After the Aircraft Carrier: 3 Alternatives to the Navy’s Vulnerable Flattops

Well, none of the three alternatives really addresses what carriers do best - bringing and projecting significant airpower to the theater.

Many of the alternatives in the article mention the F-35 as a candidate aircraft, but a fighter is not the only thing that defines airpower. You need support aircraft such as E-2C AWACS, C-2s, P-3s or P-8s, EA-6Bs, plus a myriad of other support aircraft to round out the air fleet.

Even if the F-35 does integrate into the Navy's fleet, there are still F/A-18s, and a few F-14s that are perfectly operational and will be for decades to come. The Navy is simply not going to abandon these aircraft as the costs for replacement would be too high.

I suspect the demise of the super-carrier is a little premature.

I agree with most of what you say, but I think the F-14 was finally retired about 5 years ago. Those electronic aircraft along with increasingly intelligent countermeasures help keep the carriers from going obsolete.

I agree with you AH.

This article and the 'futurist' it sights fail to understand the importance of air superiority, or at least substantial air power in a conflict.

It isn't just the carrier fleet protecting the carrier, the air power the carrier provides protects the fleet.

Without air power, the rest of the ship and the subs will be greatly marginalized by the enemy's air power.

The idea that SSGNs might be a reasonable replacement for aircraft carriers is complete folly. The author is embarrassingly uninformed.

replace the manned aircraft with drones........

It really wouldnt cut down on the personell much (Pilots) but you could increase the nuber of aircraft........ and this could really become a deadly weapon.

I say melt em all down and bring back the 1970's Chrysler Imperials!

Government Official: "There is a big problem sir!"

President: "Where are the carriers?"

So sarcasm is a good answer?

It would indeed be wonderful if this country didn't need to show air superiority to calm some situations down, to a time out. Today gangsters are ruining civilizations, most of the smaller nations are bowing to them, as are the normal citizens. Simply the posibility of these ships being within striking distance, is a deterent to some extent.

What can never be calculated is prevention. If "IT" doesn't happen, "IT" cannot be calculated. Prevention of "IT" is not calculatable!

I think you may have answered your own question you posed.

.....most of the smaller nations are bowing to them, as are the normal citizens.

As opposed to what? Abnormal citizens? Now we need not only a definition, we also need to know who makes that difinition.

The title of this article at first seems like a leap into fantasy. No aircraft carrier has been sunk in battle for nearly sixty seven years. How could a web reporter or civilian theoretician validly claim an aircraft carrier as vulnerable, particularly the mighty US super carriers? However, a US Navy Captain Jerry Hendrix with his with combat aviation experience certainly brings an informed opinion on the concept. So I skimmed the Wired article and read Captain Hendrix's article.

What Captain Hendrix presents is a well reasoned "due diligence" review of the cost, benefit and risk analysis of the US Navy focusing on super carrier deployment in the future. In essence this is a review to see if the super carrier fleet is becoming the modern equivalent of the Maginot Line. The key criteria in this analysis is that more and more weapons systems have become sniper like one shot to kill one target. What is particularly important that the Captain recognizes is that the precision strike technology is becoming cheap and readily available to all. Putting so much reliance in one mighty vessel maybe putting too many of our eggs in one tempting basket.

It's not the aircraft carrier, protected by the operating group, that is becoming the most vulnerable. It is the manned aircraft itself, once it has left the protective cover of the group.

Human physiology and its affect on mass fractions, aerodynamic cross-section, performance limits, and other variables is already limiting its usefulness against modern air defense systems.

In a battle space that will soon be dominated by super high performance, loiter capable, autonomous UAVs and missiles, the manned aircraft becomes a dinosaur - regardless of its basing.

The systems presented to us by the monopolistic supply chain are founded on profitability, not the future battle-space.

Our technologists are in this thing for the money; our adversaries appear to be into it to win.

'....In a battle space that will soon be dominated by super high performance, loiter capable, autonomous UAVs and missiles, the manned aircraft becomes a dinosaur - regardless of its basing.....'

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UAV capable of effectively defeating modern combat aircraft is still a long ways off.

A more likely scenario is that manned aircraft and UAVs will work together in an effective force. That effective force, whatever the ratio of UAVs to manned aircraft, still has to either be launched and refueled and rearmed near the fight, or spend a huge amount of carrying capacity on fuel just to get there.

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Not every fight will be conveniently located in close proximity to a friendly defensible airbase.

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As far as our technologists being in it for the money, I have to agree. Capitalism is the worst system, with the exception of all the other systems tried to date.

The advantage of the remote piloted vehicles (UAVs) is loiter time. They can remain over the theater of operation and provide intel and to a lesser extent, a platform for weapons.

They are not well suited for SEAD (suppression of enemy air defenses) or air to air combat missions. At least, not at this time.

Future versions of these vehicles will have more ability to perform CAS and CAP, but the military would not be investing billions of dollars in programs like the F-35 if they really were obsolete aircraft platforms.