The USN's supercarriers are extremely capable, but also very expensive, and even the USN can only afford a few. As a result, every few years, the suggestion of building smaller, cheaper carriers comes up. In recent years, these have gotten louder, driven in large part by the development of the F-35B, which can operate without the need for catapults or arresting gear and offers capability unmatched outside the F-35 family. There have even been tests with USS America, normally an amphibious helicopter carrier, serving as a "Lightning Carrier". Unfortunately, there are serious practical problems with all of this. The simple fact is that there are major economies of scale in carrier aviation, and STOVL isn't going to remove them, nor is something like America, lovely though she is, a good substitute for the CVNs.
But where do these economies of scale come from? The first and simplest is the fact that steel is cheap and air is free. What really costs is not size, but capability. A full-capability carrier is going to need radar, big engines, defensive weapons, mission-planning systems and fancy communications gear, all of which costs a lot more than the bare hull, regardless of the size of the carrier. Not to mention things like catapults, arresting gear, and heavy maintenance facilities, all of which need to be onboard to make a conventional carrier regardless of the size of the air group. Nor is the air group going to scale linearly. Sure, you can cut the fighter complement from four dozen to two dozen, but there's going to need to be some minimum number of fighters kept for self-defense, and since the threat doesn't halve for a smaller carrier, that might not be something you can cut too much, leaving fewer than half of the previous complement for strike missions. Things are even worse for the rest of the air wing. The complement of E-2 Hawkeyes (typically 4-5) is set by the need to keep one airborne at all times while allowing maintenance, and the size of the MH-60R detachment similarly comes from the need to keep a helicopter or two active to hunt subs. The EA-18G and MH-60S detachments could be cut, but you're still looking at needing more than half of the carrier wing for less than half the capability.
Of course, some of this can be compromised if you're willing to abandon CATOBAR1 carrier operations and rely on STOBAR2 or STOVL3 instead. These let you discard the catapults and, in the case of STOVL, the arresting gear, allowing aircraft to fit onto much smaller ships. But there are several major drawbacks. One is that a smaller ship inherently carries fewer aircraft, which limits striking power. Another is that ski jumps limit the use of fixed-wing aircraft to high-performance fighters, which most notably takes the E-2 Hawkeye off the table. Yes, it is possible to use a helicopter for AEW&C,4 but because a helicopter has to beat the air into submission to fly, it will lack the range and endurance of a fixed-wing aircraft. It also closes off the possibility of other low-performance aircraft for missions like sea surveillance or ASW, as performed by the retired S-3 Viking or the upcoming MQ-25 Stingray.
STOBAR and STOVL operations also impose significant performance penalties on the aircraft involved. Quantifying aircraft performance is quite difficult, so I'm not going to touch STOBAR right now, but for STOVL, I can turn to the excellent Command: Modern Operations. I loaded up two aircraft of each variant, one with two internal GBU-32s (Mk 83/1,000 lb bombs) and one with the maximum load (4 in the F-35B, 6 in the other two) of GBU-31s (Mk 84s/2,000 lb bombs).5
| Aircraft | Weapon | Range (nm) |
|---|---|---|
| F-35B | Mk 84 x 4 | 163.6 |
| F-35A | Mk 84 x 6 | 253.8 |
| F-35C | Mk 84 x 6 | 280.8 |
| F-35B | Mk 83 x 2 | 321.0 |
| F-35A | Mk 83 x 2 | 789.5 |
| F-35C | Mk 83 x 2 | 816.1 |
I also investigated station time over base at 36,000' with a load of 4 internal AMRAAMS.
| Aircraft | Loiter Time (h:mm) |
|---|---|
| F-35A | 4:13 |
| F-35B | 1:41 |
| F-35C | 4:33 |
Basically, when in full bomb truck mode, the conventional versions can carry 50% more payload than the F-35B 50% further, or the same light payload over twice as far. On CAP, they have close to three times the loiter time, which translates into a lot less time spent operating aircraft. Although the F-35B may be by far the best STOVL fighter ever built, the limitations of STOVL remain abundantly clear. Particularly in a world where the range of US carrier wings comes in for frequent criticism, advocacy for "Lighting Carriers" is a rather strange thing to do.
The USN is well aware of everything discussed above, and has a long history of fighting off attempts by various groups to downsize the carriers. In some ways, this makes the saga of the Americas surprising. The first two units of the class, America and Tripoli, were built without a well deck, to allow for a bigger hangar and more aviation supplies.6 This made them uncomfortably close to light carriers for the USN's taste, and it is rumored that making sure that Congress didn't get confused is the reason that the third unit of the class, Bougainville, got a well deck. Although tests with 20 or so F-35Bs have been carried out aboard Tripoli in 2022, the Americas are not particularly good carriers. Their design is definitely specialized for amphibious assault, with large areas for vehicle stowage and wide corridors for loaded Marines, which compromise survivability. Their magazines are set up to provide weapons for half a dozen F-35s operating in support of amphibious operations, less than 5% of the volume available on a Nimitz or Ford. Oh, and they're a lot slower than the proper carriers, capable of 22 kts instead of the 30 or so that the CVNs can make. This also explains the lack of a ski-jump. It would make them too similar to a real carrier, and take up valuable helicopter space during an amphibious assault.
On the whole, the simple fact is that the small carrier is a bad idea if you have other options. The F-35B is a formidable aircraft, and it's far better than nothing if it's the only way for your nation (or service) to get its own sea-based airpower. But it is an inferior substitute for a big CATOBAR carrier for a nation with the resources and interests of the United States.
