Light carriers (CVLs) have had a very troubled history. They were the very first aircraft carriers, from USS Langley & HMS Argus, and were frequently built to use up extra treaty tonnage (USS Ranger, IJN Ryujo) or when fleet carriers weren't ready yet (USS Independence class). But they almost always exhibited poor seakeeping characteristics and could carry only small air wings, which prevented them from being very useful in combat. Light carriers haven't proven the decisive element in any major sea battles, and major naval powers usually relegated them to playing support roles for fleet carriers or doing aircraft-ferrying or escort jobs.
I would bet against them being all that useful now, too.
Escort carriers (CVEs), however, don't get nearly enough praise. Aside from one decisive strategic victory (the Battle of Samar) where U.S. escort carriers beat back the main body of the Japanese navy under overwhelming odds, they also were a major factor in winning the Battle of the Atlantic. Convoy losses plummeted once escort carriers started being attached to convoys.
I'd bet that the future of carrier warfare lies in a "drone swarm in a box". Outfit ordinary shipping containers to launch & retrieve a swarm of drones with a combat radius of a few hundred miles, and then you could load these onto ordinary freighters. They'd create an effective deterrent for any surface or submarine warfare, and could be added to existing vessels without modification.
Wait a minute, how in the world do you outfit ordinary shipping containers to "launch and retrieve a swarm of drones with a combat radius of a few hundred miles"?
I mean, yeah, that sounds like it would be pretty effective. Assuming that you could actually do it. But I'm not aware of any drone that might conceivably have an operational radius of a few hundred miles that could launch, land, and be serviced in an area of 8ft x 20ft or 8ft x 40ft. Much less a "swarm" of them in the same area.
The drone swarm folks are persistent and resist the facts that as drone lethality approaches fighter jet, so does the size, complexity, cost and operational requirement of the drone.
It's one thing for a drone to carry a few hellfires and be remotely controlled over air space where completely supremacy as been achieved or access granted versus actually having autonomous drones do strikes in hostile air space.
I mean, the later kind of drone exists of course, they're called cruise missiles and they cost 1.6m$ each (Tomahawk Block IV, 2014 price).
A Cessna Skyhawk has range of 640nm, height of 8ft, length of 27ft, wingspan of 36ft, and payload of about 900lbs. Take the pilot out, streamline & shorten the fuselage, and give it folding wings, and you're basically there for size, range, and payload.
For landing: well, SpaceX can land a rocket vertically on a drone ship after taking it to orbital velocity. You could do similar maneuvers with a drone. Flip the plane so that its wings act like a parachute to slow its descent, and then turn it around all the way to use the propeller to lower it onto the deck, then fold the wings. Without a pilot, the only limits on G-forces is the structural integrity of the airframe, and such planes are likely to land very lightly after completing their mission. Computer control lets you do things that would be totally impractical with a pilot, like maintain stability in a stall.
Takeoff seems the biggest challenge. Ground roll on the Cessna is 960 ft, and the drone will be at its heaviest on take-off. Maybe do an assisted take-off, launching from a gun barrel or compressed air cylinder? Again, without a pilot, you can be much more liberal with G-forces, and with computer control you can do things like unfold the wings in the air. It wouldn't fit in a single container then, but you could have a system of containerized components all working together.
Also, the Russians reportedly have containerized cruise missiles, which meet the requirements for range, payload, and take-off. They don't really have multi-mission capability, but it may not be all that far from there to drones:
Cessna Skyhawks also do not, you know, carry munitions, and have a top speed of about 180mph. I'm by no means an aerospace engineer, but I think a blithe assumption that you can take a slow, light, un-durable civilian aircraft, turn it VTOL, arm it, and launch it from a box essentially no larger than it is, and have an even remotely effective combat aircraft, is unfounded.
It's 640 nautical miles according to Cessna's website.
And a lot of the assumptions about what makes an effective combat aircraft go out the window when you take humans out of the loop. The #1 cost in a manned airplane is the pilot - we do everything we can to bring them home, first of all because human life is sacred and second of all because there's a massive investment in training them which can't be replaced. Why do you need durability when the drone is expendable? Why do you need performance? All you need is to deliver a critical mass of ordinance accurately onto a target. If your drones cost less than the missiles used to shoot them down, just have more drones than missiles and you win.
