Reimagining the Aircraft Carrier: A Support Vessel for Guided Missiles
[By Captain R. Robinson Harris, USN (ret.)]
39 years ago, in the October 1985 issue of USNI Proceedings, then-LCDR Joe Benkert and I questioned how the Navy structured the relationship between the carrier force and the surface fleet:
“Do non-carrier surface warships have any strategic significance? To listen to discussions of maritime strategy and naval force structure in the public arena, one would think that the only general-purpose naval forces with strategic significance in their own right are carrier-launched aircraft and nuclear-powered attack submarines, and that surface combatants are simply integral parts of larger, carrier-dominated structures. Reminiscent of Peggy Lee’s song, ‘Is that all there is?” Are surface combatants simply supporting players, or do they have a larger strategic role?”…the Maritime strategy suggests that naval forces would move forward as early as possible to take decisive, offensive action to neutralize the Soviet Navy and pressure the Soviet flanks. This strategy envisions the Soviet fleet being neutralized mostly by attack submarines and carrier-based aviation. The principal role for surface combatants in this task lies in providing defense for aircraft carriers.”
Is that still all there is? Fast forward to 2024 where we may be witnessing a role reversal. Are we reaching a point in which the surface fleet, with the long-range Maritime Strike Tomahawk missile, will become the preferred platform-weapon combination for U.S. anti-ship warfare? Could this subsequently shift the role of the aircraft carrier and its air wing to being the supporting platforms rather than the supported?
The looming introduction of VLS-capable anti-ship missiles across a wide range of untapped force structure within the Navy and the joint force deserves to trigger a rethink of the fleet’s combined arms doctrine, especially between the surface fleet and the carriers. The U.S. Navy is about to experience a historic firepower revolution, and it needs to think deeply about the implications.
Making Sense of the Firepower Revolution
CDR Jeff Vandenengel argues in his recently published book, Questioning the Carrier: Opportunities in Fleet Design for the U.S. Navy, that aircraft carriers are too vulnerable in certain threat environments to take on the strike warfare role, and that the surface fleet’s offensive potential has been hamstrung by traditional doctrinal roles that relegated it to supporting the carrier defensively. Vandenengel and others have argued that the age of the carrier has been surpassed by the age of the missile, which has become the principally dominant weapon in modern naval warfare. The question is whether the combined arms doctrine that integrates the various naval communities into a fleet has adapted to make the most of the principal weapon of the era.
The lethality of the anti-ship missile has greatly exacerbated the intense attrition that has long characterized naval combat and set it apart from other warfare domains. As Captain Wayne Hughes argued,
“It is demonstrable both by history and theory that not only has a small net advantage in force often been decisive in naval battles, but the slightly inferior force tends to lose with very little to show… every strategist must know the relative fighting value of his navy – so carefully nurtured and expensive to build and maintain in peacetime. When committed in battle, the heart of a fleet can be cut out in an afternoon.”
In war at sea, a slight tactical disadvantage in striking power can quickly snowball into major losses, strongly encouraging navies to make the absolute most of the dominant weapons of their era. As Dmitry Filipoff has argued:
“…no other service needs to be more invested in tactical superiority and solid warfighting doctrine than navies. If a carrier strike group falls prey to a single missile salvo, that’s about seven thousand lives and $20 billion dollars that is lost in a matter of minutes. By comparison, those numbers would get you about 2,000 tanks, but there is no plausible combat scenario where two thousand tanks are destroyed in a couple minutes. Modern naval warfare is an absolutely brutal form of combat, and because of that, nobody stands to lose so much so quicky from their tactical shortfalls than navies. In naval warfare especially, tactical shortfalls can rapidly escalate into strategic liabilities…”
Accordingly, the Navy’s warfighting concept of DMO should be developing a better understanding of how fleet warfare is evolving with respect to the wide proliferation of long-range anti-ship firepower across both the force structure of the U.S. military and its rivals. Lying at the core of this transformation is the point that the Maritime Strike Tomahawk possesses a combination of traits that are especially suited for mass anti-ship fires – long range, broad platform compatibility, and eventually steep inventory depth. While several other new anti-ship missiles are also joining the joint force, including SM-6 and the Naval Strike Missile, no other anti-ship missile in the U.S. inventory fields this specific combination of mass firing traits to the same degree as MST. And arguably no other community will field this decisive weapon to the same extent as the surface fleet. This historic evolution in the U.S. Navy’s striking power should have major effects on the roles and missions of the aircraft carrier, its air wing, and the fleet as a whole.