1 Catapult-Assisted Takeoff But Arrested Recovery ⇑
2 Short Takeoff But Assisted Recovery ⇑
3 Short Takeoff Vertical Landing ⇑
4 Airborne Early Warning and Control. Sometimes also called AWACS. ⇑
5 The one caveat to these is that CMO only has one load condition for each aircraft, and the maximum takeoff weight for the F-35B is probably going to vary a lot depending on the operating environment. That said, I suspect they picked a value for typical shipboard STOVL operations, so this should be broadly accurate, even though I was operating from a land base for the test. ⇑
6 A purist would argue that this means they should have been designated LPH-13 and 14. ⇑
Comments
Nuclear-powered CATOBAR carriers are the ultimate in "eschew foreign entanglements, but still wish to project power globally for long periods of time."
Since they're basically large airbases that can go anywhere there's sufficient water under their keels
What if... just spitballing here... What if we built a modern version of the IJN I-400 submarine aircraft carrier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-400-class_submarine)
Optimized for STOVL, of course. Imagine something like the Soviet Typhoon-class, but for launching planes instead of missiles.
You wouldn't need a catapult, big engines, or big radar. You could also skip most of the defensive weapons and planes, relying on stealth instead to keep it safe. And it could get closer to its target than a carrier, so range would be less of an issue. Just pop up close to the target, launch enough planes for the strike mission, and then submerge again until its time to recover them.
ack-acking: Volume is going to be a killer for this app. Air is free, and maybe steel is cheap but it takes a lot of steel, the good stuff, to enclose a hangar's worth of air and keep it leak-free at depth. Plus, you've got to push that entire volume through the water, not just the submerged displacement. The largest submarines ever built probably have about the useful volume of Thailand's "Chakri Narubet", and nobody ever expected Narubet to fight anything more than pirates.
But even if you could make it work, carriers are about much more than strike missions. Providing fighter cover for other friendly forces, surveillance across a broad area, and ASW are all important and poorly suited for something that can only occasionally launch small groups of aircraft. Plus, of course, the "presence" mission, that submarines almost by definition don't do.
And for the strike mission, you've got a critical vulnerability during the recovery portion. The enemy knows he's been struck, so he's got a pretty good idea where your strike aircraft are, you don't have the fuel to do much beyond go straight home, and your planes aren't all that stealthy from behind. So you recover your strike aircraft, and twenty minutes later the enemy's equivalent of a P-8 is circling overhead dropping sonobouys. And then torpedoes.
Or, you notice that we can pack a hundred and fifty expendable strike aircraft into an Ohio hull, if we don't insist on recovering them. You can do a lot of striking with 150+ sorties.
@ack-acking and @John Schilling
You also have to submerge said volume of air. (I don't think the F-35B would take kindly to being treated as a submersible weapons system...)
@bean
How much do the loiter time numbers change based on the takeoff mode of the F-35B? Looking at the world's most reliable open source aircraft spec site (Wikipedia) the delta in combat radius is 160nm, which is probably 45 minutes flying time at their cruise speeds.
For some of the other stuff, it seems like tilt-rotor is an inferior but workable compromise as an engineering matter for the support aircraft, though by the time you do all of the engineering to make an EV-22 and a CV-22 and a KV-22 it's probably cheaper to just buy a bigger carrier.
Also, going the other way, why not make the current CVNs bigger? I assume you start to run up against port limitations and the like, as well as a big infrastructure hurdle in terms of dry docks, but the largest container ships are about 3x the displacement and another 50m longer. They're admittedly slower at ~20kts, but with nuclear propulsion that doesn't seem like a big deal.
It's worth pointing out that "steel is cheap and air is free" does not apply to submarines. Air in particular is very much not free (volume is very expensive on a sub), and submarine-grade steel costs a lot more than the normal stuff. Beyond that, what John said. Recovery kills submarine aircraft carriers, particularly today, and you can fit a lot more Tomahawks onboard.
Cue screaming from the USN. (There's a reason that the Navy and Marines have gone very far to keep that designation at bay. I really wish they'd used UV-22 instead of CMV-22.)
The Fords are as big as they can possibly be without a lot of extremely expensive infrastructure work. More specifically, we'd have to rebuild all of the relevant drydocks, and that doesn't come cheap. There's also the fact that operating more than about 90 planes doesn't work too well, and that's about how many a Nimitz or Ford can theoretically carry, although they've been at more like 70 for the last couple decades. I have no idea how they drydock container ships, but those docks aren't qualified to work on nuclear-powered warships.
My understanding is that they just use a normal (very large!) drydock. Looking at the Daewoo yard in South Korea, it appears that they have a mix of normal and floating drydocks. For cruise ships it also appears similar, with Grand Bahama (designed for cruise ships so that they don't lose revenue by moving out of the Carribean) able to take ships up to 980' on a floating drydock, and the construction yards in Finland and France appearing to use traditional drydocks.
Sure, but a bigger carrier lets you have bigger (next generation) planes while still keeping the air wing at 70ish. Like, the F-15E has an MTOW of 81K lbs, vs. 70K for the F-35C and 66K for the F-18E. A 15% larger plane seems like it should net you some valuable improvement in range or armaments or sensors or whatever. (Plus you can make the ship more habitable and hopefully more attractive on the retention front, which I think is likely to be a bigger issue in the intermediate term)
To put some rough numbers on size not being why carriers are expensive: the biggest oil tankers (about 500k tons loaded displacement) cost about $100M and container ships (300k tons) about $200M. Cruise ships (100k tons) are rather more expensive at $1.3B, but still well short of the carrier's $10B.
The air wing costs about $4B-$7B.
Warning! Nitpick Ahead!
Isn't CATOBAR defined as Catapult Assisted Take Off Barrier Arrested Recovery?
