The U.S. Navy hopes that its forthcoming Naval Integrated Fire Control-Counter Air (NIFC-CA) battle network will enable its carrier strike groups to operate inside highly contested environments such as the Western Pacific, but not everyone agrees that it will work. While the concept has merits, there are also some fundamental flaws—the NIFC-CA effort lacks any meaningful cooperation with the U.S. Air Force and could be vulnerable to enemy electronic or cyber warfare.
Further, some analysts contend that the NIFC-CA effort is merely a way to provide a justification for existing programs rather than a genuine effort to tackle the real challenges to the carrier’s relevance in future wars. “I really think it’s more of an evolutionary concept rather than a new approach that would effectively integrate future capabilities with current systems,” said Mark Gunzinger, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “It comes across as a concept that is intended to explain how the Navy will use its program of record capabilities for future wars.”1
Other analysts such as Dan Goure at the Lexington Institute applaud the concept as essential to the future of the carrier and its air wing. But Goure raised the question as to why the Navy and the Air Force are building parallel data networks alongside each other instead of cooperating on a single common interoperable system. “It would be nice if these guys could live by sandbox rules and could play well together,” he said. “At least inform each other and coordinate better.”2
What About Interservice Integration?
The lack of joint interoperability is one of the fundamental flaws of the NIFC-CA concept. Operating against a highly capable foe like Russia or China would require close coordination between the Navy and the Air Force—particularly air assets like fifth-generation stealth fighters and bombers such as the F-22 Raptor, F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, and the B-2 Spirit. Longer term, NIFC-CA will need to be able communicate with the Air Force’s forthcoming Long-Range Strike-Bomber. But there is no indication that the Air Force or Navy are cooperating in any meaningful way.
It is clear that regardless of whatever the Air Force is doing, the Navy is proceeding full steam ahead with its NIFC-CA effort in its Fiscal Year 2015 budget submission to Congress.3 The service has protected the programs that would act as key enablers for NIFC-CA such as the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye airborne early-warning aircraft, which is the central node for the entire construct. The Navy has also protected programs like the SM-6 Standard missile that would be launched from surface warships but would, in the NIFC-CA concept, be guided in flight by the E-2D to its maximum kinematic range. Likewise, the Navy is also investing in longer-range strike weapons such as the Long-Range Antiship Missile (LRASM) and Next-Generation Land-Attack Weapon, which are also expected to play a significant role under the service’s NIFC-CA vision.
The central tenets behind NIFC-CA are situational awareness and extended-range cooperative targeting. Every unit within the carrier strike group—in the air, on the surface, or under water—would be networked so that carrier strike group commander has as clear a picture as possible of the battlespace. “We’ll be able to show a common picture to everybody,” said Rear Admiral Mike Manazir, the Navy’s Director of Air Warfare. “And now the decision-maker can be in more places than before.”4
But that does not necessarily mean that a strike group commander would micromanage every aspect of the battle—those decisions would still be “farmed out” to individual commanders, but every officer would be working from a common operational picture.
Many of the capabilities envisioned for NIFC-CA already exist on board the Navy’s aircraft carrier fleet. But those capabilities will “evolve” in the later part of the decade into a seamless network that will allow for far better situational awareness and for much more precise command and control over hundreds of miles.
NIFC-CA also forces naval planners to think creatively about the capabilities of individual platforms within the carrier air wing or even the carrier strike group at large. Under NIFC-CA, the sum total of a carrier strike group’s firepower has to be considered in aggregate. For example, targets spotted hundreds of miles away by one “sensor” could be engaged cooperatively by any number of “shooters” available to the strike group over vast distances.
No System Is an Island
But while the Navy may already have the hardware on hand today to accomplish such a feat, those systems are not yet networked together to accomplish that task. That is because in the past, the Navy bought hardware for the capability resident in that individual platform. These days, the Navy is looking for platforms that fit into an overall operating concept such as NIFC-CA rather than a stand-alone system. “What we’re buying now is integrated capability to deliver an effect on the maritime battlefield,” Manazir said.
