The Market Will Tell You What You're Short of

For navalists, the very short answer to the question of, "How many carriers do we really need?" is "More." 

Why is that the answer? Simple ... look at the length of deployments and the foolish "double pumping" of the CVN we have.

"High demand - low density" is just a PPT way of saying we didn't buy enough of what we actually need.

Let's take that simple economics concept over to the Army.

What are they short of? Remember when we were naked to attack from the Iranians? We don't want to have that happen again.

The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense and Patriot missile batteries remain among the most frequently deployed units in the service, Army senior leaders have said previously. They’ve also acknowledged a need to ease the burden on soldiers manning those systems.

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“Every Patriot unit assigned to the 32nd AAMDC was forward deployed during this period of time," Stewart said Wednesday at the conference. "More importantly, every weapon system in our arsenal, to include C-RAM, Stinger, Avenger, Sentinel Radar, Patriot, THAAD, all those were deployed forward during this time.”

Here is a question; our allies have a lot of air defense forces. How many of them have deployed to help us during this surge? 

In NATO alone, the Germans, Dutch, Spanish and Greeks have Patriot. The Romanians just got their last month, so we'll give them a pass.

The Army has been funding something ... but too much of that and not enough of this.

Imagine the requirements we would face in a war with even a half-peer.

The Future is Distributed

Technology is reaching the point of affordability and capability that even medium powers are on the cusp of having a conventional, precision global strike capability. If you're willing to scope that down, we are already at the point of regional long range strike for anyone who wants it.

Right now, a rag-tag group of rebels from Yemen is launching ballistic missiles at the capital of Saudi Arabia on a regular basis. Sure, they are not having much success, but that is because they are using half-century+ old weapons technology in limited numbers against a well integrated 21st Century ABM system. Just wargame out a bit more capability with a bit more targeting and then a diversity of better weapons with similar range and you have ... a tough nut.

The vulnerability of large airfields has been a "known-known" for over 75 years and from Pearl Harbor to Egypt to Iraq, what happens when your enemy is many and your airfields are few is clear.

Because since about 1943 we have been on the giving side of this fact vice the receiving, we've forgotten this more than we should. We need to continue to think hard about those things that are efficient in peace that may be be the most effective at war. Airbases are one of them.

In an interesting article, Robbin Laird brings up a case in point;

“From a USAF standpoint, we are organized for efficiency, and in the high intensity conflict that we might find ourselves in, in the Pacific, that efficiency might be actually our Achilles heel, because it requires us to put massive amounts of equipment on a few bases. Those bases, as we most know, are within the weapons engagement zone of potential adversaries,” Wilsbach said.
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“We’re at the very preliminary stages of being able to do this but the organization is part of the problem for us, because we are very used to, over the last several decades, of being in very large bases, very large organizations, and we stovepipe the various career fields, and one commander is not in charge of the force that you need to disperse. We’re taking a look at this, of how we might reorganize, to be able to employ this concept in the Pacific, and other places.”

In February, I talked with his predecessor, Lt. Gen. Kim Jäämeri, who is now deputy Chief of Staff for strategy for the Finnish Defence Forces. He highlighted the distributed operations aspect of the Finnish approach.

“It is becoming clear to our partners that you cannot run air operations in a legacy manner under the threat of missile barrages of long range weapons. The legacy approach to operating from air bases just won’t work in these conditions. For many of our partners, this is a revelation; for us it has been a fact of life for a long time, and we have operated with this threat in the forefront of operations for a long time,” Jäämeri said.

One could also bring this line of discussion in to the carrier debates.