Belushi TD
@muddywaters
That's not too surprising - a tanker (and to a lesser extent a container ship, but they're also generally faster) is basically the engine and propulsion section in the stern bolted to an arbitrarily long hunk of cargo, with a small crew accommodation stacked somewhere. A cruise ship at least has cabins and entertainment spaces throughout, even though they're lighter. (Though I bet if you look at the empty displacement, which is probably a better proxy for initial construction cost, the difference isn't quite as stark on a dollar per pound basis)
It would be interesting to see the breakdown of the cost by system or function. Like, a Burke is $2B, and has weapons and sensor systems that are at least comparable to a carrier hull. So most of it is probably propulsion systems (plus nuclear surtax), and flight deck systems (EMALs, bomb lifts, etc.). I don't think that the crew accommodation or stores rooms and so forth would be that much more expensive on a normalized basis.
Interesting bonus question - are the most modern carriers still nuclear capable, or has that been fully deprecated?
@Belushi TD
That would require them to use the barrier to arrest airplanes on a regular basis, which they don't do. OK, that is what a lot of sources say, but I'm going to ignore them.
I'm not totally sure, but I suspect that capability is effectively gone.
Some of these economies of scale--- self-defense fighters, AEW&C, sub chasing--- seem like they belong to the battle group rather than the ship.
The DeGaulle was about half the price of the contemporary Nimitz (CVN-77). A pair of DeGaulles would together carry a similar air wing to a Nimitz. The DeGaulle is nuclear, CATOBAR and carries E-2s, etc. The DeGaulle is slower but wouldn't 2 carriers have better survivability?
The Queen Elizabeths are also about half the price of the contemporary US carrier, but the design choices where more different, so it seems less directly comparable.
Lets look at this from the other way. What sort of mission would you want an eighth of a CBG for and no more?
Yes, in theory you could combine carriers to get a full wing's capability spread across two ships. This is a bad idea on several fronts. First, there's a good chance the ships get separated, and then you're back to not having full capability. Second, I am certain that the cost numbers don't actually work that way. Defense costing is notoriously terrible, but the Nimitz closest to CDG in time was Truman, and wiki gives her cost in 2007 dollars as $4.5 billion vs 3 billion Euros for the French carrier. I'm not going to simply say "see, it's only 1.5x the cost of the French ship" because there are so many things that could mess with reported costs. The US builds a lot more carriers than the French, which tends to push costs down. On the other hand, the French could have lower labor rates. Different nations use different cost accounting, so something that might get charged to the ship in the US is paid out of a different budget in France. Then there are questions like "what year do you do the currency conversions"? I stand behind the conclusion above. There's essentially no way that the smaller carrier is actually the better deal in terms of combat power per dollar. The engineering for that just doesn't work.
What are the practical difficulties that limit the number of operable aircraft to around 90?
Basically, it becomes hard to use all of the planes effectively. The controllers get saturated, and the deck gets too full. It becomes difficult to launch everything and then turn around and recover it without planes spending way too long in the air. This was a problem in the early careers of both the Lexingtons and Midways, in both cases solved by the growing size of airplanes.
Civilian airports tend to solve this problem by establishing multiple parallel runways. With the newest supercarriers having the island extremely aft, could they accommodate a short wire-assisted-recovery runway angled across the front of the deck, more or less parallel the "full-size" rear angled runway? I assume accommodating multiple catapults to not be the binding difficulty, since their placement is much less restricted.
Failing that, an oil-tanker-sized and -shaped hull, with the island only slightly offset from the centerline, can have an "universal" set of facilities on the port side, and a smaller "fighters-only" set of runway&catapults on the starboard.
Basically an edit: the latter is not meant entirely literally. Take a page from the LCS' playbook and make it a trimaran, so as not to sacrifice speed.
Two problems with that. First, civilian airports are physically a lot bigger than carriers, which means that planes operating from multiple runways have a safe degree of separation. That's not possible on a carrier when landing. Second, while this bears some resemblance to plans in the late 40s and early 50s for separate bomber and fighter catapults (I think they were going to use the same arresting gear) these days, the fighters are the biggest things.
I seem to recall reading, years ago, that the Fords were originally designed to be about 200' longer, but were cut down to fit into existing drydocks.
It seems a poor decision, given what it will already cost to build a dozen or so Fords, but it's hard to say what that 200' would have brought to the table.
I didn't run across that claim when I researched the post on them, and I find it kind of dubious that that was ever the actual go-path plan. I'm sure that somewhere in the giant analysis that led to the Fords, they looked at "what could we do with an extra 200', and would it be worth it given that we'd have to lengthen the docks?", because good analysis looks at those kind of questions, but it clearly didn't pan out. And I could totally see someone seeing that and reading it as "this was the original design".
Wiki says the drydock Nimitzes were built in is 662m, but they might be wrong about that (they note that it's unsourced), and the dates they list require usually 2 (1 under construction + 1 overhaul) and sometimes 3 drydocks.
Beans, that could be, it was years ago and I can't source it (the extra 200' claim) now. I was actually hoping you could shed some light on it. There are indeed lots of twists and turns in development.
Is the problem launch/recovery rate (i.e., number of catapults and arresting wires) or is it more about marshalling them on the deck? My guess is that the issue is not about 'runways' per se, so much as taxiway/parking/hangarage and avoiding gridlock.
I don't think that was the issue, given that the planes in question would physically fit. Avoiding gridlock might have been an issue, but largely in terms of just the sheer complexity of handling 100+ planes. I do think that the takeoff (and particularly landing) was a major part of it, given that you're very unlikely to get more than one set of arresting gear on a carrier.
So if we want a cheap carrier, what can we use it for and how can we make it cheaper?
To me the most obvious use case is a floating airbase off the coast of Whateveristan (or the coast of a neighboring country that will allow US tankers but not fighters to use their inland bases, like Tajikistan).
Another use could be supporting freedom of navigation operations against countries and groups without a blue-water navy. Loitering strike aircraft and better support for helicopters than destroyers can provide might be more useful than throwing all our tomahawks away.
