We've discussed naval aviation for our hypothetical navy quite extensively, but the discussion isn't over. Here's the third installment.
Davy Jones: Even if we created our own STOVL fighter, would we still want a CATOBAR or STOBAR system? We'd still need to get some other planes in the air, wouldn't we?
Bean: No. To some extent, STOVL can be thought of as moving the cost from the carrier to the planes for a given level of capability. Flying STOVL planes off of a CATOBAR carrier gives us the worst of both worlds. We'd have to go for helicopter AWACS, and it denies us the opportunity for other fixed-wing support aircraft. I'm not sure we need fixed-wing ASW, but it would be nice to have a tanker. Maybe a drone, maybe manned. I don't think John's idea is such a bad one, although I want a carrier big enough we don't need to go for it.
Davy Jones: If we partner with Boeing or Northrop early on, then we could probably get access to some of their systems to develop our fighter more easily and we'd get easier access to the US market from the beginning of the project!
Bean: Maybe. The big issue is that the US has lots and lots of interesting laws about export of any information that's vaguely defense-related. Anyone else who has sat through ITAR training knows what I mean. Boeing and Northrop are also unlikely to help us as partners using their own money, so we're paying for their services upfront. I'd want to have sold the idea to someone in the US before bringing them in.
Alexander: I think we should try to stay away from developing a new aircraft if at all possible. Fighter development seems like a nightmare and I was envisaging a rush to go from virtually nothing to a serious navy, hence the desire to stick with proven technology. You seem to share the desire for off the shelf hardware with the expeditionary fighter concept, but I really want to stick with an off the shelf aircraft. Obviously CATOBAR gives the greatest capability here, and leaves us with a choice of aircraft, where as STOBAR seems like a poor compromise and STOVL leaves us dependent on the F-35B if we don't produce our own fighter. The US is selling the F-35 to a lot of people, but I don't know how they'd feel about that sort of technology transfer to a brand new nation, even if we're pretty friendly.
Developing a new fighter, or even a new carrier seems risky, counting on foreign sales could be a gamble, and as a new country with a new navy I don't want to be too ambitious.
Bean: All good points. I'm starting to rethink the desire for the Expeditionary Fighter. It would either be a huge success or a huge flop, and my estimation of the probability of the latter has been rising as I've thought it over more. I'm not sure we can afford the F-35, and I'd rather go CATOBAR if at all possible.
Alexander: The jump in capability from a smaller carrier like Juan Carlos to a Gerald Ford is huge, but (as John points out) we don't want to put too much of our budget into one or two huge ships focused on one (important) role. I'm not sure how many carriers we need, probably two to four, but if we end up sacrificing our ability to make a serious amphibious landing, escort our fleet, or get into the SSN business, we might end up wishing we'd compromised on this capability.
Bean: Also a very valid point. I'm certainly not laser-focused on the carriers, and I'm going to present on the surface fleet very soon.
Alexander: I think we could well find that the sort of states we might want to bully with threats of air strikes may well end up acquiring some quite serious anti-aircraft defenses over the lifetime of our aircraft, and I think it's important that they at least believe we'd be confident enough to fly whatever we buy over their heads, or we might be better off just sticking with a lot of VLS cells.
Alexander: Options in tonnage order - Juan Carlos class < America class with Ski Jump < CATOBAR Queen Elizabeth. Preferentially we'd fly the F-35, version as appropriate. I don't like the idea of having a high end and a low end carrier fighter - we'd end up with two smaller fleets, making training and maintenance a hassle. Especially if we were designing our own fighter, I'd prefer to spread the development costs over as many units as possible and take the capability hit. As back up, go for Rafale or Super Hornet with CATOBAR QEs.
Bean: Juan Carlos and America are both amphibs with some minimal strike capability. America, for instance, has about two strikes worth of magazine space if you fill her up with F-35s. We're definitely not going with a split fleet. That would be the definition of insanity with the size of our force. I'm a Super Hornet fan myself. We can get them right now, they do everything we'll need, and they won't break the bank. The F-35C isn't going to be around for a while anyway.
