U.S. nuclear-powered aircraft carriers—the Nimitz– and Ford-class CVNs—continue to be giants of military might and will stay that way. They provide unmatched sortie-generation, survivability, storage capacity, maneuverability, and command and control (C2), even in the “high-end fight” of the future.
This is not a popular stance given the recent anti-CVN movement which seeks to get rid of some carriers, or to make them smaller, or to reshape the Navy into a robot fleet. The anti-CVN movement is seduced by the $13 billion price tag of a Ford-class CVN—funds which could be redistributed for other projects. They assert that the cost of building, sustaining and manning aircraft carriers is now just too high, and that so-called “carrier killer” missiles have made CVNs too vulnerable to be of any value in a fight.
No surprise here—attacking aircraft carrier programs is an American past time. Go back to the 1949 “Revolt of the Admirals” in which Air Force generals won the case for the B-36 at the expense of the proposed aircraft carrier United States, successfully arguing that carriers were so vulnerable that it was not worth the cost of building them. Or the late 1970s, when President Jimmy Carter attempted to cancel the fourth Nimitz-class carrier, the Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71), preferring instead two less-capable nonnuclear carriers. Or more recently, when the Navy nearly decommissioned the Harry S. Truman (CVN-75) at its midlife to divert money to unmanned ships.
Peer nations, however, do not subscribe to the anti-CVN movement. The United Kingdom, China, and India have embraced aircraft carriers as a national priority despite advances in antiship missiles or price tags. China even has plans to develop four to six aircraft carriers by the 2030s with future variants approaching the size of Ford-class carriers with modern catapults, arresting gear, and nuclear propulsion.
I think China is onto something. I contend that advances in threat missiles do not make aircraft carriers irrelevant; that smaller aircraft carriers will only weaken the U.S. Navy in a war at sea; and that aircraft carriers will play a critical role in power projection and C2 in future distributed wars.
CVNs: The Least Vulnerable of All Ships
Yes, the fact that China is developing hypersonic and long-range antiship missiles is a concern, but the triad of U.S. technology, industrial capacity, and tactics to counter these missiles already exists. Back in 2014, the Chief of Naval Operations noted that the DF-21D, for example, was a “good weapon… but there’s nothing that doesn’t have vulnerabilities… We’re working quite feverishly on that, and I’m pretty comfortable with where we can operate our carriers.” The defense industry certainly has taken action. Nine defense contractors now have contracts to develop better tracking capabilities against hypersonic threats. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) and the Missile Defense Agency have moved forward on other solutions, with DARPA’s prototype “counter-hypersonic” missile, for instance, expected to be tested in the near term. The Navy was similarly successful in countering ballistic missiles, and for years has routinely drilled in tactics designed to complicate adversary targeting through evolving forms of deception, maneuver, and emission control. Welcome to counter-tactics 101.
Nimitz– and Ford-class carriers also are the least vulnerable ships ever built. At war, when fixed U.S. air bases on land are being pummeled by cruise missiles and artillery, aircraft carriers will be on the move. They move faster than most adversary submarines or ships at 30-plus knots, with structural survivability features and built-in damage-control, propulsion, and power-generation redundancies that rival any submarine or ship currently commissioned. Indeed, aircraft carriers are hard to destroy and even harder to sink.
Aircraft carriers also receive substantial protection from cruisers and destroyers with their Aegis weapon system capability, producing a fully linked defensive dome with no rival. Add to this notable advances in CVN survivability with the modernization of its ship’s self-defense system (SSDS) and the Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) networking most Navy ships (to include the E-2D Hawkeye)—capabilities not available to any other country or U.S. service—the carrier strike group is a virtual suicide zone for adversaries.
Altogether, the “carrier killer” missile argument is a red herring. If we consider other so-called ship killers—such as supercavitating torpedoes launched from a submarine—nothing floating is safe, the CVN notwithstanding. So any effort to abandon aircraft carriers based on a few adversary weapons is really an argument to give up on the whole Navy.
Smaller Is Not Smarter
The quest for smaller, cheaper alternatives to big ships goes back to the country’s early days. President Thomas Jefferson gambled on building 170 small gunboats instead of the pricier but more capable 44-gun frigates, of which 6 were already built. Accordingly, these gunboats were rendered useless against the British maritime juggernaut in the War of 1812.
No surprise, in 2016, the Navy contracted the RAND Corporation to study the feasibility of shrinking CVNs by analyzing four types of alternative aircraft carriers (20,000, 40,000, 70,000 and 100,000-plus ton displacements). RAND concluded that the two smaller versions would not meet operational requirements and would require major redesigns carrier aircraft to be compatible. Instead, they endorsed the 70,000-ton alternative from a cost-savings and mission-capability perspective. The Navy countered that the tradeoff in size for the smaller 70,000-ton alternative would have unacceptable impact to mission success and questioned the cost savings of developing a whole new redesign. Turns out, size is proportional to capability.
Why is bigger better? There is not enough space to discuss the spectrum of benefits of 100,000-ton Nimitz– or Ford-class aircraft carriers. In short, they provide an unquantifiable deterrent or cognitive impact simply by “being there” (e.g. there is always one at sea in the Western Pacific); it is the only platform capable of providing meaningful humanitarian assistance in a contested environment; and CVNs and their carrier air wings (CVW) are at sea right now conducting strikes, reconnaissance, and close air support for coalition troops in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria (as the Navy has been doing so since 2001 with little interruption). None of these benefits can be overstated.
To justify the bigger-is-better argument, we have to put the CVN in the context of a theoretical high-end fight against a peer competitor, where the CVN and its air wing would be expected to gain sea control and provide power projection over land.
