"We must be ready to dare all for our country. For history does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid. We must acquire proficiency in defense and display stamina in purpose." - President Eisenhower, First Inaugural Address
My good friend CDR Salamander weighs in on the aircraft carrier debate on his home blog With Carriers: Go Smaller to get Bigger? which visits the ongoing discussions of Jerry Hendrix and Bryan McGrath about the future of the Navy force, especially aircraft carriers
Both of these gentlemen are stout in their views and their views are well worth discussing. You may find Jerry Hendrix's latest salvo in National Review The Aircraft Carrier We Need and Bryan McGrath's counter-fire on Twitter here. Big deck, small deck, proper air wing configuration, number of hulls, etc. CDR S tends to side with numbers, his view is that too big, too expensive means too much to risk and too easy to lose too much capacity with one lucky torpedo, missile, or accident.
It's a good debate and it's fun to ponder such things. However, I think it's the wrong debate.
I agree with Sal that we have perfected a myopic view of fleet equipment which holds that economies of scale dominate. "Bigger is better because on a per ship basis, it's cheaper to have one great big asset instead of smaller, 'less efficient' sized ships." You see this when you go to the grocery store - the large economy size bottle provides lower cost per ounce and may be the better buy.
The debate assumes that the aircraft carrier remains the premier weapon platform of our Navy. For almost 80 years that has been the aviator's mantra. They justify this view by noting that for almost 80 years the first question in a crisis has been, "Where are our carriers?"
What if that assumption is incorrect? What if, as submariners and others have been saying, the carrier is no longer the "king of the sea?"
What if our potential adversaries have taken a look at our reliance on carriers and designed their own counter forces to stop us from using our carriers and we might wish to?
Oh, wait - they have done just that. Part of the carrier debate is that our current carrier aircraft lack the range to penetrate the "anti-access/area denial (A2AD)" areas covered by "ship killer" ballistic missiles and other land-based weapons that are specially designed to keep our carriers at bay and actively kill them. Naval literature, both in fiction and in professional journals is full of discussion of this
I have argued before for making the effort to "spread lethality" by using many smaller ships all armed to the teeth, and for the creative use of things like missile barges Let's Have "Missile Barges" (and More) Now.
We must stop tying ourselves to large, easily targetable units and move to a force that is dispersed, hard to detect, including semi-submersible missile barges or fully submersible missile toting large autonomous vessels, or something else that mad scientists can create . . .
I support some form of the carrier Navy, but I simply don't think it's wise to suggest that creating a number of smaller carriers while hoping to increase the range of their main weapon system - the aircraft they carry - does much more than kick the problem down the road. If ship killer missiles can range to 2000 miles, why not to 3000? 4000? 5000? What kind of range will future carrier aircraft need to avoid the threat?
The effort to suggest that this "fix" or that other "fix" for carriers and their air wings will restore things to the point they were 20 years ago seems as wrong headed as the South Sea Island "cargo cults" that grew up after WWII. The thinking seems to be that if exactly the right words are spoken and the rituals observed, the magic will happen and the carrier will be "king" again.
It's time to be more innovative than that. If we are going to redesign the fleet to meet the modern threats, we need to be bold.
Perhaps we should call it a self-propelled arsenal barge. SNAFU! has this image of a towed missile barge, the source of which is hard to track, but the caption on the picture indicates this is Russian design using a Sovremennyy-class destroyer as a towing ship* There is this U.S. Navy image of what appears to be a JHSV pulling what appears to be a high speed missile barge: :
Andrew F. Krepinevich, director of the U.S. Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), alluded to this trend 10 years ago. “Just as bombers are becoming relatively less important than the ordnance they carry,” he said, “so too might surface warships, which could evolve to become “barges” (with some perhaps operating below the surface) for advanced conventional munitions that can strike pre-designated targets at extended ranges.” This concept makes the case that barges would be ideal as strike platforms of the future. The reference to the barges “operating below the surface” is the first precursor toward the idea of larger systems operating underwater. *** One of Krepinevich’s associates at CSBA put it this way: “This type of basic anti-navy architecture could be made more effective by incorporating increasingly sophisticated mines, active and passive sea-based sensor networks and quiet-attack submarines. Such architectures would have far lower barriers to entry (cost and learning) than carrier battle group operations, potentially enabling those competitors to leapfrog the carrier era and become major maritime competitors, at least in littoral waters. Absent a revolutionary breakthrough in ASW[anti-submarine warfare], naval power-projection operations could be driven sub surface.” *** This reference brings the point home in stark fashion: Technologies meant to find and destroy objects will become inexpensive and plentiful. The world’s strongest navy should not build anything but ships that employ the best covering tactics available. The CSBA suggested that the capital ship of the fleet in 2020 might be an arsenal ship — a missile-firing submersible armed with cruise and conventional ballistic missiles — and that such ships might be armed with a few hundred to a thousand missiles. A distributed power projection navy might include several classes of arsenal ships and other submersible power projection forces in the fleet.
