Critics assert that antiaccess/area-denial threats have made aircraft carriers obsolete.1 Just as carrier-based attack aircraft outranged and superseded battleships’ big guns, the attack aircraft have themselves become outranged and superseded by long-range antiship missiles. In the opening weeks of a conflict with China, which risk would the U.S. Navy take with its aircraft carriers: destruction near the first island chain or irrelevance far outside it?
This dilemma between offensive fires and force protection hinges on what the carrier can launch into the fight, and, more to the point, at what range. Although today’s short-legged carrier air wing gives ample fuel for criticism, the carrier itself fundamentally is a protean platform, able to rapidly change or replenish its huge payload of aircraft, weapons, and fuel.2 As configured today, it lacks weapon systems with the standoff range to enable self-protection and restore its contested relevance. The Navy’s Next Generation Air Dominance family of platforms may eventually satisfy that requirement in the 2030s, but the intervening “dangerous decade” will need interim solutions.3
The Navy could quickly boost aircraft carriers’ striking range in the near term by catapulting large cruise missiles against enemy sea-denial defenses in the opening phase of a great power war, then surging the carriers forward to consolidate sea control with their air wings. The Navy should revisit the operational factors that shape missile requirements and consider what such missiles could be—and how to get them into the fleet.
Shaping a Missile
The overall U.S. warfighting concept consists of playing away games—keeping the fight far from U.S. shores. U.S. weapons are designed around the constraints of expeditionary launch platforms. The heaviest missiles erupting from the ubiquitous Mk 41 vertical launch system (VLS) weigh around 3,500 pounds and cannot be readily reloaded at sea. The heaviest ordnance dropped by F/A-18E/F strike fighters weighs even less.
The range for such missiles can certainly grow—at the expense of affordability, salvo size, and warhead weight. Fine-tuning such trade-offs probably will not be sufficient to achieve adequate standoff range from China’s substantial antiaccess defenses while also delivering the volume of fires needed to overwhelm the same. Larger missiles with more fuel are needed to achieve substantially greater range, but larger missiles cannot be fired from existing VLS cells or carrier aircraft.
China’s home-field advantage allows larger missile designs than those produced by U.S. expeditionary design requirements. The solid-fueled DF-26, for example, achieves its impressive 2,700–nautical mile (nm) range with a launch weight of 44,000 pounds.
However, the significant size, weight, and cost to the United States of intermediate-range ballistic missiles like the DF-26 make them ill-suited for a lengthy salvo competition in a conventional war—particularly for an expeditionary force with stretched logistics. For the same range and warhead size, an air-breathing cruise missile is smaller, lighter, and cheaper than an equivalent ballistic missile. The differences between the Pershing II ballistic missile and the Tomahawk cruise missile illustrate the price for speed. They share a similar range (~1,000 nm) and warhead mass (~1,000 pounds), but the Pershing II weighed 16,451 pounds at launch, versus the Tomahawk’s 3,500 pounds (with booster). In constant dollars, the Pershing II costs around $10 million versus the Tomahawk’s unit cost of $1.4 million.4
Reusable strike aircraft are far more cost-efficient than either type of missile, but only when they can attack with the required massed fires and return. When mission effectiveness trumps cost efficiency, defaulting to one-way strikes can double attack ranges, haul heavier warheads, and greatly simplify tactical command and control.
The Navy experimented with ship-based catapult-launched cruise missiles (then called “flying bombs”) in 1917, launched the Doolittle Raiders from the USS Hornet (CV-8) in 1942, and catapulted F6F-5K Hellcat “assault drones” from the USS Boxer (CV-21) during the Korean War. By the mid-1950s, select aircraft carriers, cruisers, and submarines were deploying with the RGM-6 Regulus I, a long-range, nuclear-armed cruise missile.
Blast from the Past
Delivering strategic nuclear weapons counted for everything in the early Cold War. The Navy rushed to improve both strategic deterrence and its position in Pentagon budget fights by developing a survivable nuclear strike capability.
The Regulus quickly followed. Weighing in at 10,300 pounds at launch without a booster—more than triple that of a BGM-109 Tomahawk—these subsonic cruise missiles could launch from aircraft carriers, submarines, and heavy cruisers to deliver their 3,000-lb nuclear warheads against targets 500 nm away. The missile first flew in 1951 and deployed as a strategic nuclear deterrent on board the heavy cruiser USS Los Angeles (CA-135) in 1955.5
The Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missile soon eclipsed both Regulus I and its supersonic successor (Regulus II), though Admiral Elmo Zumwalt later lamented the decision to decommission the missile, calling it the “single worst decision about weapons [the Navy] made during my years of service.”6 But the Regulus operational concept—catapult-launched cruise missiles—suggests an intriguing possibility for long-range conventional strike today.
