If you made them actual CVLs with CATOBAR why couldn't you put growlers on them?
-
Please take a moment and update your account profile. If you have an updated account profile with basic information on why you are on Air Warriors it will help other people respond to your posts. How do you update your profile you ask?
Go here:
Edit Account Details and Profile
Road to 350: What Does the US Navy Do Anyway?
- Thread starter Randy Daytona
- Start date
SECDEF Esper Calls for 500-Ship Fleet by 2045, With 3 SSNs a Year and Light Carriers Supplementing CVNs - USNI News
This post has been updated to include additional information from Secretary Esper’s rollout of Battle Force 2045. Defense Secretary Mark Esper announced a new future fleet plan for the Navy that would grow the attack submarine force, supplement nuclear-powered aircraft carriers with light...news.usni.org
SECDEF Esper Calls for 500-Ship Fleet by 2045, With 3 SSNs a Year and Light Carriers Supplementing CVNs
Thought this part was interesting:
"Second, Esper stated that nuclear-powered aircraft carriers would remain the most visible deterrence on the seas, but he said a new future air wing would have to be developed to increase their range and lethality, and that light carriers would have to supplement the Nimitz- and Ford-class supercarriers to help achieve greater day-to-day presence while preserving limited CVN readiness, which has been strained recently by overuse and backups at maintenance yards. Up to six light carriers, possibly based on the America-class amphibious assault ship design, would operate both instead of and alongside the CVNs."
Will be interesting to see if this means more big deck gators and/or how it affects the Marine Corps deployments if the big deck gators are going to be pressed into constant service as light carriers.
With the way we currently acquire ships, there's no fucking way we're reaching 500 ships. When SWOs demand that every ship be a billion dollar DDG or CG, there's simply not enough money in the Congressional budget for it. We need to accept that a 500 ship Navy is going to be made up of patrol boats, corvettes, and frigates. With modern sensors and weapons, you can give corvettes and patrol boats really big teeth but it'll mean adjusting our tactics away from the Mahanian wet dreams of most admirals.
Even bigger than AEW and EW, is the need for ASW and tanking. The loss of the KA-6 and S-3 means that we have no long duration ASW assets nor heavy organic tanking abilities. That means we'll always be limited on range and how large the ASW picket can be. I'd love to see a solution for the problem, maybe like a C-2 with jet engines that can be configured for AEW, cargo/tanking, and ASW. Seemed to work for the C-1 and Stoof, I don't see why it can't work now.
1. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm more of a technical fiend and haven't had the privilege of going through War College or studying logistics...how do we fight a war 1/3-1/2 of the way around the world with patrol boats and corvettes?
2. Please talk to anyone in an aviation community tasked with 3 or more primary missions and ask them if that's a good idea. Oh, and ask NAVAIR if building one platform to do 3+ primary missions has worked well in the past.
I don’t think you know what MAGTF EW means... because I honestly don’t know if the Marine Corps knows either. F-35s brings capabilities that allow the MAGTF more access than previous years/decades, and I think the Marines are focused on more of ground centric EW vice threats at sea. Current LHDs are a little more than 1/10 the cost of a CVN. I’m sure some accountant and/or finance nerd and flex that number up or down.
I’d think they’d make more money for their buck if they’d start with the America class hull, expand the flight deck, and redesign the hangars, berthing, and well decks for more aviation space. I’d imagine the Navy is probably better at managing hangars inside a CVN, but the MEUs I have been on are always a food fight between GCE, ACE, and Navy for square footage and everyone’s special widgets. There would probably be some benefits for having a new design fall under the same PEO and TYCOM as CVNs focused on aviation with significant Marine air input. Funding, maintenance, and sustainment have always been a huge issue for gator fleet. In large part because they’re seen as the red headed step children of the surface Navy.
1. You forward deploy them, move them by heavy sealift, or sail them across the world. We did this routinely during World War 2, Korea, Vietnam, and we do it currently. They have shorter legs than DDGs and CGs so you need a good logistics network in theater and you need tenders like we had in WW2 and Vietnam.
