Build More Carriers and Send Some to CENTCOM

At a time when nations at the front line facing a rising People's Republic of China such as Japan and India (and the PRC herself) are expanding their aircraft carrier fleets as fasts as budgets and politicians will allow, in the United States the carrier debate continues in to another decade.

It is natural; aircraft carriers are very expensive - and they bring a lot of capability with that cost. They are vulnerable because they are a high-priority target specifically because of the threat they pose to any opponent. Both sides have a point, but the question is who has the better point given our place in time.

In another chapter in the carrier debate, we're honored to have Bryan McGrath returning here with a response to a recent article in the U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings by Lieutenant Commander Stephen Walsh, U.S. Navy at the link below.

Bryan, over to you.

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There is little in the opinion-writing world more attractive to editors and readers than the thoughts of someone questioning closely held tenets of what would appear to be the affinity group of the author. So, when an aircraft carrier aviator pens a piece questioning the value of aircraft carriers in a major piece of U.S. geo-strategy, one is forced to take notice. That several members of the tight fraternity of un-listened-to and marginalized navalists to which I claim affinity cited the work with praise and hosana also caught my attention. Having now read and digested the work, I am considerably less impressed by the substance of the argument, and I set out here to address its shortcomings. 

First though, I wish to congratulate LCDR Walsh on his effort. He is a fine writer and thinker, but most importantly, he has taken the time to submit his views to scrutiny. The world is full of opinions, but there are precious few (especially among naval officers) who are willing to address and/or stoke controversy publicly in such a lucid and well-documented fashion. That I will spend the remainder of my time here criticizing his argument should be taken as a sign of respect. Were his argument not worth addressing, I would not be writing this on a national holiday. 

Walsh’s Argument

Readers are urged to digest Walsh’s argument in full. I will only summarize it here to frame my own thoughts, and I apologize for the shorthand approach. Here goes: aircraft carriers are valuable elements of the Navy’s contribution to Joint warfighting, and as there are a finite number of them, their application to U.S. grand and defense strategic objectives must be carefully considered. This consideration extends to both the effectiveness of that application, and the consequences to force readiness that flow therefrom. In applying carrier air power to the strategic objectives of CENTCOM commanders, Walsh believes that carriers have been misallocated, as other elements of the Joint Force have been more effectively employed. Walsh asserts that the misapplication of carrier air power to a theater of secondary strategic importance (behind Indo-PACOM and EUCOM in that order, presumably) has wasted carrier readiness that should either be held in reserve or applied more liberally in the other theaters (this much is not as clear). This is not an outlier’s view. It tracks closely with the warp and weft of the Trump National Defense Strategy which shifted emphasis to the Indo-Pacific at the explicit expense of CENTCOM (and EUCOM). 

McGrath’s Argument

Whether one points to the Trump NDS or the current administration and its Interim National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy, it is hard to conclude that the current bi-partisan fashion animating national security thinking is not “managing decline” (or re-arranging deck-chairs). No one in authority puts it this way, but it is the elephant in the room. At some point after the fall of the Soviet Union, maintaining our position as the world’s dominant power and leader of the free world lost currency. Now that this position is actively challenged, our efforts seem more geared toward efficient allocation of declining resources than in addressing the challenge head-on. Decline strategists would have one believe that what they are doing is making tough choices, which after all, is the zenith of strategy-making. The problem with this approach is that they have already made (or recognized the existence of) the decision NOT to be globally powerful. Their approach and logic is internally consistent and whole all the way from “B to Z”. The problem is that I am unaware of the consensus in American defense and national security thinking that codified the step from “A to B”—that we were (as a nation) comfortable with relative decline and that our approach henceforth would be to draw out that decline for as long as possible. 

My argument is this: I am unafraid to draw Cold War parallels to the current strategic environment. We either tool up and build out for it, or we accept decline and the consequences of living in a world where we are not the dominant power. Where Walsh would have us believe that promiscuous employment of aircraft carriers to CENTCOM is leaving us ill-prepared for higher priority conflict elsewhere, I would argue that we do not have the number of aircraft carriers (or a properly sized Navy) we need to meet our legitimate security requirements. They are of course—different arguments. But if you buy into Walsh’s argument, you never get to mine. 

Does the Carrier Deter?

Deterrence of any variety is difficult to prove without exquisite intelligence, as the problem of “proving the negative” confronts any claim made without it. Additionally, the fact that Iran appeared “undeterred”, carrying out aggressive global and regional terror attacks (in addition to direct military action) while aircraft carriers were present in theater, adds to the nagging question of carrier effectiveness as a deterrent. 

Yet there are important questions to consider before concluding the ineffectiveness of the carrier as a deterrent. The very existence of the ground-breaking “Abraham Accords” points to the growing wariness of Iran in the Arab world and the discomfort felt there in U.S. overtures during the Obama Administration (re-started in the Biden Administration) toward Iran. The presence of a carrier may or may not have stopped Iranian adventurism, but was the carrier part of a regional approach to deterring a larger war between Iran and the Sunni-Arab world? I do not know the answer to this, but I suspect CENTCOM Commanders believe that it was. And the suggestion that CENTCOM Commanders might “pull punches” to preserve carrier readiness for use in another theater strikes me as misunderstanding what those officers are paid to do. We pay the Secretary of Defense to make punch pulling decisions.

