By Jerry Hendrix
Thursday, June 18, 2020
On April 24 the U.S. Navy announced that a fifth weapons
elevator had been certified for use onboard the USS Gerald R. Ford
(CVN-78). (A weapons elevator lifts munitions, such as bombs and missiles, from
the storage area to the flight deck.) Six more elevators remain uncertified,
requiring additional testing and modifications before the carrier can be
deployed. Originally estimated to cost $10.5 billion to build, the ship was
officially “delivered” to the Navy in May 2017, some 18 months behind schedule,
at an eye-popping cost of $12.9 billion. However, even those cost numbers and
dates are misleading, as the ship still does not have all of its essential
systems certified, owing to major difficulties with its ship-service turbine
generators, electromagnetic aircraft-launch systems, advanced arresting gear
(the apparatus that slows down aircraft as they land on deck), and finally its
weapons elevators. The upshot of all of these difficulties is that the Navy has
been forced to use dollars from its crucial operations-and-maintenance accounts
to “repair” a brand-new ship, for which it had already paid $13 billion, that
has yet to deploy operationally, despite having officially been in the fleet
for nearly three years.
The news on this ship is mixed. While it is true that the
ship recently completed its 1,000th electromagnetic launch and 1,000th “trap”
using the ship’s advanced arresting gear, and the newly confirmed secretary of
the Navy has endorsed continuing to build the Ford-class design, it is
also true that the ship recently experienced five days in which it could not
launch aircraft due to problems with its electromagnetic launch system. The bad
news is expected to continue as the ship is now scheduled to go through normal
shock trials, which involve the detonation of a series of underwater charges
near the hull and are known to cause havoc with a ship’s internal systems, in
the summer of 2021. This may well set back the ship’s already-delayed initial
deployment, scheduled for 2022, still further. The Department of Defense has
determined that it is necessary to identify any additional significant faults
in the design of the Ford, including ones that may be exposed by the
shock trials, before proceeding with the construction of additional ships. Even
shock trials, however, will not reveal the Ford’s most glaring problems:
It has the wrong design and is built around the wrong type and size of air
wing, and it is not optimized for implementing the current National Defense
Strategy, which focuses on great-power competition with Communist China and, to
a lesser extent, a Putin-led Russia.
The USS Ford was conceived during the late 1990s
and emerged from an analysis that examined over 75 designs. The final choice
was greatly influenced by then-recent operational experiences in the Arabian
Gulf and the Adriatic Sea, as well as a 1998 GAO report that provided rigorous
comparisons between nuclear and conventionally powered aircraft carriers during
those campaigns. The Ford’s eventual design was predicated upon an
assumption that the ship would operate in similar semi-permissive, low-threat
environments, such as the Adriatic Sea or Arabian Gulf, staying close to enemy
shores to optimize the efficacy of the carrier’s short-range (500 nautical
miles) light-attack air wing, which was then dominated by the FA-18 Hornet. To
maximize the Ford’s sortie-generation rate (the number of aircraft it
can launch and land in a day), the need to launch and recover its historically
small, short-ranged air wing multiple times per day became the driver of the
ship’s design. That design was also meant to hold down operating costs through
the extensive use of automated systems, thus shrinking the crew size.
However, as often happens in combat-system designs, the
enemy got a vote. Beginning in the mid 1990s, China’s government observed the
U.S. regime-change strategies in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia with growing
alarm. It saw how both Iraq and Yugoslavia allowed the United States to build
up forces close to their borders without resistance. Beijing was also deeply
embarrassed by the U.S. deployment of an aircraft-carrier battle group,
centered on the USS Nimitz supercarrier and the USS Belleau Wood
amphibious-assault ship, through the Taiwan Strait in 1996, in response to
China’s attempt to sway approaching elections in Taiwan by conducting offshore
gun and missile exercises. In addition, China interpreted the U.S. bombing of
China’s Belgrade embassy in 1999 with a precision-guided munition dropped from
a stealth B-2 aircraft as a deliberate act of military intimidation (the U.S.
insists it was a mistake). In reaction to these events, the People’s Republic
of China began to invest in a series of new weapons systems designed to push
American naval forces farther out to sea, limiting their ability to project
power against potential targets in the mainland. Soon aircraft, ships, and
(most of all) missiles with increased lethality and range began to appear
within the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA’s) order of battle, with the DF-21
and DF-26 “carrier killer” anti-ship ballistic missiles being the centerpieces.
The combination of dramatically enhanced maritime-domain
awareness (enabled in large part by remote-sensing satellites) and land-, sea-,
and air-launched anti-ship missiles now makes it possible for the PLA to hold
U.S. aircraft carriers (and other surface combatants) at risk well over 1,000
miles from China’s shores — which is well beyond the range of the carrier’s
FA-18E/F and F-35C strike fighters unless they are refueled. Moreover, even if
these planes were to reach designated target areas with aerial refueling, they
would be vulnerable to modern, integrated air-defense systems. Faced with this
intensifying threat, the Navy has started shifting away from the land-attack
mission in favor of less daunting sea-control and sea-denial missions.
