Carriers
and Power Projection
Naval conventional land-attack
strikes that must be launched from a contested zone’s inner sections early in
a war will probably be performed by guided missile-armed submarines because of
their stealth and survivability. Strikes that can be launched from the
contested zone’s outer sections likewise can be primarily performed at
relatively low risk by guided missile-armed surface combatants. As noted in my Tuesday post, however, the U.S. Navy presently lacks the technical and logistical
capabilities needed to reload submarine and surface combatant launchers
underway or otherwise in ad hoc locations such as defended anchorages. The need
for forward-deployed missile-armed units to cycle through unthreatened friendly
ports for pierside reload, combined with this contingent’s relatively small
size prior to reinforcement by units sortied from rearward bases in-theater,
transferred from other theaters, or mobilized from the homeland, will create significant
challenges in sustaining friendly operational tempo.[i]
Urgently developing the
capabilities to overcome this campaign-critical limitation is imperative, but
it must be understood that doing so may only mitigate potential operational
tempo impacts—not eliminate them. It follows that one must be careful when
asserting how an underway/ad hoc launcher reload capability should inform force
structure. For example, it has been argued that surface combatants could become
decisively more efficient than carriers in the strike role if the former’s vertical
launchers could be reloaded underway, and that increasing surface combatant
force structure at the expense of carrier force structure would accordingly be
warranted.[ii] A
key concern with this argument is that it is not clear how it factors in the
specifics of launcher reload operations at sea. The nominal duration of a
reloading event, the minimum distance the forward reloading area must be from
the enemy’s effective reach to execute the event at acceptable risk, and the
combat logistics force’s capacity for cycling ammunition ships between rear
bases and forward reloading areas all must be explicitly accounted for. It
therefore is difficult to tell whether such a concept of operations would be
sustainable indefinitely or only during short ‘surge’ periods throughout a
protracted conflict.
Even if launcher reload
operations could be structured such that they would minimally perturb missile-armed
SAGs’ operational tempos, one must not overlook the carrier air wing’s previously-discussed
roles providing forward surface combatants with sea control support. Indeed,
there might be a breakpoint below which any marginal decrease in carrier force
structure to afford increases in surface combatant force structure might not
yield any operational tempo benefits—and might actually decrease this tempo
while increasing campaign-level risks. With fewer carriers, there would be
fewer air wings available at any one time to support SAG operations within a
contested zone. Against a near-peer foe with robust theater-wide maritime denial
capabilities, this could severely curtail SAGs’ operational tempos—and the
overall friendly force’s campaign tempo—in its own right. Neither this nor the
launcher reload logistics issue automatically repudiates analysis suggesting
surface combatants’ advantages in the strike role, but they do highlight how
additional operational analysis and fleet experimentation is necessary to
validate such assertions.
As an alternative, one
might argue land-based long-range strike aircraft could assume a large share of
the strike tasks presently held by the carrier air wing. If a war was brief,
this arrangement might be sustainable. If a war became protracted, though, standoff-range
strike missile inventories’ depletion and the likely limited quantities of long-range
penetrating bombers suggests large-deck carriers’ operational maneuver and power
projection capabilities might become increasingly useful to the theater
commander. The advanced ordnance inventory management issue is hardly new to U.S. Navy
campaign planning and strategy development. For example, during the early 1980s
the Navy estimated there were only enough torpedoes in shore-based stockpiles
to rearm 30% of the fleet’s submarines in the event of a major conventional war
with the Soviet Union.[iii]
As the Royal Navy’s 1982 shipboard weapons, sonobuoy, and missile decoy
expenditures in the Falklands unequivocally demonstrated, this particular
problem is a core characteristic of modern maritime war. It is entirely
possible that ordnance consumption rates might be far higher in practice than
what is expected within standing contingency plans.[iv]
The same would be true
if the operational tempo needed to prevent an aggressor from attaining its
political objectives was so intense or the target sets that must be struck—especially
to support frontline defenders—were so expansive that the theater commander
simply could not avoid leaning heavily upon large-deck carriers’ strike
capabilities.[v]
Finding where all the above ordnance inventory management and operational tempo
thresholds might lie over the course of a protracted campaign, as well as evaluating
their potential severities, will be a crucial operational analysis and war
gaming task.
Assuming large-deck
carriers will be asked to shoulder however much of the Joint power projection
load is necessary at a given time, a paramount campaign-level objective of Joint
kinetic and non-kinetic strikes early in a war must therefore be to temporarily
disrupt if not permanently attrite an adversary’s wide-area oceanic
surveillance-reconnaissance-strike capabilities. When these supporting fires
are combined with effective battleforce-level deception and concealment
tactics, brief power projection (and sea control/denial) operations by
dispersed multi-carrier task forces from the contested zone’s outer sections
may be viable even during a major war’s initial phases.[vi] Indeed,
the high lifecycle costs and considerable vulnerabilities of potential
adversaries’ maritime surveillance/reconnaissance systems-of-systems are generally
overlooked in arguments contrasting the large-deck carrier’s lifecycle costs
and tactical efficacy relative to individual network-dependent weapons.[vii] The
key point is that not all strikes necessarily need to be able to reach, let
alone penetrate deep within, an aggressor’s homeland on a war’s third let alone
three-hundredth day to be strategically valuable. Just as important to
preventing an aggressor’s fait accompli
may be strikes that challenge the aggressor’s sea control in certain areas, or
that otherwise create conditions supporting eventual friendly sea control in
the approaches to isolated friendly territories within the contested zone.