The question is how cheap could we make a Ford/Nimitz variant without Aegis, diesel engines for 20kts, air ops tailored for strike and support missions, and large weapon stores for ongoing operations?
Could we make a Super-America that actually functioned as a combination helicopter/strike carrier using the same planes as a real carrier air wing?
Finally, what are the benefits? If we could cut the cost by a third, we could have 3 for the price of 2 limited-purpose carriers capable of most missions we actually use them for, freeing the more expensive ships for use elsewhere. The only downside would be if we ever needed the entire carrier force to fight the 2nd battle of Midway against China.
More available ships also has intangible diplomatic benefits. Carriers give the US a higher BATNA for negotiating basing with other countries: "if you demand too many concessions, we'll just use a carrier, eat the extra cost, and you get nothing."
In a world where the US carrier fleet gets periodically over-committed and this response is off the table, our Greatest Allies have the opportunity to declare that our current arrangement is the worst basing agreement in the history of basing agreements, possibly ever, and make new demands while we're over a barrel.
So even if the Super-America spent most of its time in port or doing normal amphib work at twice the cost, it might still save money overall.
Plus I just want to name a ship Super-America.
My thought is that the cheap carrier is an amphib, as operated by the navies of Australia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Spain. No need for a super America, the America will do fine.
Going from zero fixed wing aircraft to a handful of STOVL jets seems to be a big jump in capability, much greater than going from single digit to say low double digits. In many of the low intensity missions a few F-35Bs will be enough to discourage a third rate air force from flying their own jets or helicopters to commit atrocities or whatever else you want to prevent.
And we've just seen in the Red Sea that a few STOVL jets stuffed full of Sidewinders are useful against drone attacks. Sure, not enough against the giant drone swarms that say Russia or China would launch, but those opponents are why you would use full size carriers.
The disadvantage of an amphib compared to a small carrier is fewer aircraft and less endurance for them, but the advantages of an amphib for a navy on a budget outweigh those. A ship designed to get lots of people and supplies ashore without harbour facilities, and with excellent medical facilities and casualty evac, is great for natural disaster response and peacekeeping missions. An amphib isn't as good as a small carrier would be for, uh, low intensity air superiority; but it's more generally useful.
@bernd / Hugh Fisher
Isn’t the logical end point of “ongoing low intensity deterrence camped offshore” not an LHA, but rather an improved ESB? Six F-35Bs, a few helicopters, and lots of deck space and some radar and missile systems but no real pretensions to fighting a high intensity conflict. (I don’t think the current ESB is quite that capable, but in principle it seems a small step from what exists - take an ESB, add FFG level combat systems, and target leisurely performance of say 15 knots to ease the space and engineering constraints)
I'm with Hugh here. If you just want to operate a bunch of helicopters and have the capability to occasionally drop a JDAM or discourage a 40-year-old MiG, then America is plenty, and it's also useful for dropping lots of angry teenagers on people, which is a capability we want anyway. The problem with super-America is that in pretty much all cases, it makes more sense to spend the extra money and get something closer to a CVN, eventually ending with actually having a CVN. 20 kts instead of 30? Well, that's a substantial reduction in payload in a lot of wind conditions, and diesel is going to mean a lot of work for the oiler force, because carriers are really thirsty. And yes, you could cut the radar and electronic budget substantially (technically, the carriers don't have Aegis, but I take your meaning), but that's a big sacrifice of capability on a ship you're talking about operating pretty much independently. And so on and so forth.
To be clear - if you could only have one or a few ships, then a CVN is the way to go.
But if you want a cheaper way to project force and show the flag while freeing the CVNs for other things, it seems like the solution is not a 75% carrier (at which point you might as well go 100%), but a 40% carrier.
The problem is that a 40% capability carrier is still going to be a 60% cost carrier.
@bean
Sure, but you then have two hulls and can cover two locations (or increase your coverage ratio after adjusting for port and training time) for 120% of the cost of one carrier. Which on a pure dollar vs. capacity basis isn’t the best trade, but if you stipulate that they’re a cheaper auxiliary for limited but still worthwhile missions is more defensible.
If you get 40% of the carrier for 80% of the price it isn’t worth it, but for 50% or 60% it’s at least in the trade space.
Also, for lower intensity missions, I think capability is sort of poorly defined. Like, if a CVN is only using 60% of its hypothetical maximum capability during a lower intensity operation, an enhanced ESB gives you 2/3 of that capacity for 60% of the price.
Which is a poor trade when it comes to a maximum effort war, but given how much time seems to be spent on these engagements having a few is not the worst idea.
The current ESB confirms that it's possible to build a technically-a-warship nearly the displacement of a CVN for much cheaper (~$650M, compared to ~$3B for an America and ~$10B for a full CVN).
However, because it's shorter than a CVN and has more superstructure, the flight deck is ~1/3 the length and obstructed at both ends. It's also reportedly not heat-resistant enough for VTOL jets. I don't know whether it would be possible to build something without those issues without increasing the cost to normal amphib levels.
Another relevant question is to what extent CVNs that are currently doing low-intensity war are less useful for a major war, and how much more they cost to run, compared to CVNs that do nothing but wait/train for the possibility of major war. If there were no difference, using the existing CVNs for low-intensity war would be effectively free even though buying them wasn't.
@muddywaters
I would suspect that for some operations there is nothing like live fire from the enemy to become trained and “battle hardened”. But it comes at the price of other skills - so a CVN in the Red Sea is probably quite skilled at what amounts to Scud hunting, but this probably comes at the expense of say anti submarine warfare proficiency.
