Sea Lanes Protection Between the First and Second Island Chains in a Notional Sino-American War

On Tuesday, I summarized China’s potential wartime anti-ship capabilities between the First and Second Island Chains. It stands to reason that the U.S. and allied ability to avoid or parry any PLA attacks in these waters would depend upon the margin of temporary localized maritime superiority—or sea control, if you will—that could be extended around a transiting convoy, replenishment group, or naval battleforce.[i] This margin would likely be highest in the waters that could be persistently covered by fighters, Airborne Early Warning (AEW) aircraft, and wide-area anti-submarine aircraft operating from the Marianas, Japanese home islands, or the central/southern Philippines.

As this sea control coverage thinned out with range, PLA forces would in theory gain more operational flexibility. This might be offset, however, through the intelligent use of the one or two U.S. Navy aircraft carriers available in theater during a war’s opening weeks. I’ve previously noted how these carriers ought to be used to provide situation-dependent sea control support to Surface Action Groups (SAG) operating further forward, and alluded to their utility in providing situation-dependent tactical support to defenders in embattled First Island Chain territories like the Ryukyus. The positioning required for those tasks could also allow their fighters and AEW aircraft to screen CLF groups, military sealift convoys, and prioritized commercial vessels transiting outside effective land-based air coverage. With two carriers working together, it might even be possible to occasionally use actual or simulated shipping as ‘bait’ for luring Chinese strike aircraft raids into aerial ambushes.

It additionally should be noted that the U.S. and allied ability to delay or prevent the Chinese Ocean Surveillance System (COSS) from locating and correctly classifying transiting ships would severely complicate the PLA’s ability to cue effective anti-ship attacks. Emissions control, operational and tactical deception, and physical as well as electronic attacks against COSS assets would be essential aspects of any U.S. and allied sea lanes protection campaign. Emissions control and tactical deception would also greatly complicate PLA strike aircraft and submarines’ job of locating, correctly classifying, and targeting protected shipping. The use of “decoy groups,” perhaps using a mix of unmanned systems and actual manned low campaign-value platforms that together simulated a convoy or naval battleforce, might induce PLA attackers to waste precious time and weapons inventories engaging false targets. Better yet, it might cause them to move out of positions from which they could detect and intercept actual shipping. Attacking decoys would be particularly harmful to PLAN submarines, as every weapon wasted (and in the case of AIP boats, fuel burned moving into attack position and then "breaking datum") would eat into the amount of time the boat could remain on patrol before needing to head home for replenishment, and the time spent "breaking datum" would be time the boat would not be able to hunt effectively. Effective deception and concealment would likely have detrimental psychological effects on PLAAF and PLAN crews; over time these effects might become debilitating—and highly exploitable by U.S. and allied forces in their own right.

Lastly, U.S. political leadership might opt to selectively strike PLAAF airbases, PLAN submarine bases, and related PLA infrastructure on the Chinese mainland with long-range guided munitions in order to suppress PLA operational tempo. This would be especially likely if the PLA had set the escalation precedent of striking allied territories first at the opening of the war. Such strikes would have to be highly bounded and selective in terms of their targets in order to mitigate escalation risks. U.S. Navy submarines and U.S. Air Force intercontinental-range strike aircraft would probably perform these strikes, with additional strikes launched from Aegis combatants operating as offensive SAGs. Reducing the PLA’s ability to cycle anti-ship attackers into the Western Pacific would be of immeasurable help to the sea lanes protection effort.

With all these combined arms contributions in mind, the principal screening challenge from a surface combatant standpoint would be defending convoys and CLF ships against “leaker” anti-ship missiles fired by PLA strike aircraft and "pop-up” missile or torpedo attacks by PLAN submarines. The density of the PLA threat in a given area arguably would determine an escort’s necessary capabilities. Aegis combatants’ area air defense capabilities would probably be highly desirable for escort missions in the vicinity of the Ryukyus, Taiwan, and Luzon given the proximity to the Chinese mainland. It’s important to remember, though, that the U.S. only has nine Aegis combatants permanently homeported in Japan (with two more coming by 2017), and these warships would probably be charged with escorting the Navy’s Japan-homeported carrier, protecting the Navy’s Japan-homeported amphibious warships, executing offensive SAG missions, and performing ballistic missile defense tasks. The Navy has thirty-eight other Aegis combatants homeported in the Pacific, eleven of which are homeported in Pearl Harbor. However, not all would be surgeable due to the inter-deployment maintenance and training cycle (and this says nothing of the surge-readiness impacts stemming from the 2011 Budget Control Act). We might theorize that of the five West Coast-based carrier battleforces, the first might already be forward deployed in or near the Western Pacific as a crisis peaked, the second and third might be surgeable for arrival forward within 30 days, the fourth might be surgeable within 90 days, and the fifth would have to complete its ships’ (abbreviated) overhauls and pre-deployment workups before surging. Some of these Aegis combatants would not be detachable from their carrier battleforces, and those that were detachable might be needed more for offensive SAG operations.

Not all of the Aegis combatants would necessarily deploy with carriers, though. If we assume that two-thirds of the Pearl Harbor contingent surged as a crisis peaked, we might have seven Aegis combatants available for tasking along the First Island Chain. These warships would be well-placed for protecting shipping to the Ryukyus, Luzon, or eastern Taiwan. Even so, their use for these missions would trade against their use in offensive SAG operations.

The story would be similar with respect to the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force’s (JMSDF) Aegis contingent. Japan fields six Aegis DDGs and plans to build two more by 2020. Nevertheless, their principal mission of homeland ballistic missile defense would prevent some number of them from performing sea lanes defense operations. The South Korean Navy’s three Aegis DDGs are not counted in this analysis as it is unlikely they would be offered up for operations that did not involve direct defense of their country’s sea lanes.

It should be clear that Aegis combatants’ use for direct protection of shipping would trade against a large number of other high-priority missions. Moreover, Aegis combatants would generally be tethered to the western half of the waters between the two island chain lines. This would hardly preclude their use for sea lanes and CLF protection, for example as a forward screening layer by virtue of their positions, but they probably wouldn’t be able to closely escort shipping all the way from port to port.

Therein lies the logic of a small surface combatant possessing medium-range anti-air and anti-submarine capabilities. Such a combatant would be entirely sufficient for close escort within waters in which air defense is provided by friendly AEW and fighter aircraft supported by aerial refueling aircraft. Closer to the Ryukyus-Taiwan-Luzon line, this kind of combatant would backstop Aegis combatants’ defensive coverage of a convoy.

