The Enduring Relevance of America’s Aircraft Carriers

The American Spectator ^ | February 26, 2016 | Michael R. Groothousen, Rear Admiral, USN (Ret)

[2ndDivisionVet]

Pentagon budget battles inevitably bring out the long knives. But in the age of sequestration absolute lunacy has taken over. Left-leaning and libertarian think tanks as well as pundits of various stripes have declared open season on our Navy's fleet of aircraft carriers and the carrier strike group (CSG) concept, calling them outdated and obsolete in light of current threats.

Some politicians agree with them. These pols see the high cost of building and operating carriers as a pot of gold to be raided to pay for everything else they can think of, and they can think of a lot of ways to spend tax dollars. And it's not just the carriers they want to defund. Many see themselves as the next Sun Tzu or Mahan so they frequently target the high priced heart of each service's core capability, seeking to replace it with supposedly better and cheaper (albeit unproven) ways of warfighting. They do so at our nation's peril.

In 1897, Mark Twain joked that reports of his death were exaggerated. The same should be said today of reports of the demise of aircraft carriers/carrier strike groups as effective warfighting platforms.

If the anti-carrier pundits have it right, the development of anti-ship missiles by nations such as China, with range exceeding the combat radius of carrier-based strike aircraft, marks the end of carrier naval warfare. The carrier's demise is fortuitous, they argue, as its costs are clearly unaffordable. They are very mistaken.

While the carrier's reputation is increasingly maligned in some circles, the carrier strike group remains the fastest way to deploy American forces -- whether in a show of force or a real fight -- that America has or is likely to develop...

[Samwell Tarly]

The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783.

As relevant today as it was when Alfred Thayer Mahan published it in 1890.

[PreciousLiberty]

“While the carrier’s reputation is increasingly maligned in some circles, the carrier strike group remains the fastest way to deploy American forces — whether in a show of force or a real fight — that America has or is likely to develop...”

Well, this is just clearly wrong. Long range bombers from CONUS can blow the heck out of objectives many times faster than could a carrier group sailing there and launching planes.

Then there are ICBMs...

[2ndDivisionVet]

We only own a small handful of bombers now. It’s not 1972 any more. The fact that we have never used ICBMs or SLBMs tells you how often they will defuse a crisis.

[zeestephen]

Less than a week ago I was on a F.R. thread where several commenters were praising the leadership genius of Admiral Rickover.

My last memory of Rickover?

Testifying before a Congressional committee around 1980.

He was asked how long a U.S. carrier strike force could survive against the Soviet Navy.

His answer: “About 24 hours.”

[DesertRhino]

The USS Gerald Ford costs around 12 billion. Pakistan and Afghanistan together get around 15 Billion a year from us. We are raining money on the goat humpers and boy rapers, and neglecting our military.

15 billion there is stolen and pissed away instantly. We might run that Carrier 4 or 5 decades.

Its a disgrace.

[2ndDivisionVet]

He was a submarine admiral, what’d you expect him to say?

[DesertRhino]

“Well, this is just clearly wrong. Long range bombers from CONUS can blow the heck out of objectives many times faster than could a carrier group sailing there and launching planes.”

No, it isn’t even close. The Desert Storm mission from Barksdale to Iraq was a 34 hour crew-frying stunt. It makes sense to deliver a nuke that way in some cases, but for sustained bombing, no dice.
That range for example, means that at best, that aircraft could hit their once target every 2.5 days, with massive tanker support. That carrier bomber could do about 8 missions in that time.

And that means 8 unique targets, with different ordinance. You wont get that flexibility in any manned bomber. And for close air support, the Carrier CAPs can be always nearby. A heavy bomber, not so much.

[Fhios]

For the last real heavy naval engagement I guess you would have to go back to WWII. That’s 70+ years ago. For perspective purposes, consider that the Civil war was 70+ years from that. The technological scale is just near logarithmic.

Carriers are wonderful if you’re the worlds only super power with the largest most strategic Navy, and near dominance in Satellite spy technology.

How do we measure up to that?

[zeestephen]

At the time, I agreed with him.

I always thought most effective way to attack any kind of naval group was to launch a couple of low yield tactical nukes into the ocean and let the 100 foot wave capsize everything within 10 miles.

[spokeshave]

They might want to join New Zealand....