Walsh points at this, as senior civilians in both parties responded positively to CENTCOM requests for aircraft carriers. Walsh would have those civilians be less open to these requests, relying on other parts of the Joint arsenal for deterrence and saving carrier readiness for other conflicts. But for whatever reason, those civilians and those CENTCOM Commanders believed that the theater needed BOTH carrier air power and land-based air.  What if what was really happening was not shoddy and reflexive staff work by the combatant commander and his staff, validated by the Joint Staff and the Secretary of Defense, but the dirty business of everyday American national security? What if the CENTCOM Commander really was making a good case for these forces? What if—at the end of the day—the intelligence from both within DoD and the rest of the intelligence community indicated that overmatch was having an impact on Iranian behavior? Criticism of combatant commanders for insatiable appetites is the new national pastime. But I fear far more, a world of passive combatant commanders than I do the fear of sub-optimal carrier employment. 

Troublingly, I read little in Walsh’s treatment of carrier employment in CENTCOM of the role of crisis response from forward deployed forces. While the work he and his co-workers were doing was somewhat mundane, that he and they were there ready to respond is not to be undervalued. 

And then there is the whole business of counting bombs dropped in theater as a measure of effectiveness or utility. While this might be frustrating to the aviators participating in missions found less exciting than others, of all the metrics to apply to the effectiveness of a deterrent, this seems the least relevant. Carrier Air Wings throughout Indo-PACOM and EUCOM routinely return to homeport without having fired a shot in anger. Are we to assume their readiness was similarly wasted?

                        CENTCOM AOR

The Priority Theater Issue

Walsh begins his piece thusly: “The Department of Defense (DoD) has allocated aircraft carriers to U.S. Central Command (CentCom) for Iranian deterrence at the expense of strategic competition with China and Russia repeatedly over the past decade. DoD is locked in a cycle that regularly deprives Indo-Pacific Command (IndoPaCom) and European Command of the carriers necessary for strategic competition.” Forgive me if I impugn motives unfairly, but until late March of this year, most discussions of this sort were solely focused on Indo-PACOM, with both EUCOM and CENTCOM relegated to lesser positions. Then came a war and now EUCOM has the attention of naval force structure analysts. My point here is that the U.S. has enduring interests in all three AOR’s, and those interests drive the need for dominant naval power in each. Setting up this shell-game of priority theaters has a veneer of strategic thought, but the real-world gets a vote, and commitment of forces to lesser theaters is not always a sign of weakness in decision-makers. Sometimes it is the least bad decision. 

The Stationary Carrier

In his second paragraph, Walsh writes “Iran can and must be deterred from aggression—but without continually holding an aircraft carrier in a stationary and strategically disadvantageous position.” I do not mean to be a noodge, but with routine operations in the North Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Oman, the Gulf of Aden, AND the Arabian Sea, aircraft carriers in more obvious deterrence postures vis-à-vis Iran cover a lot of ground. In fact, to buttress the claim that “It is equally difficult to argue that a carrier is necessary for CentCom’s maritime security”, Walsh points to the 1988 “Operation Praying Mantis” in which the USS ENTERPRISE (CVN 65) “…remained outside the Strait of Hormuz, and her aircraft required assistance from an Air Force KC-10 to reach their targets.”  

Clearly the ENTERPRISE was in this case, not a stationary carrier. More importantly though, how ENTERPRISE was employed is illustrative of how we would prudently employ the CVN in conflict. To wit, carrier operations ought not be conceived as singular charges of the maritime light brigade deep within the contested zone at the beginning of a battle (especially in confined waters), followed by the establishment of long-duration frontline sanctuaries for carrier operations. Rather, they should be conceived as sequential hit and run operations that gradually degrade an adversary’s ability to fight effectively in the contested zone’s outer reaches, which in turn creates the conditions that allow the process to be repeated closer to the adversary’s shores. Put another way, attempting to operate an aircraft carrier in the North Arabian Gulf in wartime is a far different undertaking than doing so in restive peace. 

Walsh Sees a Demand Problem; McGrath Sees a Supply Problem

Again - Walsh is appropriately reacting to a set of facts that he is presented with. We have a finite number of carriers, and he believes they are being misused, which exacerbates their readiness challenges and renders the U.S. less well-prepared for higher priority uses. His prescription is to use them less. My prescription is to have more of them.  I will concede that his view is the dominant one, the most likely to be followed, the most logical one given the political environment in which we live. But because it accepts decline, it raises a very uncomfortable question: if we are accepting decline and are in essence trying to run out the clock, is not every penny we spend in this pursuit wasted if the result is essentially pre-determined? Put another way, why not just accept decline, re-orient a goodly portion of the defense budget to other uses, and accept the resulting world order as the new status quo?

The Problem of Time

Where Walsh’s good sense and my howling at the moon are most opposed is in the question of time. For instance, if what Walsh is trying to say is that FOR NOW, we need to cut back on what he believes are wasteful applications of carrier air power to store up readiness for a “Davidson Window-like” conflict with China, his argument has some attraction (although it could hardly be differentiated from a decline management approach undertaken across the same period). My argument is that we must undertake a massive naval building program over the course of a generation beginning immediately, the tangible fruits of which are unlikely to manifest for several years. In the meantime, the force we have must be employed as consistently as possible to extend and deepen American security and prosperity, and we must fund the training, parts, and maintenance necessary to achieve that readiness. Announcing such a building program and then allocating the necessary resources will send a clear message of seriousness that has not yet been achieved.  