Evolving Firepower, Evolving Roles
The air wing has a range of limits, including the range of its aircraft, the range of its anti-ship missiles, the wide scope of missions the air wing may have to perform simultaneously, the time it takes to arm and launch sizeable strike packages, and of course the risk that can be reasonably tolerated by putting carriers within reach of certain high-end targets. Long-range anti-ship missiles based on the surface force offer a useful alternative for circumventing some of these limits and risks, and providing a much more expansive array of options for fighting enemy fleets.
But the carrier will still be needed to leverage this wide scope of new firepower. An alternative combined arms relationship is offered in Filipoff’s “Fighting DMO” series. The carrier air wing can serve as a force multiplier to this potent mass firing capability by fulfilling the information demands required to take full advantage of the long range of these weapons and their broad scope of distribution across a theater. Carrier aircraft such as the F-35 can take the lead in penetrating the contested battlespace and facilitating the striking power of entire fleets. As Filipoff has argued: “aircraft are going to be very critical for managing the breadth of the offensive kill chain. This can go from scouting for targets, cueing fires against them, maneuvering those fires, and assessing those fires’ effectiveness.” As carrier aircraft call in anti-ship fires from across the joint force, they can be postured to provide crucial retargeting updates to in-flight salvos based on the dynamic awareness offered by sensor fusion, and allow aircraft to shepherd anti-ship missiles into cohesive volumes of fire against enemy fleets.
The ability of the carrier air wing to provide offensive information support for the maritime fires killchain is significantly enhanced by the sensor fusion and networking capabilities possessed by 5th generation F-35 aircraft. F-35 fighters possess multiple datalink options to share data with dissimilar platforms, such as F/A-18s and E-2Ds. These datalinks could also be used to dynamically command anti-ship missiles to fly various waypoints, flying formations, and sensor postures to maximize effectiveness in a complex battlespace. The P-8 community can also provide valuable command and control functions for the maritime fires process, and offer aerial C2 options that are not tethered to the location or risk profile of a carrier.
Aircraft can be empowered with the command-and-control of significant amounts of anti-ship firepower in the moments that could decide fleet battles. It is through these roles that the carrier can still very much serve as a decisive capital ship by focusing on the critical currency of modern warfare – information advantage.
Conclusion
Given the range advantage of surface fleet-based missiles, the range limitations of the carrier air wing, and the vulnerability of the carrier in certain threat environments, the role of the carrier and its air wing should evolve in tandem with the U.S. Navy’s changing firepower. The carrier and its air wing should serve as the force quarterback that scouts wide spaces, cues surface ship fires against targets, and provides crucial in-flight retargeting support to those salvos on their way through a contested battlespace. In this method, the air wing can be empowered to deliver much more than the force of the carrier – it can deliver the force of entire fleets.
This is only one possible concept of operations for harnessing the new possibilities that are on the horizon. The fundamental issue at hand is whether the Navy will truly recognize it is in the midst of one of the most sweeping transformations in offensive anti-ship firepower in its history, and whether it will give serious consideration to shifting the combined arms doctrine that has long defined how the fleet intends to fight. The U.S. Navy’s warfighting concepts, including DMO, should be the driving force behind experimenting with these alternatives and eventually articulating what these new combined arms roles should be. The firepower revolution and the DMO concept are also happening in the context of the Navy’s growing emphasis on fleet-level warfare and Maritime Operations Centers. All of these elements must be thoughtfully integrated, especially with respect to reforming combined arms relations to maximize the fleet’s overall striking power. That is the ultimate end, not elevating one platform’s primacy or another’s.
Captain R. Robinson “Robby” Harris commanded USS Conolly (DD-979) and Destroyer Squadron 32. Ashore he served as Executive Director of the CNO Executive Panel. He was a CNO Fellow in CNO Strategic Studies Group XII.
This article appears courtesy of CIMSEC and may be found in its original form here.