2. It seemed to work well for the E-2/C-2, F-8/A-7, Superhornet/Growler, and KC-135/E-3/etc. programs. For ASW you need a plane with sensors, operators, and a bomb bay. For AEW you need a tube with sensors and controllers. For cargo you need a tube that can hold a lot of stuff and be reconfigured for tanking like a C-130. Seems to me you could find a lot of commonality in engines, wings, nose section, tail section, cockpit, and undercarriage systems. The fuselage configuration would likely differ depending on missions.
1. Fair enough, but forward-deployed = more vulnerable in port, and logistics is the hard problem, right?
2. There's a difference between modifying an existing airframe to address a different community/mission need (your examples) and using a single T/M/S as a mutli-mission platform in one community (MH-60R).
The Growler is not the Super Hornet; it's a mod, and they're not operated by the same crews or in the same squadrons. The MH-60R lists SUW, ASW, and EW as primary missions, but we're arguably not the best at any of those. I think we're closest in SUW, but that stops at the 2nd T in F2T2EA. ASW and EW are nerdy pursuits requiring in-depth training and frequent practice. It's impossible to get that with a small crew and multiple primary missions.
IMO, a vast array of platforms, each with Liam Neeson's particular set of skills is more useful in naval warfare, assuming your data links and coordinated TTPs are up to snuff.
Spekkio
He bowls overhand.
Ships aren't the same as aircraft. By the nature of their size, cost to build and maintain, manning, and operating environment, ships have to be capable of multiple missions. Building one hull for one mission would be a monumental O&M cost. On a ship the sailors who are training to do EW aren't the same as the sailors who do ASW.
The Virginia class sub has ASW, ASUW, strike, SOF, and ISR in its mission sets and that program is doing just fine. So there's proof of concept that it's possible to design a ship to do more than one mission and come in under budget.
Last edited:
I think that was in reference to the need for specialized VS aircraft. Which...might be a valid point? Not sure about how the whole CONOPS plays out in the near future, but more subs are ASCM shooters, and those ASCMs are getting nastier.
As for Virginia, agree it looks like a great platform, but under budget doesn’t mean it’s cost effective (not saying SSNs aren’t either - not like we have a real choice to go conventional), just that the program is being run effectively.
The smaller surface assets are going to be a part of this Fleet structure, but they will be unmanned platforms. USVs bring platform costs down from the billions to aircraft money. And if one of them has to play missile sponge, not a huge loss.
Spekkio
He bowls overhand.
It looked like what got him down that path was the argument that designing ships to do multiple missions leads to cost bloat and he used aircraft acquisition programs as examples.
I'd argue that it's more cost effective.
When VA was designed, subs were envisioned as ISR / strike / SOF platforms because we hadn't used torpedoes in war since 1945. Fast forward 20 years and the PLAN exponentially increased in size, China has an A2AD strategy that puts carriers at risk for a fraction of the cost, and the RFN can afford to forward deploy subs again. Good thing no one nixed ASW and ASUW to cut costs (although Seawolf was CANX because why would we ever need a sub capable of simultaneously engaging 8 surface ships?)
Building the right mix of specialist platforms and getting it right to meet current and future needs is a very expensive guessing game. Not to mention if we designed two submarines - one for strike and one for ASW/ASUW, we'd be paying to man and maintain both while one version is kept busy with relevant tasking and the other is given busy work just to try to keep the crew proficient.
So why not just make a FFG with a reduced displacement and reduced VLS tubes instead of nixing whole missions entirely? The LCS was an abysmal failure because operational commanders can't realistically do anything useful with them, and now we want to make hundreds of similarly gimped ships?
I'm also not on board with this USV / UUV silver bullet train. I think it's going to result in billions of sunk cost because we need to operate our ships in environments that require human decision makers, and when metal machinery comes in contact with salt water it requires humans to keep it working. Hopefully I'm way off here.
Last edited:
Sure. Look, the big picture point is this.
SECDEF just said 500 ships, including a new force architecture (CVLs, Unmanned vessels).
The reality is there's no fucking way we get from where we are today at <300 ships to 500 without changing the force architecture.
We can barely maintain what we have now...going from the current target of 350 we can't even hit, out to 500 simply by expanding the current core of CVN/CRUDES/FFG/LCS/SSN/Large Amphibs - you don't get to 500 with that force. That's pure fantasy.