***
Pursuit of these missions, which the Navy calls
“distributed maritime operations,” is a throwback to the strategy employed
during the early days of World War II, when limited aircraft range forced the
United States to ponderously island-hop across the Pacific until it captured
islands close enough to Japan to launch direct bombing missions. The
hard-learned lessons of World War II led the Navy to build the Forrestal
class of supercarriers after the war, because a larger ship was required to
launch and recover a new 80,000-pound bomber that could carry atomic weapons
more than 1,000 miles into the Soviet Union on the first day of a new war. It
was the anticipation of that mission, known as a “penetrating deep-strike,” and
the composition of the air wing of the early 1950s, dominated by large A-3
Skywarrior long-range bombers, that drove the Navy to build supercarriers.
Today, however, all those lessons have seemingly been forgotten. Put simply,
the carrier should be designed around the air wing, and the air wing should be
designed to implement the nation’s defense strategy.
According to the most recent National Defense Strategy,
the U.S. military exists to “provide combat-credible military forces needed to
deter war and protect the security of our nation. Should deterrence fail, the
Joint Force is prepared to win.” To implement this strategy, the Joint Force
needs to be able to strike quickly at specific enemy military, economic, and
even political centers of gravity in increasingly contested environments.
Today’s military, using air-based and space-based surveillance assets, has
ever-increasing abilities to identify targets, but dwindling capacities to
strike them. To remedy this situation, the Navy should invest in new air wings
— much as it did in the years immediately following World War II, when it
effectively replaced its entire naval-aviation inventory — that can operate
effectively from outside the range of a prospective adversary’s
“anti-access/area denial” networks to credibly put key targets at risk.
Such an air wing would necessarily retain some legacy
components. It would make sense, for example, for each wing to have
combat-search-and-rescue (CSAR) helicopters; a squadron of four E-2D Hawkeyes
to provide airborne surveillance and command-and-control in carrier-controlled
airspace; and a squadron of six EA-18G Growlers to provide jamming and spectrum
control around the carrier and its strike group. The new air wing might also
have one squadron of ten F-35Cs to perform combat air-patrol missions as well
as airborne-coordination roles. Only one squadron should be necessary, since
the carrier would be positioned far out to sea, beyond the immediate range of
enemy short-range fighters and escorted by cruisers and destroyers capable of
providing air and missile defense. Shifting the carrier’s area of operations
farther from the enemy’s “anti-access/area denial” forces would make it
possible to reverse the modern naval bias towards defensive “anti” missions
within the carrier strike group (anti-air, anti-surface, and anti-submarine)
and move back towards offensive operations, including power-projection ashore.
As part of this shift, the core of the carrier’s new air
wing would be 30 stealthy, heavily armed unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs),
organized into three squadrons. Individual UCAVs should be capable of carrying
4,000 pounds of ordnance internally to a combat radius of at least 1,500
nautical miles without refueling. They should also feature broadband,
all-aspect stealth design with a much-reduced radar cross-section (RCS). The
design should also integrate an infrared-signature-reduction capability and an
advanced passive sensor suite. These 30 aircraft — each armed with two
2,000-pound-class direct-attack weapons (GBU-31 JDAM) or stand-off weapons
(e.g., JASSM or LRASM), four 1,000-pound-class direct-attack weapons (GBU-33
JDAMs), or up to 16 GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs — could deliver sustained
firepower against a wide array of enemy targets while their host carrier
remained in relative sanctuary at sea.
Moreover, unlike aircraft flown by human beings, they
would not have to cease operation because of pilot fatigue. With refueling,
they could remain aloft potentially for days at a time. With no pilots at risk,
there would also be no need to prepare for forward CSAR operations. Based on
the Navy’s considerable experience in designing and operating two prototype
aircraft under the Unmanned Carrier Air System-Demonstrator (UCAS-D) program,
an operational UCAV could be fielded both quickly and affordably. For slightly
more than the cost of an F-35C, the Navy could have an aircraft with nearly
three times the combat radius, significantly more internal payload, and far
better survivability. With a UCAV-heavy air wing, the aircraft carrier could
get back into the power-projection business.
***
The need for a “mission tanker” (aerial refueler) within
the new air wing could be met with eight simplified (that is, lacking stealth
accoutrements and advanced sensors) tanker versions of the strike UCAV, each
potentially capable of passing nearly 20,000 pounds of fuel some 500 miles away
from the carrier. Tanker UCAVs could also serve as communications relays
between airborne E-2Ds operating at the edge of carrier-controlled airspace and
forward-striking UCAVs, thus mitigating the risk of satellite-communication
disruptions. Taken together, this proposed air wing amounts to approximately 65
aircraft, about the same size as today’s carrier air wing. Design differences
between the UCAVs and legacy fighters, however, would allow for subtle but very
consequential changes in the design of future carriers.
