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January 30, 2006
Future Carriers
Brian Dunn of The Dignified Rant has doubts about our next generation carriers, an extensive redesign of the current Nimitz class called CVN-21 (Nuclear-powered Attack Carrier for the 21st century). His major concern is that, in an networked warfare environment at sea, big platforms are very vulnerable, and their loss potentially devastating.
I do not think that there will be another generation of aircraft carrier past CVN-21 that will bear any resemblance to our current concept of carriers. The reason for this is simple: UAVs combined with excellent anti-air warfare equipment and sensors on modern ships.
Why, after all, do we need aircraft in our military? The main reasons are logistics (rapid delivery of small amounts of critical material or personnel), reconnaissance, support of ground forces, preserving our ability to carry out those tasks, and preventing the enemy from carrying out those tasks. But UAVs will soon be taking over — indeed, are currently in the process of taking over — a large part of the reconnaissance and ground support tasks, and that will grow in the future. If UAVs are capable of being adapted to fighter roles (protecting our other aviation assets and eliminating enemy aircraft), the only necessarily manned aircraft will be cargo planes, and perhaps specialty sensor platforms that for some reason need an on-board crew. A small number of manned aircraft in each category (for missions unforeseen by the software developers of the UAVs) will suffice to cover gaps, while most missions are carried out by unmanned aircraft. Combined with increasingly effective air defense systems — particularly at sea — it becomes possible that carrier-based manned aviation will become unneccessary.
In that event, the follow-on carriers to CVN-21 (sometime around 30 years from now, the way ships last these days) will likely be more like cruisers in size, with the ability to carry perhaps 50 or 60 UAVs of various types (mostly sensor platforms and attack craft). These ships can be smaller because UAVs will be smaller than manned aircraft, and (because they have fewer systems) need less maintenance, and there will be no aircrews and smaller maintenance crews required. Thus more vehicles and their support staff and equipment can fit in a smaller volume, which will reduce the size of the ships that carry them. These will, in particular as a component of a networked fleet, still be very, very capable ships, likely as capable as the CVN-21s they will replace in most or all ways, despite being dramatically smaller and cheaper. In some ways, they would be much more capable. (For example, it would make sense to equip such a ship with VLS, which current carriers do not have, along the lines of how the Soviet carriers were to be armed.)
In the meantime, the larger the carrier is, the more efficient it is (thus, the more aircraft it can carry). This comes from a simple cause: increasing the size of the ship does not increase the size of the engineering spaces, crew or many other factors by a similar amount, meaning that above a certain size, virtually all size increases translate directly into increased mission equipment. In the case of carriers, that means more aircraft. And as Brian notes, doubling the number of aircraft is worth a 50% bigger and more expensive target, because it means that there is less chance that the enemy will be able to target the carrier in the first place.
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