Posted on 03/24/2005 9:22:21 AM PST by Paul Ross
Wow is that a straw-man. At best, that has to do with massing carriers in one place, not being able to be deployed world-wide on a constant basis. Below a certain level, one carrier with a major mechanical problem or an accident can leave a big hole in capabilites...much les if it were actually attacked.
Its a Pearl Harbor invite.
A Chinese container ship could be fitted out with Yakhont or other module bank launch cruise missiles.
You could put 50 -100 and have them look like normal shipping containers.
Plodding allong up the coast on a scheduled commerce run to New York.
In minutes 50-100 nuclear and TNT/Thermitic charge warheads skim or arc in on Norfolk.
Its easy to say it would never happen.
Yet such coup's have occured in war.
Said container ship on a certain suicide mission could also seed the ocean with mines and the Norfolk base entrance.
Its left to the imagination of the attacker.
The F/A-18 does it's job well as a light fighter/attack plane, and replaced the F-4 in the Navy and Marine Corps as such. But its was never, ever intended to replace the F-14 in the fleet defense role...it is out of it's league in that role!
Indeed, we need to call Dick Cheney on the carpet for his allowing the F-14 titanium wing-box tooling to be destroyed back in '91 when he was SecDef.
We should have fired up production of updated versions of the F-14. How long can we keep the old war-horses flying?
Doubtful. You are basically advocating a return to the Essex/Intrepid class displacements. These carriers were terrible at handling jet aircraft during the Korean/Vietnam Wars even after the angled flight decks & waist cats were added. Those ships had narrow flight decks and rolled way too much to maintain flight ops in certain sea conditions.
This is why the Brits are fighting attempts to reduce the displacement of their proposed CV's. The cost-cutters want to get below the magic 50,000-ton displacement that the MoD considers to be the absolute minimum.
Plus you need LOTS of steam from your power plant to power you catapults (directly as steam, or indirectly as electical power). One thing a large Nuke carrier has lots of is STEAM. The remaining oil-fired carriers (Kitty Hawk & Kennedy) can not maintain anything like the sortie rate of the Nimitz-class (especially the later variants).
Would that be the tradeoff? The planes-to-displacement seems to follow a pattern of (minimum size)+(displacement)^2. Halving the size gets around a quarter the aircraft, with many of those eaten up by CAP. Further, you are assuming that you can get 3 smaller ships through the budget for each carrier - that would be amazing.
Well, at least it sounds like the HMN Admiralty and Parliament finally prevailed over some free trade orthodoxy...about time!
Has the DeGaulle been shown to be a viable platform yet? If not, using it to compare to is a most questionable basis.
Well, I gotta disagree there. What we need is a new design to operate in the fleet defense role. I think the design needs to have a higher speed (Mach 3+) than the F-14 and a 21st Century sophisticated search and track radar. Stealth is not necessary. It must be capable of carrying 6-8 extended range AMRAAM or new design long-range missiles with a 50+ nm range. That would be a helluva interceptor!
And most of these baby CV's operate helicopters as primary AEW and ASW platforms. That has yet to work well in real life.
How many auxillary carriers do we have? Are you really just proposing giving some of the Aux carriers increased Command and Control capability?
You're certainly not going to land that on a 40,000 ton carrier! (see thread) The F-14 has swing wings precisely because to solve the dilema of how to land a Mach 2+ Interceptor on a (super) carrier deck. Ever wonder why the F-15 doesn't have swing wings? The payoff isn't worth the weight penalty.
Give me the range/loiter capability and I'll have the follow-on to the F-14. I don't think we need the speed. There aren't that many Backfire bombers around anymore.
It's used for size comparisons only. How big a deck and how many conventional planes will 40,000 tons displacement get you. I'm certainly not suggesting that the US build anything based on that design.
The Wasp would be a better basis (and is about the same size) for the new class. It would need a full length hanger deck in place of the well deck, and some other modifications (more elevators would be nice), but at least it wouldn't leak radiation and have key parts fall off. The CdG does show that a ship this size can handle an angled deck and conventional aircraft.
Was I dreaming last November, or did Kerry win.
What I meant about the Charles DeGaull, is that I don't think that we've seen that it even could be a functional ship. It seems to me that it was flawed not only in execution, but in concept.
Until recently the French were unable to operate the E2C Hawkeye of the CdG, and the carrier was predicated on having the Hawkeye as it's primary AEW platform. The deck is too short because the CdG can't make it's design speed. I understand that they've jury-rigged something, however.
Give me the range/loiter capability and I'll have the follow-on to the F-14. I don't think we need the speed. There aren't that many Backfire bombers around anymore.
My main concern with speed is the ability to have a higher closing rate while intercepting cruise missiles. Now I also think it's probably a mistake to go to a smaller carrier design (maybe they could go with a combined force of a smaller number of CVs and then CVLs?), but I also believe one could design a fighter with a high top speed and excellent low speed characteristics. I don't claim to be an expert, though, so I really don't know.
It depends on your definition. By the navy definition, none. If you count the new amphib. assault ships, 7, but because of the well deck, their air capabilities are very limited - a few Harriers and some copters. A light carrier would be about the size of the Wasp class, but would need signficant modifications to handle more and larger aircraft. (The deck area itself is adequate, but the hanger space is constrained, and there is limited elevator capacity. Launch/recovery options are also focused on VTOL operations.)
I think the high-speed requirement (of the F-14) was to allow them to get to the launch point BEFORE the Backfires (also Mach 2+) fired. Failing that, you shoot at the cruise missile itself. This fleet defense task is currently being done by the Aegis/Standard missile. If you want another layer of defense that is affordable, give up the high-Mach capability and go with a conventional wing design.
If you've spent time studying military history post World War I, you'd know that the Air Force has been claiming that Strategic airpower would render the Army obsolete since the 1920s. A half a dozen US conflicts later, us grunts are still waitning for that to happen.
While I don't doubt that the technology exists that can do all the magical things you say, there is not, nor will there be an adequate long term substitute for either boots on the ground or boats in the water when it comes to both sea lane control and power projection. All of the sexy toys cannot offer a continuous prescence, which is a form of deterrence by itself.
I spent a large part of my military life listening to some engineer tell me how some thing was going to cosmically whiz bang the enemy, only to take it out and find out that the power supply wouldn't work in the bush.
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