Conclusion

We are engaged in a multi-generational security struggle and unlike when last we faced such a challenge, we are attempting to manage it rather than rise to it. LCDR Walsh has offered that because our interests in the CENTCOM AOR are not nearly as important as those in Indo-PACOM and EUCOM, and because in his view, those interests are not advanced by what carriers do when they are in the CENTCOM AOR, we ought not send them there anymore, or at least not as often. I am struck by the degree to which his advice has already been taken, its strategic flaws notwithstanding. 

More importantly though, I am troubled by the resignation that I read in his essay. The sense of “because it is this way it will always be this way” is strong in it, and its acceptance of current circumstances places constraints on thinking about what is possible. At the very least, we could properly resource readiness across the fleet to address the deficits created by the capacity/need mismatch. More holistically though, we must consider a dramatic increase in spending on our Navy across the board, so that both current readiness and future capacity can be achieved. 

Bryan McGrath is the Managing Director of The FerryBridge Group LLC. His views and opinions are his own.

To Build the Fleet We Need: Demand Humility & Challenge Arrogance

Why must we continue to remind everyone who will listen of the failures of the Age of Transformationalism™? Simple; we cannot afford another generation of programs lost to arrogance, ignorance, and toxic command climates that leave bad ideas and ahistorical program assumptions go unchallenged.

Futurism, offset promises, overmatch assumptions, risk devaluation, divest-to-invest – these are all attractive ideas that brief well. They seem to promise to solve so many hard problems. They offer more for less.

They seem to allow an easy path; a way to avoid hard work and compromise … and to accrue to their advocates accolades as the “it guy/gal” who has all the vision and provides all the comfortable answers.

This is an ongoing fight. The Transformationalists won the bureaucratic war two decades ago with disastrous consequences to our Navy. The second and third order effects continue to haunt us as we approach the middle of the third decade of the 21st Century and by many measures the US Navy is now the world’s 2nd largest navy as a result.

We did this to ourselves.

To fix this we need to take affirmative action to grow our fleet. How we find the money to do that is for Congress to figure out, but grow it we must. To do that we need to understand, acknowledge, and study how we got here.

Over at National Review, our friend Jerry Hendrix has a must-read article that puts where we are in context and reminds people something we will have to repeat over and over this decade – we did this to ourselves. It is perfectly titled, “The Navy’s Littoral Hubris.”

The apparent operational successes in Operation Desert Storm (1990–91) and later during the breakup of Yugoslavia (1995–2000) convinced Navy and Department of Defense leaders that future operations would occur largely in permissive environments and against low-end small-state or non-state actors. Based upon these assumptions, they set about to design a Navy optimized to operate in littoral environments. The resulting ships, the Ford-class aircraft carrier, the Zumwalt-class destroyer, and the Littoral Combat Ship, were the products of these assumptions.

Each of these ships came with an additional fault hidden in its initial design: a hubristic belief that the moment had arrived when the United States could execute a significant technological “leap ahead” in ship design on par with the development of the HMS Dreadnought in 1905, a battleship that, according to legend, rendered all other existing designs obsolete with its launching.

The Ford-class carrier, which was optimized for increased sortie generation based upon a concept in which it would conduct high-tempo flight operations near the shores where the targets of its aircraft were, was designed with five major revolutionary changes. 

...

The USS Ford, which cost nearly $15 billion, was commissioned in 2017 but, because of problems with each of its new subsystems, has yet to deploy operationally overseas.

The Zumwalt-class “land-attack destroyer” was conceived with a unique mission and a set of technical challenges of its own. 

...

Currently the plan is to remove the gun mounts and use the space to carry the Navy’s new Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic missiles. When escalating costs and technological challenges, along with a changing security environment, rendered the ship’s “land -attack” mission moot, the decision was made to truncate the class, with only three of the originally planned 32 ships being built. This leads us to the final innovative component of the “21st century” ships (the cruiser version of the “family” was canceled before construction of the first ship began): the two Littoral Combat Ship designs.

The LCS class of ship was to be small, fast, highly maneuverable, and, most important, inexpensive when compared with the multibillion -dollar-per-hull destroyers and cruisers that made up the remainder of the Navy’s surface force. 

...

Almost immediately, problems began to accumulate. ... The Navy’s leadership, which had conceived the LCS in an era when management theory dominated councils of power, made the decision to continue building the ships and send them to sea, charging young commanders and their crews to figure out how to make them work. Unfortunately, no amount of management, or leadership, for that matter, could overcome the flaws hidden within each design.

Congenital flaws began to emerge as each class became operational, resulting in their being referred to as “Little Crappy Ships” in navalist blogs and even professional literature. These inherent flaws immediately began to directly degrade the ships’ operational readiness. 

...

These two ship classes, designed for 25-year service lives, are being recommended by the Navy’s uniformed leadership for retirement a bare ten years after their commissionings.

