Is This The End of The Carrier

[Entropy]

Please do because the article make a lot of sense to me.

Sure,

Beginning at the end, submarines? Assuming a submarine could be engineered to not only carry a naval air wing, but launch and recover aircraft in combat conditions, it would be just as vulnerable because it would have to operate on the surface - unless, of course, we plan on trying to make aircraft that can be launched and recovered underwater.

The solution is outlandish, but the threat isn't well argued either. The author spends many paragraphs in the "ships: expensive and manned" and "missiles: cheap and unmanned" sections telling us the obvious but not explaining how any of it constitutes a threat. Just because something is expensive - a "capital" asset and just because there is potentially a lot of relatively cheap ordnance that might be thrown at it does not mean that expensive capital asset is a dinosaur on the battlefield. After all, AAA and ground fire are historically the greatest threat to aircraft, but all that cheap ammo doesn't render aircraft useless.

The basic problem with the essay is that it assumes the weapon system will operate perfectly and the target is unable to do anything about it. Think of the tank example again. There are a million ways to kill a tank today yet tanks still have a lot of battlefield utility. Why is that? The same answers apply to ships.

Getting back to the essay, things get a little bit better with "satellites change everything" but the author makes a fundamental mistake when he says: "We can sit at our desks, type in an address, and have Google Earth show us the current view. It will be a simple matter to find the exact grid coordinates of any ship anywhere in the world, punch the data into a missile silo, and launch a barrage of missiles to the precise location of the ship or fleet." Well, no. If any of that were true, we'd have had that Somalia piracy problem wrapped up long ago. You can do that for immobile targets, but that's not possible with moving targets even assuming Google Earth can show us real-time simultaneous satellite imagery of the globe, which isn't currently possible.

Then there is what is sometimes called the "sensor-to-shooter" problem. There is always a time-lag between acquiring adequate targeting data and weapon launch, not to mention weapon time-of-flight. These time lags can be significant and reducing them is a goal the DoD has thrown a lot of money at. Each second that passes reduces the quality of that data for moving targets. If too much time passes then the weapon will miss. While we work to reduce that time for us in order to more effectively employ our weapons, we also work to increase it for our enemies through a variety of means.

The section on countermeasures is completely wrong. First of all, our response is not limited to what the author lists - a ship's last line of defense. Again the assumption is that we can do nothing but sit there and shoot at incoming missiles until those defenses run out of ammunition. In reality, we have many more opportunities to prevent those last-ditch defenses from even being necessary. What actions we could take depend on the particular threat, but we'd be doing several things simultaneously to mitigate the threat. Here are a handful possibilities listed in no particular order:

- attack the launch platforms
- attack the command-and-control system
- attack whatever sensor network collects and processes targeting information.
- Be tactically proficient (ie., use range, weather, deception, EMCON, etc. to our advantage)

Obviously every threat is different, but the point is that we wouldn't simply sit there and put ourselves into a simplistic situation where whoever has the most missiles wins.

Now, a lot of this is coming about because the Chinese are turning some of their older road-mobile medium-range ballistic missiles into conventional anti-ship ballistic missiles. These are called the DF-21D if you want to do some research. Here's a primer on some of the challenges of employing ballistic missiles against a ship. Suffice it to say the technical challenges of simply guiding the warhead after the missile is launched are significant even without the problem of collecting timely, precise and accurate targeting information. Let's assume the Chinese make the system work. That does not make a surface Navy obsolete because, again, like any weapon system, we can adapt our tactics and attack the system's vulnerabilities through a variety of measures.

Anyway, I hope that's clear. I have a tendency to ramble. The long and short of it is that any contest between a ship, tank or whatever and a threat is NOT determined by a simplistic rock-paper-scissors calculus.

[Fuchs]

I wouldn't count on attacks against C4 or launchers. That's going to be hopeless.

[Entropy]

I wouldn't count on attacks against C4 or launchers. That's going to be hopeless.

Launchers would definitely be difficult since the DF-21 is a road-mobile missile.

Well put. Thanks.

No problem!

[slapout9]

IMO aircraft carriers are not just vulnerable but they are super vulnerable, the bigger they are the more vulnerable. Our present and future enemies understand EBO in a way we seem to struggle with. They understand targeting a system only requires you to destroy the systems ability to accomplish it's purpose. If you can do that it doesn't matter if you destroy the whole system. If you can damage an aircraft carrier in such a way that it cannot launch or recover aircraft you essentially have a billion dollar floating hotel for sailors. What good is an aircraft carrier if it has two great big holes in the flight deck? Guided missiles are ideal for that and as has been pointed out they are cheap.

