Dispatch 006: The Carrier Reality: Dead on Arrival

Stop the madness. Stop deploying carriers and stop building them.

Publisher’s Note: I launched a broadside against the carrier cargo cult in Episode 34 of my podcast.

I have some further thoughts today.

Here’s the bottom line: the US has not won a conventional conflict much less an unconventional conflict despite the trillions spent and the wholesale creation of one of the largest and most technologically advanced armed forces in the history of mankind since the end of the War to Save Josef Stalin.

Some housekeeping:

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Stop the madness.

Stop deploying carriers

Stop building them.

I won’t be getting Christmas cards this year from the Aircraft Carrier Industrial Base Coalition.

The last US aircraft carrier of any type sunk in combat was USS Bismarck Sea (CVE-95), sunk by two kamikaze attacks on February 21, 1945 off Iwo Jima.

The last light carrier sunk was USS Princeton (CVL-23), sunk by a lone Japanese dive bomber (NOT a kamikaze) on October 24, 1944 during the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

The last US fleet carrier sunk in combat was USS Hornet (CV-8), sunk near the end of the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands on October 27, 1942, after being hit by a staggering three bombs, three aircraft torpedoes (which completely disabled the ship, forcing abandonment), nine US Mk 15 destroyer torpedoes (some of which refused to detonate), and finally four Japanese Type 93 torpedoes. Hornet just refused to sink until then.

If you look after the war: Saratoga (CV-3) was expended in the Bikini nuclear tests in 1946, Independence (CVL-22) was used in another nuclear test and later sunk in 1951, America (CV-66) was sunk after damage absorption tests in 2005, and Oriskany (CV-34) was sunk as a reef off Florida in 2006.

The latest carrier sunk anywhere was Brazil’s Sao Paulo (ex French carrier Foch), scuttled on February 3, 2023 in very deep (5000 m) water.

[H/T to Karl Zimmerman]

I am not alone in these notions and the late Captain Wayne Hughes did yeoman’s work on these ideas along with the terrific analyses from CDR Jeff Vandenemgel, author of “Questioning the Carrier: Opportunities in Fleet Design for the US Navy”, which should be on every amateur navalist’s bookshelf.

All of these gentlemen have great ideas although I do think they neglect the vast broken design and infrastructure process for shipbuilding in the US that would not support a wholesale re-imagining and implementation of rational fleet design in this century.

Although the Navy wants to achieve and maintain in coming years a fleet of 381 manned battle force ships, including 12 aircraft carriers, force-structure studies done by the Navy that eventually led to the 381-ship goal showed future Navy force structures that included 8 to 12 carriers, to be supplemented (in the case of the lower end of that range) by up to 6 light aircraft carriers (CVLs). The Navy does not currently operate CVLs. The Navy in recent years has experimented with the concept of using an LHA-type amphibious assault ship with an embarked group of F-35B Joint Strike Fighters as a CVL.28.

It gets worse:

The most criminal event occurred in 2019 when it was obvious there were serious problems with the Ford design that may be un-fixable. Admirals pressed Congress to fund two more Fords earlier than planned, as though they wanted to get them under construction before Congress and media learned about problems.

And stop the surface stealth tilting at the military windmill. I can assure every military on Earth that your stealth technology will be decoded and broken shortly after deployment. The ridiculous F35 willfully baked in payload limitations (both radar cross section (RCS) concerns and internal loading for the former) on a conceptual design that beggars engineering description.

The total F35 program costs may be near two trillion dollars. Two trillion U.S. dollars in $100 notes would be 1,356 miles high. If they were one dollar bills, it would be 135,600 miles high (the moon is 238,900 miles from Earth).

During testimony with Rep Matt Gaetz, the U.S. Air Force Secretary testified that only 29 percent of F35 aircraft are fully operational.

“While the Pentagon now expects the plane to fly until 2088, GAO found the services are planning to slash flight hours, which can help hold down the program’s topline.”

The cloudy sustainment picture comes as the F-35 program is failing to meet mission capable rate goals, which GAO covered in the September 2023 sustainment report. The program is meeting 17 of 24 reliability and maintainability goals as of August 2023, GAO found today, but woes ranging from depot capacity to a dearth of spare parts continue to drag down fleet readiness. Still, the program has managed to eke out some relatively good news in recent months, the most recent being the mostly symbolic move to approve the jet’s full rate production after years of delays. 

In total, GAO said DoD has implemented just 13 of 43 recommendations the watchdog has made since 2014 on operating and sustaining the F-35. Lawmakers plan to further probe the program’s performance in a hearing the House Armed Services tactical air and land forces subcommittee is scheduled to hold Tuesday.”

Here’s the current inventory of carrier aircraft for strike missions, please note the Hawkeye isn’t strike aircraft but a vital aerial linkage in the kill chain to redirect and dynamically re-task outgoing aircraft.