I also think the problem statement is more that even with all the resources of the US, given the constraints of maintenance and training and so on, we can only have three or maybe four of our CVNs actually deployed at any given time. Which is great, until you need to cover five hot spots, and then it becomes a question of: 1. Leave an area uncovered 2. Increase the op tempo to surge resources 3. Deploy a less capable force in place of the CVN 4. Permanently upscale the fleet to support five deployed CVN carriers 5. Other?
A lot of the skill involved is merely in operating at full scale. Sure, Eisenhower isn't practicing ASW right now, but her crew is probably getting pretty good at planning strikes, getting bombs ready and onto planes, and sending those planes out to deal death and destruction while the battle group is ready for missile attack. I'd take a group that had done that, and stayed at sea for 6 months, over one that just went out to do training for a full-scale war, and that gets serious problems in 2 months when things start to go wrong that they don't really have the onboard capability to fix. To put it simply, if we want CVNs for full-scale operations, we should also use them for smaller-scale operations, because those are practically free, and you get really good training.
Re the second part, the obvious answer is that we can use LHAs to cover some of that in lower-intensity cases, and often do.
Re the ESB discussion, you could absolutely make a cheap helicopter carrier, and probably even give it STOVL capability (I'm pretty sure the deck heating issue is solvable with a different coating) although I'm still not sure exactly what problem this is supposed to solve that isn't solved by our current systems.
@bean
I think the fact that we're referencing the various current systems suggests that they're useful solutions, and the question isn't so much 'what should the next new system be?' but more around 'what is the best balance of (mostly) existing systems' in terms of ESB vs CVN vs LHA, or possibly a very evolutionary set of improvements.
I think it's (very loosely) parallel to the issues that the RN faced at the peak of its power - how do you provide meaningful global coverage with very generous but not unlimited resources. Do you go all in on the 'battle fleet', with a focus on ships of the line (to go back to the days of sail) or battleships, or do you put together a mix of more diversified units, where you have light cruisers and gunboats and so on to provide meaningful but less capable coverage where the battle fleet can't be. This is doubly so because most of the actual naval activities since the end of WWII have been very littoral in nature, with minimal blue water combat. (Though there is an obvious and important confounding factor here...)
(Warning: this is speculative.)
The obvious thing the ESB might be is an even cheaper (~4-5x, in both construction cost and crew size) and larger (in displacement, and hence plausibly storage space, but currently not flight deck length) amphib.
The obvious potential problem with that is that the cheapness might make it too vulnerable to be useful, as it has basically no defences, and the civilian-derived hull design and small crew might be problematic for damage control.
@RedRover
The problem that WILL come up is that you won't have the right kind of units where and when you need them. Sometimes that'll mean you have a full-up CVBG handling a low-intensity conflict that your "little crappy ships" could've maybe handled cheaper; but sometimes it'll mean your "little crappy ships" wind up facing threats they were never intended to have to deal with. And then they won't be cheap anymore.
Right, but this is only true if you stipulate that you can always have a CVBG to handle whatever the conflict is. But if CVBG's are (semi-)finite, you're implicitly trading off a higher likelihood of overmatching the opponent when you can be there vs a higher likelihood of being pre-occupied elsewhere. Which today is very unlikely, but in the longer term that seems at least possible. (Though that's also sensitive to assumptions about 'showing the flag' vs 'low intensity sustained conflict' vs 'all out peer warfare').
@bean
Not to "necro" an old post, but does this deserve a fresh look given: A) the advent of persistent, possibly total, sensor coverage allowing constant real-time tracking of CVNs B) the last two years wild proliferation of low-cost, highly effective, attack options? C) the cost of the Ford class rapidly closing on the $15B/copy mark?
The America LHA as is isn't the answer, but something that size could be. A purpose-built, conventional CATOBAR carrier, at 50k tons, would probably be $4-5B or so, let's say double that for the first unit. For the cost of 2 Fords you could put 6 50k carriers in the water.
I did a little powerpoint engineering, a ship that size could comfortably operate a 40-50 plane air wing. Call it 20 F-35s, 16 SHornets (including Gs) and 4-6 each MH-60, E-2, and MQ-25. About 2/3 of the 100k-carrier's wing. With a hull the size of America, but without her vehicle or troop spaces, you could also have aircraft magazines and JP5 storage about 60-70% of what's on Nimitz or Ford.
You do lose sortie-generation rates (2 or 3 cats versus 4, smaller elevators, tighter hangar, etc) but for many situations where we deploy carriers that's not the most relevant measure. For situations where massed airpower is needed, build a task force around 2 CVs.
You also lose the "unlimited range at speed" that you only get with neutrons, but again... is that terribly relevant? These guys aren't deploying solo, and the Burkes will have to refuel.
More hulls gains operational flexibility and the ability to respond to more "short of peer war" conflicts simultaneously. It would also lessen the deployment burden on crews, trying to maintain the ops tempo the world requires of a 10-11 carrier force.
And then there's redundancy. Whether from drone strikes (see Black Sea fleet), laundry fires (CVN-78) or a hail of ASBMs in a future conflict, high-value assets without a backup make for a brittle force. Attack technology has become widespread, inexpensive, capable, and accessible, and defensive technologies are barely staying ahead (if at all). And everyone always knows where our CVNs are. Chinese or Russian satellites are there, of cousrse, but commercial satellites are darn near omnipresent. More hulls complicates adversary targeting, and provides a degree of resilience thats we just don't have today.
We have a lot of eggs in our very large baskets. I'm not saying smaller carriers are the be-all/end-all answer. But a mixed force with maybe 8 CVNs and another 6 (or 8 if we're optimistic) 50k ton CVs, with the LHAs still available as backups, sounds more flexible than limping along with 10-11 100k CVNs.
My policy is that necros are not only allowed, but encouraged.
I don't think this deserves a reexamination, because the basic drivers are still the same. If someone can do real-time tracking of 11 carriers in this day and age, they can do real-time tracking of 20. And given that they just announced a delay in the LHAs, I see no reason why the small carrier program would go any better than the Ford program. Paper designs always have the advantage of not having the real-world problems show up.