Counter missile strategies are a lot like good economic strategies.... DON"T do big concentrated systems, you need many smaller and dispersed systems to insure your survival. The answer,about like everything else, in the modern world was figured out in the late 50's and early 60's, but we have forgotten that. The Interstate highway system was part of the countermeasure to this guided missile strategy and most folks don't even know that, in fact it was actually called the Strategic Interstate Highway system when it first conceived. It was not just meant to allow people to drive from one coast to the other but to also disperse ALL our major industries all across america.....and also to connect the atomic power plants to provide a total electric economy that could in theory survive an atomic attack.....but I digress

[Entropy]

How vulnerable are carriers compared to the alternative - fixed land-based airfields? Carriers can stay outside of the range of most missiles and even sensor coverage and still conduct offensive operations. Mobility and the open sea count for a lot IMO. The greatest threat to carriers, therefore, are submarines.

[pvebber]

The arguments that the targeting problem is "too hard" to be effectively solved ring hollow when viewed through the lens of the full anti-acess area denial suite that a country can buy these days (see
http://www.csbaonline.org/4Publicati...Sea_Battle.pdf and
http://www.csbaonline.org/4Publicati...Battle__A_.pdf for the best open source discussion out there).

One has to keep in mind that it is hardley flawless, however!

The crux of the problem is in assesing the "magazine war" - how many cruise and ballistic missiles can a near peer accumulate compared to the relatively static number of VLS cells in a CSG. The "ship's a fool who fights a fort" adage gets played out by sheer numbers, even if large numbers of missiles are lobbed no where near the CSG. The Shooter can be wrong many times. The target dies if its wrong once.

Tiered ISR systems from space on down, coupled with misiles with hundreds (or thousands) of miles of range dramatically limits the complexity and time required to execute the "sensor to shooter" loop - one which typically is dominated by politcal decision-making, not technology. The ability to pick a random time and say "I want to sink the CSG now!" is not realistic, but if one says "inform me of the next opportunity to attack, and be ready to executue it" the wait will likely be hours to days, not days to weeks.

Historically, (oversimplifying at bit but I think the following cycles are fairly illustrative) we have seen several periods of ascendency of the offense. followed by defense at sea. Defense was acesndent in the WWI era leading to inconclusive clashes, the poster child being Jutland. WWII saw the airplane put the BB at severe risk, leading to the abandonment of armored defenses and a rise in the efficc of the SAM at sea. The early "T" SAM era (Tartar, Terrier and Talos) made aircraft attacks highly risky,leading to the rise of high speed diving cruise missiles, from Backfire regiments and the likes of Oscar SSGN and Slave CGs. The Aegis system was developed to counter this threat and its success is eveident by a shift from high-speed diving cruise missiles to sea skimming varieties to reduce the number of opportunites to attack. Cooperative Engagement Capability addressed this issue and now the rise of high-speed sea skimmers and anti-ship ballisitc missiles is turning the tables yet again.

The current CSG (Carrier Strike Group) is, in the parlance of Capt Wayne Highes (Fleet Tactics author) "tactically unstable" meaning that too much combat power is tied up in too few platforms to fight effectively. When you couple that with entering a period of "offensive ascendency" you have a very unstable and risky "Fleet design". I recommed reading Bradley Fiskes The Navy as a Fighting Machine. to get some insight. The problem is that the "machine" is coming up against the stops of response time and command and control, with the sheer volume of attacking missiles and paltry few seconds to deal with them ushering in a new era of offensive superiority.

Our soultion to the tactical instability of the CSG is to invest in High Energy weapons with the hopes that they offer a solution to the magazine and speed of engagement issues that are rapidly backing defenses in o a "one shot-one kill" requirement. historically speaking, the tables WILL get turned again, the question is when, by what means?

