Is This The End of The Carrier

[gute]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100805/...carrier_killer

Bring the battleships back!

The most important thing I got out of the article was not the point that the Chinese might be able to sink our carriers from 900 miles away, but the missile is cheap and evens the playing field.

[gute]

Here is a link to the article written by James Kraska which is mentioned at the end of the news story.

http://www.fpri.org/orbis/5401/kraska.navalwar2015.pdf

[Ken White]

assuming a Carrier can be accurately located -- it or they can sink a battleship.

So perhaps we might better say "Bring up more Submarines..."

Howsomeever, recalling that every action seeks an equal and opposite reaction, I suspect that the demise of the Carrier, like that of the Tank, is not all that nigh.

[Steve Blair]

Concur, Ken. I've seen the demise of the carrier forecast so many times it's not even funny. Even John Keegan "predicted" that submarines would rule the seas. Hasn't happened yet, of course.

First it was the AS-6 that was going to sweep the carriers from the seas, then it was the Tu22M, then it was... You get the idea. And it always ignores the issue of:
1) Finding the carrier
2) Getting your stuff in position to shoot at the carrier
3) Getting your stuff through the screening aircraft around the carrier
4) Getting your stuff through the air defense screening ships around the carrier
5) Hitting the carrier with your stuff.

[Redactor]

in latest JFQ:

http://www.ndu.edu/press/end-of-surface-warships.html

[jmm99]

Today, SWJ Blog is featuring The Future of the U.S. Armed Forces. Two days ago it had Pentagon Starts Study of Post-Afghan Marine Corps; and yesterday an update UPDATED: Marine Corps says, ‘Damn the G-RAMM, full speed ahead!’

In the last piece, I read:

Work made it clear that he and the Navy Department are planning to return the Marine Corps to its naval roots. Most important, Work defended the amphibious assault mission and asserted that the Navy Department will ensure that the Marine Corps will be prepared to execute a two-brigade amphibious assault even as adversaries acquire more sophisticated precision weapons.

While 2 augmented Marine regiments are not trifles, the 2 MEB construct brought me up a bit short - memories of the PTO with 2 Marine corps (6 divisions) possible. So, why only two MEBs ?

The answer was in one of today's articles, Caught on a Lee Shore:

Currently, the U.S. Navy has 31 amphibious ships, with plans to expand the total to 33 by 2016.[7] The Corps would prefer a number in the mid- to upper 40s, but the Navy’s shipbuilding budget, at least as it is currently structured, simply cannot support more. These 31 ships will just barely support the embarkation of a reduced-assault echelon of two Marine Expeditionary Brigades (MEBs). A MEB is composed of three reinforced infantry battalions, a mixed group of attack aircraft, helicopters and the new MV-22 Osprey tiltrotor, and enough logistics support for thirty days of operations. In a standard MEB configuration, two battalions would be equipped with EFVs while the third would be transported by air, meaning it is essentially foot-mobile once ashore. The light-armored vehicles, tanks, trucks and artillery reinforcing the MEB’s infantry battalions would be carried to shore by landing craft. Consequently, in a situation serious enough to warrant deploying every amphibious ship in the Navy, the Corps would be able to project ashore just six battalions of ground combat power, two of which have limited mobility.

[7] See Eric Labs, An Analysis of the Navy’s Fiscal Year 2011 Shipbuilding Plan, Congressional Budget Office (May 2010).

Lack of funding, as the reason, is scarcely surprising in today's economic environment - and that situation is not likely to change as domestic programs challenge military and international spending.

Given a posited lack of funding, we (US) face some difficult questions as to what military programs should be funded and why. Part of a logical solution (and verily I say unto you, I don't have much hope for logic being applied ) is to focus on what primary geopolitical focus the US will have in the upcoming decades.

For example, will it keep in place forces at bases spread all over the World ? Will it see force projection in Eurasian land wars as a primary mission ? Or, will it see a more limited role, such as force projection to the Atlantic and Pacific littorals, as its primary focus ?

May we live in interesting times - and cursed are we - we do.

Mike

PS: The Army guy was strumming along pretty well until he got down to solutions. Just think of it: our own I-400s (nuclear, of course) and Aichi M6As - the latter being the future of Naval and Marine Aviation.

[slapout9]

Light fast and cheap PT Boats with guided missiles, fill the sky over the objective with armed drones and don't concentrate your forces until the area has been cleared of the G-RAMM's.

[Fuchs]

Concur, Ken. I've seen the demise of the carrier forecast so many times it's not even funny. Even John Keegan "predicted" that submarines would rule the seas. Hasn't happened yet, of course.

First it was the AS-6 that was going to sweep the carriers from the seas, then it was the Tu22M, then it was... You get the idea.

Well, we don't know for sure. There was no real test.
Even the Japanese were not a 100% test, for Germany had much better aviation fuel, combat aircraft and (guided) ship attack munitions.

[Entropy]

in latest JFQ:

http://www.ndu.edu/press/end-of-surface-warships.html

Wow. There is so much wrong with that article I don't know where to begin.

[Rex Brynen]

Oh go on, begin. Start with the size, cost, operating costs, and detectability of massive cargo-carrying subs and move on from there.

By the way, Entropy.. did you ever get my PM? Email me, and I'll email you the report from my summer work.

[Fuchs]

A few thoughts:

To hide in the big ocean has become much more difficult since the end of the Cold War because long-range SAR technology has been developed. An aircraft can generate a 3D image of a ship from more than 150 miles away. SAR technology has been introduced for maritime patrol aircraft decades ago and its extremely long range (and this includes the identification of ships from satellites) has changed the identification topic.


A carrier (strike group) will have the best chance of hiding on the ocean (or keeping its exact vectors unknown) early on in a conflict when the sea is still full of civilian ships.

The second joker would be staying far away from the coast. This could cause problems, though. The F-35 and F/A-18 series aren't exactly long-legged aircraft. A huge share of naval aviation could be busy as buddy tankers. Add in SEAD and CAP efforts and the problems of long-range SAR at sea. I understand that this long-range approach causes a huge collection of problems that ultimately diminish the naval aviation's strike capability to a small fraction of its nominal strength.
In other words; carrier strike groups could almost be neutralised by forcing them to spend so much effort and time on their survivabilty that they'd lack the punch to decisively influence events.
A medium range ballistic anti-ship missile is certainly a promising approach for achieving exactly this effect.

[carl]

Well, we don't know for sure. There was no real test.
Even the Japanese were not a 100% test, for Germany had much better aviation fuel, combat aircraft and (guided) ship attack munitions.

Maybe they were the best test. Japanese aviators at the beginning of the war were extremely lethal. Ronald Spector made the point that if the British were confronted with Japanese rather than German dive bombers off Crete in 1941, none of them would have survived.

At the end of the war the Japanese threw thousands of kamikazes at the American fleet, and the observation has often been made that a kamikaze was essentially a guided missile.

[gute]

Wow. There is so much wrong with that article I don't know where to begin.

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

[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.

[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.

[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.