The Carrier Air Wing of the Future

The following article is is an excerpt of "The Carrier Air Wing of the Future", external page"originally"call_made published by the external page"Center for a New American Security (CNAS)"call_made on 24 February 2014.

The U.S. Navy faces several choices in the near term that will shape the future of its carrier air wings into the 2020s and beyond. Despite some questions about their enduring relevance, aircraft carriers will likely remain influential instruments of U.S. power projection for many years to come. Making the right choices now on the composition and capability of their planned air wings will determine, to a great degree, their future operational relevance and longevity.

As the Navy wrestles with shrinking budgets, evolving threats and shifting technology, it should consider four options to shape its future carrier air wings:

1. Continue the current program, but at reduced budget levels.

2. Delay the carrier variant of the stealthy Joint Strike Fighter (F-35C) until the next Future Years Defense Program (FYDP) – which lasts from Fiscal Year (FY) 2020 to FY 2024 – and invest in battle network enablers.

3. Delay the F-35C until the next FYDP, and improve the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet fleet.

4. Delay the F-35C until the next FYDP, and accelerate the transition to carrier-based unmanned aircraft.

While none of these options presents a clear right answer for the U.S. Navy, the tradeoffs that each represents frames the challenges well, and allows for combinations of choices that may deliver an effective solution. As is evident, most of these options involve delaying the F-35C, which remains in development. Given the aircraft’s vital capabilities for the Navy’s future, however, it should not be terminated.

Introduction

Since supplanting the battleship as the fleet’s primary capital ship in World War II, aircraft carriers have occupied center stage in American naval operations and force structure planning for the past 70 years. Today’s nuclear-powered aircraft carriers (abbreviated as CVNs) provide 4.5 acres of sovereign U.S. territory and a floating airbase that can be readily relocated to provide rapid response across vast stretches of the world’s oceans. Together with their embarked carrier air wings (abbreviated as CVWs), American carriers fill numerous roles including forward presence, deterrence, reassurance to allies, crisis response, sea control and deep strike. Carriers also play diverse roles in power projection, ranging from the carriers USS Nimitz and USS Independence showing force in the Taiwan Straits in 1996 to the unconventional roles played by the carriers USS America and USS Eisenhower as invasion force command ships and launch platforms during the September 1994 American intervention in Haiti. The versatility of U.S. carriers has also been repeatedly demonstrated in recent humanitarian and disaster relief operations.

Some now question the future relevance of carriers in an age of proliferating precision weaponry and growing anti-access and area denial (A2/AD) threats. These threats include, for example, advanced mines, sea skimming anti-ship missiles and long-range precision-guided ballistic missiles. Recognizing this emerging threat, last year Navy Captain Henry J. Hendrix published a paper called “At What Cost a Carrier?” which argues that carriers have outlived their usefulness.3 Given the great opportunity cost of procuring nuclear-powered carriers and their assigned air wings in a period of declining resources, Hendrix suggests the Navy should begin to replace them with long-range, unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAV) operated from smaller amphibious carriers, and rely more on conventional cruise missiles for strikes ashore.

While resolving the question about the long-term viability of the aircraft carrier is a central task for U.S. naval force planners, it is not the subject of this paper. Even if their numbers decrease, this paper assumes CVNs will still play outsized roles around the world for some time. Consequently, the presumption is they will continue to be a central part of the Navy’s force structure well into the future.

Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to outline choices the Navy leadership should consider as it manages the evolution of the current carrier air wing from today’s mix of platforms and capabilities into the carrier’s striking arm of tomorrow. The following discussion assumes that the current program of record – a force of 11 CVNs and 10 CVWs – remains viable and serves as a baseline for discussing future carrier air wing options.

This paper focuses on the CVW for one reason: the carrier air wing is the carrier’s “Sunday punch,” providing a wide range of defensive, offensive and enabling capabilities for Navy fleet operations. As such, the composition and capabilities of the future CVW will determine, in no small way, whether or not the aircraft carrier remains operationally relevant, and for how long. During the next two decades, the aircraft currently flying off of carrier decks will have to be replaced. Decisions made within the current FYDP (which lasts from FY 2015 to FY 2019) will affect investment opportunities in the next FYDP (FY 2020 to FY 2024) and will set the stage for the third and fourth FYDPs, which will extend to the mid-2030s. Given the long timelines involved in developing and fielding modern, high-performance aircraft, the Navy is thus making choices today that will shape the composition and capabilities of the CVW for decades to come. The Navy needs a strategic approach that manages its existing aircraft through the operational and planning period of the next two FYDPs, while simultaneously planning to transition new types of aircraft into the CVW in the third and fourth FYDPs.

Because of decisions made toward and since the end of the Cold War, the Navy has a broad set of choices available in shaping the evolution of its air wings over the next decade. Although budget pressures will constrain these choices, the debate about what sort of air wing the Navy needs in the 2020s and beyond should be driven first and foremost by strategy. Navy leaders would need to critically examine their choices for how to best shape the carrier air wing of the future even if resources were unconstrained. Said another way, the Navy needs a resource-informed strategic approach to the next carrier air wing that accounts for the fact that the operational environment of the 2020s and 2030s could involve very different threats, technologies and capabilities.

Before framing the choices that the Navy confronts as it manages the evolution from the current carrier air wing to the future, however, it is first important to understand the Navy’s current thinking and plans about future CVW composition and capabilities. These judgments and the programs that derive from them are informed by the way the Navy intends to fight in the future, the shape of its current carrier air wing and how today’s threats are evolving into a more deadly future operating environment.

Battle Networks: How the Navy Fights Today

In the early 1990s, strike platforms often had to be relatively self-sufficient, both detecting and launching weapons on self-identified targets at sea and ashore. Today, the Navy fights as an integrated battle network, where an ever-increasing number of platforms can link and share target quality data. Put simply, once the battle group detects a target with any sensor, it should be able to attack that target with any means available – regardless of whether the “shooter” can see the target or not. The shooter could be an aircraft, a surface ship or even a submarine. The integrated battle network also substantially improves the carrier battle group’s defensive capabilities. In that domain, the Navy is developing a concept called Naval Integrated Fire Control – Counter Air (NIFC-CA), which is primarily designed to network all available defensive assets to protect the battle group from attacking aircraft and cruise missiles. Yet the broader advanced battle network concept is rapidly being extended to fleet-wide situational awareness and cooperative targeting against heavily defended targets ashore. Future variants will include sea- and land-based NIFC-CA elements that “would form an overarching battle network.”

These networks effectively create a whole whose combat power far exceeds its individual parts. Every component will serve as a key node in an integrated system providing offensive, defensive, attack and targeting information that will be widely distributed and instantly shared. However, networked warfare also raises a potential vulnerability. Even the most advanced networks are susceptible to jamming and disruption, and the greater the reliance on the network, the greater the consequences if the network fails to operate properly. To mitigate these risks, the Navy is moving aggressively to build redundancy and resilience into its planned systems through additional space capabilities, existing fleet data networks such as Link-16 and new multi-layered variants, and new tactical targeting network technology (TTNT). These investments clearly signal that the Navy sees integrated battle networks as here to stay, and will be an inherent part of delivering both effective strike and defensive capabilities in any future conflict.