves how best to win this battle of signatures and long-range strike.
In the current Fleet, submarines are the gold standard for signature control. But unless they receive intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) from other sources, they have limited sensing ranges. While surface combatants have longer-range sensing capabilities in multiple domains, they pay for it with a significantly higher signature. This balance between signature and sensing will, in large measure, dictate the future Fleet’s architecture.
So will the future be one of submarines belching massive salvos of missiles, or large arrays of land- and air-launched hypersonic, conventional projectiles crossing a maritime no-man’s-land to directly strike strategic centers of gravity? Given very clear technology trends toward precision long-range strike and increasingly sophisticated anti-access and area-denial capabilities, high-signature, limited-range combatants like the current aircraft carrier will not meet the requirements of tomorrow’s Fleet. In short, the march of technology is bringing the supercarrier era to an end, just as the new long-range strike capabilities of carrier aviation brought on the demise of the battleship era in the 1940s.
The Carrier Dilemma
Factors both internal and external are hastening the carrier’s curtain call. Competitors abroad have focused their attention on the United States’ ability to go anywhere on the global maritime commons and strike targets ashore with pinpoint accuracy. That focus has resulted in the development of a series of sensors and weapons that combine range and strike profiles to deny carrier strike groups the access necessary to launch squadrons of aircraft against shore installations.
One issue of concern is the highly experimental and expensive move toward high-sortie-generation technology like the electromagnetic aircraft launch system (EMALS), which flies in the face of transition to precision-strike systems that promise one-target:one-weapon ratios. In addition, a series of poor acquisition decisions, beginning with the mismanagement and ultimate cancellation of the A-12 Avenger as the replacement aircraft for the A-6 Intruder deep-strike aircraft, have exacerbated the challenge to carrier efficacy. The resulting reduction in the combat-effective range of the carrier air wing from 1,050 to 500 nautical miles forces the carrier to operate closer to enemy shores even as anti-access systems would logically force the carrier farther seaward.
Accompanying this range deficiency has been the dramatic increase in the cost of the carrier and her air wing. The price tag for the USS Nimitz (CVN-68) was $950 million, or 4.5 percent of the Navy’s $21 billion budget in 1976. The USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78), lead ship of a new class of supercarriers, is estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to cost $12.5 billion. Add to that the Navy’s own estimate of a 60 percent chance the ship will exceed the original cost projection and the number of technologies still under development. This brings the estimate to around $13.5 billion, or 8.7 percent of a $156 billion budget—all this while the ship is still plagued with technical risk factors like EMALS and the multi-function radar. The U.S. National Command Authority would need to be facing a gravely extreme scenario to commit this sort of strategic asset, with a crew of 5,000 men and women. The Gerald R. Ford is just the first of her class. She should also be the last.
Future Challenges, Future Missions
Before suggesting an alternative to the current Fleet architecture, we must further explore the coming threat environment. And from that assessment, we should define future missions. As has been discussed recently in these pages, the naval services are at a strategic inflection point with regard to Fleet design unlike anything they have faced in 70 years. That the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor had a catalytic effect on hastening the ascendancy of the carrier over the battleship is well recognized. But it is also essential to point out that the enemy always has a vote, and geography and geopolitics matter.
It was not simply that aviation technologies had matured to a point where they became sufficiently reliable and effective in the 1940s to doom the battleship; it was also key that the Japanese presented the United States with roughly equal demand for naval sea-control and power-projection forces. In response, the aircraft carrier performed very well in both mission areas. So it is the mission as much as the march of technology that dictates the development of an effective Fleet architecture.
Since World War II, we have experienced varying levels of demand for sea control and power projection. The Soviet Union certainly challenged us strongly in sea control with submarines and long-range bombers. That approach was both logical and expected for a continental power confronting a maritime power. Since 1989, sea control has been largely uncontested and assumed, leaving power projection as the mission emphasis. Now, with the reappearance of a former great power, China, on the seas in force, a sea-control challenge emerges for the United States. Unlike the Soviet Union, however, China is responding in a way one would expect a maritime nation to challenge another maritime nation.
The Chinese are emphasizing sea control over power projection. Given this Chinese “vote” and the challenges we continue to face in the Middle East and Northeast Asia, we must rebalance our Fleet to meet new sea-control missions while maintaining reasonable power-projection capabilities for the range of global threats we will encounter. These new challenges mean that the Fleet architecture must evolve rapidly to meet the new mission requirements of our time. We need to recognize this now and avoid a 21st-century Pearl Harbor.