The extent to which the
large-deck carrier can thusly contribute is a function of the air wing and its
ordnance, not the ship. If the air wing possesses medium-range strike aircraft
and organic aerial refueling capabilities, Joint forward forces gain an
important tool for launching strikes from a contested zone’s outer periphery in
support of defenders fighting within the zone’s middle sections. The frequency
and responsiveness of these kinds of strikes would increase as the adversary’s
maritime surveillance-reconnaissance-strike capabilities are worn down. Should the air
wing’s fighters carry longer-range standoff weaponry and be supported by high-confidence
cueing, strike footprints could increase by several hundred additional miles
and potentially bring the contested zone’s inner reaches into play fairly early
in a war, albeit with a lower number of carried weapons the further the
aircraft must fly. In fact, evolved longer-range variants of existing strike
weapons could offer ‘gapfiller’ capabilities along these lines at reasonable
cost and risk while the long-range, autonomous, unmanned naval strike aircraft
technologies that will eventually be needed due to potential contested zones’
anticipated continual peacetime expansions are matured.[viii]
As noted previously, though, inventories of such weapons will likely not be
large enough to permit protracted standoff-range strike operations. The most
logical use of these weapons, therefore, would be to poke holes in an
adversary’s defenses (however localized and temporary) that other friendly
units armed with more plentiful shorter-range weapons could then exploit. It is
also important to point out that not all of these weapons will be kinetic,
whether they are long or short-range. Some of the most campaign-critical carrier
air wing weapons will be electronic attack systems that must be physically
brought within line-of-sight of an adversary’s distributed
surveillance/reconnaissance sensors and their supporting data networks’ RF relay
nodes.
As alluded to in the
previous paragraph, large-deck carrier power projection’s other and often
unrecognized aspect is Joint forward aerial refueling. Long-range, high
capacity, carrier-based aerial refueling was a most unfortunate post-Cold War
budgetary casualty.[ix]
The same permissive environments that allowed fixed-location carrier strike
operations over the past twenty years also permitted the air wing to fall back
upon U.S. Air Force theater-range aerial refueling resources. Unfortunately,
the theater-range conventionally-armed missiles potential adversaries now use
to hold forward friendly airbases at risk increasingly threaten those resources.
The carrier air wing’s maximal offensive as well as defensive employment
depends upon assured access to timely aerial refueling at range, and this means
a carrier-organic capability must be restored since ‘buddy stores’ on shorter-range
fighters is insufficient.
There is a Joint angle,
however, in that carrier-based long-range aerial refueling can also support Air
Force operations when forward airbases for the latter’s refueling aircraft are
unavailable or in maritime areas where they ought not to be risked. Based
closer in relative terms to the contested zone, carrier-based refueling
aircraft can also step in when Joint forward operational tempo rises beyond
what Air Force refueling aircraft can support alone. This same logic would apply
to the air wing’s screening, AEW, and electronic warfare support of Air Force
operations within the contested zone.[x] Carriers’
inherent mobility can additionally be used to position over-ocean aerial
refueling rendezvous that enable the Air Force’s use of unpredictable or
unanticipated routes for penetrating as well as retiring from opposed areas.
Tomorrow, a concluding look at how the air wing's capabilities and composition will determine carriers' future doctrinal roles
[i]
Van Tol, 40, 46-47, 56, 78, 90.
[ii] CDR
Phillip E. Pournelle, USN. “The Rise of the Missile Carriers.” Naval Institute
Proceedings 139, No. 5 (May 2013): 32-33.
[iii]
RADN William J. Holland, Jr., USN (Ret). “Strategy and Submarines.” Naval Institute Proceedings 139, No. 12
(December 2013), 52.
[iv]
See 1. “Lessons of the Falklands.” (Washington, D.C.: Office of Program
Appraisal, Department of the Navy, February 1983), 3, 11, 34, 36; 2. ADM Sandy
Woodward, RN. One Hundred Days: The
Memoirs of the Falklands Battle Group Commander. (Annapolis, MD: Naval
Institute Press, 1997), 12, 97, 176-177.
[v]
For another take on the campaign-level ordnance management dilemma as related
to carriers, see Robert C. Rubel. “National Policy and the Post-Systemic Navy.”
Naval War College Review 66, No. 4
(Autumn 2013): 26.
[vi]
Solomon, 88-94, 99-103.
[vii]
A more accurate comparison would count the lifecycle costs and consider
the relative limitations and vulnerabilities of the various sensors and network
infrastructure necessary for the adversary to effectively use such a weapon.
For instance, the lifecycle costs of the satellite(s) relaying targeting data
from a reconnaissance scout, any sensor-equipped satellites cueing the scout or
supporting weapons targeting, and the navigational satellites providing the
positioning data this entire enterprise depends upon are neither inexpensive
nor without serious vulnerabilities. Several generations of these satellites
will also have to be procured over a carrier’s lifetime. It would not be
surprising if the carrier’s lifecycle costs still exceed the
surveillance-reconnaissance-strike system’s lifecycle costs, but they would
likely be much closer than popularly thought. It follows that one must
holistically examine what is actually obtained with those expenditures, as one
cannot properly pass judgment on the former’s tactical efficacy and survivability
relative to the latter without comprehensively examining the latter’s tactical
efficacy and survivability when subjected to protracted withering, combined
arms attacks by friendly forces across multiple warfare domains.
[viii]
For a strong argument in favor of such unmanned systems, see Thomas P. Ehrhard
and Robert O. Work. “Range, Persistence, Stealth, and Networking: The Case for
a Carrier-Based Unmanned Combat Air System.” Washington, D.C.: Center for
Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2008.
[ix]
See discussion of KA-6 Intruder in Norman Polmar. U.S. Naval Institute Guide to the Ships and Aircraft of the U.S. Fleet,
16th Ed. (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1997), 367.
[x]
Van Tol, p. 27, 45.