I also really question your ability to fit 60% of a Ford's air wing on a hull half the size. I'd expect economies of scale to run the other way. And as for supplies, definitely not. Ford is using that tonnage for something, and it's not just ballast.
There are a couple points here. First, even these are much bigger than Burkes and will need a lot more fuel, greatly increasing the strain on the oiler force. Second, carrier ops require a lot of time at high speed, and eat oil like nobody's business. The escorts often have a bit of flexibility to not follow exactly, and are spared the worst of it. (Also, planes don't like exhaust fumes, although that's probably less of a problem now that Bunker C is gone.)
I don't think the America class got "uncomfortably close to light carriers for the USN’s taste" - instead I think the Navy deliberately built them as light carriers. The Navy designed the ships so the lack of a well deck was not something foisted on the USN but something it wanted.
In the 80's and early 90's the USN had 14 to 15 supercarriers (Midway class and beyond) in service. With the end of the Cold War this dropped to 12 carriers through 2007. But the end of the Cold War not only meant mass decommissioning of non-nuclear CVs (6 of them in 7 years) but also a slowing of CVN construction from one every 2-3 years to one every 5-8 years. As a result the carrier force declined to 10 ships in commission in 2013 with the retirement of the Enterprise, before reaching its current stable level of 11 since the Ford was commissioned (although with an all nuclear carrier fleet at least one is always in reactor refueling which means only 10 operational, and in 2021-22 when the Washington's overhaul was extended the number operational dropped to 9).
I don't think it is any accident the the America was commissioned in 2014 at the nadir with no well deck and a bigger hanger. The Navy knew in the 2000's as the America class was being designed that the carrier force would be in trouble numbers wise in the 2010s. With a 24 month deployment cycle (17 month workup, 1 month transit, 6 months on station) it takes four carriers to keep one deployed, so 9-10 operational carriers means only 2 overseas consistently and only 4 available for war right away (the 2 deployed plus the next 2 in the rotation; the others more recently returned are undergoing less complex repairs, have no air wing on board or assembled, etc.) This is a far cry from the 6 carriers deployed to the Red Sea and Persian Gulf in 1990-91 for the Persian Gulf War, with 9 others available for the rest of the globe.
The USN needed more carriers, but it didn't have the budget to order more CVNs, and institutionally it didn't want to order actual light carriers because it would raise questions why the big expensive CVNs were being bought (basically Chad W's analysis). But the USN was also maintaining a fleet of about a dozen big deck amphibious ships (since reduced to 9) that were as larger or larger as most other country's aircraft carriers. So they commandeered the design of the America and Tripoli and made them light carriers by taking out the well deck to make the hanger larger, increasing aviation capability at the expense of amphibious capability (which was nominally the ship's intended purpose). This resulted in a light carrier that was not as effective as it could be, because the USN could not eliminate all amphibious capability without giving away the game, thus compromising the design compared to a clean sheet light carrier of the same displacement. It also did not make the Marine Corps happy, who needed that well deck capability to be able to fulfill their amphibious mission. From Bougainville on the well deck returns - whether this is a result of the Navy not wanting Congress to ask too many questions about 'light carriers', or because they feel two light carriers is equivalent to the "missing" CVN (if you want a 12 carrier fleet to keep three continuously deployed, versus 11 CVNs actually in commission), or because the USMC made enough noise is a good question.
It is worth noting that the Chinese Type 076 "landing helicopter dock" seems to be following the same pattern. It is ~10% larger than the US LHDs/LHAs, and while it has a well deck, it also has an electromagnetic catapult and arresting gear, making it full CATOBAR ship, and the first "amphibious" ship with CATOBAR capability. Whether this is because the PLAN is also raiding their amphibious warship budget to get more carrier aviation, or because they don't have a Gen 5/stealth fighter with STOVL capability like the F-35B, or becuase they feel that amphib ops in the future will require drones large enough to need the catapult and arresting gear is another good question.
Small note, if you were designing an air wing for a light carrier you would not drop the MH-60S detachment, you would drop the MH-60Rs. The six escorts will be carrying a dozen MH-60Rs for anti-submarine warfare which is more than enough to keep one or two up to protect against subs, while the MH-60Ss are required to act as plane guard during aviation ops, for search and rescue (admittedly not the Navy's strong suit compared to the Air Force HH-60/HH-47 platforms) vertical resupply, etc.
@Onux
Is there any material impact on the ship in terms of which MH-60 variant is chosen? I think you're implying that this would be about the choice of airwing, but the way you phrased it made it sound like there is also a carrier design component that I'm not getting. (i.e., the MH-60R requires additional storage and shop space for the sonobouys or something)
@redRover
No change to the ship design, that comment was entirely in relation to the makeup of the air wing.
@Onux
There is, AFAIK, no evidence of that being the origin of these ships. There is reasonable evidence that the design was driven by the coming of the V-22 and what was seen as an increase in the need for aviation capability inside an ESG. And I will note that the later units got the well deck back because they realized it was useful and didn't want light carriers.
@Bean
Why people say they are doing something and why they are actually doing them is sometimes different. The V-22 should have reduced the need for aviation facilities because the greater capacity of the V-22 and its greater speed means that the same number of airframes (or even fewer, given the V-22's larger folded size) can move more troops (more on each trip, and each trip happens quicker). If you want to park more F-35B's however....
