The U.S. Federal budget is in grave debt. Other than platitudes, our politicians have no solid plan for getting us out of this mess; yet, steel was just cut for another large and overly expensive aircraft carrier.
“Three Hampton Roads congressmen, Navy officials and Newport News shipyard executives donned ceremonial safety glasses and hardhats Friday, but stood idly by while Wayne Kania, a shipyard machine hand specialist, punched a few orders into his computer.
Kania set in motion a hulking machine that fired a flaming mix of oxygen and propane onto a 2.5-inch slab of American steel, cutting two bevels that will allow the sheet to be welded to another, teaming to form a part of the understructure of a new aircraft carrier.
The event at Northrop Grumman Corp.’s Newport News shipyard marked an important milestone in the life of the yet-unnamed CVN-79 aircraft carrier: The official beginning of construction.
Although the CVN-79, the second aircraft carrier of the Gerald R. Ford class, isn’t due to be completed and handed over to the Navy until 2020, design and fabrication work is well underway.”
What will it cost? $15 billion? That price is not far-off. More? Less? Will there even be money to complete it? Will there be money to operate and sustain it?
Worse, the U.S. Navy has no carrier air wing that will be able to stand up to modern threats. The Super Hornet and F-35C will be obsolete. UCAS-N? We can look at that when it has success with carrier recovery and launch.
The American taxpayer is on the hook for a floating largess, that can be located and sunk; along with the rest of the battlegroup, because we possess no credible naval air domination assets.
The Navy, like the rest of the DOD, is going to have to join the real world and demonstrate that they can use the money we give them wisely. When will that be?
Support new carriers! One every fourth year, open end. The lack of a competitive carrier capable fighter certainly is a problem. That’s why NGAD/FAXX now, with IOC ~2025, is so important. In the meantime fill up the decks with SHornets (Quantity has a quality of its own, as someone else said). And that’s one of the reasons the U.S. needs a unified tactical aviation, as NavAir organisation alone can’t fill up the decks. The F-35C in the medium attack role should do fine. Just DON’T TRY to make it a fighter. Ah! While we are at it: Revive CSA, also for the land based CS/CSS units.
P.S.: Forgot financing.
– First get out of Europe (and retire the 50 Generals residing there) and other questionable overseas land base location. Trade permanent presence (“fortresses”) for the strategic mobility a strong fleet (and a decent airlift capability) gives.
– Then no more fastmovers for the Marines. Scale the whole club back to 50.000 fighting men. MEN!
– If it’s still not enough to keep up the carrier groups, scale back the land forces (safe light infantry).
Maybe it is time to tell our Allies that we are broke and cannot be the sole defender of the free world and that they need to take care of their own defense including nuclear deterrence. Maybe German and Japanese Nuclear Subs sound disconcerting, but this is not 1941.
Emma Maersk Triple E class container ship will cost $190m each! Floating ready for sail. 10 ships ordered, ready for sailing between 2013 to 2015.
http://www.mb.com.ph/articles/306551/maersk-orders-largest-most-efficient-ships-ever
I propose we simply order a bunch of this and set it up as artificial island/sea base/small water landing strip and do away with aircraft carrier.
for the price of single $8B ford carrier, one can get 40 container ships ! Think about it. larger and longer than biggest carrier.
for 5 carriers, that’s 200 ships. (seriously, you can string them up in chain and bunny hop across the globe… I know they are different ship. but I am trying to illustrate the wacky price gouging that goes on. It’s unbelivable. rule of thumb for ship building cost, half material price, half man power. The longer one build a ship, the more out of control the labor cost become. Because that’s 40-50% cost right there. )
PS. I still want my stealth jet fighter destroyer. They are the way of the future.
We have to stay ahead of the curve on CVNs… Otherwise we’ll see the same disaster the USAF Fighter Fleet is facing on a grander scale with CVNs…
I think we will be lucky to end up with maybe 6 Nimitz and 2 Fords active. The other ones will be put in some kind of storage.
Distiller, I’m mostly in agreement with you on USMC re-structuring.
Until you get true VTOL going, the Carrier is gonna stay pretty much the most practical means for launching aircraft.
With a straight up/down system (perhaps Skyhooked) you still pay the 1/3rd deckhouse-as-hangar penalty but with no-empennage airframes and auto-RAST on a massive scale (think the powered jig armatures used on the F-35), you can still do a lot of rack-and-stack with small airpower in a 300-400ft hull.
You go up to a full length takeoff or even just a short-shot (waist cat or ramp) system and now you have to think about a 600 ft of recovery and 200+ of deck park/elevator marshalling.
You can do better, by giving a twin-tramway system that effectively puts two separate runways on each side of the island with a mideck elevator and full length hangar. But this is only in terms of cyclical rates and safety (no more crabbing in over the spudlocker…), not in terms of deck area (wider than existing carriers, posing a canal transit issue0 or under-deck volumes (three hulls) which are where your reinforced-for-flightops + fuel + magazines penalties are in weight.
My problem is that I don’t see the need for a full up flight operations capability as long as we are playing gunboat diplomacy and -particularly- given that we are looking DEWS and Railguns right in the eye (no later than 2050).