Disbanding the Air Combat Force press.anu.edu.au/sdsc/.../ch05s05.html Australian National University

From the New Zealand perspective, the force most suitable for reduction is the air ... yesterday abandoned 85 years of Anzac tradition by scaling down its military ... The opportunity cost was enormous...

[DesertRhino]

Congratulations, you are instantly a nuclear war. And love this antiship missile and submarine braggadocio. Of course, both of those are also affected by nukes.
I always liked the idea of ASW out front and a nuke depth charge here and there.

[nathanbedford]

About a year ago some of us began considering the future role of the flat top and, not to disappoint, I wrote a couple of extremely long replies which I offer here:

Here we have yet another article which over the years have come dribbling in which cumulatively raise the question whether the romantic age of the aircraft carrier, with whom the man in my tagline below is so intimately associated, is drawing to a close. Is the age in which the United States can resort at will to super carriers to project power around the world coming to a close, forcing us to other platforms, other tactics and other strategies?

We have previously been reading that the Chinese are developing missiles intended to strike carriers from a distance while the American Navy has been transitioning to planes with shorter range creating an obvious vulnerability to the skin of the carrier despite undoubted multiplicity of defensive weapons. It is the old problem of cost vs. gain and it will take an intrepid president indeed to send the carrier into harm's way where it can be taken out by the odd missile. It would be politically disastrous to lose a carrier and it would be disastrous to America's image as a superpower to do so.

One then begins to think that the application of carriers will resemble 19th century British gunboats patrolling colonial waters showing the flag and offering a whiff of grape if required to intimidate the native populations. It is one thing to send a super carrier against the Third World country and quite another to risk it against the missiles soon to be produced in staggering quantities by the world's second (or perhaps even first) economy.

So the first question is whether we need 13 carriers if within a reasonable timeframe they cannot be deployed except with extreme risk? Should we not be diverting precious defense funds to other platforms such as submarines or satellites? In any event, how do we maintain American power in places like the South China Sea if our carriers are in fact exposed?

The questions get worse: with the advent of this gunboat missile technology are we not in the foreseeable future facing an imbalance or asymmetrical naval battlescape in which we will be risking multibillion-dollar carriers against cheap but lethal and, more importantly, multiple missile capable gunboats? A retired naval captain once described the war in Korea to me as follows: we loaded a very expensive bomb onto a very expensive airplane whereupon a very expensively trained pilot flies it off the deck of an extremely expensive aircraft carrier and seeks a target in North Korea. They find an oxcart, fire the missile, consume expensive fuel and return to the carrier having a successfully completed mission. Two North Koreans climb out of the ditch observe their dead ox, gather the splinter wood from the cart with which to build a fire and eat the ox. Who won?

We have to run a cost-benefit analyses and we have to decide whether we have the right tools for the theater. We have to know this 30 years in advance. And we have to do it with defense in mind and not politics, with a concern only for the security of the nation and not the pork at home, with a scrupulous regard for the precious nature of our Armed Forces and a rigid indifference to the temptations of social engineering such a top-down organization as the American military represents to God playing leftists.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

My caveats to your observations about the Chinese economy are that I am not sure that this recession or even depression will affect their military-industrial complex, in other words, they will still have an infrastructure that enables them to build up to ten ships to our one.

The second caveat is that in the nuclear age much of the game is not to actually wage war but to change the balance of power. That, for example, is why Iran wants the bomb in the Middle East, to topple American nuclear hegemony there and leave the Persian Gulf as vulnerable to Iran as it is to America. Likewise, the Chinese are building islands as launching pads for planes and missiles etc. for the same reason, to change the balance of power, to impose their will economically and politically on one of the world's most important shipping lanes.

Finally, we have the Chinese perspective on history as compared to ours and in their Long view a recession or even a depression is hardly a hickup. Our political system, our military-industrial complex, does not blind us entirely but it certainly leaves us shortsighted.

Here is that reply:

this I quite agree with your description of the modern aircraft carrier as a platform for projecting power. I would analogize it to the role of British gunboats in the 19th century.

We have a window until the Chinese can launch carriers which can hope to compete with ours. Meanwhile they are trying to change the balance of power by developing missiles with the ability of taking out aircraft carriers, thus neutering our advantage. We still have a window of time in this field.

My belief is that the Chinese will offer a credible threat, not a decisive threat, but a threat grievous enough to change the balance of power and compel a reassessment of strategy by the United States. Food for thought: if there is a dustup and three Chinese carriers are sunk for one American carrier, who won?