The proposed LCS-derived frigate will possess the towed active and passive sonar arrays as well as helicopter capabilities needed for effective anti-submarine warfare. CSBA’s Bryan Clark has also outlined how it could receive the requisite anti-air capabilities for shipping escort.[ii] These improvements would not allow the LCS-derived frigate to detect a submarine-launched sea-skimming anti-ship cruise missile raid beyond effective shipboard radar coverage, though. Land or sea-based AEW support via the Navy Integrated Fire Control-Counter Air capability would be crucial to that end.

Bryan has additionally proposed a longer-range shipboard anti-submarine missile than the legacy Vertical Launch Anti-Submarine Rocket; such a weapon could be very effective in disrupting a PLAN submarine’s attack preparations.[iii] It’s worth pointing out that if COSS could not provide a PLAN submarine with a targeting-quality tactical picture to support firing anti-ship cruise missiles from over-the-horizon, the PLAN submarine would have to close within the range of its onboard sensors. If we assume the primary use of sonar for this purpose, that range might be one to two convergence zones from a target (perhaps 30 nautical miles in the first case and 60 nautical miles in the second case). A shipboard “rocket-thrown torpedo” able to quickly reach out to the first convergence zone and ideally also the second would thus be highly useful.

It’s important to note that the JMSDF already fields two light destroyer/heavy frigate classes that would anchor shipping protection in the approaches to the Japanese home islands and Ryukyus.[iv] As I noted earlier, though, there might not be enough of them to fully carry the shipping escort load within the waters Japan was primarily responsible for protecting. This suggests the utility of the LCS-derived frigate gaining medium-range anti-air capabilities.

One final point is that there would be a demand for LCS-derived frigates to participate in offensive SAGs. It would accordingly be desirable to backfit as much of the LCS-derived frigates’ anti-surface and anti-submarine capabilities as possible into legacy LCS hulls in order to free up as many of the frigates as possible for shipping protection tasks. The logic for using backfit LCSs instead of the frigates in forward-operating SAGs is simple: since the frigates are not presently slotted to receive medium-range air defense capabilities, and since Aegis combatants would be principally responsible for SAG air defense anyway, then the inclusion of backfit-improved LCSs instead of air defense-capable frigates in the SAGs would not alter the existing concept of operations.

The bottom line is that protection of shipping, including the CLF, would likely be far more resource-intensive than is often assumed in the strategy debates. Sea lanes protection would be absolutely critical to the U.S. prevailing in the war, and as such merits extensive study and analysis. I will note that I have never participated in campaign analysis of these questions, nor have I ever been “read into” any such analyses that might have been conducted. Detailed quantitative analysis may very well prove that some of my key assumptions and conclusions are incorrect. Even so, my errors almost certainly center on the specifics of the threat and not on its general nature or the needed seriousness of the offsetting response.

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not reflect the official positions of Systems Planning and Analysis, and to the author’s knowledge do not reflect the policies or positions of the U.S. Department of Defense, any U.S. armed service, or any other U.S. Government agency.

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[i] The discussion that follows is heavily influenced by CAPT William J. Toti, USN (Retired). “The Hunt for Full-Spectrum ASW.” Naval Institute Proceedings 140, No. 6, June 2014. Toti’s article is seminal on modern anti-submarine warfare and should be read in its entirety in parallel to this post.

[ii] See Bryan Clark. “Commanding the Seas: A Plan to Reinvigorate U.S. Navy Surface Warfare.” (Washington, D.C., Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2014), 27, 50-51.

[iii] Ibid; 27.

[iv] A third similarly-capable JMSDF destroyer class exists but would generally be tied to providing air defense support to Kongo-class DDGs on ballistic missile defense patrols.

The Future of Naval Warfare is Swarming, or… Distribute Everything

A few weeks ago, two esteemed navalists debated the future of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier at the U.S. Naval Academy. To provide an overly-simplistic summation of this debate, retired Navy Captain and think-tank fellow Jerry Hendrix believes that the days of super carriers should be numbered in favor of more (affordable) platforms, such as large-deck amphibious ships, missile carrying submarines, and future semi-submersibles embarking unmanned vehicles. But fellow ID poster Bryan McGrath argues that supercarriers - more (capable) platforms - will continue to provide value and versatility in future conflicts. They were both correct - to an extent.  CVNs have proven their value in war and peace since their inception and will continue to serve the fleet proudly for decades.  But they are expensive, and getting more unaffordable with every iteration.  Bryan notes that despite its extravagant cost, a carrier represents a mere rounding error in the overall federal budget.  Though true, this wishful thinking doesn't make a larger fleet any closer reality than it has been since the heady days of the (almost) 600 ship navy.  

Our super-carrier fleet has shrunk from 14 to essentially 10 over the course of a quarter-century. Nuclear carriers, the centerpiece of today’s fleet, can only be in one place at one time.  Fewer carriers means less forward deployed presence.  Jerry has favored a fleet of more numerous and affordable "Fords" over pricier "Ferraris" for years now, and it is his vision that more closely matches the direction of future war at sea - distributed operations and swarming. 

I first wrote about swarms here about three years ago. My thinking on this concept has evolved as the U.S. Navy has now begun research and development on unmanned air and surface swarming technology in earnest.  Increasing portions of the research portfolios at DARPA, ONR, and the Naval Postgraduate school are focused on autonomy and swarming.

Defining the New Swarm
First, some history is order.  In some respects, the aircraft carrier was the platform that originally brought swarming to modern naval warfare - though one could look back somewhat further to the triremes of antiquity for tactics that somewhat resemble swarming. In World War II, dozens of U.S. and Japanese fleet carriers operated across the Western Pacific, carrying hundreds of aircraft that swarmed to attack and defend enemy surface ships and island bases. Future swarming will occur at both the tactical and operational levels. Though with projected force structure, surging three, maybe four carriers at any time to a given theater is going to be a challenge. Discounting casualties (a big assumption), maintaining them forward deployed over the course of a protracted naval campaign would be virtually impossible.  So how will tomorrow's smaller fleet be able to project power - both ashore and at sea across battle areas spanning millions of square miles in a major war?