When the Machine gun and high volume artillery broke the paradigm of concentrated waves of men in the attack on land, the vulnerability to overwhelming firepoer was to disperse, and fight a scouting/anti-scounting battle before general offensives. For the navy, the current entery into a period of firepower being able to overwhelm defenses will not lead to the death of the surface ship, just as machine guns and artillery did not obsolete infantry. It did cause it disperse - and that is one way the navy can address the problem. It is the tactically undstable CSG that is in danger of being rendered obsolete. Even high energy lasers still have an engagement time that limits the number of engagements they can undertake. It only takes N+1 to ruin a ships day.

Surface ships, like infantry may be requred to enter a period of becoming smaller, more numerous, and more tactically agile - exploiting littorals and sea lanes. IT may also mean that submarines will need to dramatically increase their "tooth to tail" ratio. A 2B$ Virginia class SSN that only carries 12 tomahawks and is otherwise totally oriented to ASW may require rethinking along the lines of the 150+ weapon capacity of the Ohio SSGN.

Currently the Navy is crusing along happily, certain of its plan to move to high energy laser defensive weapons to at least return defense to parity. The prpoblem is that this ignores the tactical instability problem that has crept in as frigates have left CSGs and LCS's are eyed for lots of non-CSG type tasking.

The scenario of the lost naval war in the excellent link above will not occur because of lack of technology, but by cultural attachment to a "Fighting Machine" that is already overly long in the tooth.

[Cliff]

Our soultion to the tactical instability of the CSG is to invest in High Energy weapons with the hopes that they offer a solution to the magazine and speed of engagement issues that are rapidly backing defenses in o a "one shot-one kill" requirement. historically speaking, the tables WILL get turned again, the question is when, by what means?

Currently the Navy is crusing along happily, certain of its plan to move to high energy laser defensive weapons to at least return defense to parity. The prpoblem is that this ignores the tactical instability problem that has crept in as frigates have left CSGs and LCS's are eyed for lots of non-CSG type tasking.

pvebber-

I agree, lasers are probably the best answer to this problem. While there are issues with their ability to operate continuously, they will still far exceed the current VLS' magazine capacity. I think the real issue will be how many lasers can you get in the CSG.

Another option is to make the ships "stealthier", though I doubt you can really get there with a CVN size ship.

Another option for dispersed ops as you say is to take a page from the UK in the Falklands War, and put a VSTOL F-35 on small deck ships that can get closer to the action before launching without getting hit. You possibly could make these ships stealthy, or just cheap enough to have a lot. You could retain the CVN as the landing platform, just further to the rear.

I imagine that even with a lot of missiles any adversary will run out of them after a day or two- then it's back to standard ops.

V/R,

Cliff

[Kiwigrunt]

The current CSG (Carrier Strike Group) is, in the parlance of Capt Wayne Highes (Fleet Tactics author) "tactically unstable" meaning that too much combat power is tied up in too few platforms to fight effectively. When you couple that with entering a period of "offensive ascendency" you have a very unstable and risky "Fleet design". I recommed reading Bradley Fiskes The Navy as a Fighting Machine. to get some insight. The problem is that the "machine" is coming up against the stops of response time and command and control, with the sheer volume of attacking missiles and paltry few seconds to deal with them ushering in a new era of offensive superiority.

That is why I question the wisdom of the UK with their two new 65000t carriers. I would have thought that 3 or 4 smaller ones would make more sense. Also with regards to round the clock availability. This last point is seen as a weakness here in NZ where we only have 2 frigates. One has been in Auckland for a while now for a bit of a facial. That leaves just one in the game.

Some interesting points from this article: http://www.naval-technology.com/projects/cvf/

A number of protective measures such as side armour and armoured bulkheads proposed by industrial bid teams have been deleted from the design in order to comply with cost limitations.

The carrier might be built for but not with the installation of a close in weapons system. Another systems which could be fitted if budget were made available would be two 16-cell vertical launchers for the Aster missiles.

Also, the complement of aircraft seems a bit disappointing at 40, for a ship that is two thirds the size of a US carrier. I assume the reduction in aircraft relative to the reduction in displacement is not a linear equation. And that may well be the answer to my above mentioned concern.

[Entropy]

The arguments that the targeting problem is "too hard" to be effectively solved ring hollow when viewed through the lens of the full anti-acess area denial suite that a country can buy these days

My whole point in this is that comparing what a country could potentially buy and how that stuff potentially compares going toe-to-toe with our stuff is completely insufficient. For one, it completely removes the human factor. Secondly, if we find ourselves fighting a "magazine war" against anyone except maybe the Chinese in 20 years, then we've done something horribly wrong or were caught with our pants down. That's the biggest problem I see with analysis like Krepinevich's.