A typical container ship has between 10,000-20,000 TEUs. Many of those are stacked below decks and wouldn't be available for flight operations, but even if you assume 500 containers on the top deck and pack 2 drones/container, you could have an air wing of 1000 drones. Or put 50 containers each on 10 ships in a convoy. I'd consider that a swarm.
I'm a little lost, what is your differentiation between CVL and CVE?
To add to your praise of CVEs, one example of the victories of the CVE (particularly the Casablanca-class escort carrier[1][2][3]) is kept in Chicago to this day[4].
CV = fleet carrier. These are purpose-built as aircraft carriers, designed for sustained flight operations, had speeds of 30 knots or better, and support an air wing of roughly 80-100 aircraft (this has remained constant from WW2 to now, but the aircraft today are bigger).
CVL = light carrier. These were usually built on cruiser or ocean-liner hulls, with a (WW2) displacement of ~10-14k tons. Some were also purpose-built as small aircraft carriers. I would also include the Cold-War era VSTOL carriers of the British Invincible & Soviet Kiev classes in this category, as well as the jet-conversions of 1950s-era carriers that ended up in many third-world countries. They were built with fleet-carrier speeds of 30+ knots, so they could accompany the fleet on operations, but had air wings of only 20-30 aircraft and often lacked armor protection.
CVE = escort carriers. These were often converted merchant hulls, or purpose-built with a hull similar to merchant ships. They were the same tonnage or slightly smaller than light carriers and were similarly unarmored, but sacrificed speed for simplicity & seakeeping - they were designed to escort merchant convoys or amphibious assaults, which required only about 10kts.
Basically, it's a speed vs. simplicity tradeoff. CVLs were intended to accompany the fleet and participate in offensive operations, while CVEs were intended to accompany merchant or landing ships and operate only defensively. But the tradeoffs involved in making CVLs hit their design goals of speed and aircraft capacity tended to give them poor seakeeping characteristics and made them ineffective in their primary mission, while relaxing those constraints and focusing only on defense led to a platform that was very effective at its more constrained mission, and could also be produced in large-enough numbers that it was surprisingly effective against even superior surface forces.
(This trade-off should be familiar to anyone following the F-35 project.)
You could also drop one of these into any cargo ship, and have clandestine weapons systems at any major port in the world. I'm guessing this violates volumes worth of international maritime law/treaty... but I can think of at least one organization that'd be comfortable doing exactly that.
Such drone swarms already exists in particular scenarios against mobile AA units to overwhelm and make them use up all of the AA missiles. I can't remember what it's called but the #1 weakness is reloading times and limited quantity of defensive projectiles against a potentially numerically overwhelming independent flight vehicles tricking the radar into thinking they were legitimate jets or ATG payloads.
CIWS seems like an answer until you realize you can't shoot all of them down. Just a few that will bypass is enough to take out the C&C for AA mobile units.
Extrapolating that further, I shudder at the thought of a black cloud emerging over the horizon only to discover they were military drones powered by AI, all independently communicating and strategizing against human operators.
There hasn't been a major sea battle between powers with advanced missile and guidance capabilities.
It's hard to not see large carriers as floating coffins in a war between closely matched powers, unless anti-missile capabilities went through a huge leap. But then you would just throw more missiles at the target until one got through.
The idea of "swarm drone in a box" also ignores that ordinary freighters are easy targets against missiles or other swarm drones. That doesn't rule out other implementations of drones which would likely play a role.
A war between powers with such advanced tech are also sophisticated enough to be nuclear powers, and that's just another scary path to wander down.
I fear we will come to bitterly regret building the QE class without cats and traps, or without nuclear power. I mean even more so than every sane taxpayer in the UK does already.
A US carrier battlegroup contains the carrier itself, and a cruiser and two destroyers to protect it. We will have two carriers and a grand total of 6 destroyers, no cruisers. So the choices are abandon all other commitments and use the entire rest of the Royal Navy for force protection for the carriers, or leave the carriers as sitting ducks. Yes I know only one carrier will be at sea at a time. All six destroyers won't be at sea at the same time either!