Japan’s kamikaze attacks were another early form of naval swarming.   By some estimates, the Divine Wind suicide attacks accounted for up to 80 percent of U.S. Navy losses in the final phase of the Pacific war.  Although they were lethally effective, the lives of thousands of pilots sacrificed to execute these attacks accelerated the attrition of the Japanese war machine that ultimately led to its defeat.                                            

In the past decade, the Iranian fast attack craft swarming threat has driven significant discussion in U.S. Navy circles, ranging from grave concern to outright dismissal.  To address these sorts of threats, the Navy has acquired and deployed various countermeasures, such the LCS/FF surface package and USS Ponce’s laser system.  Developing hardware to counter swarming isn’t enough.  Iran’s multi-pronged sea denial threat illustrates some of the aspects of future naval swarms that will be emulated by other potential adversaries and friendly navies alike.  

Despite our best attempts, future enemies and conflict drivers are difficult to predict. But it is likely that increasingly affordable and numerous autonomous systems will make swarming a common tactic in the future, employed by both state and non-state maritime powers.  I strongly recommend Paul Scharre's work to understand the nature of military swarms and how they might be employed. What follows are some thoughts on how swarms might work in the naval milieu. 

Naval swarms require numbers.

A swarm is designed to overwhelm targeting systems and magazine capacity with its size.  Unlike the Japanese kamikazes, low cost, unmanned autonomous platforms will alleviate any qualms about mass human casualties on the side of the swarmers.  

By employing distributed maritime operations, a single surface platform with embarked unmanned vehicles can operate over a wider area than one without.  Using a multi-tiered hub-and-spoke concept, a large surface ship should be capable of simultaneously operating dozens of air, surface, and sub-surface vessels. So while a traditional surface ship might operate a boat or two and the same number of helicopters, using unmanned vehicles, that same platform can deploy numerous sensors and weapons at a considerable distance from the ship across all maritime domains.

Naval swarms will be multi-domain.  Manned and unmanned platforms will coordinate in the air, under, and on the sea.  The cyber and space domains are already integral to naval warfare and will remain so.  Investments in these areas will remain viable, but agility and upgradeability should be the hallmark attributes for future cyber and space programs.

Herd. Defend. Distract. Attack.

Naval swarms will be multi-dimensional.  Swarms will not simply attack, they will deceive, distract, and defend.  Multi-dimensional platforms - dissimilar and similar, will collaborate autonomously to disable command networks, insert malicious code into control systems, and yes, destroy enemy vessels.  As Scharre notes, swarming is not the same as network-centric warfare. Controlling data-links will be not necessary when autonomy, local visual or acoustic sensors, and insect (or fish-like) intelligence enable tiny platforms to collaborate.

So what sort of platforms will compose future naval swarms? Increasingly, miniaturization and unmanned systems will allow smaller platforms to enjoy the the plug-and-play payload versatility that Bryan rightly argues make the super-carrier so valuable. Somewhere between today's high end fleet and tomorrow's nano-swarms are distributed naval operations.   

Existing and planned surface combatants
Though high in quality, today's fleet is smaller in quantity than needed for future distributed operations. Although a "thousand ship" multi-national navy has possible utility in peacetime, what happens in time of war, when partners go wobbly? I have advocated for distributed operations at sea to include distributed firepower for about five years now.  So it warmed my heart to see surface warfare leadership take an interest in distributed lethality in a recent Proceedings article and in subsequent public comments. 

Future warfare will require more than just a new generation of weapons onboard planned combatants. The LCS/FF and SSC, warts and all, will be critically important, given their numbers and versatility at carrying various payloads. By adapting smaller unmanned payloads, each ship will be able to launch a mini-swarm.  These platforms will aggregate and disperse as the tactical situation dictates.  Of course, carriers and large deck amphibious ships will remain valuable for the foreseeable future, simply because of their massive capacity to carry smaller vehicles.  Additionally, the vision of long range, persistent, even armed UAVs embarked on every surface combatant is slowly edging closer to reality with research programs such as DARPA’s TERN. Realizing the full potential of distributed warfare at sea will require will a variety of vessels to augment the conventional fleet, which is unlikely to grow much at all. 

Non-traditional naval platforms

Military Sealift Command Ships embarking adaptive force packages, such as the JHSV and MLP, will by virtue of their payload capacity, speed, and numbers, become a component of the distributed swarm. Does it make more sense for a $3 billion destroyer or a naval auxiliary costing a tenth that amount to sit in mod-loc for weeks at a time as a host platform for an ISR UAV? If the LCS/FF can host offboard mine-countermeasures systems, then why can't the JHSV? Should amphibious ships continue to perform nine and ten month deployments when we have equally spacious USNS ships with flight decks sitting in reduced operating status? The legal issues raised with employing USNS ships in combat situations can, and should be overcome with some creative lawyering.  

Expeditionary Swarming

Swarming gets even more chaotic where the sea meets the land and increasingly dense urban populations reside. David Kilcullen has laid out a future of swarming maneuver doctrine already embraced by many urban guerrillas.                            

Ever since J.F.C. Fuller, in 1918, the foundational concept of maneuver doctrine for the 20th century is not to fight the enemy bit by bit, but to find his headquarters and put a pistol shot into the brain. Fuller talks about finding and killing the enemy headquarters, putting a deep penetration armored unit behind the frontline looking for the enemy headquarters to kill it. That is on what blitzkrieg is based on, it’s what Russian maneuver warfare is based on, it is a fundamental guiding idea for Liddell Hart or Guderian. The scary thing that Black Hawk down tells you is that because of how these guys operate-- with tactics completely emergent within a self synchronizing swarm-- there is actually no headquarters in the Western sense. The guy I sat with, a Somali brigade commander, didn’t have a bunch of guys with radios in a command and control center. What he had, it was walkie talkie and a larger truck than everybody else, carrying a reserve of fighters and ammo. He just listened on the radio and drove around the battlefield to where the fighting was heaviest. He didn’t need to give an order for the attack because the self-synchronizing tactical system didn’t require that. The scary thing that Black Hawk Down tells you is that if the Rangers were able to capture Aidid, it might not have any effect at all. They were going after a headquarters that didn’t exist.

American special operations forces are already doing distributed warfare.  Several SOC-Forward headquarters are deployed across the globe, each one composed of very small teams of multidisciplinary operators and enablers conducting training, information operations, civil affairs, and direct action.   The Marine Corps is also experimenting with distributing smaller units of action, both ashore and afloat.                  