Here is where this horrid two decades of delusion bears its fruit;

The loss of these ships would drop the Navy’s battleforce from the 298 ships it has today down to somewhere in the 270-ship range for some time to come. ... Congress has passed a law requiring the Navy to achieve a battleforce size of 355 ships, a goal that seems more unreachable with each passing year. 

Regulars on the Front Porch remember that we made this recommendation first in 2007 - 15 years ago;

In 2020 the Navy announced that it had selected the European multi-mission-frigate design, which is currently operated by four other nations, for modification and construction in the United States. Currently ten ships are planned, but there are clear indications that the number of Constellation-class frigates (as the category has been named) will grow considerably.

As a matter of fact, let's look back at how I started that October of 2007 post. 

Let me beat that drum a little harder - license build a EuroFrigate NOW!!! Do it while we still have time - time to keep the Fleet numbers treading water and have enough shipyards open.

A revolutionary project on PPT is just that - on PPT. An evolutionary project (see pre-WWII Cruiser development and the history of Carrier development as an example) results in ships pier-side and ships underway. Good officers have bought the line over this decade that LCS with all its toys will let them cover 10x more water than the old Spru-cans did - and do it better? ADS was to be one of the keys in doing this.

We have put all our eggs in that gilded crap-basket of an LCS - thanks to Sid, we have the proof much of the oversold ASW capability increase portion has gone poof. With ADS gone we now have, well, an poorly configured, expensive, undermanned Corvette.

There it is. We were not alone ... but there is it.

Back to Jerry's NR article. He ends with about a perfect note.

While it would be good to find ways to extend the lives of and make operational the LCS platforms that have been built over the past two decades, the Navy’s new frigates, along with the advanced Virginia-class fast attack submarines, will represent the modern balanced fleet that will give national policy-makers the confidence to maintain American interests in both peace and war. The previously conceived “21st-century family of ships,” expected to include the Littoral Combat Ships, will soon be forgotten artifacts of a hubristic past.

Indeed.

If you find people who are new to the maritime side of the natsec community or are not up to speed with how we got there, get Jerry’s article in front of their eyes. It is a superb 1-stop summary.

Japan Back in the Carrier Game ...

This really is an amazing video if you have a historically focused mind. 

Fresh from her modifications to fly F-35B, the Izumo is bringing the Japanese Navy back in the carrier business again … with some friends via United States Marine Corps F-35B.

The Japanese will be buying 42 F-35B and maybe more, so soon we will see the Izumo and her sister ships with the first Japanese fixed wing airwing at sea since the end of the Second World War.

I’d like more, faster – along with the South Koreans … and if we could get the Australians to play at some point that would be nice too … but this is all good news for navalists in the West.

Though not a “Western” nation, Japan is part of our network of allies and friends who stand for secure seas and the rule of law. The more of us who are strong and capable, the better we can contain other powers who see a darker future.

With USMC F-35B also underway for a full deployment with the HMS Queen Elizabeth – and even USAF CV-22B paying a visit – this is a good week for combined maritime operations that makes us all stronger and better.

Yes, this is a good week…but…more faster.

Carriers: Workhorse & Warhorse with Megan Eckstein & Sam LaGrone - on Midrats

 

Fewer carriers are deploying more even as repeated warning lights have been going off that we are expending in peace what we will need in war when it comes to personnel and materiel in carrier aviation.

How did we get here, where are we, and where are we going?

Using her article, No Margin Left: Overworked Carrier Force Struggles to Maintain Deployments After Decades of Overuse, as a starting point and diving it to some of the additional insights she gained while writing it, Megan Eckstein from USNINews will be joining us along with Sam LaGrone this Sunday from 5-6pm Eastern.

Megan Eckstein is the deputy editor for USNI News. She previously covered Congress and the Pentagon for Defense Daily, and the surface navy and amphibious operations as an associate editor for Inside the Navy. She began her career covering the military at the Frederick (Md.) News-Post, where she wrote about personnel and family issues, military medical research, local reserve and National Guard units and more. Eckstein is a 2009 graduate of University of Maryland College Park.

Sam LaGrone is the editor of USNI News. He has covered legislation, acquisition and operations for the Sea Services since 2009 and spent time underway with the U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps and the Canadian Navy.

If you use iTunes, you can add Midrats to your podcast list simply by clicking the iTunes button at the main showpage - or you can just click here. 

 

Iran's Performative Art

In the words of the great philosophers, "But why?"

This just continues to be strange.

Iran has moved a mock-up U.S. aircraft carrier to the strategic Strait of Hormuz, satellite images show, suggesting it will use the look-alike vessel for target practice in war games in a Gulf shipping channel...“We cannot speak to what Iran hopes to gain by building this mock-up, or what tactical value they would hope to gain by using such a mock-up in a training or offensive exercise scenario,” said Commander Rebecca Rebarich, the spokeswoman for the U.S. Navy’s Bahrain-based Fifth Fleet.

While the strangeness of this does not change and one wants to just mock it and move on, you also need to examine the Red Most Dangerous COA.

Iran is not a rich nation. It has a lot of challenges. What are they doing that makes this worth the investment? It can't just be for the performative art of it all, can it? 

What is the worst reasonably expected use of such a mock up? I hope we have some smart, imaginative, and skeptical eyes on this and what they are using it for.