What's more, in some ways the most potent 'aviation' asset in an ESG is the LCAC (they are aerodynamic after all). The America class was replacing the Tarawa class, and the Tarawa class could only carry one LCAC because it was designed when the LCU was the heavy lift landing craft (and they often carried none because of how inefficient that was versus carrying 4 LCU). The Wasp class could carry 3 LCACs. Given how the focus at the time of the American design was over the horizon operations, and how the LCAC can do that with heavy vehicles in a way that LCU and the V-22 cannot, it should have been a given to include a well deck for them. That a well deck was not included is the best evidence that use within an ESG was not the reason for the design of America and Tripoli. If it was, then why did they go back to the Well deck for Bougainville on? The ships nominally operate interchangeably within ESGs, it's not like the usefulness of well decks is some secret, and the omission was widely criticized from the start.
You're assuming that there's a fixed amount of air they want to do, which isn't really how this works. If the V-22 is a better helicopter, the assumption would be that deployment of troops is going to swing more towards V-22s and less towards other methods that require a well deck. So maybe get rid of the well deck and get more capacity for V-22s. And better supporting F-35s was probably part of that, too, but it was the MEU detachment of F-35s and not a full air wing. AIUI, they don't have the munitions space for that to work well.
I can also say from personal experience that America has a lot of features (wide corridors, big vehicle storage deck, etc) that make no sense for a light carrier, and make a lot of sense for a 'phib.
"If the V-22 is a better helicopter, the assumption would be that deployment of troops is going to swing more towards V-22s and less towards other methods that require a well deck."
Well the thing is that the V-22 is not a better helicopter, it is a tilt-roter. Not only does it carry 1.5 to 2 times as many troops as the CH-46 it is replacing, it's cruise speed is twice as fast. So if you want to swing your deployment of troops towards aviation you don't need more V-22s, embarking the same number will get you 2.5 to 3.5 times as many troops ashore in the same amount of time (a little less than 3-4 times because time landing and reloading another wave is fixed). So is it better to embark two squadrons and move 5-7 times as many troops? No, because you don't have that many troops. An embarked MEU has three line companies and one weapons company that could be moved ashore by helicopter/tiltrotor,* plus maybe another company of attachments (snipers, recon, medical, command and control, etc.) 12 V-22s can move all of that ashore in less time than 12 CH-46s could make two trips and move a company and a half, so why would you need any more V-22s?
One might say you would use the other V-22s for vehicles and equipment. A MEU also has an artillery battery, a company of 14 light armored vehicles, and at the time the American class was designed a platoon of tanks. The weapons company, meanwhile, normally operates mounted with HMMWVs or the new JLTV. The V-22 can slingload an M777 155mm artillery piece or a HMMWV, only the CH-53K can internally load a HMMWV or slingload a JLTV or LAV, but range and capacity are extremely limited in all cases but the internal CH-53K condition (for instance one V-22 can carry the M777 cannon, but you need another one to carry ammo). Plus, your cannon are immobile once set, and the limited number of vehicles you can fly will be immobile soon without fuel.
All of which leads to the point that you don't use the well deck for deployment of troops, you use it to move vehicles, equipment and supplies. A single LCAC can carry more LAV-25s than a MEU's entire CH-53K detachment, and even carry them farther (although not faster). Artillery moved via LCAC comes with a truck to move it around and ammunition so it can actually be fired. Once again, the three LCACs in a LHD can move six guns in a battery with ammo, which would take an entire squadron of V-22s - plus on the LCAC there is a truck to give tactical mobility and once again the LCAC can fly farther with that load than the V-22 can (over the horizon, right?) No aircraft can carry a tank like an LCAC, of course.
As a further advantage, the LCACs can load those artillery pieces, or any vehicle for that matter, faster than planes since they can be driven directly to the well deck, instead of to the hanger and then up an elevator to the flight deck and then spotted and rigged by hovering aircraft. Plus loading in the well deck does not foul your flight deck preventing other aviation operations (like those troop assaults we started with, or F-22 / AH-1 ops for fire support).
This in fact brings up another point why increased V-22 capacity is a non-starter: there is limited deck space for spotting rotary wing aircraft. No matter how big the hanger or embarked airwing is, there are only 8-9 landing spots on deck, and that will constrain your rotory wing sortie rate (and I'm not even sure if the starboard side spots can be used by H-53s/V-22s if the port side ones are, given the large rotor span of those aircraft, so you might be limited to 6 landing spots per wave). It should be noted that this is less of a limitation for F-35s. They can be stored on deck in a loaded and ready to fly condition using much less space due to how much smaller their wingspan is compared to rotor diameter(s) and then rapidly launched one after the other. When getting ready they don't need space behind them to load troops or equipment over the aircraft ramp.
Finally, if the doctrine is that amphibious assaults will be more aviation focused then why did the well deck come back for Bougainville onwards? Your suggestion that the Navy "didn't want light carriers" fails on two levels. 1) If design supposedly came from the idea that more assault aviation would be an advantage because the V-22 is so good, then why has America only ever deployed with a single V-22 squadron, and why are there pictures of it with a dozen plus F-35s on deck, like a light carrier? Per your logic we should see pictures of the deck full of 16-18 V-22s, and only 4-6 F-35s, not the other way around. 2) The Navy designed the ship! The America class is basically a repeat of the final Wasp class ship, and that already had a well deck, so if the USN didn't want light carriers and are worried about Congress asking questions why did it go out of its way to make it more more like a light carrier by removing the well deck and increase the hanger? The Marines were certainly not asking for that.
As to the design elements that do not make sense for a light carrier, I already explained how the Navy was raiding the amphib construction budget to make up for the lack of full sized carriers. They couldn't delete all amphibious elements without giving away what they were trying to do. Completely eliminating the vehicle deck, etc. and commissioning a CVL instead of an LHA would have raised the ire of the Marine/amphibious lobby in Congress (and the USMC itself), caused questions among the fiscal accountability/defense reform types about why big carriers were necessary, etc. Tweaking the design to get two squadrons of F-35s on an 'amphibious' ship though....