Unconventional players

A small sample of the largest surrogate fleet in the world...

Naval swarms will not consist solely of naval combatants. What I call naval unconventional warfare - essentially the use of maritime surrogates to achieve naval objectives - will feature prominently in future swarm warfare at sea.  China’s massive fishing fleets are already demonstrating a form of surrogate swarming in the South China Sea.  

These non-state maritime actors - some working at the behest of nation states and others on their own accord - will complicate rules of engagement, entice overreaction, disrupt surface movement, and in some some cases, attack as swarms.

On the air side, commercial drones, of which 32,000 are estimated to be flying in the next decade (most not in the U.S.), along with of hundreds thousands of personal drones, will be pulled into this unconventional swarming threat. Currently light-weight and short-ranged, civilian UAVs will expand in capability more rapidly than their military counter-parts.

Physics Gets a Vote

A solid argument against this vision is that smaller platforms, be they a combatant ship, unmanned underwater vehicle, or unmanned air vehicle, are limited in range and payload capacity.  Notionally, shorter-legged vehicles dispersed over hundreds or thousands of miles require more frequent resupply and refueling (or recharging).  However, innovative ways of resupply will mitigate some of these concerns. Along these lines, the Navy’s recent choice of the V-22 as a carrier onboard delivery (COD) aircraft will greatly enhance the fleet’s distributed logistics capabilities.  The COD will move parts and people not only for the single deployed carrier and its air-wing, but for amphibious ships and smaller combatants (via vertrep) within hundreds of miles of the carrier.  Commonality with Marine Corps and Air Force Special Operations Command Ospreys will bring operational, maintenance, and training efficiencies.  

Unmanned vehicles operating at the edge of the battlespace will require new concepts in afloat logistics.  Moored undersea docking stations to recharge the batteries of long range UUVs should be designed for air or surface deployment.  Unmanned air vehicles flying from surface ships will also support vertical resupply of distributed sea and ground elements operating hundreds of miles from their motherships.  This concept has been demonstrated successfully ashore with the K-MAX rotary wing vehicle which flew more than 17,000 sorties in Afghanistan, delivering over four million pounds of supplies to Marines in remote forward operating bases. Even small patrol vessels operating alone and unafraid could be partially refueled by air, using blivets (from drones, of course) or conceivably, a reverse helicopter in-flight refueling (HIFR) system from the V-22.  Moreover, surface ships with shallower drafts, such as the FF and JHSV can pull into more austere and remote ports for upkeep than their deep draft counter-parts. 

The Future is Clear as Mud

It’s possible that this future is unrealistic, and large combatants - including the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier - will reign the seas for decades, if not centuries to come.  But given the changing rate of technology, an entirely different scenario is not implausible.  In Peter Diamandis' new book BOLD, futurist Ray Kurzweil portrays a future dominated by nanosystems, artificial intelligence, and yes, singularity.  Diamandis discusses some of these astounding (and somewhat scary) predictions for the not too far out future:

By the 2020s, most diseases will go away as nanobots become smarter than current medical technology. Normal human eating can be replaced by nanosystems. The Turing test begins to be passable. Self-driving cars begin to take over the roads, and people won’t be allowed to drive on highways.

By the 2030s, virtual reality will begin to feel 100% real. We will be able to upload our mind/consciousness by the end of the decade.

By the 2040s, non-biological intelligence will be a billion times more capable than biological intelligence (a.k.a. us). Nanotech foglets will be able to make food out of thin air and create any object in physical world at a whim.

By 2045, we will multiply our intelligence a billionfold by linking wirelessly from our neocortex to a synthetic neocortex in the cloud.

Extrapolating just a few of these trends into naval warfare, one begins to see a very different future emerge than one dominated by a handful of $15 billion capital ships.  Thousands of autonomously navigating civilian and military unmanned surface vessels, such as the “Sea Hunter” prototype currently undergoing testing, will share the seas with manned vessels.  These vessels will be large, small, and very small, and much cheaper to operate than their manned equivalents.  

If Kurzweil is even partially accurate, nanobots will eventually become naval weapons in their own right.  Dispersed from the air prior to hostilities, they will float dormant like plankton in shipping lanes until they recognize an enemy ship. They will then swarm the vessel’s seawater intakes, disable engines, sensors, and perhaps even crew.  Airborne nano-bots floating in the trade winds will be attracted to electromagnetic emissions and disable radar array faces. 

Far-fetched? Perhaps, but then again, twenty five years ago, how many of us expected to always carry a pocket-sized device that responds to voice commands enabling us access to most of the world’s information wirelessly? Kurzweil did.

Because the only certainty is that disruptive technological change will continue to accelerate apace, investments in extremely expensive singular-unit force structure (both air and naval) must be viewed with circumspect.  Simply put - if we don't figure out naval swarming, the democratization of technology today means somebody else will. America's traditional battle force fleet can - and should - be expanded as the fiscal and political environment dictates. But careful investments in an alternative portfolio emphasizing distributed naval operations and swarming will hedge future uncertainty that is sure to result from coming technological disruption.

 The opinions and views expressed in this post are those of the author alone and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Defense or any of its agencies.

The CSBA Monograph on U.S. Navy Surface Forces

Over the holiday I read Bryan Clark’s study on reinvigorating U.S. Navy’s surface forces’ abilities to perform sea control tasks. His commendable work casts a light on surface Navy issues that generally don’t receive much attention from the think tank community—and certainly not at such high levels of detail and fluency.

Bryan’s core argument is that the surface Navy is disproportionately organized and armed for reactive defense, and that this implicitly contradicts the maxim that the side that effectively employs its offensive weaponry first in naval battle is generally victorious. He also observes that the primary weapons the surface Navy uses for defense are often at a sizable cost-per-engagement disadvantage to the offensive weapons they counter. These considerations lead him to suggest the surface Navy should cede defensive depth against an adversary’s inbound weapons in exchange for a combination of increased offensive armaments capacity and increased inner-layer defensive density. By doing so, he argues, the surface Navy would be better able to disrupt or destroy adversary platforms before the latter could attack effectively, and any weapons the adversary did succeed in launching would have to contend with a deep (and cost-per-engagement advantageous) arsenal of multiple overlapping short/medium-range defensive systems. 