A UCAV-heavy air wing with tailless aircraft, for example,
significantly reduces overall carrier flight-deck and hangar-deck space
requirements, especially in the vertical dimension. Current carriers’ hangar
bays are designed for legacy aircraft with tall vertical tail assemblies, but
these are leaving the force and are not likely to return, as stealth
characteristics, which preclude such assemblies, become the norm in aircraft
design. Given the UCAV’s long endurance and extended mission time for
long-range strikes and sea denial, the sortie-generation rate is less
important, so fewer catapults to launch the planes would be needed. Automatic
takeoff and landing protocols, which are already improving the safety of
carrier operations, would allow for a reduction in arresting-gear wires.
Carrier-design features that will likely remain constant are speed (30-plus
knots, to generate wind over the deck for launch and recovery),
ordnance-magazine capacity, and the size of the aviation-fuel bunker to
maintain the air wing. Designers should allow for future growth in electrical-power
requirements to enable the integration of more-advanced radars, communications
systems, and eventually, defensive directed-energy weapons (those that use
lasers, microwaves, or streams of particles to attack the enemy). Finally,
given that there are no longer any large fossil-fuel steam-boiler manufacturers
in the United States (and the U.S. Navy is unlikely to repeat the British Royal
Navy’s mistake of powering a large carrier with gas-turbine engines), the
Navy’s next carrier will almost certainly be nuclear-powered.
Accepting the average size of the air wing (the Nimitz
and Ford classes were originally designed to support 85 to 90 aircraft
but now carry around 65), taking into account new aircraft designs as well as
new launch and recovery intervals, and then carefully examining previous
carrier designs as well as design studies, suggests that the next carrier
should be in the mid-sized range (65,000 to 75,000 tons), with a flight deck
approximately 900 feet in length and 135 feet wide and an armor-box hangar deck
some 700 feet in length by 95 feet in width by 18 feet in height.
In addition, the carrier should have at least two
long-stroke, heavy catapults in the bow and one in the waist (centered on the
carrier’s angled deck) in order to maintain redundancy in battle, two
arresting-gear wires, and three deck-edge heavy elevators to move aircraft to
and from the hangar bay. The new carrier should have the storage capacity to
accommodate 1,500 tons of aviation ordnance and 1.5 million gallons of aviation
fuel. Lastly, to power all this, in terms of both speed through the water and
electrical-power generation, the carrier will likely need two nuclear reactors
(for combat redundancy) capable of generating 240,000 shaft horsepower. The
United States no longer has the capacity to build large conventional maritime
steam turbines, but if it ever does, this option should be considered. Such a
carrier should cost no more than $5.5 billion, about a third of the cost of the
current Ford-class carrier. This effort would take, at a minimum, ten years to
design and build.
Before arguing that this proposed carrier is too small,
its catapults and arresting gear are too few, and its aviation-ordnance and
fuel capacities are too slight, critics should pause and consider that the
carrier parameters described above, with the exception of the two nuclear
reactors, lie directly between those of the Midway-class carriers built
during World War II and the Forrestal-class carriers built during the
1950s. Both served in the Navy until the mid 1990s and operated heavy,
long-range, penetrating-strike air wings. The USS Midway (CV-41) served
on the battle line in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm for 43 days alongside
larger carriers and was able to maintain an average sortie-generation rate of
70 aircraft per day, second only to the Nimitz-class carrier USS Theodore
Roosevelt. On most days, the Midway launched well over 80 missions,
on a few days even 90, and on three days she launched no missions at all as her
crew did maintenance on her aircraft and flight deck. Midway, at this
stage of her life, was operating two long-stroke, heavy catapults for larger
attack aircraft and one medium catapult for lighter aircraft. Given the ranges
to be spanned, the duration of missions, and the anticipated smaller air-wing
size, there is no reason for the next carrier to be built with more than three
steam catapults.
All these proposals are put forth with the goal of better supporting the National Defense Strategy, but also with the hope that the Navy’s new leadership is keeping a weather eye towards the fiscal storm that is bearing down upon the fleet, and the entire Department of Defense, in the “terrible Twenties” that stretch out ahead. Past profligate spending combined with the large successive stimulus packages that have accompanied the COVID-19 global pandemic will increase competition for limited funds, and $15 billion supercarriers that cannot generate meaningful offensive firepower to deter and, if necessary, fight the next war will almost certainly become targets for cuts. It would be wise for the Navy to better align its carrier-procurement plan with the nation’s defense strategy and, in particular, its ability to conduct conventional power-projection operations against rival great powers such as China and Russia. To do so it must fundamentally restructure the carrier air wing, shifting away from manned, short-range fighters with insufficient survivability in the expected threat environments, and towards stealthy, heavily armed, long-range UCAVs. To support that air wing, the Navy should design and build less complex, mid-sized carriers that are far more affordable than the Ford class and could be built more quickly, perhaps even in multiple shipyards. The Navy says it needs carriers to deter enemies and win wars. It should move rapidly to a new design that can fully support the National Defense Strategy by efficiently doing both.
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