What was once called network-centric naval warfare is being built. How can the platform-centric carrier fit in to that Navy?
America's super carriers are the pinnacle of platform-centric warfare. When massing effects required massing assets, the carrier's strike aircraft massed the decisive weapons in one place for effective command and control. But the development of persistent surveillance, secure networked communications, and highly accurate long-range missiles has allowed a navy to mass effects without massing assets.
The U.S. Navy is considering how best to equip ships and sailors to take advantage of fleetwide connectivity that Project Overmatch will provide. At the heart of this is the Integrated Combat System, a single hardware-agnostic software suite that all ships can pull from to conduct missions alone or in a group. ...
The key to this “paradigm shift” — of connecting a group of ships and allowing their combat systems to collectively agree on a best course of action based on ships’ locations, munitions stocks and other factors — is the aids that will help humans make rapid decisions, Pyle explained.
“The ability for a decision-maker — whether they’re in the fleet, whether they’re in a strike group, whether they’re in ... a maritime operations center, or whether they’re sitting on a cruiser — to be able to pair any sensor to any shooter, that’s pretty powerful,” he told Defense News during the conference.
It may be the early days of ICS, but the concept under different names has been around a long time.
I've noted the possibilities when you can separate the sensor from the shooter in aerial warfare, too. That is the foundation of ICS.
And at the beginning of this century I wrote about the effects of network-centric warfare on the platform-centric aircraft carrier:
Under the conditions of today’s platform-centric warfare, dispersal weakens a force and makes it slow to respond and mount a concentrated attack. In order to concentrate effect in an attack with platforms, forces need to be collocated or, if dispersed, near the enemy (or collocated with or near the friendly asset to be defended). Aircraft carriers overcome this problem of delivering massed effect by collocating a powerful air wing on a mobile airfield that, on its own, can deliver strong blows. While a carrier may be assisted by outside sensors and weapons systems, the carrier's and associated battle group's organic capability to fight enemy assets is substantial and greater than any other individual naval platform. Before Tomahawk and Harpoon missiles entered service with the fleet’s escorts, the carriers were the sole means of offensive action and represented “the highest value seaborne target against which an enemy could aim.” These newer weapons allowed any surface action group to conduct offensive warfare.
According to the United States Navy, the basic advantage of network-centric warfare is that the Navy will be able to deploy widely dispersed units that mass effect in a timely manner without needing to mass the components themselves, as platform-centric warfare requires, for coordinated action. Superior surveillance, communications, mobility, and weapons effectiveness and range will allow this geographic dispersal of units. Even before the dawn of network-centric warfare, the widespread deployment of surface-to-surface missiles throughout the Navy made the aircraft carrier an important asset rather than one vital for offensive missions. By allowing all the units in the network to fight as a physically dispersed but tactically unified force, networks will make the carrier platform’s ability redundant. Concentration of effect will no longer rely on concentration of forces. In addition to the evident offensive value, this characteristic has defensive value by reducing the footprint of our forces, thus avoiding giving the enemy an attractive, high-value target. Dispersed small units that can fight as one yet remain dangerous despite the loss of even many of the individually less capable platforms will confound the enemy's efforts to deliver a decisive strike against the Navy.
But the delay is no less devastating for the survivability of carriers when enemies have similar capabilities.
I'm not saying carriers lose all their value with this kind of network. Carriers have two basic roles. One is achieving sea control against a peer enemy. The other is power projection against enemies ashore that cannot effectively strike--or even find--the carrier at sea.
With ICS-equipped enemies, the former role becomes too expensive to carry out. Carriers will be sunk and their host of sailors, pilots, and expensive stealth and support planes will be lost in minutes as swarms of enemy missiles converge on the target.
You may say that ICS-equipped escorts will be able to mass defensive missiles and systems to protect the carrier. But I doubt that the defenses could stop all the inbound missiles. Enough will evade defenses to get at least a mission-kill. Is it really worth it to use networks to defend the big platform-centric offensive carrier instead of focusing on networked offense?
The future I wrote about is arriving later than I thought. But it gets worse for carriers:
The multibillion-dollar endeavor, referred to as JADC2, envisions any sensor feeding any shooter the data he or she needs — meaning responses to foreign aggression will likely be quicker, more efficient and less constrained by geography.
At the same time, the Navy is pursuing what’s known as distributed maritime operations: becoming harder to find, harder to target and harder to sink. Underpinning the concept is the need for reliable, insulated connectivity.
This is broader than the Navy capability being built and has more uses than just naval warfare if the sheer volume of expanding the capability beyond the more manageable Navy assets that must be included.
And why bother tying up so many ICS-equipped escorts to defend expensive super carriers when those ships could be in ICS-equipped strike groups swarming an enemy with offensive missiles?
The carriers will remain useful against smaller enemies that can't strike them. And the carriers could be committed like cavalry of old when the ICS-equipped swarm wins control of the seas and breaks an enemy's naval cohesion to fight networked. Then the carriers can be committed to help sink the scattered and isolated vessels. And used to project power ashore to really exploit control of the seas.
My prophecy is old. And delayed. But the vision is arriving even bigger than my original thoughts. Will the Navy lose the carriers needlessly in combat because it is too sentimental and reverential about their history? Or will the Navy phase out the carriers from their central role by relegating a smaller number to power projection roles, using the money for more ICS-capable ships?
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