Bryan addresses quite a number of topics including fleet doctrine, top-level requirements for weapons, ideal characteristics for the LCS-derived Small Surface Combatant, and potential uses of U.S. Coast Guard and Military Sealift Command (MSC) ships to shoulder more of the overseas maritime security cooperation task load. Since several of his ideas relate closely to subjects I wrote about last fall, I will focus my commentary accordingly.

Sea Control, Campaign Design, and the Carrier-Surface Combatant Relationship

Bryan asserts that the Navy’s surface combatants must possess some capacity for attaining and then holding sea control (e.g., a temporary local margin of naval superiority) on their own in a notional major conflict because large-deck carriers’ air wings might not be available to contribute. I strongly agree, but my reasoning is different.

Bryan suggests the carriers’ unavailability might result from their being engaged in power projection operations elsewhere in theater. It seems unlikely, though, that conditions could be shaped to allow carrier battleforces to operate deep within a contested zone at a tolerable degree of risk relatively early in a conflict against a strong adversary. This would be especially true if the contested zone’s inner sections were adjacent to the adversary’s own borders. Furthermore, it normally takes a minimum of two carriers on scene to conduct sustained land-attack operations in even a lesser contingency, let alone to conduct operations of any kind inside a contested zone. Given that the presently-programmed 30-year carrier force structure means deployments of a single carrier within a given region will be the norm unless a crisis erupts, and given that the time lag for a second carrier to arrive on the periphery of a contested zone from elsewhere could be measured in weeks, there is a considerable chance that insufficient carriers would be on hand to perform early-phase land-attack strike tasks. For these reasons, the largest share of these early-phase tasks deep inside the contested zone would likely be allocated to missile-armed submarines and land-based long-range aircraft. Not only would these platforms be less vulnerable in such areas to the adversary’s attacks than carriers, but they would also be comparatively more available for this tasking.

Unlike the case with early-phase deep power projection, however, a battleforce containing a single carrier could contribute immensely to protecting situationally prioritized segments of the sea and air lines of communication that are necessary for U.S. military access to the combat theater as well as for embattled allies’ economic sustenance. A single-carrier battleforce operating from the contested zone’s periphery could similarly provide support to operations by Surface Action Groups (SAG) or other friendly forces further forward on a periodic basis. These would arguably be the most important—and in some cases, irreplaceable—roles for carriers during the early phases of a major maritime war.

This is where the doctrinal changes and capability enhancements Bryan recommends come into play. The in-theater carrier shortage means that mission-tailored U.S. Navy SAGs must be able to operate at some distance inside a contested zone for multi-day periods with limited to no external air support at a tolerable degree of risk. These operations might be offensive sweeps to draw out and then destroy adversary maritime forces. They might be reconnaissance missions or raids against adversary forward operating bases or expeditionary lodgments. They might be missions to provide friendly forces on the ‘frontline’ with supporting fires or defensive coverage. They might be convoy escort missions supporting the flow of supplies and reinforcements to these forces, or perhaps the flow of economic and basic humanitarian goods to embattled allied populations. They might even be operations to induce the adversary to react in ways that other friendly forces could then exploit.

The extent to which surface forces could perform any of these tasks at a particular distance inside a contested zone for a particular length of time would be determined by the margin of temporary local superiority they could sustain under such circumstances. It should be clear that the deeper an operating area might lie within the contested zone (and the closer that area was to the adversary’s homeland), the harder it would be for any SAG to persist in operating there. Bryan is thus absolutely correct in that the more offensive and defensive capacity that can be packed into existing surface combatants, the longer on the margins they would be able to operate more or less on their own at some distance inside a contested zone before their ordnance depletion reached the point that their margin of local superiority—and thus staying power—was all but gone. These considerations combined with the availability of carriers and other maritime forces to support SAG operations as deemed necessary would shape the sequence in which individual maritime operations were conducted a U.S. campaign. Precursor or parallel operations by other forces accordingly might be required to pave the way for a SAG’s operation.

This would not change dramatically as reinforcement carriers arrived in theater. Some would likely be tasked with extending greater protection over intra-theater maritime lines of communication. Others might be used to take on some share of Joint power projection tasks as submarines’ and long-range air forces’ standoff-range strike missile inventories became depleted. It should be noted, though, that these power projection operations could not be performed unless the carriers and their surface combatant escorts had already obtained the requisite sea control. As a matter of fact, a carrier battleforce’s tactical actions to seize and retain sea control could be just as consequential in a campaign context as the power projection tasks they might support. For instance, if a carrier battleforce could sustain a certain margin of temporary local superiority when clashing with the adversary’s maritime forces, its ability to inflict outsized damage or losses on the latter while absorbing tolerable damage or losses of its own would help erode the adversary’s probable advantages in the overall theater conventional military balance as well as arrest the adversary’s campaign progress. Likewise, the adversary’s allocation of maritime forces to fight a carrier battleforce (and any friendly forces supporting it) might result in fewer adversary forces available for operations elsewhere in theater during some period; this could be exploited by other friendly forces including independently-operating SAGs. The use of carriers in any of these ways should of course be governed by calculated risk, and precursor/parallel operations by other elements of the Joint force would very likely be necessary or desirable to create particularly advantageous margins of temporary local superiority.

The Airborne Early Warning Caveat

The greatest challenge facing SAGs operating without external air support would be their ability to detect and engage adversary platforms (or inbound threat weapons) at the most tactically advantageous distances. As I’ve previously noted, AEW is crucial to gaining and then holding sea control under intense opposition. Shipboard sensor ranges are limited by their height of eye relative to the earth’s curvature; an inbound air threat flying beneath or beyond this coverage will not be detected in the absence of offboard sensor support. It should also be pointed out that carrier-organic AEW is presently central to maximizing the effective range of the shipboard SM-6 interceptor missile via the Navy Integrated Fire Control-Counter Air (NIFC-CA) concept. While it would be possible for Air Force or allied AEW aircraft to support U.S. Navy SAGs, I am aware of no plans to develop capabilities for integrating either in NIFC-CA. Nor are there any plans I’m aware of to install the large aperture AEW radars necessary for long-range/wide-area surveillance on unmanned aircraft.[i] All of this drastically affects a surface combatant’s ability to engage an adversary aircraft before the latter can launch its own missiles.