This isn't to suggest the Navy doesn't need to change. The Navy's over-reliance on missiles is a problem that should be addressed. I also think the SSGN's are a good start and the CSG probably needs to be reconfigured. More than that, though, the Navy needs to get out of its current "dominance" mindset. It needs to relearn some ASW, EMCON, deception and other skills that I believe atrophied during this brief period of complete naval dominance which I believe has made us lazy.

We also have to be cognizant of our limitations. The notion that we have the money to recreate and sustain a force to allow us to maintain that dominance over the Chinese in their littoral is a fantasy IMO.

[gute]

Sure,

Beginning at the end, submarines? Assuming a submarine could be engineered to not only carry a naval air wing, but launch and recover aircraft in combat conditions, it would be just as vulnerable because it would have to operate on the surface - unless, of course, we plan on trying to make aircraft that can be launched and recovered underwater.

The solution is outlandish, but the threat isn't well argued either. The author spends many paragraphs in the "ships: expensive and manned" and "missiles: cheap and unmanned" sections telling us the obvious but not explaining how any of it constitutes a threat. Just because something is expensive - a "capital" asset and just because there is potentially a lot of relatively cheap ordnance that might be thrown at it does not mean that expensive capital asset is a dinosaur on the battlefield. After all, AAA and ground fire are historically the greatest threat to aircraft, but all that cheap ammo doesn't render aircraft useless.

The basic problem with the essay is that it assumes the weapon system will operate perfectly and the target is unable to do anything about it. Think of the tank example again. There are a million ways to kill a tank today yet tanks still have a lot of battlefield utility. Why is that? The same answers apply to ships.

Getting back to the essay, things get a little bit better with "satellites change everything" but the author makes a fundamental mistake when he says: "We can sit at our desks, type in an address, and have Google Earth show us the current view. It will be a simple matter to find the exact grid coordinates of any ship anywhere in the world, punch the data into a missile silo, and launch a barrage of missiles to the precise location of the ship or fleet." Well, no. If any of that were true, we'd have had that Somalia piracy problem wrapped up long ago. You can do that for immobile targets, but that's not possible with moving targets even assuming Google Earth can show us real-time simultaneous satellite imagery of the globe, which isn't currently possible.

Then there is what is sometimes called the "sensor-to-shooter" problem. There is always a time-lag between acquiring adequate targeting data and weapon launch, not to mention weapon time-of-flight. These time lags can be significant and reducing them is a goal the DoD has thrown a lot of money at. Each second that passes reduces the quality of that data for moving targets. If too much time passes then the weapon will miss. While we work to reduce that time for us in order to more effectively employ our weapons, we also work to increase it for our enemies through a variety of means.

The section on countermeasures is completely wrong. First of all, our response is not limited to what the author lists - a ship's last line of defense. Again the assumption is that we can do nothing but sit there and shoot at incoming missiles until those defenses run out of ammunition. In reality, we have many more opportunities to prevent those last-ditch defenses from even being necessary. What actions we could take depend on the particular threat, but we'd be doing several things simultaneously to mitigate the threat. Here are a handful possibilities listed in no particular order:

- attack the launch platforms
- attack the command-and-control system
- attack whatever sensor network collects and processes targeting information.
- Be tactically proficient (ie., use range, weather, deception, EMCON, etc. to our advantage)

Obviously every threat is different, but the point is that we wouldn't simply sit there and put ourselves into a simplistic situation where whoever has the most missiles wins.

Now, a lot of this is coming about because the Chinese are turning some of their older road-mobile medium-range ballistic missiles into conventional anti-ship ballistic missiles. These are called the DF-21D if you want to do some research. Here's a primer on some of the challenges of employing ballistic missiles against a ship. Suffice it to say the technical challenges of simply guiding the warhead after the missile is launched are significant even without the problem of collecting timely, precise and accurate targeting information. Let's assume the Chinese make the system work. That does not make a surface Navy obsolete because, again, like any weapon system, we can adapt our tactics and attack the system's vulnerabilities through a variety of measures.

Anyway, I hope that's clear. I have a tendency to ramble. The long and short of it is that any contest between a ship, tank or whatever and a threat is NOT determined by a simplistic rock-paper-scissors calculus.

Well put. Thanks.