With Carriers: Go Smaller to get Bigger?

In what will hopefully jumpstart another chapter in The Carrier Wars, our friend Jerry Hendrix has an article in National Review, “The Aircraft Carrier We Need” where he doesn’t argue that we don’t need carriers, just that we don’t need – or want – the one we’re building.

I’m in alignment with some his points, only slightly in others, and have a few points of my own that I think need to be part of the conversation.

As always, read it all, but here are a few pull quotes to get you interested.

… the Ford’s most glaring problems: It has the wrong design and is built around the wrong type and size of air wing, and it is not optimized for implementing the current National Defense Strategy, which focuses on great-power competition with Communist China and, to a lesser extent, a Putin-led Russia.

We really do not have a coherent National Defense Strategy and being that a CVN has a life of a half century, what it is “designed for” now will not exist in 20-50 years while it is still a capital ship.

This has always been the worst argument against specific platforms and it represents a line of thinking that can have bad results because you try too hard to specifically tailor a ship to your snapshot view of what is “optimized” for the challenge at hand in any specific POM cycle. That is how you get LCS and DDG-1000.

Instead, what we need are broadly flexible platforms built to be scalable if needed, fitted with a variety of known and unknown systems as the future tells us are needed at that time the need reveals itself. Flexibility and a design based on the ability to modify later are what is needed. That way, when the actual future – not the future we imagine – reveals itself, we’ll be able to adjust to it.

The Ford’s eventual design was predicated upon an assumption that the ship would operate in similar semi-permissive, low-threat environments, such as the Adriatic Sea or Arabian Gulf, staying close to enemy shores to optimize the efficacy of the carrier’s short-range (500 nautical miles) light-attack air wing, which was then dominated by the FA-18 Hornet. 

…the air wing should be designed to implement the nation’s defense strategy.

This is the real weakness. We have discussed here over the years the utter professional malpractice from short-sighted thinking that begat the 2020 airwing. People excused away the long range capability brought by organic tanking, heavy fighters, and strike aircraft. Instead, we think in terms of incredibly efficient decks of strike-fighters and their support aircraft. Much of the vulnerability of the carrier – and remember carriers have always been vulnerable because everyone is trying to kill them because they are so effective – derive from the pyrrhic victory of the Light Attack mafia against the Fighter and Attack mafia in the 1990s.

The next pull quote is a regular area of friction between Jerry and me. While we agree that unmanned aircraft will be part of the future airwing, we are at opposite ends of the UAS Overton Window. I believe we are about 1 decade away from knowing what we can actually “do” with unmanned systems so we can line up the next generation and will have a better idea of their use in 20, but Jerry thinks we know enough to make grander assumptions now. I think he is just too optimistic on the program risk, the technology risk, and the ability to do what he wants in a non-permissive EW environment.

As part of this shift, the core of the carrier’s new air wing would be 30 stealthy, heavily armed unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs), organized into three squadrons. Individual UCAVs should be capable of carrying 4,000 pounds of ordnance internally to a combat radius of at least 1,500 nautical miles without refueling. They should also feature broadband, all-aspect stealth design with a much-reduced radar cross-section (RCS). The design should also integrate an infrared-signature-reduction capability and an advanced passive sensor suite. These 30 aircraft — each armed with two 2,000-pound-class direct-attack weapons (GBU-31 JDAM) or stand-off weapons (e.g., JASSM or LRASM), four 1,000-pound-class direct-attack weapons (GBU-33 JDAMs), or up to 16 GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs

More important than UCAV right now is the replacement for the F/A-18 series of aircraft. Not only does it need to be manned, it needs the option to have a 2-seat version for strike and electronic warfare. I know I jinx it by saying it needs to lean in the direction of a heavy strike-fighter, but it needs to lean in the direction of a heavy strike-fighter.

As for the size of Jerry’s carrier – it sounds familiar for a reason;

In addition, the carrier should have at least two long-stroke, heavy catapults in the bow and one in the waist (centered on the carrier’s angled deck) in order to maintain redundancy in battle, two arresting-gear wires, and three deck-edge heavy elevators to move aircraft to and from the hangar bay. The new carrier should have the storage capacity to accommodate 1,500 tons of aviation ordnance and 1.5 million gallons of aviation fuel. Lastly, to power all this, in terms of both speed through the water and electrical-power generation, the carrier will likely need two nuclear reactors (for combat redundancy) capable of generating 240,000 shaft horsepower. The United States no longer has the capacity to build large conventional maritime steam turbines, but if it ever does, this option should be considered. Such a carrier should cost no more than $5.5 billion, about a third of the cost of the current Ford-class carrier. This effort would take, at a minimum, ten years to design and build.

Before arguing that this proposed carrier is too small, its catapults and arresting gear are too few, and its aviation-ordnance and fuel capacities are too slight, critics should pause and consider that the carrier parameters described above, with the exception of the two nuclear reactors, lie directly between those of the Midway-class carriers built during World War II and the Forrestal-class carriers built during the 1950s. Both served in the Navy until the mid 1990s and operated heavy, long-range, penetrating-strike air wings.