SAGs can mitigate this somewhat by positioning their combatants so that the group’s fused sensor picture provides expanded coverage as well as engagement depth. Not all of these combatants need to employ their active sensors; it is perfectly valid for some to only search using passive sensors depending upon the tactical situation. Nevertheless, actively radiating SAG units expose themselves to counterdetection and targeting by adversary platforms operating outside the SAG’s sensor coverage. The same would also be true for the use of a SAG’s helicopters to perform AEW against inbound sea-skimming ASCMs, as the helicopters’ necessary proximity to SAG units to perform this task would cue the adversary’s reconnaissance and possibly targeting efforts. The risk that a SAG’s active sensor usage poses may remain entirely tolerable if the SAG possesses a sizable margin of temporary local superiority against the adversary’s forces. As this margin decreases, though, tactical (and operational) risk increases. Below some threshold margin, it very simply may not be possible for a SAG to operate at acceptable risk in some area for some span of time without carrier/land-based large AEW aircraft support. This further highlights the importance of a campaign’s operational sequence, particularly with respect to the role of precursor/parallel operations in helping a SAG gain and hold sea control.

Engagement Depth, Ordnance Inventories, and Targeting Confidence

Bryan correctly notes that shorter-range defensive weapons tend to be more affordable-per-engagement than longer-range defensive weapons, and that the latter tend to take up more shipboard space than the former. He consequently argues that by concentrating defensive firepower in a single inner layer with a roughly 30 miles radius, each surface combatant not only gains more favorable cost-per-salvo ratios relative to the adversary’s inbound weapons but also gains more opportunities to engage the adversary’s ‘archer’ aircraft with SM-6 before they can fire their ‘arrows.’

The implication here is that surface combatants are most likely to detect inbound Anti-Ship Cruise Missiles (ASCM) at the shipboard radar horizon. This is certainly true for sea-skimming ASCMs to a considerable degree, but not all ASCMs are pure sea-skimmers. For example, some spend a good portion of their flyout at high altitudes, and a few older types perform terminal dives on their targets. Shorter-ranged defensive interceptors can certainly be used against these threats, but it might be desirable to retain the option of situationally employing longer-ranged interceptor missiles (though not necessarily SM-6) against them as well. It should also be noted that an interceptor missile’s ability to intercept any particular inbound threat is often a factor of the ‘engagement geometry.’ Assuming sufficiently timely sensor detection and tracking of a given air threat, an interceptor missile’s effective range against that threat will be closer to its ‘advertised’ maximum range when the threat is headed more-or-less directly towards the interceptor’s firing unit than when the threat is crossing at a tangential distance to the firing unit. If SAG units are intended to mutually support each other within an inner zone defense, this means that the practical separation distance between those units will be less than the ‘advertised’ maximum reach of their shorter-range interceptor missiles; Bryan notes as much in his Footnote #51 (Pg 20). Many perfectly valid SAG tactics allow for minimal to no mutual kinetic defensive support. Greater separation between a SAG’s combatants might be desirable at other times, though, in order to expand the volume covered by the SAG’s sensors or to support concealment tactics. If either of these are the case, and if some degree of mutual kinetic defensive support is desired, then use of a somewhat longer-ranged interceptor becomes necessary. Lastly, it should be noted that if ‘archer’ aircraft could fire their ‘arrows’ from outside SM-6 range (which is well within the realm of the possible), SAG defenses would have to cope with a much larger inbound salvo. The preceding considerations lead me to conclude that Bryan’s call to rely predominantly on a dense inner zone defense is correct, but that some number of relatively affordable medium-range interceptors that can reach beyond 30 miles will still need to be carried in combatants’ vertical launchers for the reasons I’ve outlined.

Not all inner zone defenses need to be kinetic, however. Bryan correctly observes that Electronic Warfare (EW) systems can contribute greatly to defensive effectiveness. He also correctly observes that the short distances and timeframes involved during inner zone defense mean that even the most effective of shipboard EW systems will not allow a surface combatant to refrain from firing interceptor missiles against a given inbound threat. There are also physics-based limitations on the jamming techniques a shipboard EW system can employ. The same physics suggests the value of offboard EW systems, especially in circumstances where their placement can result in inbound threats never detecting or otherwise locking on to defended combatants.[ii]  With adequate separation between offboard EW systems and defended combatants, it becomes theoretically possible to cause a threat ASCM to commit itself early enough towards a harmless direction such that shipboard interceptor missiles can actually be withheld. Perhaps more significantly, the intelligent use of offboard EW systems can contribute enormously to an overall deception and concealment plan that prevents a SAG from being detected or correctly classified by the adversary in the first place. Consequently, I would add ship-launched offboard EW systems to Bryan’s list of future ‘ordnance’ that would be useful for expanding the surface Navy’s sea control capabilities.

All the same, nothing prevents the adversary from employing similar EW methods to defeat the surface Navy’s own offensive weapons. An adversary’s effective use of EW in tandem with other forms of deception could entice surface combatants into wasting their limited longer-range missile inventories against decoys. As I wrote last fall, the Navy faced this exact problem during the Cold War. Thus, from a purely technological perspective (i.e., excluding the non-material solutions I mentioned in a follow-on piece), the use of multi-phenomenology sensors (and often visual-range examination of contacts) is necessary to have high confidence in a long-range targeting picture. While SAG-organic scouts such as manned helicopters or unmanned aircraft can perform this role against distant surface contacts, it is less clear what organic tools a SAG could to perform it against distant air contacts. Shipboard radars could use non-cooperative target recognition techniques to perform some air contact classification, but their doing so could be subject to EW countermeasures by the adversary. Bryan’s call for improved inner layer defensive density resultantly gains additional importance, as it would provide a SAG’s only other recourse in the event an adversary’s deceptions defeat a SAG’s offensive use of ASCMs or SM-6.

In turn, this reemphasizes my earlier point that the location and length of a SAG operation within a contested zone must be predicated on its ability to sustain its margin of local temporary superiority above some threshold. If it cannot do so on its own, and if the operation in question cannot be delayed until circumstances are more favorable, then it will either need external air support at some stage (such as for detection and outer-layer visual-range identification of air contacts) or the theater commander will have to accept the elevated risks.