Regulus Redux
The Tomahawk’s performance establishes a baseline for a bigger cruise missile. Tomahawk’s 2,900-pound launch weight (without the booster) is split into three roughly equal parts: warhead, fuel, and airframe, including a small turbojet with 600 pounds of thrust and small pop-out wings. The proposed catapult-launched missile—call it “Regulus III”—would be roughly twice the weight of a tube-launched Tomahawk but carry a similar payload a lot farther.
A catapult-launched Regulus III design could achieve substantial performance gains by freeing its shape from the physical constraints of a VLS cell’s 21-inch diameter and 22-foot length, giving the new missile room to grow. A less constrained airframe allows more room for fuel and better aerodynamics. It also permits a non-cylindrical, low-observable shape to better penetrate enemy air defenses. All this ultimately increases the survivability of the catapult-launched cruise missile and yields a greater probability of kill.
This missile might resemble the Northrop Grumman X-47, a flying wing with roughly double the empty and maximum gross weights of the Tomahawk, but also carrying a 1,000-lb payload like the Tomahawk.7 These ratios make the 20-year-old X-47A design a good stand-in for the proposed missile. Northrop Grumman published a 2,100+-nm range for the X-47A, suggesting that a catapult-launched cruise missile of similar design, size, and weight—without landing gear and other such extras—could manage closer to a 3,000-nm range on a one-way mission.
Unlike sealed missile rounds, this larger missile concept would be assembled, armed, and fueled just prior to launch. This would increase the carrier’s potential missile load and minimize impacts to normal operations by allowing crated airframe components such as wings and fuselages to be stacked where convenient on the carrier or resupply ships, without fire or explosive concerns, while storing the warheads in the ship’s magazine. The absence of a built-in warhead and fuel would also minimize the weight of the dry airframe for replenishment at sea, which is generally limited to 5,700 pounds.8
Finally, decoupling warheads from preassembled missiles would permit greater tactical flexibility. Using one or more Mk 80 series general purpose (GP) bombs—of 500, 1,000, or 2,000 pounds—as the internal warhead (with inversely variable fuel loads) would allow immediate customization between range and weapon effects and obviate the need for a unique warhead in the magazine. Arming it instead with submunitions would maximize dispersed effects, while adding deployable decoys could help penetrate terminal enemy defenses. This flexibility would allow strike planners to tailor each salvo’s payload mix to the target and threat environment. For flight-deck maneuvering and launch, the Regulus III would use an adapter cart similar to that employed by Regulus I.
This evolutionary design approach relies on mature technology and a proven, if largely forgotten, operational concept. Changing the launch platform and taking advantage of the carrier’s powerful catapults sidesteps the physical constraints of existing launch concepts to achieve a major increase in performance.
Develop, Deploy, and Employ
Tabletop exercises and wargames should evaluate this concept to explore its utility and further inform requirements. Because a carrier-launched cruise missile is just an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) on a one-way mission, existing UAVs such as the MQ-25 Stingray could be used (and reused) as surrogates during fleet exercises to develop employment tactics. The underlying technology is well-proven.
Aircraft carriers would carry relatively few of these weapons during normal operations. Combat logistics ships would carry the bulk of them, transferring them to the carriers before long-range strikes. Assembling and launching these missiles would require precious space in the hangar bay and on the flight deck, a potential predicament for a crowded aircraft carrier. But their one-time use feature means that loss of space would be only temporary.
Catapult-launched cruise missiles could also transform quayside and mid-workup-cycle aircraft carriers into rapidly deployable strike platforms. A tessellated parking arrangement of three or four X-47s (standing in for the proposed missile) would take up about as much space on deck as a single F/A-18F Super Hornet. Were a carrier to mass missile power by sailing without an air wing embarked, it could stage several hundred catapult-launched cruise missiles in the recovery area and hangar bay.
Although this concept is structured around maximizing long-range firepower, the resulting system also could be rail-launched in smaller quantities from potentially vulnerable ships that lack long-range strike weapons, such as large amphibious or littoral combat ships. It also could be launched from heavy bombers or cargo aircraft.9
After launch, these larger cruise missiles would act like any other cruise missile: navigating autonomously to fixed targets while receiving in-flight updates and cueing for dynamic targets.
