Tuesday, October 18, 2016

A Floor Wax AND a Dessert Topping?

The Royal Navy wants to adapt their new biggish deck carriers to also carry marines if necessary. Is this how America's Ford class carriers should be adapted?

This is interesting:

The UK Royal Navy (RN) is conducting study work to determine how to optimise the planned integration of an amphibious capability element into its Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers.

The two carriers - the future HM ships Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales - are dedicated to generating carrier strike operations. However, the size and scale of the 65,000-tonne platforms provides the flexibility to support additional roles.

The British want to the carriers to be able to launch a two-company assault force, which sounds like the ship could hold a battalion in total.

Given that our large amphibious ships are to have a secondary strike aviation role with the ability to operate a small number of F-35s, I wondered if we should eventually replace our amphibious ships with a smaller number of Ford class carriers in order to have a better back-up aviation role, while reducing the number of dedicated strike carriers (because I worry about their survivability in sea control missions) so we can build more ships and subs better able to fight for sea control while not representing a catastrophic loss if sunk in battle.

We would have more Fords in total than we have big deck strike carriers and big-deck amphibious shops combined now, but would have the ability to switch their roles depending on the needs.

The dedicated Ford strike carriers would then have a back-up amphibious role to complement the amphibious Fords with a strike back-up role.

Just a thought. Remember that The Dignified Rant is not a ship designer.