Spekkio
He bowls overhand.
Wait til you use eNavfit.
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Road to 350: What Does the US Navy Do Anyway?
- Thread starter Randy Daytona
- Start date
Kori Schake reviews a couple of books detailing naval strategy and the problems facing the US Navy. From Foreign Affairs:
Lost at Sea
The Dangerous Decline of American Naval Power
By Kori Schake
March/April 2022
Looks like the Marines will be testing out next month both the Lightning Carrier" concept as well as embarking a squadron of 10 F-35B's with a the full complement of helicopters and tilt-rotors of the MEU.
Marines To Test Lightning Carrier Concept With 20 F-35Bs Aboard USS Tripoli This April
The Lightning Carrier concept has been in the works for years and will effectively see big deck amphibious assault ships turned into light carriers.
www.thedrive.com
Recognizing it is still in the concept phase, I think this is a great idea for expanding capacity.Looks like the Marines will be testing out next month both the Lightning Carrier" concept as well as embarking a squadron of 10 F-35B's with a the full complement of helicopters and tilt-rotors of the MEU.
Marines To Test Lightning Carrier Concept With 20 F-35Bs Aboard USS Tripoli This April
The Lightning Carrier concept has been in the works for years and will effectively see big deck amphibious assault ships turned into light carriers.
View attachment 34696
And twenty F-35s with limited rotary wing? The article says "... 20 F-35Bs will be conducting sustained operations followed by surge operations from the USS Tripoli. " Seems they are exercising two different concepts.
Nope. Give them AEW, Growlers and AR, then you can have your lightning carrier.
Agree, that is the all purpose CV concept. But historicly we have had other carriers. CVS, CVA, CVE, etc. Even under current CONOPS, we operate Harriers off gators without the support mentioned. It isn't like DDGs and CGs can't provide AEW. And although we can't discuss it here, sooner or later F-35s will have some sort of EW capability.
Worth noting that this debate takes place on the 100th anniversary of the aircraft carrier, as marked by the Langley's commissioning.
Will be interesting to see what becomes of our experiments, as well as the UK’s two Queen Elizabeth (65,000 tons) jump carriers and Japan’s two Izumo (30,000) jump carriers. Do you let the jump carriers operate independently? Do you fold the jump carriers into a USN carrier battle group? Do you mass the jump carriers for a sufficient sortie rate? Do you rebuild any of the jump carriers with catapults and arresting gear?
A few of items of note: saw an article that the UK is considering a catapult and arresting gear system for UAV’s up to 55,000 lbs, the Queen Elizabeth’s and the Izumo’s have the speed to keep up a US carrier battle group while the US gators do not, the Izumos have more hangar space than the US gators but haven’t seen any numbers on the amount of fuel and ordinance they can carry.
Looks like the Marines will be testing out next month both the Lightning Carrier" concept as well as embarking a squadron of 10 F-35B's with a the full complement of helicopters and tilt-rotors of the MEU.
Marines To Test Lightning Carrier Concept With 20 F-35Bs Aboard USS Tripoli This April
The Lightning Carrier concept has been in the works for years and will effectively see big deck amphibious assault ships turned into light carriers.
View attachment 34696
A full up squadron on top of everyone else on the boat? More dudes, less space, and hot-racking Marines, what could go wrong?!
I wonder what the deck cycle is going to look like when all of those airplanes have to land to get gas. We haven't heard much about the Plopter tanker idea in a few years, and I'm sure that's one more mission the VMM really wants to pick up.
The article stated that a number of helicopters would be on the LPD. Question is: how many skids and 53's can you crossdeck? As for deck cycles, the article stated that is one of the reasons they are running exercises.
Nice photo of some 53's with a Puma doing vertrep.
If they put 2 x VMFAs on an LHA there won’t be much room or need for anything else. They will probably stuff the well decks for other enablers that need moved (MLG, MWSS, MACG etc). They’re already talking about expanding the spots to allow for VLs on more spots than just 7 and 9. It’ll be a requirement to move the chess pieces and decrease the paint swapping opportunities.
VMMs aren’t going to AR F-35s. The required give for an F-35 is in excess of what they would need to carry to make it useful. A KC-130 barely gives enough gas as it stands right now. The Lightening Carrier concept is nothing more than a demonstration and validation of what we already know. An LHA is not a carrier, but a modified version of aviation combat element. Both a CVN and LHA need support from the Air Force for the next fight.
I was under the impression the Brits have a RW AEW platform for the QE?
This is nothing new. Future and some current ARG/MEUs will have variations of 2 LPDs with a mix of HMH and HMLA footprints. As the LSDs get phased out this should will most likely be the standard organization. The deck cycle is probably specifically to assess how many sorties they can generate for F-35s probably taking into account launching, recovering, and hot gas/loading.
Harriers off gators, yes, but they aren't lightning carriers. Harriers aren't capable A/A players. DDGs and CGs aren't and E-2D. F-35 has some EW capes, but those are designed for a very specific purpose. If you want those F-35s to operate like a CVW, they need Growlers and E-2D. Until that happens, calling them lightning carriers is meaningless. You're just not going to do DCA against an advanced threat with just F-35 unless you're ALR extreme, and that's just dumb.
All I'm going to say. This conversation is about as useful as the "bring back the (Tomcat/Viking/Etc)" nonesense. It just makes people look silly, who clearly don't know any better.
Interesting, and yeah, I agree with you. The room or need for anything else if they throw 2x VMFAs isn't there- that's just a plus up on the aviation capability of the ESG when they're going someplace that they don't need all of the other stuff. But 1xVMFA with all of the other people, airplanes, and stuff that comes with it smells like the idea of overconfident Generals that want to put a MEU in places that it probably shouldn't be without the CSG.
I suppose Harriers have been okay without a recovery tanker for, what, 40 years? But they really never had a (realistic) A/A mission.
Guess it took a lot of powerful nonsensical people to propose this experiment. All I will say is it all depends on how you define a Carrier. No it isn't a CVN with the notional CVW embarked. CVAs and CVSs had limitations, but we made it work. They were aircraft carriers. If as suggested the lessons learned are about deck spots, cyclic rate etc, then, if you need this configuration, all limitations will be known.