The Gray Lady and Stripe-Stacked Sara

In 1916 Congress authorized two battle cruisers of 35,300 long tons with seven funnels and boilers disposed on two deck levels, but the ships were never built before World War I ended. After the war, and as a result of the lessons thereof, the ships were redesignated CC-1 and CC-3 in 1919. The ships were laid down as part of an order for six smaller battle cruisers on January 8, 2024 by Fore River Shipbuilding Company in Massachusetts.

The Washington Naval Conference changed those plans, and all six battle cruisers were to be sent to the scrap yard as part of the Washington Naval Treaty. At the time the United States was the only great Navy in the world that did not have modern aircraft carriers. The Navy roster contained the names of the Wright and Langley as "Motherships for navy planes," but the speed of both of those carriers was so inadequate that the treaty did not consider them of sufficient importance to even mention either ship.

Recognizing the US Navy was lagging behind the rest of the world in aircraft carriers, assistant secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt decided that rather than build two new aircraft carriers at $80,000,000, $40,000,000 would be spent to convert the two battle cruisers that were most advanced in construction at the time into aircraft carriers. The result was two 33,000 ton, 35 knot aircraft carriers known today at USS Lexington (CV-2) and USS Saratoga (CV-3). When both aircraft carriers were commissioned in 1927, they were among the largest capital ships in the US Navy and were the fastest capital ships in the world.

Even more interesting, both aircraft carriers were among the most expensive Navy ships built up to that point in the inter-war years, and the primary role of aircraft carriers was designated as scouting. Chris Cavas had a great article on the topic in April, and he described the early challenges to fielding a first in type ship like aircraft carriers:

But the ships’ entry into service heralded the onset of an intense period of conceptual and technical development that took place between 1927 and the end of 1942. Areas of debate included:

• What’s the best way to form up aircraft to land on the ship? How should a landing signal officer communicate with the aircraft? How should the plane be trapped on deck — with a fore-and-aft wire system or a cross-deck configuration with arresting wires? Should planes be struck down to the hangar as they’re landed — as the British did — or should they be bunched forward to bring planes aboard faster but run the risk of greater damage if a plane crashes into the group? What sort of flight deck barriers could be developed?
• Should the ship have an open hangar to warm up planes before they’re brought to the flight deck, or have a more secure, closed hangar which precluded running engines? Is a second hangar necessary? How should maintenance shops be organized? Should more planes be stowed in the overhead or kept intact at all times? What’s the best way to handle weapons stowage — deep in the ship for protection or closer to the hangar or flight deck for ease of operation?
• Should the hangar be part of the ship’s hull or superstructure? Should the deck be armored for protection at the penalty of fewer aircraft, or wooden, allowing more aircraft to be carried but also more easily damaged? Should a control island be provided or the flight deck kept completely clear? Which side is best for the island?
• What’s the best way to spot planes for takeoff? What are the most efficient and expedient — and safest — flight deck procedures? What problems are there between operating different types of aircraft? How can you get large numbers of planes into the air and form up efficiently?
• How do you operate aircraft in the air? Should fighters stay with fighters, scout planes with scout planes, torpedo planes with torpedo planes? How do groups communicate? How do aircraft handle open-water navigation? Can a single pilot handle that? How do you find the carrier when it’s time to come home?
• Is the air group part of the ship’s crew, or is it better to keep it separate? Do squadrons stay with the wing or rotate in and out?
• What is the role of carriers in the fleet? Are they just scouts for the battle line? Do they have an offensive role? How much of one? What are the best applications for an offensive role? Should carriers operate alone, in pairs or in larger groups? Should they be bunched together during combat or kept over the horizon from each other?
• What are the command and control differences between the ship’s captain and the air group commander? The commodore or the admiral? The group commander and the squadrons?
• What are the best aircraft designs? Fighters, bombers and torpedo planes typically had front-line service periods sometimes measured in only a few years or months because of the pace of development.

All that and much more occupied those 16 years, even as the Navy designed and built more carriers.

What would it look like today if we knew this little about the concept of operations of a ship type and yet committed to building several of these ships as part of a very expensive program? Today it would look like the Littoral Combat Ship program.

Good thing the internet didn't exist in 1927, because Theodore Roosevelt would have been tarred and feathered for being an advocate of aircraft carriers for the US Navy. It is vogue today to criticize supporters of the Littoral Combat Ship, because just like the aircraft carrier of 1927, the LCS today is a lightly armed, expensive, new type of ship that will field an immature technology, and to top things off the Navy cannot articulate a concept of operations for the LCS in 2011 - just like the aircraft carrier of 1927.

In 1927 it was understood that aircraft had a future role in the US Navy, but because Americans didn't fully understand the scope of the challenges nor the extent of the cost - there were few complaints. That doesn't mean aircraft carriers were popular in the late 1920s and early 1930s, because in the Navy they were not. In 2011 Americans fully understand that unmanned systems have a future role in the US Navy. Americans also have access to information that describes the scope of the challenges and the extent of the cost of development required for LCS.

But who in the Navy is out articulating what the Littoral Combat Ship is for the Navy? Who is describing what this program means to the taxpayer? Who is adding context when any shipbuilding program runs into problems? Who is discussing solutions to those problems? The answer to all of those questions is...

Not the US Navy.

The aircraft carrier had advocates, not in public but where it counted in politics and inside the Navy. They were the minority. At the time there was no need to advocate ideas publicly, so very little public dissemination of potential naval capabilities that the aircraft carrier offered the nation was necessary. The LCS on the other hand, is widely unpopular, despite a general awareness that the Navy needs unmanned technologies - particularly in the context of reducing costs. Doesn't matter because all the public focus is on the hull, and not enough is on the modules - which is the real substance of the program that makes LCS important in the first place.

The Littoral Combat Ship program is the subject of a fierce debate that strikes to the heart of credibility of the Navy's future operating environment with unmanned systems, and leadership is absent. Imagine having a fierce debate about the combat capabilities of aircraft carriers, but you can't include the air wing as part of that capability. That's the heart of the LCS discussion today, and it isn't unlike the scenario faced by aircraft carriers in 1927 - which had very little combat capabilities, and even the combat capabilities of the air wing was little more than the equivalent of a PowerPoint presentation.

People want the LCS to be something it is not. It doesn't fight like a conventional surface combatant, so from that perspective the ship is flawed as a warship. The LCS doesn't field the offboard firepower of the modern aircraft carrier, so from that perspective the ship is flawed as a mothership. The great hurdle the LCS faces is that people must imagine it is even possible to fight a ship different than existing ships fight today, using weapons systems that are different than and used differently than what is used today. That was the doctrinal hurdle that many of the Battleship Admirals could never make in the 1920s and 1930s prior to Pearl Harbor. History repeats itself.

Whether it is OPNAV or NAVSEA, there is a wardroom crowded with Admirals somewhere who collectively never truly understood what Huntington was trying to say, and the fierce debate of the Littoral Combat Ship hull combat capability is striking evidence the Navy cannot articulate a vision for the future of distributed naval battle networks that include unmanned systems - because if they could, that would be the LCS discussion today.