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