Other Thoughts

• One of Bryan’s most important observations was in his Footnote #39 (pg 14). In describing an adversary’s reliance on wide-area surveillance and data relay systems to cue attacks by Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles (ASBM), he suggests that “surface combatants would be more effective in targeting these enablers, rather than planning to attack mobile ASBM launchers themselves from 800 - 1,000 nm away.” This is absolutely correct. What’s more, these surveillance/reconnaissance 'systems of systems' are likely to be used to cue anti-ship attacks by other platforms such as submarines and land-based aircraft. Degrading or neutralizing these constituent sensor and communication systems—however locally or temporarily—using deception, concealment, or (as feasible) physical attack will be a critical prerequisite for sea control within a contested zone. Doing so essentially represents a 'mission-kill' against the adversary's ability to perform over-the-horizon targeting. At the campaign-level, these anti-scouting efforts will be central to rolling back the adversary’s offensive progress and eroding his military potential in theater. Surface forces will have major roles to play in this fight, but it will often require contributions from other Joint combined arms to be successful. 
• I agree with Bryan’s three desired design attributes for future shipboard missile development: offensive capability, multi-mission usability, and smaller physical size. I would also add wartime producibility to Bryan’s list. 
• I strongly support the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) concept for all the reasons Bryan articulates. Nevertheless, I believe more analytical attention needs to be paid to how it will be provided with high-confidence targeting cues at distances beyond the range of SAG-embarked aircraft or in hotly opposed areas where the MQ-4C Triton or P-8 Orion might not be risked. The Navy’s Outlaw Shark over-the-horizon targeting experiments of the late 1970s highlighted the extreme difficulties this situation presents, especially if missile cueing depends upon the adversary’s Emissions Control indiscipline.[iii] Visual-range confirmation of a target’s classification may be necessary for employing LRASM with high confidence. This may be a potential major role for the proposed Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) system. 
• Aircraft embarked in combatants will remain the most lethal means for time-sensitive attacks against a nearby adversary submarine in the absence of land-based anti-submarine aircraft support, but as Bryan observes there is a need to buy some time for the embarked aircraft to fly out to the threat. The existing Vertically-Launched Anti-Submarine Rocket (VLA) does not have sufficient range to disrupt attacks by adversary submarines that are solely using their organic sensors to target the protagonist’s battleforce. I therefore strongly agree with Bryan’s recommendation for a new, longer-ranged quick-reaction anti-submarine weapon.
• Bryan is entirely correct that the Navy’s programmed shortfall of Small Surface Combatants (SSC) capable of performing wartime convoy and combat logistics ship escort duties means these tasks would fall on the AEGIS cruiser and destroyer force, which itself would be heavily in demand during a conflict. He is also correct that the SSC shortfall in general is pulling cruisers and destroyers into performing peacetime security cooperation tasks that detract from their combat readiness. I agree with his recommendation that the sea services should find ways to use U.S. Coast Guard and MSC ships to take on some share of peacetime as well as wartime SSC missions. In particular, I think it would be worth examining whether the Coast Guard’s High Endurance Cutters could be outfitted and their crews regularly trained to take on some share of wartime escort duties in low to moderate threat environments (e.g. outside or on the periphery of a contested zone). With respect to MSC ships, though, I would note that their hypothetical combat activities may be constrained by international legal considerations. These need to be fully investigated when developing concepts for how they might be used to take on SSC-type tasks.
• The Navy’s proposed SSC solution is to modify the two existing LCS variants’ designs so that the FY19 and follow ships receive permanently-installed anti-submarine and long-range anti-ship capabilities as well as improved EW capabilities. Bryan reasonably recommended that they should also receive a medium-range air defense interceptor such as the Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile (ESSM) that would allow them to protect escorted units, but this is not part of the proposed program of record. As a result, wartime convoys approaching a combat zone in which there is a considerable air (or submarine-launched ASCM) threat will likely need to be augmented by AEGIS combatants or external tactical air support. This will absolutely be the case if a convoy must traverse part of a contested zone. Convoy demands are likely to be high in a war against a great power adversary, and as such the availability of AEGIS combatants for offensive SAG operations may be limited by the demands on them for convoy protection.

Tomorrow, I will examine the surface Navy’s leadership’s article on SAG concepts in the January Proceedings.

--Updated 8:43PM 1/14/15 to clarify why longer-ranged interceptors might be needed by a SAG if the separation between its units is increased, and to delete a typo in the beginning of the 'Other Thoughts' subsection--

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not reflect the official positions of Systems Planning and Analysis, and to the author’s knowledge do not reflect the policies or positions of the U.S. Department of Defense, any U.S. armed service, or any other U.S. Government agency.

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[i] The X-band AN/ZPY-3 radar on the MQ-4C Triton is a surface surveillance and ship classification sensor. It is not suited for long-range AEW.

[ii] See 1. Dave Adamy. “EW Against Modern Radars-Part 2: Radar Jamming Techniques.” Journal of

Electronic Defense 33, No. 1 (January 2010): 44-46; 2. Thomas W. Kimbrell. “Electronic Warfare in Ship Defense.” Technical Digest, Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division, (September 2004): 85-86; 3. Craig Payne. Principles of Naval Weapon Systems. (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2006), 91-92.

[iii] See Norman Friedman. Network-Centric Warfare: How Navies Learned to Fight Smarter Through Three World Wars. (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2009), 206-210.

Is the Carrier as Obsolete as the battleship?

Scrapping the battleship
ex-USS West Virginia in the 1950's

The former UK carrier Ark Royal
being scrapped more recently in Turkey
Will US CV's soon follow?

     During last Friday’s great aircraft carrier debate hosted by the Naval Academy Museum, one of the debaters, Dr. Jerry Hendrix, said that the day of the carrier was drawing to a close primarily due to their vulnerability. He further compared the coming demise of the big flattop to that of the battleship. These assertions are at odds with the opinions of many in the history and analysis communities. The battleship had reached its evolutionary limits by the mid 1940’s while the carrier continues to evolve as a platform in the present. The battleship disappeared from the world’s naval inventories at the end of World War 2 for reasons of cost and firepower analysis, not vulnerability. Finally, the carrier has generally been viewed as more vulnerable than the battleships it replaced. Its air wing, rather than the physical platform of the ship, is the source of both its offensive and defensive capabilities. Both Dr Hendrix and his debate partner Bryan McGrath rightly addressed shortfalls in the present carrier air wing.