The key to delivering those effects is not particular to any one platform such as a fighter or Aegis cruiser, rather it is a question of matching a “sensor” with a “shooter” in order to accomplish a specific task. In practical terms, F-35Cs, F/A-18E/F Super Hornets and EA-18G Growlers, E-2D Hawkeyes, and Sikorsky MH-60S/R Seahawks, along with DDG-51 destroyers and even submarines, will all have to work together as a coherent whole—connected via data links—under the NIFC-CA construct.
One example could be when a carrier strike group is operating inside an anti-access environment where the ship would need to launch a strike deep into heavily defended hostile territory. With NIFC-CA, the carrier air wing would launch all of its aircraft. The tip of the spear would be the stealthy F-35C, whose role would be to fly deep into the heart of hostile airspace to gather intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) data.
The F-35C would be backed by standoff jamming support from the EA-18G Growler with next-generation jammers—and possibly other capabilities—to help degrade enemy low-frequency early-warning radars in order to facilitate its penetrating ISR mission. Potentially, the Navy’s forthcoming Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) aircraft could be used to extend the range of the F-35C and supplement its ISR capabilities. But at its core, the idea would be for the F-35C to use its extensive array of sensors to find and identify targets. “What’s in the F-35C can give us a weapons-quality track that we can push back to the E-2D,” Manazir said.
The E-2D Hawkeye—which coordinates the carrier strike group’s air assets—would then send the data from the F-35C to the air wing’s Super Hornet strike fighters. The heavily weapons-laden F/A-18E/Fs would penetrate as far as possible into the heavily defended zone before launching their standoff weapons in a coordinated effort. And like the F-35C, the Super Hornets could also be refueled en route by the UCLASS. Effectively, that would realize the maximum shooting range of the Navy’s forthcoming long-range weapons—that can go farther than a shooter can see.
The Navy is working on a number of weapons that are both longer-ranged and far more survivable than ones currently in its inventory. The problem for the Navy is that a lot of its current weapons, such as the Tomahawk cruise missile or Harpoon antiship missile, are not survivable against the most potent enemy air defenses.
One example of such a next-generation weapon is the LRASM. Additionally, the Navy is working on the Next-Generation Land-Attack Weapon, which would eventually replace the Tomahawk cruise missile. The Navy could also potentially adopt the Air Force’s stealthy AGM-158B Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range air-launched cruise missile to help extend the strike range of the Super Hornet.
Once the Super Hornets launch their standoff weapons, those missiles are guided by a data stream from the E-2D. Toward the later stages of the missiles’ flight, the F-35C, with its target-location updating capability, would take over guidance of the weapons for the end game.
Think Links
The key challenges for NIFC-CA will be data links. Every aircraft is connected to every other aircraft in the carrier air wing via the E-2D, which acts as a central node. The E-2D is also connected to the carrier and the rest of the strike group, making that aircraft a crucial asset for future naval fires. Effectively, with NIFC-CA, the carrier strike group would be able to cover hundreds of miles of territory with weapons and sensors.
The Navy has worked over the past half-decade to mature the necessary data-link technology to implement the ambitious NIFC-CA plan. “That’s what was missing in the past, that’s why we had these very high-end weapon systems like the F/A-18Es and Fs Block II with the AESA [active electronically scanned array] radars with all of this fusion on there and fusion systems that would do their own track,” according to Manazir. But with the development of the Tactical Targeting Network Technology (TTNT) waveform, an individual platform does not necessarily need to generate its own tracks. “Now I can bring that whole integrated architecture to the fight to deliver whatever effect I want to,” he said. The TTNT waveform allows for very high data rates and has very low latency, making it ideal for sharing vast amounts of data over long distances as was demonstrated during the Joint Expeditionary Force Experiment in 2008 at Nellis Air Force, Nevada.
For the purposes of NIFC-CA, the TTNT would link together the carrier strike group’s E-2Ds, EA-18Gs, the carrier itself, and eventually the UCLASS. The E-2Ds would share a specific part of their data with the EA-18G Growlers, which would also be linked via a TTNT network or potentially a variant of the Link-16 data link. If the Growlers do end up using the Link-16 data link, the EA-18G would use an advanced variant called Concurrent Multi-Netting-4 (CMN-4), which is basically multiple Link-16s stacked on top of each other. With four radio receivers, the system can move data rapidly—almost as fast as TTNT.
