Will somebody explain why we should spend so much effort to preserve a weapon that is supposedly vital to win the fight?
Giving more thought to protecting carriers at least explicitly recognizes their vulnerability and implicitly recognizes the cost of building vulnerable ships that could be spent elsewhere. But this effort over-estimates their offensive value in sea control campaigns to justify protecting them.
How can carriers contribute to the fight when they are evading attacks all the time?
During multiple iterations of a 2022 Center for Strategic and International Studies war game, at least two U.S. aircraft carriers were sunk and their air wings destroyed. If a carrier somehow managed to flee the second island chain unscathed from the war’s initial salvos, it would have to continue operating (or hiding) outside the second island chain until U.S. submarines and bombers cleared out China’s “carrier-killer” platforms.
Based on these war games, contemporary navalists are now coming up with ways to defend strike groups. Strategists should also be thinking about how to make them force multipliers. The U.S. Navy’s 11 aircraft carriers rack up an annual $13 billion in operating costs alone. For that kind of money, U.S. taxpayers deserve more than 11 wartime liabilities.
The kill chain may be harder to break than even I thought. And the author wants the carriers to "go dark"--avoiding emissions that could lead to detection by China and a hail of missiles. Sure, the author wants better passive sensors to make sure going "dark" doesn't mean going "blind." But as the expression goes, nice work if you can get it.
The question of whether large aircraft carriers deserve to be the center of our future naval strategy is a fundamental question that has not been adequately explored. Network-centric warfare signals the beginning of the end for the United States Navy's large aircraft carriers. They will lose their value as an instrument of forward presence and become valuable targets that, if struck, will encourage an enemy at the outset of war by apparently demonstrating that American technological prowess can be nullified and beaten. In the long run, large aircraft carriers will add little to most offensive missions and will absorb scarce resources and assets simply evading attack rather than striking the enemy and contributing to victory.
I wrote that in 2000. And here we are thinking more about how to hide the carrier rather than using it to find and kill the enemy. I'm thinking we reached "the long run."
Ships and planes directly defending carriers could be used to attack the Chinese fleet and invasion flotilla. Going dark under less than ideal hoped-for conditions takes both the carrier and its escorts out of a network-centric battle, no?
Doesn't everybody see this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
Yet this author gives a full-throated defense of carriers for fighting China for control of the seas. He is confident we can break China's kill chains; says Japan couldn't sink many in World War II; counts on their mobility; looks forward to new carrier aviation capabilities ... one day; and says sure, carriers can be sunk (which is at least an improvement over writers who argue carriers are too hard to sink to worry too much)--the question is whether we lose them to achieve our objectives.
That last is an excellent point. Victory and not efficiency is the proper metric. And I do respect that author.
But I strongly believe the resources needed to protect carriers--or build as many as we have--would be better spent on other assets--in the Distributed Maritime Operations (the latest term in a series for network-centric fighting concepts) he cites in defense of big carriers--to sink enemy ships. And given their public image as a symbol of American power, video of one or more carriers burning will be a public relations disaster at home and abroad even apart from the loss of so many sailors, aviators, and Marines and the treasure wasted on the carrier and planes.
Maybe we should admit that carriers are a useful power projection asset and not a sea control asset against a peer enemy. And then make our fleet composition decisions accordingly.
Also, that CSIS war game series had a serious defect in how it defined victory in a Taiwan scenario.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
