At the Thin Pinstriped Line blog, Sir Humphrey considers the arguments put forward by a US Navy officer on the viability of the USN carrier fleet:
Humphrey was lucky enough to be tipped off about the existence of an extremely thought provoking article by a US Navy officer (Captain Hendrix) on the future viability of the US carrier fleet. This was an alternative thinkpiece, produced in an unofficial capacity, but one that does raise some extremely searching questions about the viability of the long term future of the US carrier fleet.
The author conducted a detailed analysis of the cost of the CVN fleet, and also of the airwing attached to it, and broadly concluded that in terms of delivering effect, there were other means that could deliver similar effect for less cost (e.g. stand off missiles, more escort vessels etc). He was also scathing about the overall cost effectiveness of a current airwing, suggesting that large amounts of an aircraft’s use was linked to carrier qualification and not necessarily the delivery of effect. At the same time, the increased use of long range anti-ship missiles will make it more difficult to operate close in to an enemy coastline without being at increased risk. He believes that because of this, in future the F35 will simply not have the range to be able to penetrate enemy air defences, and that instead efforts should focus on development of a navalised UCAV to take over instead of the F35, with any future force structure being built around UCAVs and SSGNs using land attack missiles.
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What is perhaps interesting about the paper is that in many ways it revisits a lot of the long term arguments about the validity of carriers, and revisits them to show that the perceived weaknesses remain the same as they always have. One only has to think of the argument in the UK in the 1960s, when the decision was taken to move away from fixed wing carriers that they were inherently vulnerable to attack and could be sunk with ease. Humphrey is always somewhat sceptical of claims about ‘wonder weapons’ that can take out a carrier battle group from nowhere with ease. While there are indeed many very potent long range weapons out there, the problem remains one of getting accurate enough real time intelligence to be able to ensure accurate targeting of the carrier in the event of war.
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The issue for UCAVs at present is that they are probably not at a sufficient level of maturity to conduct the wide range of operations that are being envisaged for JSF. It is worth considering that while there is plenty of use of so-called ‘drones’ like the Predator, these are fundamentally fairly simple aircraft designed to not be used in hugely complex missions. To meet the requirements of a new UCAV, you would essentially need to design an entirely new platform from scratch, adding in technologies never used before and then integrate it with all the likely weapons systems expected to be used. You’d then need to ensure the platforms were capable of flying the missions expected of them, which are likely to be very different to the so-called ‘racetrack’ circuits flown by drones in Iraq or Afghanistan.