This is a strong selling point to me for this reason alone; one of my greatest concerns about our present fleet design is that the cult of efficiency has led us to build a lot of very big platforms that cost a lot of money because the spreadsheet tells us that is the right thing to do. At war, what this does is make any loss unacceptable as it is one thing to lose 1 of 5 of your ships in an engagement, it is another thing to lose 1 of 3. One is a bad day at sea, the other means defeat; at tactical defeat that undermines your operational plans and puts your nation at strategic risk – all to make the peacetime spreadsheet optimized.

Can we trade 3 FORD’s for 5 HENDRIX’s? Would that be the right move … not on the spreadsheet, but for where it matters … at war?

An extended war? A war of attrition? The kind of war I’ll write about later this week?

Who will save a Navy for tomorrow from the zombies feeding it to vanity today?

We have learned nothing from our foolish habit of burning out Sailors and ships chasing fevered dreams pumped out by over-caffeinated and under-employed mid-level thinkers.

I'm screaming in to the void again over at USNIBlog.

Come by and bring you autotune machine with you.

Transformed Our Way Out of a Functional Sh1tter

It has been awhile since we covered the second most important thing to a happy Sailor next to good food - that is an easily available and fully functional head.

Want a nasty ship? Worse than the Big E during a Suez transit?

Have the heads crap out on you.

Better yet, have it do so because someone during the Age of Transformationalism had a great PPT slide that, after telling you how equality and modernity required you to get rid of urinals, told you modern technology was going to revolutionize the heads on your transformational warships.

Via Anthony Capaccio at Bloomberg, hug your HT today;

New toilets on the Navy’s two newest aircraft carriers clog so frequently that the ships’ sewage systems must be cleaned periodically with specialized acids costing about $400,000 a flush, according to a new congressional audit outlining $130 billion in underestimated long-term maintenance costs.

The Navy isn’t sure the toilet systems on the USS Gerald R. Ford and the USS George H. W. Bush can withstand the demand without failing frequently, according to the watchdog agency’s report on service sustainment costs released Tuesday.

No, there is no excuse for this. The USN has decades, well, actually over a century of experience having thousands of people use the head on a warship every day. I guess the Boomer designers and program managers just knew better than everyone who came before them.

Of course;

“The pipes are too narrow and when there are a bunch of sailors flushing the toilet at the same time, like in the morning, the suction doesn’t work,” said Oakley. “The Navy didn’t anticipate this problem.”

Amazing.

No, "the Navy" isn't the right answer.

Follow the people.

Follow the money.

Probably the same experts who sold the Navy on titanium fire mains.

Whither the Super Carrier

With apologies to Jo Moore, with COVID-19 spinning out of control, last week was a good week to bury bad news.

Did you catch it? The anti-CVN forces saw their moment, and it looks like they are making their move.

Though ordered, CVN-82 is as of yet, unnamed.

Could she be the last of her kind?

The Navy is launching a deep dive into the future of its aircraft carrier fleet, Breaking Defense has learned, even as the Secretary of Defense, dissatisfied with current Navy plans, conducts his own assessment. The two studies clearly show the deepening concern over how China’s growing might and the Pentagon’s eroding budgets could affect the iconic, expensive supercarriers.

The Future Carrier 2030 Task Force, which the service plans to announce next week, will take six months to study how carriers stack up against new generations of stealthy submarines and long-range precision weapons being fielded by China and Russia.

While always willing to give great and worthy people the benefit of the doubt, "Blue Ribbon Panels" have a spotty history of objectivity. I willing to be sold - but I'm not at the moment.

Add to that nugget, a little under two weeks' earlier, the confirmed SECDEF sent a frowny-face emoji to the acting SECNAV;

Defense Secretary Mark Esper has put a stop to the the expected release of the Navy’s long-term force structure plan, telling the service on Monday to hold off and take another look, several sources confirm.

The plan, announced last year and slated to be wrapped up by Jan. 15, has run into serious headwinds. The Navy insists it can grow the fleet to 355 ships as early as 2030 despite its shipbuilding budget being cut in the recently released 2021 budget, and as officials concede there’s little hope of significant growth in the near-term. Now Esper, who has been reviewing the plan for the past two weeks, is unwilling to sign off on it.

There you go. Unless there is significant intervention at the Congressional level - things look set up.

Even without the above, we knew this was coming.

Almost exactly 10-years and one month ago, I wrote the opening post announcing the upcoming Terrible 20s. This is what I wrote in February 2010;

Let's look at 2020 again. What else is happening in the 20s? Well, for one, we will have to find money to re-capitalized the SSBN fleet. I offer to you that the 20 JAN HASC SEF Subcommittee meeting has an outstanding money discussion about that challenge. Deputy SECNAV Work has also discussed this challenge in other venues, and I think he has a very firm grasp of the problem, as do most in positions to know.

You have to look at it in the broader context of the budget as well. The hangover in the 20s from this decade's drunken frenzy of spending will couple with another cohort of Baby Boomers retiring and putting stress on the budget in ways we still do not have a firm grasp on.

In 2020 - that ship built in 1990 will be at 30 years. That LCS built in 2009 will only have 9 years or so of service life (LCS is expected to only last 20-25 years) - so by the end of the 2020s, LCS will be dropping like flies.

