Monday, November 17, 2024

The Large-Deck Carrier: Doctrinal Roles and Campaign-Level Value

The large-deck aircraft carrier is predominantly associated with power projection ashore. This traces from U.S. Navy carrier air wings’ widespread post-Second World War use for conventional strike operations as well as for providing direct support to ground forces. Indeed, the most common criticisms against the large-deck carrier’s future utility are that potential adversaries’ rapidly expanding maritime denial capabilities, the presently-programmed air wing’s constrained combat radius, and long-range anti-ship missiles’ comparatively low lifecycle costs per target render carriers overly-vulnerable and expensive fleet assets with insufficient tactical reach.
The problem with these arguments is that the large-deck carrier’s wartime value cannot be accurately assessed outside a major maritime campaign’s holistic context. Doing so not only reveals that large-deck carriers’ survivability can be quite high if the combined arms doctrine governing their employment intelligently accounts for risk, but also that the carrier air wing’s innate capabilities will be indispensable in helping U.S. Navy forces obtain and then exercise localized sea control when and where operationally necessary. Such an assessment also suggests that carriers will play crucial roles supporting Joint power projection operations, and should a war become protracted, carriers will likely have to assume a significant share of the Joint force’s strike tasks if an American campaign’s operational tempo is to be sustained.

Carriers and Sea Control

A naval force’s execution of any task, power projection or otherwise, is predicated on it securing control of the localized sea area from which the task must be performed. This localized control is not (and cannot practically be) permanent; it only must be maintained as long as necessary to complete the task.[i] Occasionally control must be obtained over a relatively fixed area, such as when a force is supporting a major amphibious assault. A fixed area is also desirable when the choice is made to maximize aircraft sortie-rate efficiency during routinized overland operations, though this can only be done at low risk when the threats facing the force are minimal. Most commonly, though, sea control occurs as a localized ‘moving bubble’ of maritime superiority as a force maneuvers along its voyage route or within a large operating area.
It is easy to take localized sea control for granted, especially considering the U.S. Navy secured it practically by default during each of its post-1945 combat operations. The Cold War-era U.S. Navy harbored no illusions, however, regarding the sea control challenges it would have faced in forward areas as well as along allies’ oceanic lines of communication had there been a direct clash with the Soviet Union. In fact, the 1980s Maritime Strategy’s much-debated concept for surface operations within the Soviet maritime periphery was explicitly conditioned on the margin of sea control obtainable in any given area at any given time in a hypothetical major war.[ii] Similarly, Second World War U.S. Navy power projection in the Pacific was overwhelmingly tied to the fleet’s ability to attain localized sea control in support of each individual sequential operation. As such, it is worth noting U.S. Navy battleforce operations within Japanese home waters did not begin until February 1945, and even then consisted primarily of hit-and-run land-attack raids due to residual Japanese sea denial capabilities. In both these historical cases, large-deck carrier air wings’ screening, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities figured prominently in securing the localized sea control needed for power projection tasks.
It is true that from December 1941 through the early 1980s, the large-deck carrier’s primary sea control role supporting power projection was to protect itself from attack. This was because carriers, by virtue of hosting the air wing’s strike aircraft, represented the fleet’s core land-attack assets. The other warships within a carrier group therefore served almost exclusively as defensive screens.
The U.S. Navy’s fielding of the Tomahawk land-attack cruise missile altered this arrangement. Launchable by submarines and surface combatants alike, Tomahawk permitted striking power’s distribution throughout a dispersed battleforce. What did not change, though, was surface combatants’ reliance on the carrier’s air wing for outer layer screening support. This support was especially crucial when sufficiently dense, timely, or persistent land-based air support for screening was unavailable—a common condition within contested forward zones or mid-oceanic areas. Only the air wing under such circumstances could intercept massed multi-axis maritime aircraft raids hundreds of miles away from a battleforce, and thereby reduce the number of inbound anti-ship missiles that friendly surface combatants had to defend against. Likewise, only the air wing could rapidly respond to a brief detection of an enemy submarine beyond a few tens of miles from a battleforce’s warships when land-based anti-submarine support was excessively distant. Perhaps most significantly, only the air wing could persistently seek out and neutralize adversary surveillance/reconnaissance patrols far beyond the latter’s maximum effective range for detecting and classifying a battleforce warships—or for uncovering the battleforce’s deception and concealment efforts.
The air wing’s outer layer screening role has not evaporated. Instead, it has been tacitly deemphasized over the past two decades of relatively-unopposed U.S. Navy operations. Aegis surface combatants, the middle layer of 1980s battleforce air defenses, largely became the de facto post-Cold War outer layer due to the vastly reduced threat. Carrier and surface combatant-based helicopters likewise served as a battleforce’s sole anti-submarine ‘pouncers’ when land-based fixed-wing maritime patrol aircraft were unavailable.
These assignments will likely remain adequate for most contingencies involving lesser powers, though U.S. Navy battleforces’ standoff distances from land during a crisis or a war’s early phases may need to be situationally increased somewhat to complicate such an adversary’s surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting tasks. In contrast, the post-Cold War battleforce screening ‘status quo’ will not be adequate for contingencies involving great powers who possess theater-wide sea denial capabilities. Under such circumstances, and notwithstanding its continuing role providing support to maritime ground force operations, the air wing will need to reassert its historical doctrinal role as a battleforce’s primary outer layer screen.

Tomorrow, the doctrinal relationships between carriers and surface combatants


[i] Julian S. Corbett. Principles of Maritime Strategy. (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004), 100-102, 202, 268.
[ii] John B. Hattendorf and Peter M. Swartz, eds. “Naval War College Newport Papers 33: U.S. Naval Strategy in the 1980s.” (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, December 2008), 82, 85, 176, 178, 183, 185, 216, 219, 297, 320-321. Of interest, early 1980s U.S. Navy war games conducted in support of the maritime strategy’s development suggested carrier groups could exploit Soviet strategy and doctrine by serving as an at-sea ‘force-in-being’ that tied down sizable Soviet air forces during a major conflict. Carriers performing this role would operate in forward North Atlantic areas firmly controlled by NATO. See John B. Hattendorf. “Naval War College Newport Papers 19: Evolution of the U.S. Navy’s Maritime Strategy, 1977-1986.” (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, December 2004), 35.

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