In this case, size matters in three ways. First, the CVW must have the right amount and type of assets to independently penetrate adversary defensive shields and destroy both ship and land targets. The CVW accomplishes this with MQ-25 drones and F/A-18Fs for aerial refueling to increase tactical reach; F/A-18s, F-35Cs, and a future replacement to the F/A-18 to destroy next-generation threat aircraft and then strike targets; EA-18Gs with electronic attack to neutralize threat defenses; and E-2Ds for early warning and C2 to manage the fight.
Second, the aircraft carrier must have adequate space for more than 72 aircraft, thus impacting the size of the flight deck and hangar bay. A 1,090-foot flight deck, properly angled, with multiple catapults and arresting gears, allows for 110 to 160 sorties per day for strikes, self-defense, or a combination of the two—not to mention the ability to support simultaneous launch and recovery of aircraft. Meanwhile, the hangar bay is critical to repairing aircraft and routine maintenance.
Third, the aircraft carrier needs to avoid replenishment at sea as much as possible so it can maintain persistent attack or defense. A combination of two Nuclear reactors and significant storage capacity for food, aircraft fuel, and ammunition means a CVN can keep fighting for weeks while delaying at-sea replenishment.
Another way to illustrate the importance of size is to compare the United Kingdom’s 71,600-ton Queen Elizabeth (QE)-class aircraft carrier to a 100,000-ton U.S. Navy CVN. CVNs are faster than the QE class (30-plus vs 25-plus knots)—a key planning factor for swift tactical withdrawals or to outpace threat submarines. CVNs have two nuclear reactors, giving them unlimited global range; while the QE carriers have four diesel engines and a refueling range of just 10,000 miles. CVNs are also much more robust in terms of air power with more than 72 aircraft including 48 strike fighters; while the QE class is likely to deploy with just 24 F-35Bs and 4 CROWSNEST AEW helicopters. QE-class ships also lack two critical high-end fight requirements—organic aerial refueling capability to extend aircraft range and loiter time and an electronic attack capability to neutralize sophisticated adversary defenses. Moreover, QE-class ships are lightly defended with its short range Phalanx close-in weapon systems, thus requiring up to six escort ships—a notable challenge when considering the Royal Navy has only 19 frigates and destroyers in its entire navy. Compare this to a Nimitz class with two Phalanx, 16 Sea Sparrow missiles, and 42 Rolling Airframe Missiles, all baked into an automated self-defense network with sensor and target data integrated with two to three escort ships—not six. The bottom line is smaller alternatives to a 100,000-ton nuclear-powered aircraft carrier do not meet U.S. Navy requirements for persistent sea control or power projection in any meaningful way in a high-end fight.
CVNs Provide C2 in a Future Fight
One of the Navy’s latest operational concepts is distributed maritime operations (DMO)—though much of what DMO is will be unpacked in upcoming exercises detailed in former CNO Admiral John M. Richardson’s Design for Maritime Superiority 2.0. We can imagine widely dispersed warships across an entire ocean conducting maneuver with feints, deception, strict emission controls, hit-and-run raids, and cyber warfare, with some ships acting independently or in pairs. We can also envision fleet commanders—probably operating from highly vulnerable maritime operations centers at fixed locations—broadcasting orders in a communications-degraded environment with “commander’s intent.” More independent action, more creativity, more risk.
So what do big aircraft carriers have to do with DMO? It turns out that CVNs are not simply lethal and survivable, but also play a role in decision superiority, providing assured C2 through robust and redundant communications, timely intelligence, and continuity-of-operations capability for fleet commanders. To be sure, the fleet commander C2 node is likely to be degraded by missile attacks and jamming, so the loss of the fleet commander and her staff should be a major planning factor. Here the CVNs pick up the slack—and it is not just because they have quantities of radios and a substantial intelligence capability, but because they have the people and space to direct fights, including a team of trained warfare commanders.
And since DMO is an operational principle and not an end state, there will be times for C2 nodes to reconcentrate forces for new attacks—that is, to be less distributed—such as the coordinated massing of surface, subsurface, and airborne assets for decisive engagements. Here the CVN comes in, providing critical communication relays through its aircraft, a spectrum of redundant radios closer to subordinate units to burn through jamming, or even delivery of paper orders from CVN helicopters to other ships as was done in Operation Desert Storm when there were no digital networks.
CVNs are Irreplaceable
Despite all these spectacular warfighting benefits, CVNs are the most expensive pieces of military hardware ever built, weighing in at $13 billion per unit. This is fuel for the anti-CVN movement. Of course, the Navy is pursuing innovative cost-saving initiatives, such as automated designs to reduce manning costs and long-term contracts and bulk buys to save on purchasing costs—all good. But this is a hard to sell when headlines are focused on how many of the Gerald R. Ford’s (CVN-78) weapons elevators are working or not.
Accordingly, the main thrust of the anti-CVN movement is to save money by producing fewer CVNs. This is a bad idea. The Navy already has assumed enough risk by slimming down to the current 11-CVN statutory requirement. Most force size estimates call for as many as 15 CVNs if one takes into account current combatant commander global demands; requirements for several CVNs in a major conflict; two to three CVNs in maintenance at any given time; 10 to 14 month work-up cycles to train crews; seven-month deployments combined with shorter “surge” or “double-pump” deployments; and the impact all this has on individual sailors and families—even in peacetime. With 11 CVNs as we have now, the Navy will still attempt to support all combatant commander requirements and thus decrease the service life of both its ships and sailors. In essence, the Navy already has saved tens of billions of dollars by not building to a 15-CVN requirement, and at a strategic cost that will be felt in war.
Big aircraft carriers are simply irreplaceable. There is no set of future alternatives – indeed no cyber attack solution, no fleet of droids, no low-cost mini carrier – that will replace the capability of modern or future CVNs in terms of survivability, brute air power, or command and control.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Navy, Department of Defense or the U.S. government.