Did I mention no cats and traps? That means we are forced to rely on rotary wing for AEW - a decision that cost dearly in the Falklands. Helicopters simply don't have the altitude or endurance for that mission. So we have a fleet that can't see, can't fight, and can't stay at sea for very long. And there's no money left.
I wish our government would make something of Rolls Royce's suggestion [1] from last year of developing small scale nuclear reactors for general usage, with an eye to utilising more of them in shipping, merchant and military.
Particularly since I read the other day that the Americans have over 140 nuclear-powered vessels (!!) [2].
But no, let's not capitalise on our capabilities — much better to squander them and instead outsource, wasting [credited-] billions and losing potential.
We really are a hopeless little country when it comes to self-belief sometimes.
The French used the same nuclear reactors in their aircraft carrier as is used in their (many) nuclear submarines, and have had many problems with the system. Making a CVN is not easy.
That is hilarious and depressing in equal measure. One of the much trumpeted features of the QE class is they were going to be modular and upgradable to cats and traps for little cost. When new govt tried to exercise that option turns out the upgrade would increase the cost of a ship by about a third or thereabouts.
It's also depressing how little we learned from the air war over the Falklands. Presumably because it was the Fleet Air Arm rather than the RAF. RAF contribution was the Vulcan raid which was a) ludicrous and b) needed our entire tanker fleet airborne to get one (ONE!) Vulcan, equipped with a 1948 design bomb sight, there.
Meanwhile the Harriers turned out to be rather good dogfighters as they could essentially be put in reverse (viffing [1]). Rather than selling them off to the USMC we should have kept them, and worked on modern replacements. There was even a supersonic Harrier design produced at the same time Hawker were flying the Harrier prototype.
Meant the Harrier was the most impressive display aircraft ever. Flying sideways, check. Bowing to the crowd, check.
One of the much trumpeted features of the QE class is they were going to be modular and upgradable to cats and traps for little cost
Realistically that was never going to happen. We were never going to have steam catapults because a) where would we get the steam with no reactor (and no-one uses conventional steam turbines anymore) and b) steam catapults aren't reliable in arctic waters, which is why previous British and Russian carriers used ski-jumps. And we weren't going to have EMALS either because again, with no nuke where would we get the electrical power?
But the REAL reason is that British Aerospace is involved in the F35 programme and couldn't take the risk that we might shop elsewhere, say Dassault, so they fucked up the design entirely deliberately. Someone should be in jail for that, or at least lose their final-salary pension.
Quite. The smell was strong from the very first announcement. Didn't stop the media proudly telling us how wonderful and flexible this was. Frankly the whole thing stank and you can be fairly sure the navy wanted cats. Sandy Woodward and Alan West certainly did.
No matter we were going to have 150 F35s by 2012. We've got what, five so far?
The advantage to having a carrier without the support ships is if the security situation seems to be getting dicey you can build out the rest of the fleet a whole lot more quickly than you can build a carrier. It will have taken China a good three decades to field an operational modern carrier with trained crew and air wing, so that's not a capability the UK should give up lightly.
Yeah, the lack of CATOBAR is less than ideal, but you do what you can with the money you have.
You can't build modern warships and recruit and train crews for them without a lot of lead time. It would take a decade or more to rebuild the RN to its size of the 80s.
You could build destroyers and train crews in four or five years. That's a fraction of the time it takes for an aircraft carrier, particularly if you haven't been building them.
You absolutely could not. The POs and CPOs on an RN ship have 10-20 years experience! And unlike WW2 where there was rapid expansion, there isn't the civilian population to start from anymore - people in civilian life aren't doing comparable jobs anymore. You would be literally starting from scratch.
I would guess that at this point, the notion is that in any serious conflict the US would be involved. Those gaps could be easily filled in that context.
Err no they couldn't. There is zero interoperability between an RN carrier and any fixed-wing in a US fleet carrier's air group. They can't land on a QE (no trap) and even if they could, can't take off again either (no cat).
One of the main goals of the RN's aircraft carrier program is presumably to help out in any Falklands War II, and the US stayed out of it last time (for reasons I've never understood -- wtf Ronnie?)
The UK now has a serious combat airfield [0] on the Falklands with Typhoons [1] permanently based there, and a much larger garrison. If this doesn't deter aggression against the islands, a remote carrier wouldn't.
