Our island nation, protected from invasion by two great oceans, for that same reason depends for its military supremacy on “force projection,” fighting battles far from our shores. To project force first we much reach someone else’s shore and then shift vast ground and air forces and their supplies onto the land.
This is already impossible to do against any well-equipped enemy, indeed has been impossible for several decades. We have masked our vulnerability only by our (well-advised) preference for attacking primitive countries
Suppose a war with China, precipitated by a mainland attack on Taiwan. Our principal battle platform, on current doctrine, would be our carrier fleet. (We can not count on any of our regional allies to allow us to attack China from their territory.) With the carriers we would hope to destroy the Chinese air force and missile launching sites, crippling their ability to invade.
How long would that take?
About four hours. Not four hours to win but four hours—at most--to lose our entire carrier fleet in which we have invested at least half a trillion dollars.
That four-hour lifespan is based on experience.
USS Gerald Ford: $25 billion including support craft and air wing
There has not been a fleet carrier battle since 1945. In WWII there were only six: Pearl Harbor, Coral Sea, Midway, the Solomon Islands Campaign (two battles), Philippines Sea, and the Leyte Gulf. In those battles nearly every carrier sighted by an enemy was destroyed or severely damaged within four hours of being detected.
All carrier tactics came down to hide and seek; concealment was the only defense; to be discovered was to be destroyed.
On Dec 7, 1941, the Japanese carrier task force sank five U.S. battleships in two hours. Yet the Japanese attack was a failure. The Japanese did no harm to their primary target--the three U.S. carriers expected to be at Pearl—because they weren’t there. Enterprise, Lexington and Saratoga were all at sea, saved because not sighted. If the carriers had been at Pearl there is no reason to think they would have escaped the fate of the battleships.
The first major battle to which the carriers of both sides actually showed up was the Coral Sea, in May 1942. On the U.S. side were the Yorktown and the Lexington. On the Japanese side were the light carrier Shoho and the fleet carriers Zuikaku and Shokaku.
The carrier battle began on May 4 when the Japanese and US carrier groups each became aware that the other was somewhere in the area. For the next three days each nation’s carrier group frantically searched for the other, each launching scout planes, mostly in the wrong direction.
Finally on the morning of May 7 at 7:22 AM two Japanese scout planes reported they had spotted US carriers and escort ships to the south of the Japanese carrier group. The cooperating Japanese Admirals Takagi and Hara immediately sent most of their available strike force--78 fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo planes--in pursuit. The scouts had been mistaken. The ships turned out to be an oiler and a destroyer. Both were bombed and eventually sank.
An hour after this first sighting another Japanese scout plane did actually find the two US carriers to the north of the Japanese carrier group and reported this. But because of the first sighting the Japanese admirals decided the US must have divided its forces in half. They decided to continue with the southward strike on what turned out to be the oiler and destroyer. The American carriers escaped to hide again.
At almost the same time, 8:15 that morning, a US scout plane reported sighting the Japanese task force, including the fleet carriers. Wrong again: the pilot had sighted a screening force that included the light carrier Shoho.
Still, it was a carrier and it had lost the game of hide and seek. By 10:40 Shoho was under attack, by 11:35, three hours and twenty minutes after Shoho was first sighted it was sunk. Three and a half days of hide and seek, 55 minutes of combat, one dead carrier.
That afternoon the Japanese again sighted what they believed was the US carrier group, again they were wrong: it was a detachment of surface warships, trying to cut off the Japanese invasion fleet headed for Port Moresby. Even after realizing this force was not the carriers the Japanese again sent out a large strike force. They believed the ships they had sighted must be covering the carriers, which therefor must be nearby.
This was true, but before the Japanese planes could find the American carriers, the US picked up the Japanese planes on radar and sent out fighter group to intercept them, successfully downing most of the Japanese planes. The US carriers remained hidden and survived.
Finally, the next morning, May 8, the two carrier groups found each other at almost exactly the same moment. A US scout plane sighted the Japanese carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku, through thick cloud cover at 8:22. Just two minutes later a Japanese pilot sighed the US carriers, alas in the bright sunshine.
Within an hour both sides had launched air strikes. By 11 AM, two and a half hours after being sighted by the US strike force, the Shokaku was crippled putting it out of action for months. Zuikaku escaped unscathed—because it disappeared beneath the cloud cover. It won the game of hide and seek.
