Resolved: Aircraft carriers are on their way out. The US should plan on needing only a handful by midcentury, not the dozen we currently have (and which force level we are planning on keeping by building more of them). Moreover, most Air Force planes will be obsolete.
The replacement will, of course, be drones. As they continue to improve, they will become far cheaper and safer force-projection platforms, eventually being capable of delivering more ordnance more accurately and much more cheaply than manned aircraft.
Carriers will have a role for quite some time, especially as a show-of-force big stick. But if we go to war with Elbonia in 2025, 90% the sorties now flown by AF and Navy pilots will be drones whose pilots are done by her hundreds or thousands of miles away in permanent bases (and for that matter, Army and USMC aviation will be mostly drones, too).
Please note that I’m not saying that carriers are obsolete now. I’m saying the writing is on the wall, the military should start planning accordingly, and stop building ships that will be white elephants by the time they’re finished.
I agree with your take on drones becoming more prevalent. But won’t it still be useful to have some mobile sea based platform to launch/land them from as needed?
You need a dozen carriers so you can rotate them through theaters and retrofit programs. They’re expensive to operate and build, you’d want to run as lean as possible.
Carriers are all about force projection and response time. If you have to fly a drone all the way around the world and refuel it at every step of the way, you STILL have to have forward bases from which those refueling tankers are flying, and then it takes you a very long time to fly all that distance to respond to a threat. The same isn’t true from a carrier, which can be positioned as needed in order to respond on a much shorter time-line.
Who said anything about eliminating forward bases? A drone launched from Diego Garcia is over Iran in a few hours (for example). Carriers take days to get on the scene, and then are targets when they arrive.
Drones are, as yet, unproven technology: they have never been used against enemies with even rudimentary airborne or anti-aircraft capabilities. Once we see drones actually take out fighter jets and SAM installations we can talk about replacing aircraft carriers.
Even with drones, there is still the tyranny of distance. If you build a futuristic drone that has, let’s say, a 48 hour endurance, would you really want to spend 12 of the 48 hours on getting to and from the target area from Guam, Diego Garcia, or somewhere else? Why not have a 5 hour transit time from a ship, and that much more operational time?
Now, it is entirely possible that 50 years from now aircraft carriers will look a lot different – maybe less like a 100,000 ton displacement supercarrier, and more like an LHD with a 40,000 ton displacement, or even smaller.
After thinking about what you’re saying, I could see a future where every cruiser, destroyer, frigate has the capability to catapult a small number of drones off the deck. Perhaps recovery would even be possible by having the drone land or parachute into the water and wait to be picked up again by the ship.
Many of these types of ships already handle having helicopters on board - so moving into carrying drones doesn’t seem like such a large stretch.
And this way, every ship could have its own defensive air screen and/or the capability to launch a distant aerial assault.
It just might make a lot more sense to have 15 destroyers carrying 4-6 drones than to have one carrier with its associated huge task force.
I agree that aircraft carriers may become obsolete but I am not sure it’s because of drones. Drones are competing with piloted aircraft and carriers are competing with air bases. I don’t see how drones are competing with carriers; as mentioned there is no reason why you couldn’t use carriers to launch drones.
The real threat to carriers are anti-ship ballistic missiles. War Nerd has a nice pieceon this and apparentlyChina is seriously exploring this technology.
Well, no, because what you can launch off of a destroyer is never going to be as large as what you can launch off a small runway. Larger equals more capability.
Now, a Tomahawk is an awful lot like a drone, in a sense, but when it comes time to refuel, rearm, or maintain a drone that isn’t expendable like a TLAM, space is needed – and surface combatants just aren’t the right size to do that.
To put it another way, imagine a fleet of 100 destroyers, each with several multipurpose helicopters – an impressive armada of hundreds of helos. Is that capability even comparable to a carrier with even 50 attack aircraft? No way. Numbers of helicopters don’t make up for the fact that jets are better for attack roles, and you need a runway for the capability of a jet. Similarly, numbers of smaller UAVs can’t necessarily make up for the capabilities of smaller numbers of larger UAVs that require runways.
