"3 Alternatives to the Navy’s Vulnerable Flattops" Topic

"The U.S. Navy's huge, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers — capital ships that have long dominated military planning and budgeting — are slowly becoming obsolete, weighed down by escalating costs, inefficiency and vulnerability to the latest enemy weapons.

But if the supercarrier is sinking, what could rise to take its place? Smaller, cheaper flattops; modified tanker ships; and missile-hauling submarines are three cheaper, more efficient and arguably more resilient options.

Navy Capt. Jerry Hendrix, a historian, analyst and futurist, caused a stir by making the case against the Navy's cherished supercarrier fleet. Hendrix's recent study "At What Cost a Carrier?" (.pdf), published by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for a New American Security, urges the Navy to begin drawing down its 10-11 Nimitz-class flattops and follow-on Ford-class vessels.

A single new carrier costs $14 USD billion to build plus $7 USD million a day to operate. "Not a good use of U.S. taxpayer money," Hendrix asserts. Moreover, he contends that huge carriers with their five-acre flight decks and scores of warplanes are ill-suited to the American way of war, in which precision and avoiding civilian casualties are more important than overwhelming firepower. Worst, Hendrix warns, the carriers — major symbols of American military might — are increasingly big targets for China's DF-21D ship-killing ballistic missiles.

The Navy is unlikely to decommission its giant flattops, to say the least. But should it start taking Hendrix's advice, one or more of the following vessels could sail in their place…"
Full article here.
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Also interesting.
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Amicalement
Armand

Carriers are gunboats. 'Gunboat Diplomacy', carrier style.

Nothing says, 'you have attracted the attention of the Americans' like 100,000 tons of steel 12.1nm off your coast.

Even the 'gator freighters', the amphibious assault ships, are used as often as diplomatic chips as they are for non-combatant evacuation or humanitarian response.

The first aid to northern Japan after the earthquake and tsunami was the American fleet. The first aid after the Indian Ocean tsunami was an American fleet (amphibious assault ships, IIRC). When Haiti got hit with that massive earthquake and tsunami, the US sent a hospital ship. We only have two of those.

Why were they the first on scene? Carriers can make 30 knots through any weather (as can their escorts). They have to, in order to get enough wind over the bow. The entire US Fleet has been designed around the need to keep up with carriers.

Your country has been devastated, the roads are all blocked off. People are hurt, babies screaming. Then you hear this rumble, it's not another aftershock, it's something in the air. And when you look up, those helicopters say, "US NAVY" on the side. People come running out of the helicopters bringing food, water, shelters, and medical supplies. People have a very long memory for things like that.

Carriers and Amphibious Assault ships let the US do that. They aren't just for fighting.

True, carriers are symbols as much as combat vessels. Sending an American carrier battle group is a political statement second to none.

Still, a case can be made that they are becoming ever more vulnerable with the latest counter technologies we keep hearing about in the media (massed drones, carrier killer missiles, etc.). I think that's why the new class of LCS was developed, to counter these new 'threats.'

Building more but smaller carriers might be a viable option. Given the effectiveness of small, unmanned drones, we might not even need fewer.

Beyond that, while it's probably anathema to the USN, the French are looking for a new carrier design. They might be willing to split costs…

We should just build 2 carriers and put them in orbit. You'd need some sort of cargo hauler to put the planes back in orbit after a mission but nothing says behave like the threat of a space based aerial assault that can hit any target in the world in under 3 hours. :)

Big does not particularly mean more vulnerable. It does means more expense but it is not particularly clear how small you can go and still economically achieve the desired Sortie rate of the USN via its CVNs. I suspect most Navies would give their eye-teeth for a couple of super-carriers and their airwings.

From a design perspective, longer translates into fuel efficiency, more room for weapon systems to strike the enemy (including massive numbers of drones), more fuel capacity for the platforms, greater sortie rates, more room for active and passive defenses, more room for watertight integrity, more Sailors for damage control, and in general a long list of factors that make CVNs very difficult targets to hit, let alone mission kill.

Of course, battles at Midway, Coral Sea, Leyte Gulf, etc. demonstrate the inherent vulnerability of flat-tops – nothing new. But for the foresseable future the big-decks still seem to be war-winners and great power projection platforms for the Global Force of Good.

Last, I would not dispute that the USN (and sister services) desire to limit collateral damage when war aims can be achieved, but it would be short-sighted to assume the US and her allies will continue to have those luxuries in all future wars.

My two cents…

Lost Pict (an unabashed fan of the US Navy)

Constantly challenging the assumptions around force mix is healthy and wise but, basing a significant amount of that thought process around the Chinese semi-mythical DF21-D is hog wash.

The DF21-D is a missle that has never been fired in anger, never against a hostile target armed with an arsenal of countermeasures both passive and active, is not designed to swamp with numbers and possessing of a very high ballistic profile. The Chinese seem to have gotten the ideal bang for the buck by claiming a weapon with a tremendous stand off range while not actually having to produce them in massive (expensive) numbers and or even actually having to demonstrate its effectiveness. Methinks it doth smell greatly similar to the equally mythologically scary Soviet wake following torpedoes that were definitive proof in the eighties that the very large carrier was doomed.

>Carriers are gunboats. 'Gunboat Diplomacy', carrier style.

Yep. But gunboat diplomacy only works if the people you are trying to impress believe you have the will to follow it up. Hitler didn't. Milosevic didn't. Saddam didn't. The Taliban didn't. The Iranians are betting that they can stall until they have nuclear weapons – and then we won't have the will to follow up.

The irony is that almost every war the US fought in the last hundred years was avoidable – if our enemies had actually believed we would both fight and stay and finish what we started.

But we won the biggest of them all (the Cold War) precisely because the Soviets finally realized we were not only willing to fight an unwinnable war – but were also willing to outlast them in "winning the peace." We're losing the War on Terror/Islamic Fundamentalism precisely because they believe the opposite.

McKinstry wrote:

Methinks it doth smell greatly similar to the equally mythologically scary Soviet wake following torpedoes that were definitive proof in the eighties that the very large carrier was doomed.

That was after the Soviet SSCNs doomed them, wasn't it?

Tanks and carriers, and to a lesser extent manned aircraft, have been more or less permanently doomed ever since 1945. They are all dreadfully expensive, and I'm sure treasury officials would like to see them all rendered obsolete by an anti-everything app you can download onto your i-phone for $3. USD Meanwhile, forces that possess these things continue to have war-winning advantages over forces that don't.

Number6 wrote:

The Iranians are betting that they can stall until they have nuclear weapons – and then we won't have the will to follow up.

Any Iranians old enough to recall "Praying Mantis" might remember the sort of beating a US carrier group can dish out when it wants to.

All the best,

John.

If we're going to swing back to the traditional 'blowing things up' discussion, carriers have a huge advantage over long-range bombers: repeat sortie rate. Sure, a B52 can fly all the way from a base in the US to Afghanistan, dump a hundred tons of bombs in a glorious stretch of the concept 'close air support', and fly home, but that's an all-day event (or longer).

A carrier group can fly 8 missions or more in the time it takes a BUFF to fly one.

Good Lord… Sounds like a redux of the 'Sea Control Ship' debate again from the '70s. And even further back, the debate for smaller carriers during the '20s and '30s. If theres one thing that has survived all these debates, its that there is a set size (critical mass, if you will) below which a carrier becomes more liability than asset. But the debate goes on and on…