The Growlers would coordinate with each other using their data links to precisely locate threat-radar emitters on land or on the ocean surface using a technique called time distance of arrival. “They can locate that down to enough of an ellipse where we can put a weapon onto that ellipse,” Manazir said.
Moreover, the data link–coordinated Growlers could also use the same technique to eliminate hostile electronic-warfare assets that might attempt to attack the NIFC-CA battle network. “When we widely disperse sensors, like two E-2s or two Growlers, the threat—you can’t jam all of that,” Manazir said. “If one guy is getting jammed real hard, the other system over here can see . . . we not only home in on the jamming, but we can see where the energy is coming from and then we can actually target whatever it is.”
To eliminate the target once it is located—in the air, on land, or floating on the ocean—the Growlers or the E-2D would relay via Link-16 a weapons-quality track to one of the Super Hornets, which would actually destroy the threat. The F/A-18E/F and the F-35Cs, which are operating far forward inside hostile airspace, would not even need to have their radars activated; instead those jets could simply be receiving targeting data. Moreover, the F/A-18E/F would not necessarily even control the weapon it launches—other than to pull the trigger. The E-2D, the EA-18G, or even another Hornet or F-35C could guide that weapon.
‘Our Achilles’ Heel’
While networks are the great strength of the NIFC-CA concept, they are also a source of vulnerability. Particularly for the F-35C, which the Navy plans to use as a long-range penetrating ISR platform, it needs a secure and low probability-of-intercept data link to relay information back to the Fleet. “We need to have that link capability that the enemy can’t find and then it can’t jam,” Manazir said. “The links are our Achilles’ heel, and they always have been. And so protection of links is one of our key attributes.”
The NIFC-CA network will be built with redundancy so that the Fleet can continue to operate while under electronic or cyber attack. Theoretically, it is extremely difficult to jam links over huge distances, and one of the key features of NIFC-CA is that it is dispersed broadly across a vast geographic area.
But NIFC-CA is an extremely ambitious effort and there are still potential wrinkles. One of the major concerns raised by a number of operational aviators is the potential overreliance on networks. As one highly experienced pilot pointed out, even if the NIFC-CA network is large enough that the whole system cannot be jammed at any one time, that does not mean individual strands of the web cannot be cut. Even if just some individual elements of the NIFC-CA network are disrupted, it could seriously effect data distribution.
Some have questioned whether the NIFC-CA construct would be robust enough to withstand a concerted barrage of electronic and cyber attacks. The Chinese are particularly adept at such techniques and would likely be able to disrupt the NIFC-CA battle network—regardless of whether the Navy has taken electronic and cyber warfare into account when designing the construct.
However, a Navy official familiar with the program countered that while it is true that jamming could be a serious problem, it would not have a huge impact on NIFC-CA operations. “While if you’re that one node, it sucks, but there is no single/small group of nodes that is essential,” the official said. “The information sharing and network routing over multiple paths means that the group is still effective. Routing is key.”5
‘Make Sure They Can Talk to Each Other’
The key bone of contention raised by critics is that the NIFC-CA construct is not a joint effort in coordination with the Air Force. The Air Force, meanwhile, is developing its own networking effort to link the F-22, F-35, F-15, F-16, E-3 Sentry, and other platforms together using the battlefield airborne-communications node and a series of beyond line-of-slight “gateway platforms.” The Air Force also has programs in place to develop means for fifth-generation fighters to directly “talk” to their older fourth-generation counterparts—however, the Navy and the Air Force have shown no signs of any collaboration on their respective efforts.
Air Force officials applauded the NIFC-CA concept, but complained that the Navy seems to have forgone “jointness” in their efforts to develop NIFC-CA for operations against A2/AD threats.6 But a Navy official said that the Air Force had been consulted in the development of NIFC-CA, pointing out that the service had paired its E-2D with an E-3 Sentry AWACS and a number of Air Force fighters during Joint Expeditionary Force Experiment 2010 at Nellis Air Force Base.
NIFC-CA is huge step toward coordinating forces within the Navy, but it would be far more effective if Air Force assets like the F-22 could link to naval aircraft like the F/A-18, said Dan Goure. “I keep wondering when someone in OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] is going to come around and say, ‘That’s it. You’re not going to be allowed to do this. If they don’t talk to each other you don’t get it.’”
