View Single Post
  #26  
Old January 5th 07, 03:19 AM posted to sci.military.naval,rec.aviation.military.naval,us.military.navy
Mike Kanze
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 114
Default New Carriers - Old refurbishments - New Navy Fighters that go FAR - FAST - and HIGH


Ski & Paul,

Excellent thread, and a very welcome counterpoint to much of the trash appearing in rec.aviation.military.naval recently.

Keep it coming.

--
Mike Kanze

"I would love to change the world but they won't give me the source code."

http://www.sfgate.com/blogs/tech

"Ski" wrote in message news:dvenh.7388$kB3.6406@trnddc08...
Paul - good points but let me continue...


"Paul J. Adam" wrote in message ... In message Z4_mh.1884$IT2.1222@trnddc06, Ski writes

Happy to jump back in, but aware that some F-14 drivers are reading

"Paul J. Adam" wrote in message ... Some issues there - the Hornet's much more survivable than the A-7 or A-6, and certainly much more flexible (you couldn't multirole a Corsair or Intruder airframe, let alone swing-role it - but the Hornet's been doing that for twenty years).

The Hornet gets you flexibility and affordability, which is what the Navy needs at the moment.

Agree for the moment

In my opinion, the Hornet gets you all that and to its lasting credit - but had it been mixed with a "like" maintainable "high-far-fast" fighter the modern CVN would be at its peek in potential, without it there is nothing but adjustments. At first the so-called "outer-air battle" would shift to escort ships with many naval SAM's - then the ship numbers dropped, the enemy employed lots of ECM and the cruise missiles became lower and faster and more numerous.

Add "and launched from a lot closer in". We're not fighting blue-water warfare any more, and aren't likely to in the near future. The cruise missile threat remains real, but it's exemplified by incidents like the attack on HMS Glamorgan in 1982, the Gloucester shootex of 1991, or the Hanit attack last year: ships not too far from shore getting attacked by a late-unmasking threat, often in conditions of air superiority or even air supremacy.

"We are not fighting Blue Water any more" - that is the "wish" but not the reality - the ships are moving away from the coast lines as the threats from anti-ship cruise missiles, aircraft, ballistic missiles, small suicide craft, and bombers increases. The Naval build up now in the Persian Gulf will "show" many things but the "teeth" are gone and even with AMRAAM's and the latest F-14's theer is not enough of either to make a difference. We have one or two cycles then beat feet for open water.

So now the air wing can't do the outer battle despite higher sortie generation

Who are fighting the outer air battle against? The Bad Guys aren't going to form up alpha strikes and come at us over a couple of hundred miles of open ocean for us to work on: and if they do, Hornet plus AIM-120 remains an effective counter. (Arguably, since we're more likely to be talking fighters than Backfires, more effective than Tomcat plus Phoenix).

The "outer" air battle can form very fast and one does not need regiments to do it, just four, six or ten platforms with cruise missiles. Note that this week Malaysia takes delivery of its first Su-30's, Indonesia has them and the Chinese are converting their Air Force to them and evaluating still better versions as the Russian come out of the cold and have started to deliver new models to the Russian Air Force. The Su-34 will replace the Su-24 Fencer, a far more capable platform and as we look to the Carribean Venezuela and Mexico will have these machines - all capable of employing several families of anti-ship cruise and precision stand-off weapons. The Navy will need to move wide, deep and fast and the only things that will keep up with them will be aircraft and submarines and a small number of specialized auxiliary boats.

The Tomcat was a very specific answer to a very particular question, that being "How do we deal with a regiment-plus of Badgers or Backfires armed with supersonic high-diving carrier-killing ASMs?". Lacking that threat, there's no urgent requirement for a Tomcat or replacement.

And hence the big "mis-information" to modernize the decks, simplify the Navy's aviation types and support trail and in the end a smaller more capable Navy to fight an enemy that has already check-mated that capability and can do so min an un-organized way of failed-states and irregular actors.

Unfortunately that is not the case but it was the Navy's position when it trashed the Tomcat, and like Iraq intelligence it was a political position not facts. We still have a growing threat from all kinds of cruise missiles
(sliders, high-divers, skimmers, combos, etc.) from ships, subs, tactical aircraft, UAV's, ballistic missiles and bombers - it did not suddenly stop, it only got worse.

Very true, but again the danger is - and for the near future remains - inshore and in confined or busy conditions. When you've got forty-plus surface contacts within five miles and are within spitting distance of Iranian territorial waters, with "IRGCN incursion!" being piped several times a day, your priority and the primary threat is *not* the outer air battle: current and near-future Bad Guys who make their intentions known at 250 miles are well within the ambit of current capabilities.

You are not wrong that the "core" threat for irregular ops remains littoral, but the present fleet can not operate there safely and the ships they have programmed for that cost 5 times too much, hence a step back may be necessary.
We need a littoral carrier but not a $3 billion LHA(R) - more LHA's and LHD's with more MV-22's and a Blitz-fighter would make the case much better. The best and most cost effective aviation littoral ship for the Marines and SOF would be a refurbished JFK (CVA-67) revamped to include two less boilers and screws, reduced cats, a trauma hospital, SOF troop quarters, a wing of Marine F/A-18E/F/G's, more CH-53E and the Blitz fighter. Now with the JFK operating close and the swarm of ships and aircraft from the amphibious expeditionary battle group it all fits better. The Kitty Hawk would round off the 2 x fleet 2 x ExBG idea

Hezbollah don't have an air force or any significant over-the-horizon targeting, but that didn't stop them putting a C802 into an Israeli warship despite the skies being black with the Heyl Ha'Avir.

