Restore a Distributable Naval Air Force

In June 2018, the U.S. Naval Institute published my article, “Build a Green-Water Fleet.” The article names the types of vessels and computes their costs, emphasizing that the fleet must be designed to go in harm’s way in dangerous littoral waters against a variety of prospective enemies. The green-water fleet would take only a fraction of the Navy’s shipbuilding budget: because it comprises relatively small vessels, its 394 ships could be had for less than $2 billion in shipbuilding and conversion funds per year. By far the most costly component would be the eight CVLs, small carriers of 30 aircraft, including 20 short takeoff and vertical landing (STOVL) F-35Bs. They are priced at $3 billion each.¹

The June essay also contends that because of the cost of building the next generation of nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines, the blue-water fleet will have to shrink, although it does not specify in what way.² To work up a new, smaller blue-water fleet within a realistic budget is a good deal harder than to describe the much less costly fleet designed to take the offensive to deny an enemy his own littoral waters. 

The blue-water fleet is responsible for both sea control and power projection, so it is far bigger in tonnage and more costly in billets. It is not easy to formulate its composition for many interrelated missions and tasks. A strong first step, however, is to concentrate on diversifying its most expensive and manpower-intensive component: the sea-based air force. Toward that end, the first task ought to be to restore a more distributable naval air force instead of concentrating so much value in 10 or 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers (CVNs).

Past as Prologue

A fleet of large warships for sea control and power projection was the stable core of the 20th-century U.S. Navy. In recent years, awareness of the need for a bigger navy has grown, but most solutions have included buying more of the same kind of warships or changing the mix of existing designs. This is like shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic—with the CVN as the only deck chair design for sea-based air operations.

In the 20th century, the Navy employed many and varied aircraft carriers and supporting land-based aircraft. When Rear Admiral William Moffett was charged with developing naval aviation in 1921, he did not know what size or configuration of carriers and aircraft types were best suited to support the fleet. Moffett also explored land-based aircraft primarily designed to detect the enemy at long range, including seaplanes, amphibians, and dirigibles.³ 

At the end of the 1930s, the Navy had only six carriers of various sizes, but six was enough to become operationally proficient and ready to expand the carrier fleet rapidly. During World War II, when it realized the many roles naval aviation must play, the Navy built more than 100 carriers of different sizes and configurations. After the war, for the next 40 years, it employed a variety of carriers for many purposes. In 1954, as a junior officer, I served in a destroyer that was part of a hunter-killer task group centered on an escort carrier flying antisubmarine aircraft. Over the years, however, the carriers became so much bigger that their numbers dwindled, and each one had to serve more purposes.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, most naval aviation energy was devoted to supporting land operations around the world with a single design: the large and costly CVN. The fleet became efficient at projecting power with sophisticated aircraft that flew into danger over land, but from a safe sanctuary at sea. That sanctuary is now lost, yet one CVN has upward of $18 billion in ship and aircraft eggs in its single basket. The vulnerability of large carriers to missile attacks is a growing problem, and sea control is once again a significant—perhaps the most important—mission for the blue-water navy.

The Strategic Context

A realignment of our Navy and Marine Corps air components into a more distributable force is the first step in changing the blue-water fleet, because air superiority is essential to execute what has to be a multifaceted 21st-century strategy. In outline, such a durable 21st-century strategy must:

• Fit a national maritime strategy. The United States is a maritime nation that must retain sea control before any other national aims can be achieved overseas.  
• Recognize deterrence of nuclear war will continue to be a costly role for the Navy.
• Emphasize two distinct but complementary capabilities: (1) sea control of the open oceans worldwide to defend the sea lanes and keep blue water safe for all friendly nations; and (2) sea denial in confined waters where prospective enemy forces lurk and where the United States must keep commitments to its allies or support friendly nations in critical regions such as the Baltic, Eastern Mediterranean, and China seas.
• Along with operational plans and fleet composition, be suitable for cooperation, competition, confrontation, and different levels of conflict with a major power. Such a strategy, when affordable, cannot be risk free.
• Recognize conflict against a major power must be a war of containment, avoiding escalation and terminating with the least possible violence in a negotiated settlement that achieves U.S. goals for going to war. A sea-denial strategy against China that does not threaten the mainland illustrates a strategy of peacetime influence and wartime containment. A strategy of total victory against China would lead to World War III.

