Is This The End of The Carrier

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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

[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.