- Military
- History
- Middle East
- China
- Confronting and Competing with China
- Revitalizing History
On its face, the simple but clear logic of cost should serve as a key measure of military power. After all, military power is in some respect the translation of economic capacity into the means to kill. If one dollar purchases ten more units of “kill power” than the enemy, which spends the same amount of cash on only one unit, then the small, cheap, more numerous weapon is clearly more effective.
However, in practice, complexity and simplicity represent trade-offs in combat power, particularly in naval combat. Swarms of small, cheap French torpedo boats were meant to overwhelm the expensive battleship, driving it into obsolescence, and breaking British naval power in the late nineteenth century. In response, the British developed a more expensive, more complex warship—the torpedo boat destroyer—that totally outclassed any torpedo boat. Complexity, in turn, scaled beyond a single unit, encompassing a combat system. Battleships and torpedo boat destroyers combined became a significantly more effective force than uniform heavy or light warships.
Larger platforms are more expensive. But they can more easily integrate new weapons, sensors, propulsion systems, and other technologies. When paired with less complex specialist platforms, a navalized combined-arms emerges.
A capital platform will always be necessary in naval combat, even in a world of small, smart, cheap weapons. Smaller weapons need to be delivered some distance, a reality for all militaries except those that fight exclusively along their borders. They also need sophisticated targeting mechanisms to prove accurate, and often command and control and engineering support, meaning the combat system as a whole remains complex. Ukraine’s drone complex appears cheap considering its low unit costs. But the whole system relies on Starlink, derived from a $1.63 trillion parent company and built over a decade, alongside a distributed network of workshops and tech labs that constantly tweak, update, and iterate on battlefield data. Taken together, the Ukrainian drone system derives its advantages not from its cost-competitiveness, but its integration of different technologies and tactics with a whole-of-society backbone. Similarly, even powers that need only consider their local waters must generate sophisticated targeting complexes, disperse launchers, and harden storage sites, an aggregate effort of substantial expense.
For any nation with interests that do require power-projection, the question the naval strategist must answer is whether the capital platform at hand is best at delivering firepower. A capital platform is necessary because only it can sail the distances required to reach a combat zone and fight under its own power. At times, the conceptual layout of a platform exists, but technology advances sufficiently to make the actual platform radically more effective. The HMS Dreadnought battleship integrated a revolutionary all-big-gun armament with much higher speed and fire control enabling engagements at significantly longer range. In raw gunnery terms, each dreadnought battleship was worth at least twice a pre-dreadnought. When taken altogether, the disparity was so great as to make prior capital ships obsolete.
Alternatively, the means of delivering effects changes radically enough to necessitate a transformation in capital ship design. The last time this occurred was in the 1940s, when the carrier eclipsed the battleship. Indeed, the torpedo did ultimately spell the death of the battleship, but only when combined with aircraft. The combination of range, speed, maneuverability, and mass, when launched in pulses of firepower, meant that torpedo-armed aircraft could overwhelm battleships in a manner impossible for motor torpedo boats.
It is worth noting, however, the incontrovertible death of the battleship occurred two decades after Pearl Harbor. Throughout the Second World War, night fighting remained enormously difficult for all but a handful of highly trained pilots with specialized modified aircraft. It took until the early 1960s for the United States to convert its carrier air wings to all-weather aircraft. This revolution received none of the Dreadnought’s fanfare because only the United States and its allies built blue-water navies in the 1960s.
Moreover, as missiles eclipsed guns, bombs, and torpedoes, carrier aircraft remained the most efficient tools to deliver effects because of their flexibility. Unlike a $13 billion nuclear-powered carrier, cheaper warships small and large cannot be reloaded at sea or sail indefinitely and change their missions within hours. Barring a breakthrough in propulsion technology, designing aircraft to be launched by catapult off a 100,000-ton warship generates higher-performance results, manned or unmanned. Nor can a smaller carrier generate the same sortie rates as a larger one. Sortie rate, not aircraft numbers alone, determine carrier combat power generation. Unless additive manufacturing feedstock becomes lighter, more flexible, and less power intensive, making high-performance weapons on the fly will be cost-prohibitive.
The Carrier Air Wing is desperately in need of an update. It has shrunk from a dozen-plus specialist aircraft in the late Cold War to just three main airframes today, the F/A-18, F-35C, and E-2C. While larger platforms can integrate new weapons, smaller ones are typically better at specific tasks. The Navy badly needs a long-range penetrator that can deliver both high-performance, stealthy missiles and very large numbers of cheap missiles. It should probably experiment with parasite fighters, building very large “mothership” aircraft and smaller one-way attack weapons and loyal wingman hybrids. Space-based platforms and very-high-altitude long-endurance UAS (unmanned aircraft systems) can help link aircraft over hundreds of miles at least, improving operational coordination. Crucially, the Navy needs carrier-organic air-to-air refueling aircraft to increase operational range. The Navy started its unmanned refueler program in 2006. Two decades later, there is not a single operational unit on a carrier. This is a searing indictment not of the Navy’s technological backwardness, but its inability to manage basic programs.
The United States needs a transformation in naval airpower akin to 1945–60. In 15 years, carrier air wings transitioned from single-engine piston-driven aircraft armed with guns, bombs, torpedoes, and rockets to jet-powered aircraft equipped with radar and firing missiles. The U.S. Navy must do the same today. But the deployment mechanism will remain the same—not simply the carrier, but the 100,000-ton supercarrier.