Alexander: On this subject, especially if we go with CATOBAR, we might as well just buy the same jet to operate from land too, at which point I think admitting that what we would then have was a naval air service, and should be under naval command, would be the obvious choice. Let's not skimp on the air arm though, even if John's idea of a Viking successor doesn't work out, buying some land based maritime patrol aircraft and maybe tankers to support them, would make protecting our coasts much easier. That kind of ties in with what I was saying earlier about the coastguard actually. The same aircraft that could be locating mariners in distress or smugglers could also shadow foreign warships or hunt submarines. Having one set of planes to drop life rafts and another to drop torpedoes probably doesn't make sense.
Bean: I'm definitely in favor of a single navy-dominated air force. There's no reason at all to buy a separate plane for land-based use.
I'm well aware of the need for maritime patrol aircraft, and I might be tempted to buy P-8s even if we do develop the Viking successor. It's pretty much the only game in town so far as western MPAs are concerned, and everything I know about the project says that it's a very good airplane. 737NGs are everywhere, so running the airframe is cheap and easy, and it's a lot bigger than John's plane, which means room to grow and put new things on it. And higher speed means you can search more territory.
But I'm not at all sure that the apparent commonality between dropping rafts and dropping torpedoes really exists. It helps if the plane that's dropping torpedoes is one designed for 7 cycles a day for 20 years, but even then, the tasks are rather different. Dropping torpedoes is something that's difficult and done infrequently, often far away from home. Dropping rafts is easy, done every day, and always in the same place. And it seems like the sort of thing you could do with a much smaller airplane.
This discussion was continued later.
Comments
With respect, folks, I think this discussion is in desperate need of numbers with dollar signs. Without a budget, this risks becoming an argument about whose Christmas wish list is cooler.
You're not entirely wrong. But for the numbers to actually be useful, I'm going to have to do an incredible amount of work in setting up the scenario, and I don't have the time for that.
I still think we're putting the cart before the horse in terms of trying to decide what we should buy before we decide what our navy is actually for. Take 2-4 carriers, for example. the number you need depends almost entirely on what your deployment plan looks like. And while I agree that if you're going to buy carriers, a catobar QE is a hell of a deal ($10 billion for the pair), but we don't seem to have a real reason for buying them.
And frankly, the F-35 is getting to the point where it's not much much expensive than super hornets. It's already cheaper than rafales, at least if you're talking flyaway costs. Lifecycle costs remain a bit of an unknown, and the F-35C is still a bit pricey because they haven't started making them in earnest yet, but that price will come down dramatically in the next 5-10 years or so, but there's a reason that everyone who's allowed to buy the F-35 is buying it, the economies of scale behind it are making it a steal.
@cassander
Good point on the F-35. I'm reluctant to commit to something of that nature, but it might be at the point of becoming a good deal.
As for mission, to some extent, we're handicapped by my refusal to give a map location and hard budget numbers. But I can't do those properly with the time I have available.
@bean
My impression is that without stating it you've basically assumed that the UK has been transported to somewhere halfway between Chile and New Zealand, in terms of budget, location, and so on. At least, that's been my assumption when I've been reading about capabilities and so on.
So one thing I’m very interested in the carrier choice discussion is this: Is a CATOBAR carrier necessarily that much more expensive? I have to wonder if the fact that the US is the only entity that fields supercarriers has led to assumptions about the capabilities and expense of a large deck carrier. In particular I would imagine we could get away with a much slower ship than what the US is fielding, with a smaller aircraft compliment. A four carrier fleet gives a lot more operational flexibility than a one or two carrier fleet.