Recently, the DoD's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced the concept of a "Sea Train":
The Sea Train vessels independently depart a port under their own power to reach a sortie point notionally 15 [nautical miles, or nmi] from the pier. The four independent vessels then begin the Sea Train mission by assembling in Sea Train configuration and completing a notional 6,500 nmi transit through varied sea state conditions that might require re-routing to optimize travel times or vessel seakeeping. The Sea Train then arrives at a disaggregation point, where the four vessels begin independent yet collaborative operations consisting of transits, loiters, and sprints in varied sea state conditions. The vessels then arrive at a sortie point to begin the aggregation process and conduct a Sea Train sprint from the operational area. The Sea Train then returns to normal transit speed for the remainder of the transit in varied sea state conditions, disaggregates outside of port and the vessels self-navigate to a pier.
There has been research in this area as set out here (pdf) in a paper by Igor Mizine and Gabor Karafiath:
A sea train is an arrangement of multiple hulls connected together to form a longer assembly of vessels. The sea train configuration takes advantage of fundamental hydrodynamic principles to reduce the drag of the assembled train below that of the individual components proceeding separately. In some circumstances the sea train arrangement can also offer operational advantages.
WHAT IF?
What if we develop large numbers of these "sea train" modules, including several loaded with generators, sensors, and "missiles in a box," they can serve as "accompanying assets" to a battle force. Such vessels, arriving in an area of interest could decouple, spread themselves out over a wide area and allow for a very wide distribution of lethality.
Other "Sea Trains" may be equipped with machine shops, cranes, additive manufacturing equipment, or replenishment munitions or fuel. These units could be held in "safe havens" and brought to the fleet as needed. None of them need be manned which makes them far less expensive to construct. Each could carry sufficient habitability containers to provide comfort for technicians or oother personnel needed to operate equipment at their needed destination.
The larger the number of sea train modules, the great the the likelihood of needed components reaching the fleets on a timely basis. With enough units, even the expanse of the Pacific can be "shrunk."
As with WWII merchant shipping, some elements of a sea train could contain self-defense detection and weaponry, remotely monitored, but capable of self protection when authorized by a "human in the loop." Such equipment might include ASW-capable drones, or ASuW assets.
Further, the use of unmanned but armed surface and subsurface could take the place of manned convoying ships.
COMMUNICATIONS
A key issue in discussing using unmanned vessels in the manner described above is communicating with those vessels to direct their positioning and, in the case of combat. controlling their weaponry.
Obviously, with the towed missile barge such communications could be done through a cable connection piggy-backing on the tow line.
With vessels within line of sight of the controller ship, the comms may be done through lasers or line of sight radios. It is also conceivable that light weight fiber optic lines could connect units even several miles distant.
In certain environments, satellite links may be available. If those are blocked, manned or unmanned aircraft may serve as relay platforms. Indeed, the concept of solar powered high-altitude communications air systems placed to create an continuous link along the projected sea routes is not far-fetched. AeroVironment, among others, has been working along these lines for almost four decades.
Explained in their video concerning their HAPS project - which could obviously be modified for military use, if needed:
The point is that we currently have the technology to distribute lethality at a much lower cost than the cost of new ships. We just need to get moving on experimenting with these technologies to find the right mix to provide the tools needed by our Navy and Marine Corps.
*What SNAFU! wrote in 2012 to accompany those images was:
Worried about saturation attacks by anti-ship missiles? Tow a couple of these behind a Burke loaded with about 1000 plus quad packed SM3's. Want to savage a coast line? Fill the other half with about 500 tomahawk land attack missiles.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Tactical Technology Office (TTO) seeks to enable extended transoceanic transit and long range naval operations by exploiting the efficiencies of a system of connected vessels (Sea Train). The Sea Train will demonstrate long range deployment capabilities for a distributed fleet of tactical Unmanned Surface Vessels (USVs).
New research from North Carolina State University and the U.S. Army’s Aviation Applied Technology Directorate shows that stainless steel composite metal foam (CMF) can block blast pressure and fragmentation at 5,000 feet per second from high explosive incendiary (HEI) rounds that detonate only 18 inches away. “In short, we found that steel-CMF offers much more protection than all other existing armor materials while lowering the weight remarkably,” says Afsaneh Rabiei, senior author of a paper on the work and a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State. “We can provide as much protection as existing steel armor at a fraction of the weight – or provide much more protection at the same weight.
Good for the Army and NC State University, but the Navy needs to get into this, too. More protection at light weight has significant possible uses for design and construction of ships and aircraft. Weight savings means increased ranges among other things.
Citing a series of technological breakthroughs, Navy leaders announced plans Apr. 8 at the Sea-Air-Space exposition to deploy for the first time a solid-state laser aboard a ship in fiscal year 2014. "Our directed energy initiatives, and specifically the solid-state laser, are among our highest priority science and technology programs. The solid-state laser program is central to our commitment to quickly deliver advanced capabilities to forward-deployed forces," Chief of Naval Research Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder said. "This capability provides a tremendously affordable answer to the costly problem of defending against asymmetric threats, and that kind of innovative approach is crucial in a fiscally constrained environment." The announcement to deploy the laser onboars USS Ponce (AFSB[I] 15) comes as Navy researchers continue to make significant progress on directed energy weapons, allowing the service to deploy a laser weapon on a Navy ship two years ahead of schedule. The at-sea demonstration in FY 14 is part of a wider portfolio of near-term Navy directed energy programs that promise rapid fielding, demonstration and prototyping efforts for shipboard, airborne and ground systems. "Our conservative data tells us a shot of directed energy costs under $1," Klunder said. "Compare that to the hundreds of thousands of dollars it costs to fire a missile, and you can begin to see the merits of this capability."