Pioneering battleship HMS Devastation
(1873)

HMS Dreadnought (1906)

     The battleship evolved as a platform, beginning with its first recognizable incarnation, HMS Devastation, which appeared in 1873. Over the next 70 years, as gun size and effectiveness increased, both the armament and the armor required to protect the battleship from such ordnance swelled in both size and cost. Combat ranges increased parallel to these developments. Captain Wayne Hughes suggests that battleship effective gunnery ranges increased a matter of tenfold from 1898 to 1948. Engineering plants grew as well in order to propel the battlewagon at appropriate tactical and operational speeds. These factors combined to gradually increase battleship size. The  limited battle experience of the period indicated that bigger guns fired at longer ranges were decisive. Battleship designers responded and the all-big gun HMS Dreadnought of 1906 further accelerated the growth of the platform in order to accommodate more long range ordnance.  Further advances such as lighter-weight Krupp armor, turbine engines, and director-firing of naval guns allowed for continued battleship construction at reasonable size and cost through the 1920’s, but by the early 1940’s this process reached the physical and financial limits of effectiveness. Battleship guns of 18 and 20 inch size required hulls in excess of 80,000 tons displacement to mount a tactically useful battery of such weapons. The armor required to provide protection from similar ordnance and the engineering plants necessary to propel these behemoths resulted in warships like the Japanese Yamato class battleships by the early 1940’s.

IJN Yamato (1943)

HMS Glorious

     The problem, however, with these armored titans was that their ability to deliver sustained ordnance at long range over time had approached an apogee in technological development. Further battleship growth was no longer a cost-effective solution to the problem of mass-delivery or ordnance at range over time. The aircraft carrier that emerged during the First World War offered much more potential to deliver high volumes of ordnance at much longer ranges than the battleship gun. This condition developed as the range and weapon capacity of carrier aircraft increased. Carriers remained vulnerable to surface ship attack, especially before the widespread introduction of radar and in the absence of strong escort. The British carrier HMS Glorious was sunk by the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau under such conditions in June 1940. Unlike the British, the U.S. and Japanese Navies developed larger, longer-ranged and more capable carrier aircraft. Their efforts were fully developed by 1942, when according to Hughes, the weight of a carrier airstrike was sufficient to destroy capital ships without risking the carrier to counterattack by gunships under cover of darkness. The battleship, by contrast, could not improve beyond the range of its guns. This inefficiency, combined with their large crews and high rate of fuel consumption, made the battleship less desirable as the principal means of large ordnance delivery at sea or against shore-based targets. The revolution in antiaircraft provided by the proximity-fused shell had restored the battleship's survivability against air threats but was not enough to save the big ships from their logistical and financial limitations. When the surviving world navies downsized at the conclusion of the Second World War, the battleships were one of the first platforms to be retired.

     The carrier, despite its obvious greater vulnerability, was retained and continued to evolve as an ordnance-delivery system. Like the battleship, the carrier grew in response to technological change and war experience. Before the war, the two prevailing carrier designs were the British closed and armored carrier and the American/Japanese open/unarmored hanger design. The British version accepted a lower number of aircraft in exchange for greater protection of their aircraft from both attack and the elements. The British also expected to fight largely in littoral regions and believed their small carrier air wings would be supplemented by land-based aircraft. The Americans and Japanese, by contrast, expected to fight in the blue water spaces of the Pacific where the relatively warmer weather and absence of land-based aviation support both supported and demanded a carrier with a large, open hangar where its much larger airdrop could warm-up in preparation for launch.

USS Midway

     The U.S. decided on a combination of these two formulas with the 1945 Midway class carriers. These ships grew substantially compared with the proceeding Essex class in order to support both armor protection for the hangar and a large air group. This need to protect the air group, as well as the advent of nuclear weapons, the fuel economy factor offered by nuclear propulsion and increasing size of jet aircraft rapidly drove increases in carrier size in order to maintain an ideal large air group. Smaller carriers have been considered by the U.S. and other navies since 1945, but most have determined that it is more cost-effective over the long term to take a larger airdrop to sea. The late British naval constructor and historian D.K. Brown said, “it is wasteful to provide all of the workshop and store facilities (on a carrier) for only a few aircraft.” This problem condemned many British small carrier designs until the advent of the Harrier aircraft allowed for a moderately respectable air group to be embarked. While small carriers have continued utility in littoral areas during the 21st century, independent operations without the support of land-based aircraft demand larger carriers with more comprehensive air wings. The British experience in the Falklands Islands campaign of 1982 illustrates both the advantages of sea-based aviation in remote areas, and the limits imposed through the use of smaller carriers with reduced air complements. 

     Despite increasing physical threats to the carrier as a platform in the last decade, the evolutionary development of the ship remains open and vibrant. Both Dr. Hendrix and Bryan McGrath discussed the limitations of the present, post-Cold War carrier air wing in comparison with its longer-ranged late Cold War counterpart. In the period 1990-2010 there seemed little need for a long range carrier strike aircraft. Most conflicts were associated with areas along the vast Eurasian littoral where land-based air assets were also in support alongside sea-based aviation. An Indo-Pacific conflict with limited land-based air support again demands longer-ranged aircraft operating from carrier decks. Development of a replacement manned or unmanned carrier strike aircraft would restore the carrier’s long range strike potential. 

     D.K. Brown eminently describes the battleship’s replacement by the carrier. He stated, “it is often said that the battleship died because it was vulnerable. This is incorrect; it was replaced by the fleet carrier which was much more vulnerable. The battleship died because it was far less capable than the carrier of inflicting damage on the enemy.” The carrier needs a similar well-defined successor in order to be similarly superseded as the principal naval platform. This could be the nuclear-powered guided missile submarine (SSGN), but it does not exist in sufficient numbers to equal a carrier’s strike capability. A mass launch of missiles from submerged platforms might also convince a would-be adversary that a nuclear weapon attack is underway. Such a situation could trigger a nuclear response from that opponent. A mass of surface ships has also been proposed as a potential carrier successor, but issues of logistical support necessary to keep a large number of small combatants on station, as well as weather could complicate such an effort. By at least Brown’s standard, the aircraft carrier has yet to be replaced as the principal naval combatant.  Other navies seem to accept this condition, as the People’s Republic of China, Russia, France, India, and Great Britain have continued to purchase or build large aircraft carriers. Small carriers are operated by Italy and Spain. Japan and Australia’s new amphibious assault ships have the potential to be carriers. The carrier remains in many ways as vulnerable as it was when first introduced at the end of the First World War. It continues, however, to be an as yet unequaled flexible and re-configurable strike and naval warfare asset. Discussions on the carrier's future should continue, but the platform is by no means obsolete and its vulnerability remains an acceptable risk in light of its many capabilities.