https://breakingdefense.com/2020/03/...ers-exclusive/
Beyond the Ford: Navy Studies Next-Gen Carriers
WASHINGTON: The Navy is launching a deep dive into the future of its aircraft carrier fleet,
Breaking Defense has learned, even as the Secretary of Defense,
dissatisfied with current Navy plans, conducts his own assessment. The two studies clearly show the deepening concern over how China’s growing might and the Pentagon’s eroding budgets could affect the iconic, expensive supercarriers.
The Future Carrier 2030 Task Force, which the service plans to announce next week, will take six months to study how carriers stack up against new generations of stealthy submarines and long-range precision weapons being fielded by China and Russia. It comes at a fraught moment time for the fleet, as Defense Secretary Mark Esper has taken personal ownership over the service’s force planning while
publiclylambasting the Navy’s deployment model as broken.......
For decades, American aircraft carrier strike groups, led by massive big decks bristling with fighter planes and surveillance aircraft, have been the key to US power projection. But with new generations of long-range precision weapons that can smack into a carrier from well beyond the horizon, military planners have started rethinking the risks of putting a 100,000-ton supercarrier anywhere near a contested coastline.
“The Navy is realizing they need to change that approach and perhaps think about using carriers in more peripheral ways in a fight,” Bryan Clark, senior fellow at Hudson Institute, said. Instead of launching aircraft for strike missions deep inland, as they’ve been used in Iraq and Afghanistan, they’re more likely to “hang out out of range and do sea control,” covering down on large swaths of ocean.
In February, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower
performed just such a mission, sweeping a path across the Atlantic for cargo ships full of Army equipment bound for major ground exercise in Europe. The expercise, run under the newly reconstituted 2nd Fleet, was the first drill simulating a contested crossing of the Atlantic since 1986.
The Ike, along with an unidentified submarine sweeping the depths of the ocean for unexpected Russian guests, sailed well ahead of the convoy while fighting off simulated electronic warfare and undersea and aerial attacks in a stress test for how prepared the Navy is to punch its way across the Atlantic.
As the Pentagon and Navy hash out what the Navy of the future should look like to meet challenges posed by China, they are experimenting everywhere. Navy and Marine Corps leadership have warmed to the
“lightning carrier” concept, designed to pack amphibious ships with Marine Corps’ F-35Bs and sail them to the hotspots to cover places the big decks aren’t.
Late last year, the USS America photographed in the Pacific with 13 F-35s on its deck, something the services want to do more of as the so-called Gator Navy reinforces more decks to handle the fifth generation fighter. The Marines and Navy
are working on a new strategy to more closely align their operations, which would allow both to provide more punch, and give the Marines the ability to launch from both ships and from small ad-hoc land bases to support the fleet.
Any potentially smaller carrier of the future will not be as small as an amphibious ship, as those ships can’t support high sortie rates over long periods of time like a Nimitz or Ford carrier. They would, however, certainly be smaller than the hulking Fords...........