You're missing my point. Nobody reasonable is going to contest the US Navy should deviate significantly from a multi missions SSN force when we have to deploy them globally.
My point was saying they came in under budget is not the most relevant metric for whether it's the right approach or not.
We're already making the FFG with reduced displacement and reduced VLS tubes. They still come in significantly over a BILLION dollars each. It's actually pretty damn gimped compared to a DDG. You know what MUSV goes for? $30 F'ing Million. It's at least worth looking at further.
LCS was, and kind of still is, a failure because the missions modules don't work, and the CONOPS for it makes no sense because it was designed when the Chinese and Russian Navy were basically non-factors.
More specifically, we made hulls costing hundreds of millions of dollars, with a reduced but still very human crew, with questionable self defense capability.
If you shaved 10x off the cost, and removed humans from the equation, the COCOMs would have zero qualms sending those things in to do the shitty jobs we don't want humans to do. Missile sponge included.
We'll just have to see how the experiments play out. Merchant shipping machinery runs for days, months with minimal human intervention. The first experimental USV did as well.
Yes, it'll still need humans to keep it working, but there's a big difference in running something on station for a week or two then running it back to a tender to maybe restore full redundancy vs something that needs to have a fault rest tripped every day to stay functional. That's just good design and engineering.
An actual CVL would work better without any well deck or GCE or MEU. Starting with an America class and putting an angled deck and catapults would be an interesting concept
Spekkio
He bowls overhand.
Chill out man.
First off, the devil's in the details of reporting. The 355 ship navy is a cap / target is on specifically manned warships that kill and blow up things. The 530 ship Navy includes support / logistics, command, and unmanned ships, which our current fleet sits at 490. This isn't really a big jump, and the study even recommends decommissioning some warships in our fleet including two carriers.
SECDEF hasn't asked Congress to fund this 530 ship Navy; he commissioned a study that recommended this force structure and the media got a hold of it. Surely you know that the final proposal won't look exactly like the study, just like the blended retirement plan stopped short of getting rid of Tricare standard, expanding MTFs, and establishing a healthcare BAH to get healthcare costs under control, which was the largest cost saving measure recommended in that study.
The ability to design, build, and maintain a platform within its allocated budget is directly related to its 'cost effectiveness.'
I don't care if MUSV cost $30 instead of $30M. If it can't accomplish a relevant mission that money is better spent on something that can.
Last edited:
As we move to full autonomous landings, the opportunity for some crazy continuously dynamic maneuvering to get aboard (way back side of power curve stall on touchdown) or other trickery maybe opens up. Do more with less deck?
If SpaceX can land a booster rocket standing up...
Agree. As BigRed said, my response was to AllAmerican's idea that we should build mutli-mission aircraft. Ships have size and manning for capacity, and independent deployment drives the need for mutli-mission capabilities. Aircraft have size/weight and crew limitations and generally don't deploy alone. In the case of DDG-embarked aircraft, we really are an extension of the ship, and the platform was never designed to fight all the fights using only the brains in the crew.
Last edited:
1. Yes, forward-deployed ships are more vulnerable and patrol boats and corvettes will likely not be as survivable as DDGs, but you have to make trade-offs.
2. I don't want to develop another JSF debacle where we try to do everything with a single aircraft and crew pipeline. I was thinking more like E-2 and C-2 where you use as much of the same parts as possible throughout the aircraft and then make modifications where necessary. The crew training pipelines would also be different. This isn't going to be like the -60R and -60S where you have severe limitations on size and weight due to your operating environment. You can lift a significantly larger payload using fixed wing aircraft with CATOBAR field capabilities. Again, we managed to make this work for S-2F/C-1/E-1 and E-2/C-2 programs.
Again, I agree that you can't fit all three missions into a single aircraft. You're going to have to make design modifications, but it can be done. The F-8 and A-7 were different as are E-2 and C-2, but they use a lot of the same components and start at the same concept and deviate where needed. I don't think you'd need different engines or wing roots or landing gear for instance, but you'd need to make fuselage modifications for a bomb bay and sonobuoy rack in the ASW version and phased array panels in the AEW version. You'd also probably have to make the fuselage wider on the cargo/tanker version just like the C-2. I will reiterate, this will not be the EXACT same airframe but a family of airframes tailored to their mission.