New Paradigm, New Fleet
Change is essential, but Fleets don’t just change overnight. As always, the true pacing factors are the financial and industrial capacities of a nation. Current anti-access systems suggest that the future Fleet will be dominated by submarines. But the relative lack of maturity in implementing those technologies into a comprehensive battle network means that we have time to make deliberate and strategic course corrections to a lower signature and a longer-range striking Fleet. That would feature not only subs, but also unmanned systems in the air, on the surface, and below the waves, thus establishing a new paradigm for Fleet design.
In such a new strategic environment, unmanned systems diminish the utility of the supercarrier, because her sea-control and power-projection missions can be performed more efficiently and effectively by other means. When the carrier superseded the battleship, the latter still retained great utility for naval surface fire support. Similarly, today’s carrier will be replaced by a network of unmanned platforms, while still retaining utility as an as-needed strike platform. Ultimately, the decision to kill the battleships was not because they lacked utility, but because they were too expensive to man and operate. Future budgetary constraints could lead to a similar outcome for the carrier, recognizing that even if we purchased no new supercarriers, we would still have operational carriers in the Fleet for more than 50 years.
In the meantime, the America-class big-deck amphibious ship has the potential to be a new generation of light aircraft carrier. At 45,000 tons’ displacement, she will slide into the water larger than her World War II predecessors, and larger even than the modern French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle. Designed without an amphibious well-deck, she will put to sea with a Marine Air Combat Element and key elements of a Marine Expeditionary Unit.
However, to view this purely as an amphibious-assault ship would be to miss her potential as a strike platform. Stripped of her rotorcraft, the America class could comfortably hold two squadrons of F-35B short take-off vertical-landing (STOVL) stealth fighter/attack aircraft. Such an arrangement would allow the naval services to dramatically increase presence and strike potential throughout the maritime domain. In addition, if the requirements were instituted in the near term, the new unmanned carrier-launched airborne-surveillance and strike (UCLASS) aircraft could be designed to operate from America-class decks with greater potential utility and distribution than what could be expected when operating from super carriers.[/]
(cont'd)
And so it goes...
Richard :munchin
Twilight of the $UPERfluous Carrier
USNI Proceedings, May 2011
Part 1 of 3
[I]With smaller and lighter unmanned aircraft coming into the mix, the United States can also deploy smaller and lighter—and less expensive—ships to carry them.
We can’t know for sure in what ways future adversaries will challenge our Fleet, but we can assess with some certainty how technology is affecting their principal capabilities. Judging from the evidence at hand, future Fleet actions will place a premium on early sensing, precision targeting, and long-range ballistic- and cruise-missile munitions. Increasingly sophisticated over-the-horizon and space-based sensors, in particular, will focus on signature control and signature deception. Thus, we must ask ourselves how best to win this battle of signatures and long-range strike.
In the current Fleet, submarines are the gold standard for signature control. But unless they receive intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) from other sources, they have limited sensing ranges. While surface combatants have longer-range sensing capabilities in multiple domains, they pay for it with a significantly higher signature. This balance between signature and sensing will, in large measure, dictate the future Fleet’s architecture.
So will the future be one of submarines belching massive salvos of missiles, or large arrays of land- and air-launched hypersonic, conventional projectiles crossing a maritime no-man’s-land to directly strike strategic centers of gravity? Given very clear technology trends toward precision long-range strike and increasingly sophisticated anti-access and area-denial capabilities, high-signature, limited-range combatants like the current aircraft carrier will not meet the requirements of tomorrow’s Fleet. In short, the march of technology is bringing the supercarrier era to an end, just as the new long-range strike capabilities of carrier aviation brought on the demise of the battleship era in the 1940s.
The Carrier Dilemma
Factors both internal and external are hastening the carrier’s curtain call. Competitors abroad have focused their attention on the United States’ ability to go anywhere on the global maritime commons and strike targets ashore with pinpoint accuracy. That focus has resulted in the development of a series of sensors and weapons that combine range and strike profiles to deny carrier strike groups the access necessary to launch squadrons of aircraft against shore installations.
One issue of concern is the highly experimental and expensive move toward high-sortie-generation technology like the electromagnetic aircraft launch system (EMALS), which flies in the face of transition to precision-strike systems that promise one-target:one-weapon ratios. In addition, a series of poor acquisition decisions, beginning with the mismanagement and ultimate cancellation of the A-12 Avenger as the replacement aircraft for the A-6 Intruder deep-strike aircraft, have exacerbated the challenge to carrier efficacy. The resulting reduction in the combat-effective range of the carrier air wing from 1,050 to 500 nautical miles forces the carrier to operate closer to enemy shores even as anti-access systems would logically force the carrier farther seaward.