We should be building interlocking alliances with the smaller countries that ring China to the East and South encouraging them to supplement their forces, especially their air forces, using our carriers under an umbrella of land-based air power to project military force from a place of relative safety toward the Chinese. The Chinese must be confronted with a united front which somehow affects their vital interests. It will not do just to win a sea battle, China is vast with teeming population and can swallow setbacks and still carry-on. But it cannot sustain its ambitions if its sea lanes lanes are closed, depriving China of the commodities (and markets) it absolutely requires.

If China intends to keep the sea lanes open with aircraft carriers, they become extremely vulnerable to submarines etc. The equation which runs against us when we try to impose a perfect security system in the waters around China now reverses and favors us. Beyond their capabilities as gunboats, how does the aircraft carrier fit into a global strategic defense system? We can intimidate smaller countries with our aircraft carriers as China clearly intends to do but I do not think that we can intimidate the Chinese, nor they us, with aircraft carriers.

In the world to come the Chinese will be using aircraft carriers to say to Taiwanese, Vietnamese, Japanese and Filipinos we have commensurate power with the Americans but the difference between us and America is we will use it and they might not. Can you trust an ally with your very existence which elects a series of Barack Obamas as commander-in-chief? Your only hope is to align yourselves with the future.

To counter this disruptive force, which we will also see in the Middle East, the United States must demonstrate that it will maintain military superiority and that it will use it. More, and perhaps most important, the United States must seize the window of opportunity we now have to move toward the next weapons system beyond the aircraft carrier in order to create a new paradigm which sets the Chinese and the Islamists back into the age of the gunboat.

[alexander_busek]

Interesting analysis.

Food for thought: if there is a dustup and three Chinese carriers are sunk for one American carrier, who won?

Is that a mere rhetorical question, or do you care to supply an answer?

Regards,

[nathanbedford]

The question is purely rhetorical but it is posed to get us to think about our national interests. It seems to me that as we identify those national interests in places like the South China Sea, we then want to develop a strategy which is practical to achieve or protect those interests, then to think about tactics and finally to invest in weapons systems.

Sometimes when there is a technological breakthrough the process must be reversed-but the process must be completed down to up just as it must be done from top to bottom. For example, the launch of HMS Dreadnought in 1906 rendered every battleship, indeed every ship, in the world instantly outclassed. Pearl Harbor and the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse meant the end of the battleships and the dominance of the aircraft carrier. Submarine warfare in World War I and World War II very nearly change the outcome but the technology of radar and the coping by convoys defeated that.

Machine guns, Barb wire and especially artillery were technological innovations that changed entirely the nature of land warfare which in turn produced the tank and later integration of air power leading to the blitzkrieg.

But the important question is always, what is our national interest? Too often, I think, we start wars or invest in weapons systems because they are the flavor of the week or decade or, worse, because they bring pork home.

My plea is to recognize that we are entering a bizarre world of asymmetrical warfare on the one hand and potential nuclear holocaust on the other hand. In between we have to be able the battle ox carts or satellites.

I think we should make sure we have the right end of the telescope to our eye.

[Gaffer]

If that happened, I’d look at it this way. The Chinese lost 3 carriers for which they already have builds lined up to supplement with newer performance criteria experienced with the three during their sea-life and even in their demise. In other words, there were already additions and replacements in the pipeline.

For the US? I’d consider that the bigger loss because it very likely isn’t going to be replaced.

[bill1952]

Sorry, you are misunderstanding the point. Bombers and missiles destroy things so as to allow the projection of force and the deployment of forces
Blowing things up is nothing much without the deployment of forces and only naval assets can do that in sufficient numbers

[SkyPilot]

I have been saying for years that Sequestration was a dagger at the heart of the military, and Sequestration was the cherry on top of multiple cuts that Obama had made (and Congress agreed to) BEFORE Sequestration took effect.

And now we have a military that is so weak that the next war will result in a massive loss of life at best, and total defeat at worst.

[ops33]

While I would be the first to admit my knowledge of naval tactics is very limited how would a carrier strike force defend itself against an attack by several thousand kamikase drones?

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

Right. Tactical support requires more planes which can essentially ‘strafe’. And a nearby air strip [floating or otherwise] means less time flying around in the middle of nowhere.

Drones are great, but they can be jammed. So here we are. Still need carriers.