No one has 24/7 AEW or CAP, unless you have more than one carrier.
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USN Showdown between Super Hornet and F-35
- Thread starter ChuckMK23
- Start date
Yep. You patch together early warning from a lot of different assets (carrier AEW is one piece of the puzzle)... picket ships/screen, patrol planes and surveillance planes, drones, satellites, stopgap solutions like what Chuck mentioned- all of the above with your own stuff and the stuff the partner countries bring.
I don't think the ESG concept, at least in writing and in formal doctrine, got much higher than a tacmemo. Neat jack-of-all-trades (almost all trades) task group concept, but it sorta fizzled out about ten years ago because we obviously didn't have enough smallboys to go around for it- not with all the other commitments (CVBG/CSG, BMD, independent ops/show the flag to friendly countries). I guess it's good that we keep on cranking out new Burkes since we're not getting any new cruisers, and the little crappy ships will be able to cover the friendly country/show the flag port calls that the frigates used to do.
We don’t even have enough LHD’s apparently. Look up what the 24th MEU is up to.
... And with ~10 jets aboard, I would imagine the sortie generation capacity in a 24 hour cycle would not be something with which one could sustain any kind of tactically significant operations.
Right now, the USMC says that MUX (a concept that only exists on paper right now) will be the AEW platform for the MAGTF.
It will also be all weather, instrument capable, be both a shooter and an ISR platform, have EA capability, be a tiltrotor that will keep with the F-35, all while making the best cup of coffee you've ever tasted.
I think we'll get better performance out of a Starbucks' Barista named Chadwick who is working on his masters degree in Italian poetry (in-between his auditioning schedule). At least I'd get something that resembled coffee out of him.
That's....rich. Not as rich as a Starbuck's hot chocolate though!
I wonder where they will get the sensor operators, will the crew chiefs pull double duty or will they add a 3P to the crew?
We had one or two dets deploy with them during my first tour. I think the first det was with the first ESG. Seemed to mostly work, but like you said, it fizzled out, especially when BMD finally came online (beyond LAKE ERIE and her test DDGs).
The ideas being tossed around about MUX right now are...ambitious. I’ve been asked about some concepts that are truly sci-fi fantasy lately. Whoever is putting them together really seems to believe that the “lighting bolts” on contractors’ conceptual art - you know; where the various Future Concepts fly around the battlespace - are real things that really exist. No concept of how much bandwidth, manpower, and processing power are needed. “Just...(handwave) connectivity!”
There's a whole lot of F-35 Kool-Aid being served up by LM and people in the program office. Right now, the USAF seems to have the most realistic view of what the platform can and cannot do since they've been operating it the longest.
Some here have said that the big deck gators can only carry 10 JSF's, however the 2017 Marine Corps Aviation plan states the plans are for 16-20 F-35's + 4 V-22's for LHA-6/7 (no well deck - a few less for the others) https://news.usni.org/2017/03/28/document-2017-u-s-marine-corps-aviation-plan
For aerial refueling and AEW, you will see variants of the V-22 which the Marine Corps is already flying. Phrogdriver can probably tell us more about the future of these variants. Moreover, I would suspect that the V-22 and the planeguard helo would operate on the LPD - Marines are very familiar with split-ARG operations thus maximizing even more space for JSF's on the big deck gator.
SAR helo is on your picture. There's on one Spot 4 and one folded and stuffed by the forward garage. Where do the MEU's V-22s go in this concept? And what of the three bird SARDET?
AEW V-22 is just a pretty picture from the BD office. VARS is not a current operational capability.
So I think you'd have to see an LHD/A working closely with the CVN to make use of their AEW, AW, and tanking capabilities.
15 jets on the roof in Randy's pic is more than nothing. Just depends on how "significant" you need to be and in which warfare areas. I'm not savvy enough on how F-35s integrate with NIFC-CA and E-2D but I can't imagine that having more F-35s for a peer fight is a bad thing.
https://news.usni.org/2017/03/22/lo...ire-test-in-2018-lrasm-flight-tests-this-year
It "sort of" does, which is what I was kind of getting at.
E-2D is nice, but obvious limitations in a model purely dependent on a high demand asset, and one not as survivable.
In the long run, if any F-35 can spot for long range missiles off any destroyer or cruiser, that would seem to be pretty significant force multiplier.