When you consider that we will be limited this decade to LCS and DDG-51 for our non-amphib surface ship program (don't throw JHSV at me, that is just a truck - full stop - all else is spin and hope) - you have about a perfect story for the 20s of limited shipbuilding funds and a stunted fleet.

Stunted? If you continue to assume that CG(X) is dead, then you might get funding for the much needed DDG(X) follow-on for the DDG-51 class - might. That will be requested in light of the SSBN money sponge - and I don't see how with all the other needs in the 20's, we will be able to afford both a DDG(X) and a CG(X) - and there is a good chance that we will simply have to live with DDG-51 Flight III as our "new" platform through the beginning of the mid-21st Century.

I know that looking into the future is a fuzzy hobby. Heck, if you outlined in 2000 where we were in 2010 people would have said you were a nutty pessimist - so we can only see 2020 in very large, fuzzy pixels. The beginning of the mid-century (2030) is just a silly exercise in many ways - but one that needs to be done. There are known-knowns (DDG-1000 will be a rump, expensive class of ships, Ticos history, DDG-51 backbone, LCS decomm'n like flies), known-unknowns (will LCS even meet some of its promised ability and numbers, will DDG(X) be moving forward), and unknown-unknowns (Black Swan events), but still - 2020 is closer than we think, and there are economic facts that need to be looked at.

Huge challenge, one whose source is the lost decade we just came out of. You know, that "transformational" decade. The one that was to build the Fleet of the future. Well, it sure did, didn't it?

It holds up well, I think.

What I didn't see was the POLMIL stew our Navy would find itself in.

At this critical juncture, The Pentagon is led by the Esper/Milley West Point-West Point team while the Navy's Flag Officers try to recover from damage the previous generation of leaders inflicted on our institution over a decade spending their professional capital, like, well, drunken Sailors - mostly in WESTPAC - from Malaysian fat men to exhausted and untrained bridge watches driving Japan based destroyers. 

To top things off, those who should have spent every penny left getting ready for this decade spent what little professional capital they were able to scrape together from under the couch cushions on Ottomanesque bureaucratic protect-my-legacy games.

Almost two decades of sub-optimal performance at the highest levels has us where we are; a nice, solid-but-last-man-standing CNO and an Acting SECNAV fighting hard but wrestling two weight classes up in 4A. The previous SECNAV demonstrated what some of his problem was when he was last seen endorsing a Presidential primary candidate from the other party just a few weeks before he dropped out due to a complete lack of support among, well, almost anyone.

Of course.

Of course we are where we are.

The smart money is on a better than average chance the CVN will be killed by next POM (though perhaps not for good) and what little money is captured will be spent prosealing cracks from an overstressed and underfunded maintenance and readiness hole while trying to find some magic beans to build a useful fleet not reliant on a Cold War era destroyer as we stumble to 2030.

How will we project power from the sea in 2030? You can't do that from a submarine - a platform with limited followthrough and has its own growing vulnerability issues. You can't do that from land based aircraft. I win that wargame every time. There are not enough VLS cells in Christendom to do what a CVN can do ... with a proper airwing (which we don't have).

No, if we have to go to war in 2030, the question will be, "Where are the carriers?" ... and we will send thousands of Sailors in harm's way with an underfunded legacy system bereft of upgrades, carrying an airwing saddled with three decades of bad, short term decisions made by people trying to survive the next POM, not create a Navy ready to fight and win the next peer war.

I'm really not interested in discussing CVN vulnerability ... something known in detail since WWII. All capital ships are vulnerable ... that is why RN BB sortied so little during WWII, etc ... etc ... etc ... we've discussed that in volume here through the years. New folks can look it up, won't rehash it wholesale.

No, what are you going to replace them with? Vaporware? PPT thick programs? Unmanned systems whose performance and utility assumptions are based on AI that does not exist, robust reachback that is peace-time only, and ROE that won't survive a public university law school second-year law student?

I've seen that movie. It is stale and derivative. 

No, you can't. All you can do is, like The Thing in the dog kennel, flail around for anything that can justify taking food from Mom's plate so you can feed Dad so you can tell the rest of your family that you are taking care of the parents just fine.

With apologies to Jeremiah,

1:1 How doth TACAIR sit solitary, that was full of people!
She is become as a widow, that was great among the the services!
She that was a princess among Hollywood is become tributary to grunts!
1:2 She weepeth sore in the Unfunded Priorities List, and her tears are on her EMALS;
Among all her WBB contractors she hath none to comfort her:
All her fellow Service Chiefs have dealt treacherously with her; they are become her enemies.
1:3 NAVAIR is gone into captivity because of affliction, and because of great servitude;
She dwelleth among the Mine Warfare community, she findeth no rest:
All her budgetary enemies overtook her within the POM.
1:4 The ways of PEO Aircraft Carriers do mourn, because none come to the solemn assembly;
All her hangars are desolate, her Program Managers do sigh:
Her Flag Officers are afflicted, and she herself is in Executive TAP.
1:5 Her adversaries are become the head, her enemies prosper;
For SECDEF hath afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions:
Her JOs are gone into career transition before the selection boards.
1:6 And from the Office of the Acting SECNAV all her majesty is departed:
Her Admirals are become like harts that find no pasture,
And they are gone without strength before the CBO.

So sayeth the Book of Salamander.

TRUMAN to the Breakers Early?