Meanwhile at almost the exact same time US forces were crippling the Shokaku, a Japanese combined force of torpedo bombers and dive bombers was attacking Yorktown and Lexington. Lexington was hit repeatedly, disabled, and scuttled that evening. Yorktown was hit repeatedly and rendered unfit for combat. It was repaired sufficiently to play a critical role at Midway.
Every carrier on both sides that was sighted by the enemy was crippled or destroyed in less than four hours of being sighted, with the partial exception of Zuikaku which was sighted briefly then lost to the clouds.
We will not try your patience by refighting Midway—the movie is terrific—but skip to the bottom line. In that battle, waged June 4, 1942, the Japanese sighted only one of three US carriers, the repaired Yorktown. Hit hard, it sank three days later.
The US found all four Japanese carriers. All four were destroyed within hours.
During the extended Solomon Islands campaign, which included the fight for Guadalcanal, the results were not as clear cut. But on the two days—August 24, 1942 and October 25, 1942—that can be called carrier battles most carriers sighted were soon destroyed or damaged.
By the time of the Philippines Sea and Leyte Gulf Japanese flight crews consisted mostly of young, relatively untrained pilots. American fighters had long since outclassed the Japanese Zeros. The combination severely limited the impact of Japanese attacks. The Japanese lost seven carriers in those two battles.
Carrier hide and seek was a brutally costly game 80 years ago. Today it would be suicide.
Hide and seek was doomed on October 4, 1957, the day Sputnik was launched. Today we have thousands of satellites scanning the earth for objects considerably smaller than aircraft. The Chinese have 500. Carriers could never run, today they cannot hide.
In WWII the vast majority of torpedoes and bombs launched from the air missed their targets. Today hypersonic missiles travel hundreds of times as fast as their naval targets. The missiles are not only guided to their targets they can take evasive action if attacked.
The Navy says that its rapidly evolving Aegis defense system can down at least some hypersonic missiles in the terminal portion of flight. And Aegis keeps getting better and more capable. Last October the USS Carl Levin in a test in the water north of Kauai, Hawaii, simultaneously engaged and destroyed both multiple incoming cruise missiles and a medium range ballistic missile.
Aegis is an extraordinarily capable weapon, now enhanced not only with artificial intelligence for threat detection and fire control but with the Helios laser defense system. Helios, firing at the speed of light and with each “round” costing no more than the electricity that powers it is the Navy’s great hope against both fast surface ships, multiple cruise missiles and eventually drone swarms.
Relevant is the late Clay Christensen’s concept of disruptive innovation by which a dramatically inferior technology gradually becomes “good enough” to overtake a far more impressive system. The world may never see a more sophisticated, ship-mounted defensive system than the Aegis, which started out as an exalted machine gun and has been enhanced repeatedly over decades. By comparison even the hypersonic missile is a simple device. One U.S. company proposes to build America’s version from the surplus engines of the long abandoned F-104 Starfighter interceptor.
How ever sophisticated their defenses, carriers remain an always visible, essentially stationary target that can expect to come under sustained attack for hours or days. The incoming missiles need to succeed only once. At $25 billion for each carrier group, and more than a billion a year to operate and maintain, with more than 6,000 highly trained personnel aboard, expect an enemy to go to extraordinary lengths to destroy each one.
The US currently has nine carrier strike forces. The first time a U.S. carrier group faces an enemy that can deploy these carrier-killer weapons expect the fleet to be swept from the sea. Overnight the perception of America’s power will be eviscerated.
The carrier is not useless; it can play a role in limited conflicts, such as the ongoing game of bumper cars in the South China Sea. Perhaps we should give ours away one or two each to Japan, India, Australia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. But as weapons of war against a determined and competent foe, and above all as vehicles of force projection, not only the carrier but the U.S. Navy is obsolete. In WWII we sent two great armies across our guardian oceans. We could do nothing of the sort today.
As laser weapons ride the learning curve, they could conceivably solve the hypersonic missile and drone swarm problems. But that would only reveal a bigger problem. Our Air Force is also obsolete.
And yes, so is the Army.
To be continued
Very good (and sobering) analysis Richard. I wish it weren't so, but alas...
Thanks Amy. I'd love to catch up. Drop me an email?