Let’s quickly parse out the strike power of a carrier air wing. I will not use a Ford air wing because the Ford doesn’t operationally work. There are ten Nimitz-class carriers in service now. Hence a Nimitz air wing will characterize the strike capabilities: a maximum of 130 F/A-18 Hornets or 85–90 aircraft of different types, but current numbers are typically 64 aircraft. There is no realistic prospect of increasing air wing sizes due to severe operational and manufacturing problems with the F35 and the aging F18 platform is running into end of life difficulties.

As futuristic as the media likes to make the F35 to be, it is not. The F-35 was the product of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program, which was the merger of various combat aircraft programs from the 1980s and 1990s. One progenitor program was the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Advanced Short Take-Off/Vertical Landing (ASTOVL) which ran from 1983 to 1994.

Again, the US military is the most expensive paper tiger in Earth’s history.

So, what characterizes a naval strike package?

Strike aircraft types:

Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet

Range: 1,275 nmi (1,458 mi, 2,346 km) with armament of two AIM-9s

Combat range:

• 444 nmi (511 mi, 822 km) combat radius for interdiction mission with 2 × 480-gallon drop tanks

• 489 nmi (906 km; 563 mi) interdiction mission on 3 × 480-gallon drop tanks

• 462 nmi (856 km; 532 mi) fighter escort (air-to-air) mission on internal fuel only

Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II

Range: 1,500 nmi (1,700 mi, 2,800 km)

Combat range:

669 nmi (770 mi, 1,239 km) interdiction mission (air-to-surface) on internal fuel

760 nmi (870 mi; 1,410 km), air-to-air configuration on internal fuel

Boeing EA-18G Growler

Range: 1,275 nmi (1,458 mi, 2,346 km) ; clean plus two AIM-9s

Combat range: 390 nmi (449 mi, 722 km) ; for interdiction mission

McDonnell Douglas AV-8B Harrier II [USMC to retire NLT 2025]

Range: 1,200 nmi (1,400 mi, 2,200 km)

Combat range: 300 nmi (350 mi, 556 km)

Northrop Grumman E-2 Hawkeye

Ferry range: 1,462 nmi (1,682 mi, 2,708 km)

Grumman C-2 Greyhound

Range: 1,300 nmi (1,500 mi, 2,400 km) with 10,000 lb (4,500 kg) load; or 1,500 nmi (1,700 mi; 2,800 km) with light load

A typical carrier air wing can include 24–36 F/A-18E or -F Super Hornets as strike fighters; two squadrons of 10–12 F/A-18C Hornets, with one of these often provided by the U.S. Marine Corps (VMFA), also as strike fighters.

Let’s do a thumbnail sketch of requirements to have a carrier in a conflict zone: The carrier will develop strike packages in sorties (individual missions) which are the external elements to the orbit of a Combat Air Patrol (CAP) and a Barrier Combat Air Patrol (BCAP) drilling holes in the sky to protect the carrier[s] and its support vessels. The CAP and BCAP provide an airborne ready reserve of aircraft at two separate layers outward through which the strike aircraft pass to achieve their missions. Now incorporate my discussions of the one third rule in which aircraft are in hasty or deliberate maintenance and recovery, training or active combat readiness with a ten minute fly-off warning.

That miniscule strike package has, for instance, the AGM-A58 Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) which is reported to be capable of flying 300-500 miles or more. Giving the benefit of the doubt, one could posit that the carriers could 400nm + 500nm but still well within the strike envelope of numerous anti-ship missiles in the Chinese inventory not to mention the tremendous almost contiguous defense of the Chinese Pacific coast line in a deep anti-access/area denial (A2AD) barrier.

That rule of three also effects carrier deployment: operation deployment, return, recovery and training and finally return, refit and reconstitution for long loiter ship maintenance. There is a disturbing trend of multiyear dockside refit such as the USS George Washington which just took six years:

The Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington was officially handed back to the U.S. Navy yesterday, May 25, after an extended six-year overhaul that became a painful episode uncovering shortcomings in the Navy’s systems. The redelivery is nearly two years behind schedule after having lasted over 2,100 days

Six years.

And it won’t get better because there are only two ship-yards in the US capable of nuclear refitting of ships. The Congress has been trying to jump-start a third nuclear ship-yard but that is decades in the future if approved.

Beware of any performance data you see published, I just read this 2022 Congressional Research Service report on the F35 which still has performance parameters for range envelopes listed from 2007. I consider all of these parameters for the F35 suspect and exaggeration but for the sake of demonstration, I will roll with them. In carrier operations in a non-permissive hostile war environment, the carrier must be at half the strike range if it intends on retrieving aircraft. Thus in a speculative Pacific war campaign[s] against China contesting a Strait crossing for the invasion of Taiwan or merely hitting targets within China proper demands placement of the vulnerable carrier armadas within missile range of a salvo in quantity of known ship-killer munitions like the Dongfeng missile families.

You don’t have to sink a carrier, put a shaft out of action or a five degree list and it can’t launch aircraft (you had one job). But the technology and means of employment to sink a carrier is well within the current inventor and capability of peer players on the world stage.