Personally, I doubt that Falklands II will ever happen because the Argentinians never substantially rebuilt their airforce.
Maintaining the remaining tattered shreds of the British Empire was less important to US interests that not annoying their South American client states.
Chile had a key role in helping out the Brits in the Falklands.
The US, or more specifically Reagan, offered Thatcher use of a carrier or two if one of ours was lost. Supposedly it was going to be navy to navy with as little involvement of politics as possible. Oh, and they sold us a bunch of extra sidewinders at zero notice.
We had been cultivating Argentina to help deal with communist insurgencies in South and Central America. For the US the right ending was you to win without the Argentinian public seeing us as an enemy.
So we helped by delivering missiles early and even supposedly offered to lend you a carrier (which would be crewed by the UK), but didn't get involved directly. I doubt the Argentinians were much happier than they'd have been if we started dropping bombs, but that was the thinking.
That's true, but do you really think we'd stay neutral again? The "Special Relationship" has only been more emphasized over the last decades, and we probably owe some for co-opting their PM and dragging them into Iraq.
You're right, the major war prior to the Falklands was Vietnam, and the British didn't help out in that one, so I guess there was no reason the US felt obliged to help out a decade later in the Falklands.
I guess it really depends on US-Argentina relations, and also whether the UK looks like they actually need any help.
The US could at least help out covertly. "Whoops, the entire Argentinian Navy just exploded at once! I guess the British must have more submarines down there than we thought!"
Realistically from what I've read, Argentina is so militarily depleted nowadays, and the UK has learned so much from the previous war, that Argentina couldn't even win a war against the British forces garrisoned in the Falklands, let alone the reinforcements. There is no chance of a serious war... although when I went to Argentina last year I found there's still freaking road signs by the side of the road with a map of the Falklands and proclaiming "Las Malvinas son Argentinas" (or whatever the correct Spanish is)
There were a heck of a lot of USAF C-141s on Ascension Island during the conflict. We haven't even been told half of what went on, even the crews transiting southbound weren't privy to what was in them ( and I've asked a few ).
Over 100 AIM-9L missiles were delivered to the UK forces from the US production lines, and in some cases from USAF fighter units, within 48 hours of the request. The all-apect-seeking '9L was critical in achieving air superiority as the '9G model in UK service was basically tail-chase only.
Satellite imagery was also made available on a daily basis.
Mr Reagan also, apparently, personally offered a CVN for general support duties in the Atlantic ( SAR, refuelling etc ) though I haven't seen any official confirmation of that.
Trump has been specifically talking about the countries which fail to spend the 2% of GDP on military which is (apparently) mandated by the treaty. The UK is fine in this regard (along with only four other NATO powers though).
President Trump isn't really interested in dismantling NATO, just in making sure that the US doesn't have to continue to shoulder quite such a large fraction of the costs.
I really wonder what the next 20-30 years might hold for the US Navy. This entire Supercarrier business looks just like the Dreadnoughts pre-WW1 where in the span of a decade, these ultra heavy ships became completely worthless and unusable because they were so expensive that no one could ever justify fielding them in combat.
Can you imagine the political repercussions of even losing a single Carrier?
Super carriers are still useful even if they become increasing vulnerable. Most US military conflict is with developing countries who lack access to cutting edge weapons
But their vulnerability is overstated imo. It's easy to build a missile that can physically get through an AEGIS defense. It's hard to accurately target ships during a time of war. Over the horizon targeting is tough. The US would destroy or jam satallite.
If the US were dumb enough to put a carrier in the middle of the Taiwan straight during a shooting war, then it will at a minimum be disabled. But 200 miles off shore?
The STOVL capability of the F-35B comes with a cost. According to the Congressional Research Service, the projected flyway cost for the various models are :
> The B is the most expensive and least capable in terms of range/endurance and weapons carried.
And oddly enough, it's the model that drove most of the program's requirements.
Why civilians in congress thought it was a good idea to have a one-size-fits-all Fighter/Attacker is beyond me, but then to effectively allow Marine requirements to pollute specifications for the two branches of the military that operate the most aircraft is another thing entirely.
