What the United States Needs from Aircraft CarriersĪircraft carriers enable four key missions for the Navy: gaining maritime situational awareness, neutralizing enemy naval power, carrying out short-term raids and strikes against specific targets, and acting as an “airfield at sea.” The first two form a part of the broader idea of gaining sea control. The greater flexibility that such a combination will provide will more than compensate for any loss of individual carrier capability. Moreover, it needs to adopt the “ distributed lethality” concept as a fundamental pillar of naval operations. While the Navy faces an increasingly austere budget environment, the service still has opportunities to grow the fleet if it thinks outside the box. At the same time, the possibility exists to augment these still further with a “lightning carrier” derivative from the amphibious ship fleet. As a result, the time is ripe to cut the number of Ford-class carriers from 10 or 11 to six, and instead build four to five smaller carriers to maintain the congressionally mandated numbers. Moreover, a full Ford-class program is likely to be financially unsustainable in the long-term. The idea of the Navy trading off a proven capability for the many uncertain new technologies included on the Ford-class carrier has been contentious from the start. Some are even suggesting that the Navy will have to be prepared for drastic reductions in its size. allies would suggest that this is unlikely. ![]() Second, given the expected budgetary pressures after the pandemic, will the United States actually be able to afford the current plan to buy 10 to 11 Ford-class carriers without hopelessly disrupting the balance of the fleet in the process? History and the experience of U.S. In fact, it may be possible to carry out future missions with a “Hi-Lo” mix of carrier capabilities, in which the less demanding missions would still be ably accomplished by the smaller, less-capable ships. For the carrier force, the key questions would have to include the following: First, is it necessary that all new carriers can deliver a whole air wing capability, which is taken to include fighter and strike aircraft, airborne early warning, electronic warfare, and tanker capabilities? While the United States needs this capability, particularly when dealing with sophisticated rivals, it’s not clear that all carriers need to have it. ![]() In the past, such losses in naval thinking have not gone well. Yes, the Pentagon’s Future Navy Force Study will continue, but this is more concerned with the Navy’s contribution to an overall Department of Defense effort, and is not focused on the Navy’s force structure questions per se. Specifically, the worry about cancelling the Navy’s own study is that the questions the service ought to be asking itself will probably not see the light of day. In the words of one analyst, “If the fleet were designed today, with the technologies now available and the threats now emerging, it likely would look very different from the way it actually looks now.” The Navy’s new shipbuilding plan is still very much under development, and reportedly “ reliant on new classes that don’t exist yet.” There has never been a better moment for a fundamental reassessment of the country’s naval posture. While the loss of an individual study doesn’t necessarily mean that the Navy has stopped thinking about the future of its carriers, it is nevertheless a great shame. The “Future Carrier 2030 Task Force” was asked to test how large, nuclear-powered carriers might stack up against the new generation of long-range precision weapons being fielded by China and Russia. Navy secretary called a halt to a study on the future of the country’s fleet of 11 aircraft carriers. In stark contrast, last month the incoming U.S. Fisher did not want their creativity constrained by traditions and legacy designs. ![]() ” His point was to break his team away from orthodox thinking and to encourage them to develop new ideas. Sir John “Jackie” Fisher, said that “in approaching … ship design, the first essential is to divest our minds totally of the idea that a single type of ship as now built is necessary, or even advisable. In guiding his design teams for the crucial Royal Navy reforms in 1905 - an effort that produced HMS Dreadnought and a new generation of battlecruisers - Britain’s First Sea Lord, Adm.
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