The weapon’s maximum range of nearly 3,000 miles would allow combat logistics ships to resupply aircraft carriers and other ships in sanctuary firing positions. Once these persistent long-range strikes had attrited enemy defenses and ships in coordination with other fires, carrier strike groups could press ever closer, increasing the air wing’s volume of fires and gaining decisive local sea control.
Carrier-launched cruise missiles would enable the carrier to pull its weight on long-range strike and thus free the strike group’s attached cruisers and destroyers to adjust their warfighting focus and modify VLS weapon load-outs for air and missile defense, surface warfare, and antisubmarine warfare.
The notional size, weight, and configuration of Regulus III satisfy minimum basic requirements of long range, replenishment at sea, and deconfliction with carrier operations. They are not limits; another operational concept could produce a larger platform with longer range, greater payload, and much greater speed.
Stop-Gap Measures
Some naval tacticians might argue that aircraft carriers and their attached air wings can adequately cover the necessary capabilities, and, by extension, that carrier-launched cruise missiles should stay in museums.10 Joint tanking support certainly expands the air wing’s nominal advertised combat radius, but it is insufficient: The tyranny of distance is real.
If strikes must launch from far behind the first island chain, using tanking to add another 500 miles of range to carrier-based aircraft certainly helps, but more is needed.11 Sustaining distant flight operations also depends on matériel readiness and crew limitations, producing in sum a very limited number of discrete aim points that can be targeted per day. With existing platforms, a carrier can deliver only a trickle of warheads at extreme range while also exposing itself to potentially devastating counterfires.
As the Navy and Congress address the VLS capacity gap and the Army seeks to reinvent coastal artillery with the Navy’s missiles, catapult-launched cruise missiles could serve as a capable and expedient solution.12
The aircraft carrier needs powerful long-range strike. The quickest and most feasible way to regain range with concentrated mass is a one-way trip. Until the carrier air wing catches up in the 2030s, the carrier-launched cruise missile is a simple, low-risk, technologically mature solution for an urgent operational need with strategic implications.
Editor's note: This article was updated to change several references to the X-47B to the prototype X-47A.
1. Justin Bachman, “How America’s Aircraft Carriers Could Become Obsolete,” Bloomberg, 28 June 2017.
2. Jerry Hendrix, “Retreat from Range: The Rise and Fall of Carrier Aviation,” CNAS, 15 October 2015; and CAPT Robert Rubel, USN (Ret.), “The Future of Aircraft Carriers: Consider the Air Wing, Not the Platform,” CIMSEC, 3 December 2019.
3. Andrew S. Erickson, “A Dangerous Decade of Chinese Power Is Here,” Foreign Policy, 18 October 2021.
4. Jon Harper, “INF Treaty Pullout Could Be Boon for Missile Makers,” National Defense, 4 December 2018; and Mallory Shelbourne, “Raytheon Awarded $217M Tomahawk Missiles Contract for Navy, Marines, Army,” USNI News, 25 May 2022.
5. David K. Stumpf, Regulus: The Forgotten Weapon (Turner Publishing Company, Kindle edition, 1997), 274.
6. “Regulus I,” FAS.org, 25 April 2000.
7. At 3,836 vs. ~1,900 pounds, and 5,903 vs. 2,900 pounds, respectively.
8. Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, NWP 4-01.4: Underway Replenishment (Department of the Navy, March 2001), 6-45. More conservative numbers allow for transfer up to Sea State 5 using a normal STREAM rig. Loads of up to 8,750 pounds can be transferred but are limited to Sea State 3.
9. “Rapid Dragon,” Air Force Research Laboratory, afresearchlab.com/technology/rapid-dragon.
10. RADM Roy Kelley, USN, “The U.S. Still Needs Aircraft Carriers,” Defense News, 27 September 2019.
11. LCDRs Collin Fox, Dylan Phillips-Levine, and Trevor Phillips-Levine, USN, and Capt Walker Mills, USMC, “The Return of Range: How the Navy Got the MQ-25 Right,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 148, no. 9 (September 2022).
12. Rep. Elaine Luria, “Rightsizing the Fleet: Why the Navy’s New Shipbuilding Plan Is Not Enough,” CIMSEC, 2 May 2022; and Sidney Freedberg Jr., “Army Picks Tomahawk & SM-6 for Mid-Range Missiles,” Breaking Defense, 2 October 2020.