It might be too late to make the Air Force and Navy to settle on one common network, and there might be legitimate reasons for the Air Force and Navy to develop separate systems. However, the Pentagon must take steps to ensure that the Air Force and Navy networks are compatible in the event of a war against a highly capable foe. “There can be reasons why in the end, in addition to pride and ego and that, to have two parallel systems,” Goure said. “But at least for God’s sake make sure that they can talk to each other.”
Indeed, that is what must happen if the NIFC-CA construct is to be useful to the nation. The Pentagon leadership must force the Navy and the Air Force to work cooperatively. No one service will have a monopoly in fighting in the Western Pacific if it comes to war—by necessity it will be a joint fight.
Mark Gunzinger agreed with the need for networking, but he said that merely using existing platforms differently in an information-sharing environment is not enough. “This concept could lead some to believe that the Navy is planning to operate in the future much as it has in the past only with systems that are better integrated through data-links that are still in development.”
The Navy needs a long-range unmanned, stealthy, multirole platform that would afford the carrier the ability to stand off from the enemy’s shore—perhaps as far away as 1,000 nautical miles. The standoff distance would be needed to keep the carriers safe from the ever-growing threat of enemy antiship cruise and ballistic missiles, which could render waters closer to shore a no-go zone for the multibillion-dollar warships. “I’m disappointed in how the concept deals with potential new unmanned systems such as UCLASS,” said Gunzinger. “It really seems UCLASS is being viewed primarily as a capability that’s there to extend the range and provide supporting ISR to manned fighters.”
Gunzinger added that stealthy long-range unmanned strike aircraft would greatly increase the reach of a carrier strike group in an A2/AD environment. Developing a UCLASS that is primarily focused on supporting manned fighter aircraft would be a waste. “Hopefully that is not what the corporate Navy really intends the UCLASS to be, just refueling and ISR aircraft to support TACAIR. It would be an opportunity lost.”
Goure, however, said that he is not sure if a new unmanned carrier-based A-6 Intruder redux is really necessary—especially with the networking capability enabled by NIFC-CA. “Maybe you don’t need such a heavy-duty strike capability,” he pointed out. Goure said that with cruise missiles and other advanced long-range strike weapons, perhaps a very stealthy ISR platform that can relay weapons-quality tracks into the network would suffice.
Fundamentally, as the NIFC-CA concept stands, Gunzinger said, the NIFC-CA construct is simply “more of the same” rather than a fundamental relook at how Navy should conduct operations in the future. Goure, however, brushes off such criticisms. “It seems to me there is a misunderstanding of NIFC-CA,” he said.
The Navy is going to continue development of NIFC-CA, but the Pentagon will have to step in and mandate cooperation with the Air Force. Joint operations will be key in the Western Pacific. Further, the Navy and the Air Force must address the issue of potential enemy electronic and cyber attacks. The Chinese and Russians cannot be underestimated in their capacity to disrupt the communications links that underpin U.S. military might. Under the current setup, NIFC-CA is dangerously vulnerable to enemy electronic warfare, and additional measures must be taken to ensure that the Fleet is able to operate even if communications are severely disrupted. Further, given that the carrier is increasingly within the range of enemy weapons, serious consideration must be given to developing an ultra-long-range stealth-attack aircraft—manned or unmanned—that would enable the carrier to stand off from an adversary’s shores but still allow the air wing to strike deep inland. Developing such an aircraft might be the only way to keep the carrier relevant into the future.
1. Mark Gunzinger, digitally recorded interview with author, Washington, DC, 24 January 2014.
2. Dan Goure, digitally recorded interview with author, Washington, DC, 6 March 2014.
3. RADM William K. Lescher, USN, Department of the Navy FY 2015 President’s Budget (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, 4 March 2014), http://www.finance.hq.navy.mil/FMB/15pres/DON_PB15_Press_Brief.pdf.
4. RADM Michael C. Manazir, USN, digitally recorded interview with author, Washington, DC, 20 December 2013.
5. U.S. Navy official, digitally recorded interview with author, Washington, DC, 26 January 2014.
6. U.S. Air Force official, digitally recorded interview with author, Washington, DC, 8 January 2014.