Also urgently needed: a coherent national strategy and a set of associated doctrines to guide the development and use of our armed forces. For example, a strategy of containment of the Muslim world would call for a different force structure than our current strategy of providing security guarantees for various supposed Muslim allies.
Satellites, GPS, and the ability to hit targets plus or minus a few feet from thousands of miles away means that the US needs to look at new ways to project force across the oceans. A carrier is a huge target in an era in which a rowboat can be targeted.
Neither.
Fully amortize the research and production of rail gun and directed energy weapons. Place on drones. Fly five hundred of them toward the enemy and each one sink or splash a target. Enemy gone, cost benefit through the roof.
These formations need to be reconsidered for the world we are entering. The battle space is very asymmetric. Relatively inexpensive anti-ship missiles make deploying carriers near targets very risky. Yet, the operating range of the F-35 Albatross is quite limited.
You might think anti-missile defenses can intercept incoming missiles. Think again. From what we learned in the recent confrontation off the coast of Yemen, our destroyers weren’t hit because the missiles sent at them grounded themselves into the water (probably indicating they weren’t long range enough, or else that the decoys deployed by the destroyer overloaded the in-coming missile’s controller). None of the three interceptor missiles (two medium range, usually fired in pairs, and one short range) hit them. To be sure, there was one remaining line of defense, the phalanx anti-missile gun. But, in a high threat environment, ships - especially carriers - would be swarmed.
Between our new Literal non-Combat Ship, too vulnerable to actually be deployed to high threat environments, and the short-range of our new carrier-based aircraft, we have an uber expensive and hardly useful Navy.
Carriers are critical as we can not depend on land bases outside CONUS.
I served on LHD6, Bon Homme Richard, 13th MEU. MEU’s carry highly specialized assault units that can’t exist on any other platforms. Their mission requires them to be offshore with a 15 minute combat readiness.
The entire problem at Benghazi would have never happened if the two MEU’s available weren’t committed to the embassies in Cairo and the Sudan.
Currently the workup to those deployments allows no more than two effective MEU’s at a time in the Middle East. We need a third.