The Naval Institute Proceedings published an article arguing that big deck carriers will lose out to missile-armed ships as the primary weapon for surge firepower:
More than two decades into the missile age a new breed of weapons has emerged that will greatly change the way we fight. Just as technology caused the battleship to be eclipsed by the aircraft carrier, soon the aircraft carrier will be eclipsed by the missile carrier. This is not to say the aircraft carrier will not exist in the future, but it won’t retain the central position in power projection it holds today.
The carrier, the author says, will need to go back to its role as a scout for the fleet.
Back in 1999, Proceedings bought an article of mine on the end of the carrier's dominant role because of network-centric warfare that promised to mass effect with widely dispersed missile launchers would replace the massed firepower of the platform-centric big carrier. But the editors did not publish it. Perhaps they weren't ready for a carrier debate yet. No bitterness over that. Nope.
I'd add air defense as a fleet mission, too. But I still don't think we are having a proper debate. The author says that power projection will be the mission of the missile armed ships and subs (and aircraft). I think that carriers remain valuable in power projection (think Iraq and Afghanistan) but that in sea control, the carrier is losing its central position in the fleet:
Big carriers are great at power projection against nations with no ability to attack our fleet. As such, they really are 90,000 tons of diplomacy.
But in sea control, the end of carrier dominance is in sight. Many thought it was over in the Cold War, but our carriers never faced the Soviet navy and land-based anti-ship weapons. So that question was never answered by the finality of combat, and threats to our carriers rusted away.
Is carrier dominance for sea control missions over now as Chinese anti-ship capabilities are created? I won't say that. But we should start to transition away from these ships whose life span lasts 50 years, before we see several of them with thousands of sailors and scores of warplanes each go down under attack from land-based assets guided by persistent surveillance and targeting networks.
Let's define our terms before we once again argue past each other with justifications for their version of carrier strengths without addressing the other side's argument against their version of carrier weaknesses.
Carrier defenders say that naval air power will never be dethroned. I think they are right. But that does not mean that the big deck super carrier is the best means to provide that naval air power. And it doesn't mean that every mission that the carrier carried out in the past with naval air power can be carried out--or should be carried out if we spend enough money to enable the carrier to continue those missions--in the future.
And I worry that the super carrier's defenders are going to win the debate the old fashioned way--by eliminating the alternative by allowing Harpoon anti-ship missiles to fade away from our surface fleet rather than making the case for the big carrier:
Really, one of the reasons I haven't had near-term worries about carrier vulnerability is that the proliferation of anti-ship missiles in our fleet (namely the Harpoon) has made our entire fleet an anti-ship weapon. Until Harpoon, our offensive power was concentrated in our carrier air wings with other vessels restricted to protecting the carriers. But what I thought I knew was wrong. Harpoons are departing the fleet and only some of our surface warfare officers are worried about that.
Even if we have a debate on carriers, will it matter if there is no practical alternative to the behemoth Ford's we've started building?