Drones are not well suited to air to air missions. They also aren’t very good in areas with air defense capability. They won’t be replacing conventional aircraft any time in the foreseeable future.
What percentage of its mass is actually dedicated to keeping the pilot alive? How many pounds of robotics crap/high data rate communications equipment would you have to add to replace the pilot?
Besides allowing for more extreme manuevering, to me the advantages of a large remote controlled drone over a semi mobile semi autonomous military meat computer/pilot are not that obvious.
This OP is about envisioning the future, or what the military should be thinking about when planning for 20-50 years out.
If the US got into a conventional war with China or Russia tomorrow - all of the aircraft carriers in action would probably be gone within a day. As Lanterns post/links points out they are very vunerable and valuable targets.
In the early 80’s Falklands War the British had to keep their aircraft carrier very far away from the action so it didn’t get blown up. If Argentina at the time had some of todays missles the it still would have been blown up unless they kept it in London. All ships are just extremely vunerable high value targets.
The only way to counter that is to use more subs and put out more but lesser valued ships. Some will get destroyed but hopefully enough will stay around to hurt the enemy. Thus my 15 destroyers launching drones is better than 1 aircraft carrier launching drones idea. To completely eliminate the air threat a nation has to take out 15 spread out targets instead of just 1.
As far as the capabilities of drones - they are in their infancy of development right now. Computers get better every year and I haven’t heard of any reason to think that flying drone intelligence/tech has hit a ceiling. I’m certainly not saying today’s drones are comparable to today’s aircraft - but I will say that someday they will be even better than a piloted aircraft (since they won’t need to worry about life support, g’s, suicidal risks, human fatigue). And I don’t know why you’re comparing helicopters to attack aircraft. I never said that. I am putting forward that in our lifetimes small ships could launch drones. As you mention, drones might be similar to a missle except that a drone could fly around for 20 hours+ and launch missles at multiple targets.
And why couldn’t a destroyer launch a larger sized drone by catapult anyways? G forces won’t be an issue. Just get the thing in the air above stall speed and send it off.
I don’t believe this will be the case (i.e. that AC will soon be obsolete), but it will be pretty easy to see if it happens. Currently, the US is the only major carrier navy on the planet. So…if the Europeans, Chinese, Indian’s and who ever else has any kind of aspirations to parity with the US Navy, and if indeed AC’s are obsolete AND that drones are the answer, then we should be seeing other countries developing combat drones and working up the doctrine on how to use those drones both globally AND to counter a carrier heavy navy (such as, oh, say the US).
AFAIK, no other countries are even developing combat drones to the extent the US is, let alone starting to develop doctrine for using them as the OP seems to be suggesting (even the US isn’t doing that). So…I’d doubt that this would happen ‘soon’, if ‘soon’ equates to mid-century. My guess is that what we’ll actually see is the US pricing itself out of the super-carrier market, not because SC’s are obsolete, but because they are just to damn expensive…to expensive to build, to expensive to maintain, to expensive to crew and, most importantly, to expensive to risk. So, we’ll do something like what the Army is moving to…de-emphasize the MBT and produce new, lighter, less capable but more mobile and less expensive units (like the Striker or some of the other prototypes the Army is looking at). In the mean time, we’ll just keep using the SC’s until they are used up (in, oh, 60 or 70 years I guess), while we continue to develop combat drones that will be used in addition to (not replacements for) manned aircraft.
Yes, drones have a vast potential for future improvement whereas we can expect at most incremental improvements in piloted aircraft because they are fundamentally constrained by the human mind and body. There are so many constraints that drones won’t face, in addition to greater maneuverability they can take greater risks and can be better co-ordinated.
So at some point it seems likely that drones will be better though it may happen slowly because there is a lot of cultural resistance in the military where combat pilots are so revered. Secondly war between major powers remains unlikely and may never happen in our lifetimes and without the brutal Darwinian pressure of a serious war, you may not get that much innovation. Still even without shooting wars there will be an indirect competition between major powers through the technologies they adopt. Emerging militaries like China are likely to be less dogmatic about technology and doctrine and you can bet that if they make a major push towards drones, the US won't stand still.