And I worry that our carriers are too vulnerable to wage a naval war and survive, leaving a smaller non-carrier fleet to carry on as best it can.
One way or the other, whether through our decisions now in peace time or enemy missiles during war, we'll have fewer carriers. The fleet will evolve. The question is will the rest of the fleet be robust enough to win that naval war.
But there is another threat to the rest of the fleet that our focus on carriers has created. Our ships may be rusting away from lack of maintenance:
"It appears the effort to derive efficiencies has overtaken our culture of effectiveness," the Balisle report says. "The material readiness of the surface force is well below acceptable levels to support reliable, sustained operations at sea and preserve ships to their full service life expectancy. Moreover, the present readiness trends are down."
Training and manning are issues, too, but the maintenance issue will erode our surface fleet:
"Independent reports indicate that if the surface force stays on the course that it is presently on, DDGs will achieve 25-27 years of service life instead of the 30 years planned and 40 years of extended service life desired," the report says.
And our ships go to see with material deficiencies that would reveal themselves in combat.
This is bad. And the cause of it is that the Navy is sticking with super carriers as the central weapon of our fleet despite the certainty that funding for shipbuilding will not match what the Navy needs to continue this focus.
Networks, surveillance, and cheap and accurate missiles make super carriers both less needed for offense and more vulnerable to defend. And to afford them, we shortchange our surface warships. Ironically enough, those surface ships are supposed to escort the super carriers yet they may not be able to do that.
Yet we don't have to simply abandon naval aviation. As I've argued, we do have an alternative--light carriers with secondary amphibious warfare capabilities. Our new America class ships will be just that:
Designed to project power and maintain presence, LHA-Replacement (LHA-R, aka. LH-X and now the America Class) large deck amphibious assault ships will replace the LHA-1 Tarawa Class. They’re based on the more modern LHD Wasp Class design, but initial ships will remove the LHD’s landing craft and well deck. While its LHA/LHD predecessors were amphibious assault ships with a secondary aviation element, it’s fair to describe the LHA-Rs as escort carriers with a secondary amphibious assault role.
Even these LHAs may turn out to be too vulnerable to sail in range of an enemy naval strike network, but they are a start to weaning us off the cult of the big deck carrier. I love carriers. I really do. Their glory days of Pacific battles with the Imperial Japanese Navy are inspiring.
But 1942 was a long time ago. It's better for our big carriers to fade away than burn out.