Actually, I know exactly why they thought it was a good idea. At the time they were sold a platform that would have a large amount of part commonality, be very low purchase cost, and low maintenance cost. With the latter assisted by the fact that the entire US Military establishment would be using it.
I feel that explaining why the civilian government thought it was a good idea is one of the easier things to explain in the entire F-35 saga.
No doubt. I think the allure of a one-size-fits-all aircraft is just too tempting. For each new generation people just throw away the failures of the past by claiming that NOW we have the technology to not have those same issues.
This is an instructive question that should be asked more often in the context of the F-35.
A key difference in the F-4's gestation is that the Navy pretty much single-handedly drove all of its requirements. (The USAF didn't really want any part of it, and in the end it was shoved down their throats.) And if you think about it, the Navy's requirements tend to be more stringent. The Navy requires more range (blue water ops and less tanker support), more durable stealth coatings and features (shipboard life is hard on an airplane), better fatigue life (carrier landings take their toll), more corrosion resistance (saltwater exposure), simpler maintenance (all work done in crowded decks with limited ability to fly in new parts), lower approach speeds (the slower the plane lands, the more flexibility the captain has in how s/he drives the boat) and so on.
So when the F-4 was designed, it was born out of a relatively (!) unconflicted set of requirements, rather than being a grand compromise on behalf of every customer.
This is how I think the F-35 should have gone -- the Navy should have set the requirements, the USAF should have been allowed to add their own refueling gear, and if the Marines wanted VTOL that bad they should have gotten together with the Brits and modernized the Yak-141 airframe to which Lockheed bought rights, as any other alternative would have been too expensive.
The F-4 was likely deemed successful because it could launch off most US aircraft carriers, and it was the best they had at the time, so they made it work. The Phantom II was not a perfect machine, but the large radar, heavy weapons load, carrier-capability, and high-speed made it quite useful. On the other hand, it had no internal gun, guzzled fuel, had a very smoky engine, and wasn't very maneuverable.
It took a lot of retrofitting on the F-4, too, once they were actually used in anger over the skies of South East Asia. Turns out that the technology for beyond-visual-range air combat wasn't quite ready then...
The US Navy has already done this. They're called "amphibious assault ships", and the US has 8 of the Wasp class.[1] The USMC operates helicopters and Harriers from them. The plan was to use F-35s with VTOL capability, but they cost too much. Now they're stuck with these mini-carriers that don't have enough reach for inland targets.
The problem is that without a catapult the takeoff weight and therefore range and armament of any aircraft is greatly reduced. That's a problem fundamental to the Wasp class.
The F-35 will be used on the Wasp class, but not in the numbers originally planned. The F-35 just costs too much.
The Navy's problem is that, in recent decades, most of the US's enemies have been far from a coast. They need range, more range than helicopters can provide, to project power inland. Hence the Osprey and the F-35. But the price of VTOL is very high in many directions - expensive, reduced payload, and fragile.
Without sea-based long-reach air power, and without friendly territory in the neighborhood, it's back to the old way - land Marines, establish a beachhead, build an airfield, and invite the Air Force to come over with their big iron. The US won WWII in the Pacific that way, but it was slow, bloody and expensive.
At one point in my (non-military) career, I spent a ton of time onboard a LHA/LHD (the types of carriers mentioned above). They are impressively huge. You had no way of knowing if the ship was at sea or not. Even at the time - more then a decade ago - I remember thinking that with anything more competent then a harrier - they could do damage.
That said, a carrier force is also a networked force. They have planes and ships all aligned in a sensor network to project power over the horizon. I don't see them doing that with LHDs.
I would bet against them being all that useful now, too.
Escort carriers (CVEs), however, don't get nearly enough praise. Aside from one decisive strategic victory (the Battle of Samar) where U.S. escort carriers beat back the main body of the Japanese navy under overwhelming odds, they also were a major factor in winning the Battle of the Atlantic. Convoy losses plummeted once escort carriers started being attached to convoys.
I'd bet that the future of carrier warfare lies in a "drone swarm in a box". Outfit ordinary shipping containers to launch & retrieve a swarm of drones with a combat radius of a few hundred miles, and then you could load these onto ordinary freighters. They'd create an effective deterrent for any surface or submarine warfare, and could be added to existing vessels without modification.