Terrible proof that not much is really working with all the IT and ISR hype - we need numbers and strength. Note that I speak the same as you in the littoral context but all i did was to move the nuclear fleet out into the open ocean and brought in more of the present classes of chips that you can still procure for two or three to the new model. And the $600+ million for the JFK refurbishment that once was considered such an enormous figure is putts against the near $10 billion projected for the CVN-21 - yikes!!!

In half a sentence you lose most of the customers. The STOVL variant was added because there was a user requirement (US-led and then others bought in) and if you "slide a decade" then you lose your export sales, who didn't sign up for an extra ten-year gap.

The customers are leaving anyway - what is needed are some new ideas that will revigerate the JSF into something needed by everybody - it is clearly not needed now. If the JSF is slid a decade and joined by other critical technology driven add-ons the key customers will remain.

Okay, but the UK won't: we need the JSF to replace the Harriers and to fly from the new carriers, and we can't wait a decade. I doubt we'd be unique in having problems with "just keep flying what you've got for a decade".

Your UK will not leave but it will drag its feet and what really needs to be done is what is being done slowly - a merging of the US and UK defense industry - slowly - slowly. What the UK needs is to do what the Marines would be forced to do - give up on JSF STOVL (F-35B), drop it, the move to accept the Kitty Hawk and refurbish it to a UK-US standard, then as quid-pro-quo (as the Marines will do screaming but loving it) accelerate an enormous buy of F/A-18E/F/G's (drops the price some 20%) to fill these two carriers (actually provides the Marines and the UK with an additional fighter squadron to fill out the ship airwings). Organize the JFK and Hawk to be the aviation lead ships in two major Atlantic (NATO) Expeditionary Battle Groups (EBG) for all the warfare scenarios you describe and this frees the main six USN nuclear battlegroups to be strategic, nuclear and open ocean. The JFK would have one USN squadron and one RN squadron, the Hawk one USN squadron and one Marine Squadron. This would free up one air wing for the USN filling the shortfall.
The EBG's would join with other aviation assualt ships now loaded to the hilt with V-22's, in fact the demise of the JSF would double the space available for V-22 and that is what is needed more. The Blitz fighter would come with the V-22 because attack helicopters can not fly fast enough to escort it and the fighters from the lead ships would do that initially. The dropped necessary hospital ship will show up again organic to the JFK and Hawk as well as all the many multi-agency groups and kit for stability operations. Additional assault ships would then be abvle to fill in the EBG.

Trouble there is that submarines are great for sea denial, but hopeless for sea control. How do you escort oil tankers through the Straits of Hormuz, or shiploads of evacuees out of Lebanon, with a submarine?

Mahen would faint - that's showing no faith in the future. Believe me the sub-surface world will take over, the question is not will it, but just when.

That being the point - we're not ready to do this now, nor in the immediate future.

If you can communicate to surface ships a virtual support or escort ship then you are there are you not;

The problem being that communication, which requires the submarine to be slow with a mast up.

the sub can be anywhere but the invisible support ship could direct weapons if attacked just as well as a real boat could.

You still need someone to be there with a sensor, meaning a decent-sized hull with a radar at useful height, plus all the datalinks or whatever black magic is getting you comms with the submarines: lose that and your submersible forces have lost the Recognised Air Picture..

Agree but don't underestimate how the submarine could overcome the technical issues you present. Just as an F-22 could guide another aircraft's AMRAAM, X-Craft like high-speed cargo ships could be loaded to accompany the formations and the targeting for many weapons loaded on board could come from various other locations and much more stealthy then anything we have now on the surface

So, perhaps that unit needs weapons to protect itself, and crew to operate them... and it's become a warship and we're back to where we were.

And to remove evacuees there are smaller ships and if necessary a large inflatable used by SOF may suffice or in the end surface.

Which all get you back to the same vulnerabilities as surface warships, but more so.

We are in a time of great change in the very nature of warfare itself, the actual character of conflict - not whether one technology or thing is superior or inferior. We are dealing with a profound debate over just what war is and what it is not.

Actually, I'd say rather that we're moving away from an aberrant period where "war" with equivalent powers could be clearly and obviously defined, planned and prepared for; lesser conflicts were sideshows to be managed discreetly while preparations for the Next Great Conflict were made. Korea, Vietnam, the Falklands, were all heavily influenced and overshadowed by the ongoing Cold War.

The time of counting chips and comparing force structures is well gone and it is very hard to comprehend. We elude to it think about "effects based" concepts, but in the end it reduces all hierachies of power to issues of national will and values. Clauswitz is stressed at this juncture in the purpose of conflict.

This assumes that your opponent is an identifiable nation, of course.

We are saying the same thing in different ways

--
The nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors, will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools. -Thucydides


Paul J. Adam - mainbox{at}jrwlynch[dot]demon(dot)codotuk

This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm