I'm going to focus on this rebuttal to a case made against carriers. [link corrected] I figure that the rebuttal will address the weakest arguments of the anti-carrier debate and if the rebuttal can't rebut those, carrier defenders have a tough job on the merits. Besides, I don't much like CNAS in general. They seem to always want to justify reduced defense capabilities. But I suspect I'm more in line with them on this narrow issue.
And to avoid seeming like I side with CNAS, let me say that if we demote big carriers within our Navy force structure and planning, I'm fully in favor of using all the money saved for the Navy to build and operate other naval platforms. I don't want a carrier debate to be a budget debate about taking away Navy funding to give to the Army, Marine Corps, or Air Force.
Let me start with a base contention of the anti-carrier author that the pro-carrier author raises:
Captain Hendrix contends “future wars should be characterized by smaller target lists that emphasize discreetly interrupting capacities, not destroying them.”
You wonder why I shudder to stand with CNAS on an issue even a little bit? While in theory it is fine to say we can interrupt capacities to take them off the field, destroying targets interrupts them nicely. Let's not get too fancy here. Combat is killing people and breaking things. Forget that and pretty soon you are discreetly interrupting capacities to send messages to your foe, hoping they will read them as we intend and do what we want without further fighting.
Anyway, let's get to the defense of carriers against the attacks against carriers.
The Information Dissemination (ID) pro-carrier author rightly says that speaking of costs of delivering ordnance during insurgencies is way different than in conventional combat since aircraft spend a lot of time loitering, watching, and waiting. High-speed conventional combat will be different. So I'm with the pro-carrier side on the cost issue here.
The CNAS critique calls the carrier battlegroup a great diplomatic tool, but says they are too expensive for the role. ID agrees with the diplomatic role but argues that as a percent of GDP, carriers are a bargain.
Here I part company with ID. Sure, it is common to call a carrier "90,000 tons of diplomacy." But that is only because of the reputation of the carrier as a symbol of our power. If other vessels were the pinnacle of our fleet, they'd be the diplomatic message. And the carrier's perceived role in backing up our national power rests on not having to face a serious combat threat since 1944. Yeah, in peacetime they look impressive. But 90,000 tons of flaming wreckage is no diplomat's friends. And that is the real question--not whether the carrier is perceived as a symbol of our power. I concede that. I just think it is dangerous to confuse that perception with the reality of their usefulness and survivability.
And given our huge GDP, any single vessel is going to look like a tiny fraction of the GDP. The real cost should be measured by looking at the percent of the Navy's ship-building and operating budgets. On those terms, they are expensive. So expensive that we don't have as many ships as the Navy says we need. And so expensive that when sequestration hit, the first visible thing to go was a carrier deployment to CENTCOM in order to save money.
I dare say we could command the seas in peacetime and ensure trade with vessels way less expensive than carriers.
ID then denies that the CNAS critique of the carrier's survivability in the face of Chinese anti-access/area denial capabilities--especially the DF-21 anti-ship ballistic missile--is a game changer. ID has a point. I've noted that China's abilities aren't so different than Soviet land-based air power or any other land-based air power we've faced in the past. But just because it is not much different other than the range of the DF-21 doesn't mean it doesn't matter. Whether facing World War II Japanese or Cold War-era Soviet or future Chinese land-based anti-ship weapons, we have to be very careful putting our big and expensive carriers within range of those weapons if our ships can be detected and if there are assets to attack our ships.
So no, DF-21s aren't some uniquely deadly new threat that can't be countered or defeated. But they--and conventional cruise missiles and aircraft--are a deadly threat that can't be dismissed. In the past, we avoided getting near enemy land-based power until we could hit them first to reduce the threat. In my mind, carrier defenders have to answer the question of why we don't need to tread just as carefully before sending our carriers within range of China's land-based air and missile power.
IN the end, the ID defense of carriers relies on an attack on the current aircraft that our carriers deploy. If we had longer ranged aircraft that could hit Chinese anti-ship assets ashore before our carriers are vulnerable, then the carriers are just fine.
While ID has a point about naval aviation range, the argument merely evades the question of carrier survivability by promoting a solution that makes the question of carrier survivability moot--it assumes we can again have carriers with weapons that outrange land-based threats.
In real life, the Chinese will respond with longer ranged anti-ship missiles, including using ICBMs with global range. Then we have the problem of a few high-value vessels--that cost a lot and require a 50-year career to seem affordable--as the core of our fleet. How many carriers can we afford to lose and still win at sea? As symbols of our national power, how much psychological damage does the loss of a couple carriers cause us even apart from the loss of offensive capabilities?
The ID dismisses the CNAS argument that we could put naval aviation on more but smaller carriers without addressing the major advantage that we'd put fewer egg assets in more airfield baskets. Obviously, if we lose 5 carriers out of 11 super carriers, that is much worse than losing 5 out of 20 smaller carriers. And fewer aircraft lost from each smaller carrier.
And if aircraft range is your method of keeping super carriers afloat, at what point do we extend aircraft so much that we might as well base them in the continental United States? Increasing the range of aircraft that much is more of an Air Force argument against carrier aviation rather than a Navy defense of carrier aviation.
So I'm not happy with this carrier debate so far. The carrier debate involves two separate concepts that debates too often conflate:
Carriers have responsibilities in two areas: power projection and sea control.
Power projection is what we've done with our carriers since world War II. Sail them off the coast of some country that doesn't possess a potent navy or air force, and use it as a floating air base. Without the need to fight for control of the sea, we exercise that control of the sea from the start of a conflict. We've done this a lot. And the carriers have performed superbly.
This history of power projection is what the defenders of carriers point to.
But what the anti-carrier side points to is usually the sea control mission. In this mission, by definition we face a nation with a navy and air force capable of fighting us for control of the seas--or at least denying us full control.
And for nations without carriers, advances in persistent surveillance and guided missiles give them a potent weapon to use against our big carriers.
Further, while defenders of carriers like to call them sovereign pieces of American real estate that can host our planes, unlike actual real estate, our carriers float and therefore can sink. Or just burn and become mission kills. Really.
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.
As I started this post with, I'd use every dollar moved away from carriers for other platforms, and consider whether we need more even after redirecting our money. I think we need naval aviation. If we need it, how can we deploy it in a manner that makes it useful and survivable?
We really need a carrier debate. I don't think we're having one.