Accompanying this range deficiency has been the dramatic increase in the cost of the carrier and her air wing. The price tag for the USS Nimitz (CVN-68) was $950 million, or 4.5 percent of the Navy’s $21 billion budget in 1976. The USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78), lead ship of a new class of supercarriers, is estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to cost $12.5 billion. Add to that the Navy’s own estimate of a 60 percent chance the ship will exceed the original cost projection and the number of technologies still under development. This brings the estimate to around $13.5 billion, or 8.7 percent of a $156 billion budget—all this while the ship is still plagued with technical risk factors like EMALS and the multi-function radar. The U.S. National Command Authority would need to be facing a gravely extreme scenario to commit this sort of strategic asset, with a crew of 5,000 men and women. The Gerald R. Ford is just the first of her class. She should also be the last.
Future Challenges, Future Missions
Before suggesting an alternative to the current Fleet architecture, we must further explore the coming threat environment. And from that assessment, we should define future missions. As has been discussed recently in these pages, the naval services are at a strategic inflection point with regard to Fleet design unlike anything they have faced in 70 years. That the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor had a catalytic effect on hastening the ascendancy of the carrier over the battleship is well recognized. But it is also essential to point out that the enemy always has a vote, and geography and geopolitics matter.
It was not simply that aviation technologies had matured to a point where they became sufficiently reliable and effective in the 1940s to doom the battleship; it was also key that the Japanese presented the United States with roughly equal demand for naval sea-control and power-projection forces. In response, the aircraft carrier performed very well in both mission areas. So it is the mission as much as the march of technology that dictates the development of an effective Fleet architecture.
Since World War II, we have experienced varying levels of demand for sea control and power projection. The Soviet Union certainly challenged us strongly in sea control with submarines and long-range bombers. That approach was both logical and expected for a continental power confronting a maritime power. Since 1989, sea control has been largely uncontested and assumed, leaving power projection as the mission emphasis. Now, with the reappearance of a former great power, China, on the seas in force, a sea-control challenge emerges for the United States. Unlike the Soviet Union, however, China is responding in a way one would expect a maritime nation to challenge another maritime nation.
The Chinese are emphasizing sea control over power projection. Given this Chinese “vote” and the challenges we continue to face in the Middle East and Northeast Asia, we must rebalance our Fleet to meet new sea-control missions while maintaining reasonable power-projection capabilities for the range of global threats we will encounter. These new challenges mean that the Fleet architecture must evolve rapidly to meet the new mission requirements of our time. We need to recognize this now and avoid a 21st-century Pearl Harbor.
New Paradigm, New Fleet
Change is essential, but Fleets don’t just change overnight. As always, the true pacing factors are the financial and industrial capacities of a nation. Current anti-access systems suggest that the future Fleet will be dominated by submarines. But the relative lack of maturity in implementing those technologies into a comprehensive battle network means that we have time to make deliberate and strategic course corrections to a lower signature and a longer-range striking Fleet. That would feature not only subs, but also unmanned systems in the air, on the surface, and below the waves, thus establishing a new paradigm for Fleet design.
In such a new strategic environment, unmanned systems diminish the utility of the supercarrier, because her sea-control and power-projection missions can be performed more efficiently and effectively by other means. When the carrier superseded the battleship, the latter still retained great utility for naval surface fire support. Similarly, today’s carrier will be replaced by a network of unmanned platforms, while still retaining utility as an as-needed strike platform. Ultimately, the decision to kill the battleships was not because they lacked utility, but because they were too expensive to man and operate. Future budgetary constraints could lead to a similar outcome for the carrier, recognizing that even if we purchased no new supercarriers, we would still have operational carriers in the Fleet for more than 50 years.
In the meantime, the America-class big-deck amphibious ship has the potential to be a new generation of light aircraft carrier. At 45,000 tons’ displacement, she will slide into the water larger than her World War II predecessors, and larger even than the modern French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle. Designed without an amphibious well-deck, she will put to sea with a Marine Air Combat Element and key elements of a Marine Expeditionary Unit.
However, to view this purely as an amphibious-assault ship would be to miss her potential as a strike platform. Stripped of her rotorcraft, the America class could comfortably hold two squadrons of F-35B short take-off vertical-landing (STOVL) stealth fighter/attack aircraft. Such an arrangement would allow the naval services to dramatically increase presence and strike potential throughout the maritime domain. In addition, if the requirements were instituted in the near term, the new unmanned carrier-launched airborne-surveillance and strike (UCLASS) aircraft could be designed to operate from America-class decks with greater potential utility and distribution than what could be expected when operating from super carriers.[/]
(cont'd)