And this goes both ways, offensively (33MJ railgun = 200nm range 6″ gun) and defensively.
http://www.navytimes.com/news/2010/12/ap-navy-dahlgren-railgun-test-121010/
Indeed, hypervelocity and ZTOF weapons are the only mid/inner zone defense which has much potential against a mix of hypersonic sea skimmers and guided ballistics.
Which in turn has the potential to remove much of what we understand to be conventional FAD (since ASST is now much more likely to be driven by surface and tropobounce emitters cueing standoff satellite/HALE UAV, the ‘outer air battle’ is gone unless you are talking about over the enemy airbase…).
But at the same time, while there will continue to be hull volumeization and power generation issues which favor the large naval mounting over the landbased/portable option, the sheer utility (cheapness) of EML weapons in particular, in comparison to SAMs, will also mean they will rapidly begin to be introduced ashore as well.
The fact is that we are close enough to getting pulsed power to a level where you can have Mach-7 = mile per second ‘flak’ which, with guidance (mini-NCADE), is going to put manned airpower in it’s grave.
And none too soon because we cannot afford it.
Which is not to say that airpower itself has no use, only that you have to be willing to throw a lamb to the lions-
(2:15 onwards, no blood!)
The key is to understand that most fights are won with the first shot and if you hit someone in the forehead with a ball peen hammer, the difference between that and a sledge is not really less lethal so much as less messy.
http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/app4/griffin.html
Round it all up. You have common hull, into which select segments are mated up (similar to the Burke extension) on the slipway. This includes a common bow to bridge and power section. But differing air and missile/gun fits in the deckhouse. With a VTOL heavy ship you are likely looking at 1/3rd of the ship being hangar and the traditional ‘helipad’ being slightly expanded and raised to the top of the deckhouse, allowing for an elevator to a two-stack hangar with automated conveyor to a full height maintenance bay in the midship area.
You have a VTOL drone which has no pilot pod up front and no heavy armaments capacity at all. Just two triplets (six shots) worth of boosted standoff weapon. Because it is a simple delta (think big Aquila drone) with an upper deck satcomms bubble and an inlet/engine system _separate from_ the main structure, the entire mid body can accomodate a gas drive lift fan (no takeoff weight or clutch reliability issues), with fuel in expandable bladder pouches that poof up the upper wing skins (yes, they are testing this).
Total empty weight of the airframe might be 2,500lbs, in the realm of a cruise missile, but with much better wing area for altitude performance and a very flat belly to provide optimum isoluminence (lights and mirrors) optical LO. All apertures are INSIDE the skins as XTRA and EODAS type systems. And things like navalization strength (gear weight and structurals) are all FAR lower.
And with similar fuel loads to a CM but an engine more like that in high performance trainer (F125, 1,150lbs = 6,300lbf, no burner) you get very high performance to get you to a radius point in a helluva hurry (800 knots) whereupon you can back off and sip gas at 50lbs an hour and 220 knots.
If someone blows is up with a shoulder fire or some other kind of system, whoohoo! They just gave away their position to the ‘low shooter’ who can lob a Griffin over a short horizon while remaining invisible itself.
This is the kind of thing we have to think about folks. Putting tiny airpower as pure targeting with -some- ‘get there heads down!’ capacity on a hull which can be plug and play fitted out as an arsenal ship, an EML gunrig or a ‘carrier’ that maximizes the _VTOL_ capabilities of unmanned systems as the next threshold in performance (at cost) over the present system.
Specifically, no 5,000lb counter weights (cockpit and burner tube) hanging off each end of the airframe.
I would add that I don’t think it’s time for the USMC to give up on the notion of beating 300 knots on the clock. I think it’s time for them ot leverage that ability with drones. One DCA (Drone Controller Airframe) in both cost and exposure factor = 10 drones means that when the DCA aircraft retires, his replacement can come onstation and assume responsibility over 20 difference SENSECAP or Shooter orbits and never have to worry about how much burner time he has remaining if he’s jumped. Because he’s 20-100miles back from the fighting.
What the USMC needs to avoid doing is being so beaten down over the V-22 and F-35B that they become a helo-only bunch. Because then they are little more than The-Army-At-Sea.
Get rid of the 6-8 ship ‘detachment’ system for BOTH Harriers -and- Skids. And field a proper CAS airwing of at least 30 aircraft (5 DCAs and 25 huntin’ dogs) that can both escort the air assault units and directly support troops in contact. Without speed issues on the 170 knot MH-53K.
Keeping in mind that 90% of dealing with the enemy is the F2T2, not the EA, portion of the kill chain will help a lot here. If you can find’em and fix’em, increasingly, it will be cheaper and safer and more effective (300 second TOF = 5 minute delay for a 200nm reach) to engage the target using over-horizon delivery from a missile or a gun solution.
Well of course the UK should soon have two brand new 65,000 tonne carriers for sale at a bargain price. They may not have the capacity of a Nimitz but would be good enough working alone for most scenarios or as the junior partner in a larger carrier task force. I bet the British government would welcome them being taken off their hands by the US Navy. They would certainly be a much cheaper interim option than building CVN-79 (or 80).