It is expected that soon enough as Chinese technology continues forward, the carriers in the Pacific will be vulnerable to Chinese missile barrage in the ports on the West Coast. Oh and by the way, the US has no capability to defend in detail, in depth or contiguously along the coast against saturation missile or drone attacks. The Department of Defense uses the word but fails to employ defense as a means of fighting wars.

The shocking thing here is that your middling conflict observer writing this has access to all this information to a lesser degree than the bureaucracies of the US Navy, USMC and the intelligence agencies whose talent desks are very deep for these assessments. I have characterized the hazards of this against near-peer and peer competitors. Did I mention the US Navy just tucked tail and ran from the Red Sea when threatened by a power that has no navy: the Houthis in Yemen?

The costs of missiles for the US are rather alarming and in this inflation environment probably understated especially when levied against future production.

There’s real money when you add it up.

No one at the Pentagon has read Superiority by Arthur C. Clarke:

“The situation was now both serious and infuriating.  With stubborn conservatism and complete lack of imagination the enemy continued to advance with his old-fashioned and inefficient but now vastly more numerous ships.”

ComNavOps has some keen observations on this:

“Next, there's no such thing as even 30 aircraft per carrier available for strikes. The carrier group requires a dozen or so aircraft, at a minimum, from each carrier for group defense. It's combat, right? You're not going to send all your aircraft off on a strike and leave the carrier defenseless. Then, add in combat aircraft used for tanking, BARCAP, TARCAP, strike escort, high value unit (HVU) protection of Hawkeyes, tankers, and Growlers and you're be lucky to assemble six aircraft for the actual strike (see, "Carrier Strike") for a discussion of this. Now you see the folly in the Navy's downsizing of the air wings!

Finally, you're overlooking the impact of the loss of an aircraft (losses happen in combat with distressing regularity!). A million dollar missile can be replaced, notwithstanding our woefully low production rates, but a lost aircraft is pretty much a permanent loss. It takes years to produce an aircraft and even longer to train a pilot. We have no reserve replenishment squadrons. In fact, we only have 9 air wings for 11 carriers! If we lose an aircraft, there are no more coming in any useful time frame. Let's be optimistic and assume a 5% loss rate per strike. For the 40 aircraft involved in the overall strike, that's a loss of 2 aircraft. We said that we'd be lucky to assemble 6 actual strike aircraft so that means we could conduct three strikes and then we'd be out of strike-available aircraft! Remember, the supporting and defending requirements don't change just because you've lost some aircraft. Of course, if we lose, say 10% or 20% per strike against a peer defended target(s) then we're quickly and permanently out of the aircraft strike business for the duration of the war.”

Here’s the bottom line: despite the triumphalist narrative piped out of the Pentagon and its sycophants in the access/corporate media, the US Navy is a bottom tier first world surface fleet with also-rans in the NATO navies. It has been on a failure binge for three decades with the abysmal performance and costs overruns of the Little Crappy Ship, the Zumwalt disaster and the ghastly inability of the Ford super-carrier to reliably launch and retrieve aircraft (you had one job). You wed this to the colossal failures of aircraft generational maturity and the aging bomber fleet and the sole distinction that sets the US Navy apart is the nuclear submarine arm.

Take that out of the equation and the naval superiority of the US is matching its chances of air supremacy, superiority and dominance: zero.

Three characteristics mark the future of warfare in this century: autonomous targeting, robotics and hyper-velocity munitions and the offensive and defensive equations these throw into the conflict mix. All three are married to each other in a lethal hybrid cocktail that will determine who the hyper-military power will be for the remaining decades of the 21st century and it may not be America.

What is to be done?

In the conventional world of the Pentagon follies, they will not alter or eliminate the self-licking ice cream cone of the broken defense acquisition system in the West that has delivered the parade of program failures I have described here and in the past. This guarantees that US military power in the conventional realm will continue to whiter and eventually atrophy to the point of obsolescence and systemic failure.

In my world, America finally surrenders its prerogative to be a global superpower and assumes the mantle of a regional hegemon in the hemisphere and concentrates on assuring defense of the homeland instead of its imperial addiction to forever wars but that won’t happen.

In Jeff Vandenengel’s worldview, the Navy rapidly transforms itself to a Navy of the missile age and abandons the dying prospects of manned naval aviation. As good as his ideas are, the US has none of the manufacturing capacity, the engineering aptitude nor the defense acquisition system to allow this to happen.

Nor will he won’t be getting Christmas cards from the Aircraft Carrier Industrial Base Coalition.

The realpolitik navalist option accepts European corvette designs to replace the horrific LCS designs, continue with upgraded destroyer designs with no concurrent technology ship designs, retire the carrier force and let it become the reef complex it deserves. Increasing the size of the nuclear submarine force would leverage the sole distinct advantage the US has in naval employment and technology.

The future of American naval excellence and effectiveness is dim.