The End of Force Projection, Part III

We can't save the navy without destroying the air force.

Previously I argued that in the event of a war with a technologically capable foe our carrier fleet is likely to be annihilated within hours. Today that list of foes certainly includes China, probably Russia, and perhaps states allied with either given access to real-time satellite intelligence on the location of our fleet. The list will grow. 

Carriers were big vulnerable targets even in WWII. They have always depended for their survival on winning the game of hide and seek. Even 80 years ago a carrier discovered by an enemy was nearly always a carrier crippled or sunk.

Today the combination of universal satellite coverage with hypersonic missiles (or possibly even cruise missiles operating close to the surface) makes our carriers even easier to kill. Carriers could never run; even today they max out at about 45 mph. Now they also can’t hide.

There are solutions in the pipeline. Unfortunately, the only countermeasures likely to work would doom the air wings of the carriers themselves, rendering the big ships pointless.

The Navy is committed to laser weapons to defend its ships. The Helios laser weapon system, noted in the previous installment, is already promising against cruise missiles and fast incoming surface vessels. It will get better.

Sooner or later the triumph of energy weapons is inevitable. The end of the ballistic weapon, which has dominated the battlefield for hundreds of years, is in sight. Even nuclear missiles will disappear.

This will happen for the same reason the machine gun terminated the cavalry charge. At some point, when the combination of a defensive weapon’s speed of delivery, rate of fire, and accuracy become orders of magnitude superior to an incoming threat, that threat disappears from the battlefield.

 A cavalry charge reached a maximum speed of about 12 mph, and that only for the final surge, likely less than one hundred yards

Twelve mph is 17 feet per second. A musket ball traveled at approximately 1500 feet or 500 yards per second, 90 times as fast as the horse.

Given that musket-armed troops rarely fired at a range greater than 100 yards, the musket ball would reach the cavalryman in 1/5 of a second. The cavalryman was all but stationary compared to the bullet.

Still, the cavalry remained useful for most of the 19th century, especially against disordered troops. That’s because the musketeers’ rate of fire was excruciatingly slow—typically three rounds per minute in battle--and musket fire amazingly inaccurate.

The rifled machine gun solved both the accuracy and rate of fire problems. The WWI era Vickers machine gun could fire eight rounds in 10 seconds, the time it took a horse to travel 17 feet. The bullet traveled at 2400 feet per second, 142 times as fast the horse. With a killing range of 2000 yards a machine gun battery could start firing with the cavalry still minutes away, provided they could be seen.

No more cavalry

The maximum speed of an ICBM is a bit less than 5 miles per second, which is also approximately the top speed of a hypersonic missile.  A killing laser beam travels at the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second or 37, 200 times as fast as either missile. These fastest ballistic missiles on earth are almost 1000 times slower vs. a laser than a horse is vs. a musket ball. The horse was all-but-stationary compared to the ball.  Between the ballistic missile and the laser weapon, there are no “all-buts” about it.

When I first started writing about this mismatch, almost 40 years ago, laser weapons faced three critical limitations.  The lasers then contemplated by the military were too weak to assure a kill against a hardened target especially in the atmosphere which tended to disperse the beam.  They were too slow to recharge and refire in the event of a miss or to enage multiple targets.

Today’s electrically powered lasers can blow any missile out of the sky and fire much faster than a machine gun, and at lower cost per round.

Finally, there was the challenge of accuracy. The problem was not of the beam itself, which propagates perfectly in a vaccum and (these days) almost perfectly in the atmosphere. No mechanical aiming system was precise enough to hit an incoming ICBM at the distances then contemplated, more than 1000 miles.

In an era in which we engineer microchips down to nanometer dimensions, we have machine tools orders of magnitude more precise than 40 years ago. And artificial intelligence can acquire and track a target at least a million times more effectively than the computers of that era. Also, with power and rate of fire no longer issues, laser weapons will be used at much shorter ranges than contemplated back in the 1980s.

Target Drone During High Energy Laser Engagement (Courtesy Lockheed Martin)

If today’s laser weapons are still muskets, it remains true that the moment the musket appeared the end of the cavalry was ordained.

The laser will terminate whatever is left of force projection. The moment laser weapons become capable of protecting an aircraft carrier, the carrier’s weapons—the planes it carries—become irrelevant. The fastest US fighter, the F-15 Eagle maxes out at 4 miles per second, almost 40,000 times slower than a laser weapon.

But what about stealth? Only slightly slower than the Eagle, the F-22 Raptor has stealth capability as do several other U.S. fighters as well as the B-2 bomber.  Alas stealth technology is already vulnerable to certain advanced radar. AI-driven detection systems will make it more vulnerable yet.  To evade the AI-based detection systems on the horizon an aircraft would need to emit zero detectable signals of any sort, which is essentially impossible.

The airplane is a missile with a pilot.  Neither will survive the era of energy weapons.

Our navy is about about to become indefensible. If laser weapons make our navy defensible again, our air force will be indefensible. Without an air force, or a navy to carry it forward, the era of force projection is over.

We appear to be on the cusp of an era in which the defense in warfare will be so superior to the offense that actual conquest of any distant nation will be implausible, far too costly in blood and treasure to be part of any sane strategy.

As for the army…it’s WWI all over again, except this time the tank can’t ride to the rescue.

To be continued