@Chuck
The actual catapault is quite cheap on the scale of carriers, and you can definitely put it in a smaller hull. Also, tonnage qua tonnage is fairly cheap. I think the question is how much other expense does CATOBAR add, in terms of deck personnel, maintenance, and aircraft. Having an E-2 and hopefully a KC-2, plus other aircraft, makes for a more capable carrier, but it also means you need the training and support elements for an E-2 and so on, which a strictly F-35/F-18 fleet wouldn't have, or at least not to the same degree.
A middle ground might be to build a CATOBAR capable carrier, or even fit it out as a CATOBAR, but start off with a strictly STOBAR/STOVL fleet and build from there.
@RedRover
That's not at all a bad description of my base assumptions.
@Chuck
That's a good question. You're right that there isn't a much reason to assume that CATOBAR is going to drive price up directly. The big difference is the assumptions that come packaged into each carrier. A CATOBAR carrier is usually the equivalent of a major airfield, with full C3I facilities, lots of planes, extensive maintenance workshops, etc. The Queen Elizabeth is basically the same, but for STOVL planes. Most STOVL carriers are a lot more primitive, and fly aircraft that are simpler and easier to maintain.
That's a really bad way to cut cost. There's a lot of overhead on a carrier, particularly a big-deck strike carrier, and it makes sense to spread it over as many aircraft as possible. There's the combat systems, the air wing operations systems, the maintenance and ground support equipment, and so on. And the air wing overhead. If you want to do independent operations with the carrier, you need about 4 AWACS and 8 ASW helicopters, regardless of how many fighters you carry. Remember, steel is cheap and air is free, and making a carrier bigger mostly requires those two things.
When we say "a single navy-dominated air force," what does that mean, and how is the navy-dominated part guaranteed? Is there one top-level branch responsible for all the planes, and we make sure the majority of those planes are on ships? Or is the commander of all-the-planes subordinate to the commander of the Navy? But in that case, what we're calling the Navy is sort of just the combined armed forces, so what guarantees that organization will be a Navy in the sense we want?
(I hope the thrust of this question is clear enough--I'm inspired by the line from Coast Guard 2 "even if [the US] were to roll every federal law-enforcement agency into the FBI, how much of a difference would it make? You’d still have divisions specializing in drugs, firearms, alcohol, border control, bank robberies, etc," to ask how de jure organizational changes play out de facto)
@ADA
The Naval Aviation branch of the Navy is the only military aviation branch, although it would also be responsible for the equivalent of the US Air National Guard.
This isn't a bad question. I think the big difference will be that the core of Naval Aviation will be focused around carrier operations. There won't be a strong land-based air constituency. Shore tours are for retention/morale, and the permanently-ashore squadrons are part-timers.
You make a good point about this changing the institutional dynamics of the Navy. I may have to think on that more.
@bean
What I'm curious about is that overhead, why is it necessarily that much higher than a STOVL carrier? If it is literally the complexity of the aircraft themselves, then it should be possible to spread that out. I'm not convinced that 90+ aircraft is an optimal load for our goals. While storing extra aircraft is cheap, those aircraft require additional personnel, equipment and facilities if they are going to be used. (Not to mention the price of the aircraft themselves - a full load of F35s would be something like $8B!)
I just think there has to be a lower price point for a full deck carrier that allows us to avoid the seemingly common trap of only ending up with one. I'm not saying the carriers should be smaller, in fact kind of the opposite: I think they should be big but basic.
It's not so much a matter of necessity as it is one of good practice. There is some overhead to the CATOBAR configuration itself (catapults and arrestor wires are moderately expensive) but the big difference is that CATOBAR carriers are designed for strike warfare (and high-level AAW and ASW) while STOVL carriers are usually designed around Harriers, which are not really full strike aircraft. Instead of needing the whole set of equipment to manage a strike, they just need briefing rooms and a few operations spaces to coordinate simple operations with the Harriers. The Queen Elizabeths are essentially STOVL strike carriers, and the premium for a CATOBAR version was pretty small when they investigated that as an option from the start.