The features that make no sense in this regard are the cost of hiding the intent; its not what they would want to do its what they had to do. The fact that the well deck returned after two "Lightning Carriers" I think tells part of the story. The USN has 11 CVNs but since the 1990s has tried to keep 12. A CVN carries four strike-fighter squadrons. The two 'amphibious' ships without well decks can together embark four strike-fighter sqadrons....
*Nominally one of those companies is designated to go ashore by amphibious vehicles, and one by zodiac-style boats, so you theoretically have even fewer troops to fly, but Marines are flexible and would certainly move everyone by air if the situation called for it.
Also, having done some digging, I have to challenge the notion that the overall design of the ships are somehow compromising the aviation capabilities of American and Tripoli. Only small portions are going to have wide corridors for troops wearing rucksacks, leading from embarked troop berthing to the flight deck. America and Tripoli are sometimes simplistically described as "removed well deck to make hanger bigger" but it goes deeper than that. Removing the well deck meant that the ballast tanks used to lower the ship for over the stern ops could be converted to JP-5 storage. That means that LHA-6/7 have 1,330k gallons of aviation fuel, versus 585k in the LHDs, a 127% increase. Also, the entire well deck was subdivided into 3 new decks, all for aviation support, as seen here: https://news.usni.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Screen-Shot-2016-08-17-at-2.17.18-PM.png
That is a lot of new space. Some of it replaces the volume used to expand the hanger, but overall aviation support space went up 49% on top of the hanger growing 50% and having two "high bay" maintenance areas instead of one. These are ships with quite a lot of aviation capability.
The one thing I can't speak to is magazine capacity. You state it is only 5% of a Ford class, but where are you getting that from? The Navy never specifies magazine sizes and locations in any diagrams, just as it does not show layout of reactor spaces. Yes, normal MEUs normally only operate and stock weapons for 4-6 F-35s, but that is not the only thing the ship's magazines are for. There is also an AH-1 detachment that requires aviation weapons, plus magazine space for the embarked troops. I'm not sure if there are normally separate magazines for air vs land, but if there were, I wouldn't be surprised if it were different in LHA-6/7 versus the LHDs. Also, amphibs tend to have a lot of general storage (all the 'CGO' spaces on the diagram above) and the ones low in the ship below the waterline could be used as magazines when there are no Marines on board with gear and supplies (assuming those are not already magazines or designed to be convertible). only thing that really doesn't fit the light carrier role would be the vehicle storage deck; almost everything else (C2 space, berthing) can be rolled over and used by an air group instead of a MEU.
I am aware of that. I have actually seen one land aboard the ship in question. But for purposes of analyzing its impact on "how do we move troops ashore", it's a better helicopter. It can do most things a helicopter can, but it's faster and has more capacity.
Let's be clear. "Increased aviation capacity" doesn't just mean "we can put more planes on it". It includes things like "more fuel" and "more maintenance space". Now, with the extra hangar space, you can probably carry a couple extra planes of whatever sort, but a lot of it is "we can operate more complex planes more effectively for longer". And the V-22 and F-35 are both bigger and more complex than the planes they replaced.
I'm also not saying that getting rid of the well deck was a good idea from an amphibious operations perspective. All of your criticisms of air-only are well-made. But particularly in the mid-2000s, when the decisions were being made, there were a lot of weird ideas floating around, and "the Osprey's increased speed and range will let us do maneuver so effectively that we don't need nearly as much capacity over the beach" is something I could see them saying. More importantly, LHAs don't deploy alone, and the LSD and LPD still had/have well decks, so while this is a 100% reduction in well deck capacity for the helicopter platform, it's maybe a 30% reduction for the ESG as a whole.
The problem here is that if you want the F-35B to be useful, you really need to do a rolling takeoff, and that requires quite a bit of deck space. (And if "F-35B carrier" was the main requirement, they'd have a ski jump, which they don't.)
Citation needed. The Marines often get weird ideas, and while I wasn't paying a ton of attention back then, I would be very unsurprised if "super vertical envelopment" or some other buzzword wasn't dominating their thinking at the time. And for some context, this was just after the 15th MEU successfully invaded Afghanistan, which you will note is landlocked.
IIRC, pretty much every corridor I went through was wide. But that's not the main issue. The main issue is all of the space taken up by berthing for Marines and storage for equipment and vehicles that isn't really suitable for aviation stuff.
At a guess, the Seaforth WNR article on the America. I'll try to check later.
AH-1s carry way less in the way of weapons than do F-35s. And I suspect the land magazines are built differently in a way that makes them hard to use for aviation weapons. (They're dealing with smaller objects that don't need ordnanceman attention before they get used. It's at most just crates of artillery shells that get sent ashore as crates.)
I'm not saying that you absolutely couldn't use America as a Lightning Carrier, just that it's not all that good, and we definitely shouldn't build more like that.
This is maybe a dumb question, but given how much performance modern fighters have, what is the delta for an F-35 between:
In looking at the videos that I can find (e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAuBURnSqU4) it appears that they spot the F-35Bs fairly far forward for the ski jump takeoff, at least on HMS Prince of Wales. Similarly, for Tripoli they appear to spot the F-35Bs forward of the elevator at launch. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhilDBMHxjs) Which makes one wonder, at least from an engineering standpoint, what happens if you spot it all the way at the stern and give it another 200' of takeoff roll. I imagine it would complicate the marshalling of the aircraft on deck and simultaneous landing/takeoff operations if done at scale, but still seems interesting in terms of how much weight it could actually get aloft. (Doubly so as you might get into the range of an afterburner enhanced "normal" takeoff, rather than just a more effective "vertical" takeoff with the lift fan and 3BSM. Interestingly, the F-35C apparently can do non-afterburner cat launches, though that obviously is not apples-to-apples on multiple fronts)