The first step is acknowledging
that in a standoff, it could lose, and badly,
The U.S. Navy (and to be frank,
the whole U.S. military) is living in a state of total denial. In the next
great powers war, or perhaps even in a conflict with a mid-tier power like
Iran, at least one of our aircraft carriers will sink to the bottom of the sea.
That means thousands of lives could be lost—and there would be very little we
could do to stop it.
We
need to get used to a very simple reality: the decades-old age of the aircraft
carrier, that great symbol of U.S. power projection, has now passed. We can
deny the evidence that is right before our eyes, but innovations in anti-ship
missiles over many decades—combined with advanced but short-range carrier-based
U.S. fighter aircraft and missile defenses that can be easily defeated—have
conspired to doom one of the most powerful weapons ever devised.
If
the aircraft carrier is a symbol, an expression of U.S. military dominance
stretching from World War II to today, then there’s another symbol that perfectly
encapsulates its demise: China’s DF-21D, what many experts describe as a
“carrier-killer” ballistic missile.
How
the missile works is key to understanding what modern-day U.S. aircraft
carriers face. The missile is mobile and can travel anywhere via a truck,
making its detection difficult. When launched, the weapon is guided using
over-the-horizon radars, new satellite networks, and possibly even drones or
commercial vessels being used as scouts. The system also has a maneuverable
warhead to help defeat missile-defense systems. When it does find its target,
it can descend from the sky and strike at speeds approaching Mach 12. Worst of
all, the missile has a range of 1,000 miles. A Pentagon source tells me that
Beijing has already deployed “many of them—perhaps in the hundreds,” and is
“fully operational and ready for action.”
With one report claiming China could
build 1,227 DF-21Ds for every carrier the U.S. military sends to sea, Beijing
and other nations will have ample budgetary room to challenge our mighty
carriers for decades to come.
Now,
to be fair, many nations already have various types of missile platforms that
could attack carriers and do damage—even send them to the bottom of the sea.
The solution seems obvious: Why not park your carriers out of range and attack
from afar?
Great
idea—except we can’t. Right now, if we tried to strike targets in, say, China
or Russia, we would be unable to do it safely because, thanks to our
short-range aircraft, we would have to be parked right in range of those
countries’ own powerful missile batteries.
Despite
all their amazing capabilities, the latest generation of attack planes onboard
U.S. aircraft carriers, the F/A-18 and soon-to-be F-35 Joint Strike Fighter,
are not long-range strike aircraft, as they’re only able to fly 500 and 550
nautical miles respectively. In a stand-off with a nation like China, this
would put our most expensive weapon of war—and, more importantly, thousands of
sailors, airmen, and marines—in harm’s way. Since American aircraft carriers
sail in large groupings of ships, there exists the possibility of multiple U.S.
naval vessels meeting fiery deaths, as they would have to travel close to the
shores of other nations that have similar weapons.
Those
who continue to defend the aircraft carrier have an obvious solution: missile
defenses can stop any incoming attacks and keep the carrier relevant for
decades. That seems like a reasonable argument, except for one very basic
problem: first-grade math tells us it’s flat-out wrong. As I have said on
several occasions, U.S. naval planners in the future will face large missile
forces aimed at their ships that could very well overwhelm their missile
defense platforms. A great example comes from a 2011 report from the Center for
Strategic and Budgetary Analysis, which shows it wouldn’t take
much strategic sophistication to beat U.S. missile defenses—just some basic
math:
Iran could deploy its land-based
ASCMs (anti-ship cruise missiles) from camouflaged and hardened sites to firing
positions along its coastline and on Iranian-occupied islands in the Strait of
Hormuz while placing decoys at false firing positions to complicate U.S.
counterstrikes. Hundreds of ASCMs may cover the Strait, awaiting target cueing
data from coastal radars, UAVs, surface vessels, and submarines. Salvo and
multiple axis attacks could enable these ASCMs to saturate U.S. defenses…salvos
of less capable ASCMs might be used to exhaust U.S. defenses, paving the way
for attacks by more advanced missiles.
Taking
the above example to its logical extreme, could China, Russia, Iran, or even
one day North Korea simply build enough missiles on the cheap and launch them
close enough to exhaust the defenses of a U.S. aircraft carrier strike group?
Considering that we are currently unable to reload such defenses with ease at
sea, our forces would face an unpleasant choice if their missile interceptors
were exhausted: withdraw or face down enemy missiles with no defenses.
This
is a problem that will only get worse with time. And considering China is
already in the process of developing an even longer-range anti-ship weapon—the DF-26, with a range that could attack our
carriers as far out as Guam—simple logic suggests the problem will only get
worse.
The
best way to begin solving a problem is to admit that you have one. And let
there be no doubt that if steps are not taken to redefine what an aircraft
carrier does—essentially take bombs and attack enemies at long ranges—then the
next war America fights against a formidable foe will truly be historic, and
for all of the wrong reasons.
Harry
J. Kazianis is director of defense studies at the Center for the National
Interest and executive editor of its publishing arm, The
National Interest. Previously, he served as editor of The Diplomat,
a fellow at CSIS, and on the 2016 Ted Cruz foreign policy team.