There are significant economies of scale in this. Occasionally, the navigation system goes out, and you need a TEM-72 test bench to fix it. This is a million-dollar piece of hardware, and it's only needed about once every six months per airplane. So I only need one on the carrier no matter how many planes I put aboard. Having two carriers instead of one means I need an extra bench.
Big but Basic is likely to result in a ship which is only useful if we need to beat up someone with no real defenses. I want a carrier which can contribute next time we need to fight Syria or someone else with a good air defense system.
@bean
I'm sure you've covered this before, but why STOVL rather than STOBAR? From a ship standpoint it's cheaper not to have the arrestor wires and associated equipment, but it seems like the overall system would be cheaper/better performing without having to put all of the extra vertical lift stuff on the fighters, compared to an arrestor hook and some extra strengthening.
Of course, at that point you might as well just go CATOBAR, but nonetheless STOBAR seems like it would be cheaper from a system standpoint.
That's a good question. STOBAR can't provide the performance of CATOBAR. It's only become feasible with 4th-generation jet fighters, and I believe there are still some fairly serious payload limitations. But it still has some fairly serious minimum requirements. But I suspect a lot of it is political. In the west, at least until recently, it was possible to fly Harriers, so STOVL was cheap, CATOBAR was expensive, and STOBAR was Russian and thus not worth paying attention to. For certain specific missions, it might make sense. I saw a suggestion that it could provide arming and fueling for British fighters in the North Sea doing air defense missions. You don't have to worry about AWACS or aircraft with lots of weapons and fuel onboard. But beyond that, I don't see much of a case for that.
RedRover:
Half way between Chile and NZ is a pretty benign strategic environment and is likely to stay that way for sometime.
But power projection would inherently be long range, unless you're planning on restricting your meddling to pacific islands (and even those will still have some serious distance).
Chuck:
Lowering speed too much would make the carrier take too long to get anywhere and you really want it to be going reasonably fast when launching and landing aircraft (and that gets even more important if you make it a smaller ship).
A CO₂ emitting carrier with about the same top speed as a Nimitz but a sustained speed comparable to it's escorts would work but any slower is likely way too slow to be useful to a modern Navy.
RedRover:
Building CATOBAR and operating less capable aircraft off it seems a false economy.
ADifferentAnonymous:
If you're starting a military from scratch having all branches integrated into the same thing does seem like the way to go (e.g. the IDF, yes I know their surface Navy is a bit of a joke but the ground and air components (the ones that actually matter for them in terms of not getting invaded) are possibly the most powerful in history per person).
Chuck:
Probably no point only buying a single unit of anything, if only one useful carrier can be afforded then realistically you can't afford a useful carrier.
The Queen Elizabeth is a bit slower than the Nimitz, but otherwise matches this criteria. I certainly wouldn't want to build a carrier with a top speed of 20 kts, although AIUI the need for high top seed for launch has diminished slightly in recent years. Catapults helped, as did improved performance.
Absolutely. I missed that the first time around, but if you're paying for CATOBAR systems, use them. STOVL is to some extent moving cost from the ship into the planes, so using them gives the worst of both worlds. STOBAR off a CATOBAR ship is just silly.
I'm not proposing that exactly. What I'm suggesting is that we tailor our service branches to give us the strategic results we want, which is rather different from conventional service unification. I think that's generally a bad thing for esprit de corps.
The 80s called, and they want their evaluation of the IDF back.
Seriously, the reputation of the IDF in professional circles took a massive hit in 1991. Before that, we'd seen them beating up on the Arabs, and assumed that this meant they were really good. Then we fought Iraq, and discovered that Saddam's Army, who had a good reputation and stacked up well among the Arabs, would have struggled in a war with the Boy Scouts. This, and more experience actually working with them, brought about a reevaluation of how good the IDF really was. On a tactical level, they're certainly not bad, but at higher levels, their staff work is atrocious, and it shows.
@bean @anon
By starting off with a STOBAR fleet, I meant if cost was a consideration you start off with just fighters and choppers, and then add the rest of the fleet later, as time and finances permit. Obviously you give up some capability by not immediately starting off with the full compliment of E-2s, S-3s and so on, but a fully capable CATOBAR carrier with just F-18s and SH-60s is still nothing to sneeze at, and they can be added later.
I don't think the incremental airframe costs of E-2/S-3s would be that much, especially if buying used, but it seems like they would require a lot of extra overhead versus a straight F-18/F-35 fleet in terms of training/maintenance/support type things.
In other words, if funds are tight, it seems like having a CATOBAR carrier with essentially a STOBAR fleet (though operated CATOBAR) would be a cheaper and more future proof way to provide for future capability growth than going STOVL, if that makes sense.
bean:
Combining existing forces does tend to cause those problems and not save any money (as Canada found out the hard way) but if you're creating a military from scratch then you won't have that problem.
RedRover:
Not having AWACS seriously reduces capability especially if you're fighting someone who has their own fighters.
@RedRover
That's not the worst idea, although I'm not sure it would play out that way in reality. It's going to take a long time to build a carrier-operating navy (which is more than just the carrier), and I suspect that you'd by AWACS for defensive purposes before the carrier reached service. But if somebody gave you a carrier and you didn't have enough money to buy both fighters and AWACS in the first year or three, then yes, cutting the AWACS makes sense. But I wouldn't call that STOBAR operations so much as it is capability gapping.
@Anon
I'd at least give the Marines separate uniforms and ranks, and not force them to comingle with the Navy too much. I'm not sure if that makes them a separate service or not.
In a recent Quora thread, it was mentioned by Greg Whates that the US offered to build carriers for the UK when Queen Elizabeth was put to tender:
https://www.quora.com/If-an-American-ally-wanted-to-order-a-brand-new-Nimitz-class-carrier-could-it-get-one
If our hypothetical navy has more than 1/11th of the budget of the United States Navy, it would be within our means to buy a complete Carrier Strike Group.
Pro: * This would give us the best ratio between effectiveness and cost * Our relationship with the US would be greatly improved * Ability to seamlessly integrate with the US Navy in joint operations
Con: * Our domestic ship-building industry would not be happy * All our eggs in one basket * Periods of vulnerability where no carrier is available * The US might not be willing to go through with this deal
If our budget allows it, we could buy 2 CSGs, to mitigate these problems. Our domestic industry should be able to produce some of the escorts, and maybe even sell some to the US.
I'd love to have a cite for that, but I doubt Mr. Whates would be able to produce one, because it almost certainly never happened, or at least didn't happen in that way. First, there's the jobs issue. There's no way Parliament would be able to get away with giving a chunk of work that large to the US. Second, there's less spare industrial capacity for that in the US than you'd think, and handing a carrier slot to the British would disrupt our schedule for quite a while. Third, the US is notoriously difficult to work with on such things. There's a reason we don't export new warships these days.
I'll check a couple of books when I get home, just in case I'm wrong on this one, but it sounds a lot like the sort of rumors that former military personnel are wont to repeat as fact.
Probably not. Military budgeting is really complicated, and there's likely to be a bunch of overhead involved (personnel, schools, etc) which is going to mean that the budget for a single CVBG is a lot higher than 1/11th of what the USN spends on theirs.
Also, remember that we aren't the USN, and what works for them may not work for us. I have some plans for surface warfare that look rather different from the USN solutions, for instance, and their carriers are probably too big for us. The CATOBAR QE is a good middle ground.
I checked David Hobbs's British Aircraft Carriers, and there was no mention of a US offer to sell Fords. That's the best book I have that covers the time period in question (my other British carrier books end too soon), so as far as I'm concerned, the offer almost certainly never happened.
Thank you for checking.