If you were excited about the double-FORD CVN buy last month, well, you can stow that optimism.

Wait until you see the plans for TRUMAN.

Details over at my post at USNIBlog.

Japan Steps Out from History's Shadow

As I said almost a half-decade ago, say hello to the return of the Japanese flattop;

The ruling party endorsed Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's call to remove a 1 percent psychological cap on defense spending against gross domestic product that has been in place since the 1970s.

In line with the more ambitious spending policy, Abe's Liberal Democratic Party on May 25 also gave its blessing to refit the helicopter carrier Izumo into a full-fledged aircraft carrier.

All smart-thinking navalists should welcome this move by Japan. Though their own distinct culture, the Japanese are firmly in the Western camp and are a good and just people. WWII notwithstanding, they have never been a natural enemy of the United States.

As China rises, a strong Japan will with each year be an important part of keeping her in check - or at least looking over her shoulder. At a time when working with China requires certain "expectations" from smaller nations, a strong Japan will give other smaller Asian nations someone else to look towards as a partner that won't have the same strings attached.

The Japanese are an insular and proud people, and that is fine and good. They are our friends, and man for man are an exceptionally good military.

As we finish up our Midway remembrances, it is good to remind ourselves it is 2018 and Japan needs to be a full partner.

Now, spend some of that money on some F-35B and get to work on a larger follow-on class of CV.

Of Course They Were Designed as Aircraft Carriers

So, really ... no one here really thought the IZUMO Class was just an ASW carrier, did you?

Come on over to USNIBlog and see the least surprising bit of naval news so far this year.

Don't let, "That's a Ford for 'ya" - become a snarky catch-phrase

Are you up to speed on the latest issues with the USS FORD (CVN 78) and EMALS?

I've got the goods for 'ya over at USNIBlog.

Come visit and give it a read.

The Navy Gets a Summer Bonus

Great summary from Sam LaGrone on the basket of goodies that came out of the SASC earlier this week.

Some nice things, a funny thing or two, and an interesting item.

First, the nice things;

The Senate Armed Services Committee version of the Fiscal Year 2018 National Defense Authorization Act ... that spends more than $20 billion above the Trump administration’s request
...
Specifically for the Navy, the SASC is adding $5 billion to the shipbuilding and conversion fund, bringing it to $25 billon. ... funds for five more ships than the Pentagon’s budget submission. Included is a third Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer ... advance procurement of Virginia-class attack submarines ... an additional amphibious warship ... a new Expeditionary Sea Base ... eight Ship to Shore Connectors, five more than the administration called for.

I guess we'll have to wait for next year for my new construction LCC & T-AH, but this is nice.

He also has some aviation numbers. Of note, they've doubled the Super Hornet buy. Smart.

Here is a funny bit;

Absent from the executive summary provided to the public on Wednesday is any mention of the Littoral Combat Ship ship construction.

Damning with faint praise is one thing, getting ignored is another. The market has spoken, but LCS will hang about like an albatross around our neck anyway.

Now for the interesting;

Among one of the largest departures for the SASC, their bill sets aside $30 million for the Navy for a preliminary design effort to create a light carrier for the service.

Yes ... more carrier battles.

For those following me on twitter, we bounced an idea or two around. My take, if you mated an USS AMERICA (LHA 6) with a HMS QUEEN ELIZABETH (R08), you'd get something about the size of the USS MIDWAY (CV 41).

I look forward to the results of the study.

Until then, if you want to grow your understanding of the small-medium-large / conventional-nuke tradeoffs, I highly recommend this video with CAPT Tal Manvel, USN (Ret).



Hat tip Claude

Keeping an Eye on the Long Game: Part LXX

So, how do you like the sound of a 500 ship navy by 2030?

US Navy? No you silly goose ... the Chinese Navy. 

You'll find all the details over at USNIBlog.

Read that, and then take a moment to play around with a nice side-by-side comparison of the evolutionary developments seen in the 2nd Chinese CV. Good stuff here.

A final note; I remember the 90s, and I remember when the Chinese shell company towed away that rusting hulk that was the Varyag. LT Salamander and his gaggle mumbled at the time it was just plain stupid that we didn't buy it first to keep it out of Chinese hands ... but remember, that was the Clinton Administration. They were selling MIRV technology to the Chinese for goodness sake.

What did we know, right?

Idiots.

Liaoning Aircraft Carrier
by CSIS
on Sketchfab

Fleet Architecture and Strategic Efficiency, on Midrats

How do you balance cost, risk, peacetime habits and wartime requirements in designing and using the world's largest Navy?

How do we maximize the most the utility of our platforms now, and create a future fleet best suited for what is coming up?

Our guest for the full hour this Sunday from 5-6pm Eastern to discuss will be Barney Rubel, CAPT, USN (Ret.).

Robert C. “Barney” Rubel is a retired naval officer. From 2006 to 2014, he was Dean of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies at the US Naval War College. Prior to assuming this position, he was Chairman of the Wargaming Department. A thirty-year Navy veteran, he received his commission through the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps at the University of Illinois. He subsequently became a light attack naval aviator, flying the A-7 Corsair II and later the F/A-18 Hornet. He commanded Strike Fighter Squadron 131 and also served as the Inspector General at U.S. Southern Command.

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