Carrier Vulnerability and Operational Reality

There is a persistent faction of naval thinkers out there who believe that a carrier is an outdated, obsolete, vulnerable target just waiting to be sunk by Chinese “carrier killer” ballistic missiles, submarine torpedoes, massive supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles, and all manner of converging, lethal weaponry that can’t be stopped.  In fact, if one listens to these people, the only question one comes away with is, how can the vast array of attacking weapons not collide among themselves as they approach the carrier!  I guess they probably will but there will be so many that it won’t matter.

Obviously, the rest of this post is going to be about how wrong these people are and the lead in to that discussion is the question, why are these people so very wrong?  How did they come to such an incorrect conclusion?

The answer is one of ComNavOps pet peeves:  they consider the carrier in isolation rather than in its true operational form.

If one considers a lone carrier, sitting out at sea, presumably motionless in these thinker’s minds, with no support and no purpose other than to survive, fighting off wave after wave of attacks, then, sure, it is inevitable that, sooner or later, the carrier will be sunk.  So, that’s it then.  The carrier is obsolete and unsurvivable.  We need to say goodbye to the carrier, the mainstay of naval power since WWII and move on in our naval thinking to the next mainstay – networks, perhaps?  Or small UAVs?  But, I digress …

The problem with this line of thinking, as I noted, is that it considers the carrier in isolation rather than in its true operational form.

We need to keep firmly in mind the true nature of a carrier. It's not a carrier - it's a carrier GROUP. That's an incredibly important distinction. One lone carrier is somewhat vulnerable. However, a wartime carrier group would consist of 3-4 carriers, 300 some aircraft, and 30 or so Aegis cruisers/destroyers (you’re not going to risk 3-4 carriers without substantial escorts, are you?  Check the WWII historical escort ratios) with multiple Hawkeyes out in all directions providing situational awareness. It is an immensely powerful, LAYERED, defense.

The layered defense includes long range carrier fighters, long range Standard missiles/Aegis, medium range ESSM, short range SeaRAM/CIWS, passive ECM and decoys, and more. Nothing is getting through all of that easily. Nothing is invulnerable but a carrier group on a wartime footing is as close as you can get to invulnerable.

Regarding escort numbers, consider our WWII experience and Adm. Marc Mitscher’s description of a carrier group composition..

“Said Mitscher: "The ideal composition of a fast-carrier task force is four carriers, six to eight support vessels and not less than 18 destroyers, preferably 24. More than four carriers in a task group cannot be advantageously used due to the amount of air room required. Less than four carriers requires an uneconomical use of support ships and screening vessels." (1)

Even this description is a bit light.  Every carrier group had multiple cruisers and, often battleships attached in addition to the listed destroyers.

We’ve gotten so used to single carriers sailing around in peacetime with only 3-4 escorts that we’ve come to believe that’s how carriers will fight in a war and that’s just plain wrong.  We’ve also gotten so used to a numerically tiny navy that we’ve come to believe that escorts of up to 30 vessels is unthinkable.  Well, combat will change our thinking quickly enough.  We learned all this in WWII and have completely forgotten it.

Multiply This By Four !

There is another, almost always overlooked, layer to the carrier’s defense and that is that a carrier group's best defense is a good offense. We all think of a carrier, on its own, sitting in the middle of the ocean trying to fight off wave after wave of attackers and we conclude that the carrier, ultimately, has no hope. The reality, however, is that the carrier group has a mission. It doesn't stay in one place. It moves at high speed to a mission execution point, executes the mission, and returns to base. During that movement and execution, rather than passively playing defense and hoping to survive long enough to execute the mission, the group would be launching massive Tomahawk cruise missile attacks against all likely enemy bases and missile sites to suppress attacks before they even begin. This is the part of the layered defense that most people overlook and the part that, properly planned and executed, can be the most effective.

If each Aegis escort (Burkes) had 30 Tomahawk missiles, the group of 30 escorts would have an inventory of 900 Tomahawks.  That’s a lot of suppression over a thousand mile radius!

Recall, typical WWII carrier strike operations.  The carrier group would dash into aircraft range of the strike target, launch fighter sweeps to suppress enemy counterattacks, strike the target, and leave before effective counterattacks could be mounted.  The same holds true today except that we now have thousand mile suppression attack capability.

The submarine is probably the carrier group's greatest threat and we'll come to regret the loss of the S-3 Viking. Still, a carrier group is going to be moving at 30 kts and no submarine, unless it gets lucky and finds itself dead in the group’s path, is going to catch up to a carrier group without giving itself away.

Even if a submarine managed to launch a salvo of torpedoes at a carrier, none would make it to the carrier.  With an escort of 30 vessels, the torpedoes would latch on to the escorts rather than the carriers.  That would be tragic for the unlucky escort but that’s part of their job description.  Again, the group is a very tough nut to crack.

“Consideration in isolation” is one of the major problems with modern naval thought and analysis and its application leads inexorably to incorrect conclusions.  It’s at the root of the win-a-war-singlehanded school of thought that leads to massively capable (only on paper) and massively expensive ship designs such as the Burke.  Instead of recognizing that a Burke is just one ship and should have only one main function as part of a group of other ships, each with their specialized functions, we load it up with every function we can think of because we consider it in isolation.  Seriously, does anyone think a single ship has the time to train to perfection as an AAW, BMD, ASW, ASuW, group air defense controller (when the Ticos are gone), and land attack platform?  Good grief, the acronyms alone would take a year to master!  It’s been demonstrated that we can’t even train to perform basic seamanship proficiently yet we believe that a single ship will master all those disparate combat functions?  That’s a fantasy that Walt Disney would be proud of.

A carrier, when considered in its proper operational form as a group, is the most survivable military asset there is.  It’s time to put the misguided, incorrect notions about carrier vulnerability to rest.

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(1)Taylor, Theodore, “The Magnificent Mitscher”, Naval Institute Press, ISBN 1-59114-850-2, p. 316

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