Hence, a flexible, adaptable, and distributable force is necessary to achieve the strategy’s ways (operational plans) and means (force composition and tactics) and meet its several national goals.

Two special forms of sea control require separate attention. First, recent time- and energy-consuming tasks have included counterdrug, antipiracy, and immigrant policing operations. These operations will continue. Second, the Navy faces prospective future Arctic operations to guard U.S. commerce or keep Russian Navy units at bay in summer months. Both kinds of sea control require highly distributable air support, some of it sea based.

Sea-Based Air Force Components

What entities can make up a more distributable, numerous, and defendable sea-based air force? In the air, manned jet aircraft would be supplemented by some mix of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs), and all forms of vertical takeoff (VTOL) and STOVL aircraft. On the water, the first and easiest way to spread capability is to assign LHA-class amphibious assault ships an operational role that is simultaneously experimental. Another quickly achievable expedient is the “Arapaho concept”: converting container ships to support VTOL aircraft that will participate in certain kinds of contingencies around the world.⁴ For a flexible long-term solution, a light carrier should be developed similar to a design outlined a decade ago by then-Lieutenant Frank Weisser and Tinya Coles-Cieply.⁵

From the land, forward detachments of Marine Corps or Army aircraft flying from obscure airfields and accompanied by ready-to-launch antiship cruise missiles can team with forces afloat, but they must be trained for sea-denial attacks in enemy-held waters. Long-range manned Air Force bombers flying from distant airfields have more secure bases, and they carry big payloads, but they are expensive. Some allies and friendly states can contribute air capability in limited ways, and their contributions should be considered.

A Plan of Action

To improve U.S. sea-based air capabilities:

• First, there must be agreement on the durable maritime strategy’s ends. The Chief of Naval Operations recently issued a statement that goes far toward specifying a strategy that will provide the focus.⁶
• Second, a plan of action must have a sponsor who understands the need to broaden the Navy’s naval aviation perspective, and under a sense of urgency.
• Third, the plan should be developed by a small team conversant with candidate solutions led by a representative of the sponsor. The plan should enumerate initial actionable steps by the sponsor to achieve the endpoint. 
• Fourth, the team should have Marine participants who are familiar with the plans to refine future Marine Corps missions, tasks, and composition.

The outcome should describe a suitable naval air force endpoint, understanding that external factors likely will change the composition before that endpoint is reached. 

Summing Up

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor eliminated battleships as the Navy’s capital ships. Shortly thereafter, the loss of land-based bombers (B-17s) to air strikes in the Philippines eliminated them as a complement to aircraft carriers. Then the sinking of the Repulse and Prince of Wales by Japanese naval aircraft flying from land was conclusive evidence that naval aviation, not the battleship, was going to be the “capital ship” in the Pacific war. By the end of 1941, with the exception of minecraft, the purpose of every combat ship in the Navy had changed. 

Almost from a cold start, the Navy designed and produced an amphibious navy with nothing to go on except Marine Corps prewar thinking. If we suffer a new Pearl Harbor in the form of two or more CVNs suddenly being put out of action, it will be too late to change the way the Navy fights unless there is a plan in place.

The Navy must plan a more distributable sea-based air capability to support the United States’ role as a maritime nation. Something must be done to retain the capability for sea control and power projection in low- to mid-sized contingencies and to be ready to respond to great power aggression. To get started, LHAs, UAVs, and STOVLs offer three immediate ways to supplement CVNs. “Steaming—or flying—as before” cannot continue indefinitely.