[Last] month the incoming U.S. Navy secretary called a halt to a study on the future of the country’s fleet of 11 aircraft carriers. The “Future Carrier 2030 Task Force” was asked to test how large, nuclear-powered carriers might stack up against the new generation of long-range precision weapons being fielded by China and Russia. While the loss of an individual study doesn’t necessarily mean that the Navy has stopped thinking about the future of its carriers, it is nevertheless a great shame.
So yeah:
Well, my view on carriers is well established and my reasons for that position get stronger every day as precision and persistent surveillance get better and cheaper.
But the idea in that article that we should have perhaps half of our carriers smaller than the Ford class behemoths doesn't make financial sense despite successes with Navy big-deck amphibious ships using F-35Bs, as I wrote when the Navy's first deployment went well:
But remember, she is not a carrier. So don't think the testing proves we should build light carriers.
I've long discussed this secondary capability.
As I noted in this post, medium carriers don't actually save money for the same aviation capabilities:
I recently read that the Navy had studied medium carriers with 55 planes versus large carriers with 75 planes and found that the large ships and wings generated twice the sorties at a ship and plane cost only 13% more than the medium ships.
And interesting enough, even a wing of 55 planes on the large carrier generated 40% more sorties than the same wing on a medium carrier.
That's because our carriers are planned to be able to use 2/3 of the wing at the same time. So a big carrier's deck can handle a higher percentage of the smaller wing's planes.
So, yeah, we couldn't build enough smaller carriers at the same price to be more survivable and we'd have less sortie generation capacity.
If we build carriers, they should be big. But that doesn't end the carrier debate. Then the question is, do we need carriers at all?
Although I will grant the point that sortie rate might not be as important with precision. Although the cost savings of an equal number of smaller carriers won't be that much; and we'll have no more carrier targets to spread out the Chinese attackers, which is normally what you'd want to do when faced with the vulnerability of high value ships--build lots of cheaper more expendable ones instead.
To think that only three months ago I had hope we might have a seapower debate divorced from a carrier debate.