My understanding is that the effectiveness of carriers scale much better than linear with size. A single CVBG would arguably make our country the second most capable nation in the world when it comes to sea control and expeditionary strike power. Do you agree?
The overhead in price could be reduced by sending our sailors to US Navy schools. The total price might be 6-8% of the budget of the US Navy, which would be feasible for a minor power like Australia.
Sort of. If we're preparing for a climactic sea battle with someone, and everybody gets to show up with all of their forces, then yes, buying an American CVN is the way to go. But that's also a really terrible model of how naval forces are used in the real world. I'm very much of the camp that says that we need at least two carriers, so that we always have one available. A CVN tied up pierside at home is a lot less capable than a smaller carrier that's on-station.
That gives entirely too much power to the US. Obviously, if we buy things from them, we're vulnerable to them cutting us off, but we can stockpile supplies and make sure not to buy everything from them to avoid giving them control. If we essentially just send them money and men, and let them build our forces, that doesn't really work. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Congress starts forgetting whose forces they are, and we really don't want that. Also, the higher-profile our military cooperation is, the more vulnerable it is to public pressure. Let's say that we end up with another round of paperclip riots, and a large segment of the US population takes umbrage at how we deal with them. It's a lot easier to get annoyed at someone building and repairing whole ships than it is at someone who is simply selling us radars. That's not to say that cutting off our access to Aegis wouldn't be a serious problem, but it's a lot harder to get people worked up over.
I'm not saying our people won't take advantage of USN schools. They will, and there's a lot of exchange students between the schools of the various western navies. But we need to ensure that our military answers to us, and is no more than normally vulnerable to diplomatic swings.
Buying a navy from a more experienced powerful neighbor is a strategic mistake from the dawn of history. See the Delian league for a particularly notorious example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delian_League
bean:
The Marines would have camo, OK the Navy would have camo available and some units would use it but most ship crewmembers don't need camo.
Giving Marines army ranks would also work, though it might be a good idea to use Lieutenant Major instead of Captain to avoid confusion.
bean:
Only if they didn't have the ability to do it themselves (not likely) and didn't want to spend the money to get the ability (somewhat more likely, especially for small orders).
bean:
If the British wanted the Ford class I suspect the US would have been willing to license the design, it's possible that there was informal offer made, i.e. US Naval officers telling their RN counterparts that if the RN wants to license US carrier designs that they'd probably be able to do it.
Søren Elverlin:
Yet Australia bought two flattop amphibs and no supercarriers.
The fact is that middle powers are overreaching if they go for full sized carriers, only Great powers can really afford them.
bean:
As I said earlier in this thread:
Where I pretty meant that, a ship that isn't at sea isn't very useful (unless it's intended as an interceptor which does seem to be what you're trying to do).
Having just one carrier would be a prestige thing.
bean:
That would argue towards being friends with basically everyone you'd want to buy weapons off along with having some domestic industry.
Pretty much. The Marine and Navy hierarchies need only merge at the top, and there probably wouldn't be more than the normal amount of cross-pollination between them, unlike whatever it is that Canada does. (I'm not as familiar with their setup as I should be.)
One of the big problems with US carriers is that they're incredibly manpower-intensive. The British are running Queen Elizabeth on ~700, a quarter the compliment of a Ford. And based on what I know of their manpower situation, they simply couldn't have run Fords, even if they wanted to. I suppose the offer might have been made at a low level, but the signal was definitely "We're here to help you" and not "buy our stuff".
What who is trying to do? Me? I want to use the things.
Which is pretty much what everybody does. Thinking it over, I suspect that some of the logic behind international work-sharing is to reduce the risk that the prime partner decides to cut you out of the program over some minor diplomatic spat. That's hard to do when you make a critical component, although I'm sure there are duplicate plans in case something goes really wrong.
bean:
Canada discovered the hard way that you don't actually save any money merging three branches into one and I think they also don't have much more if any cross-pollination between the Army, Navy and Air Force.