I agree, as much as I enjoyed driving the US fleet up the Norwegian Sea against hordes of Backfires in the old Harpoon video game, it doesn’t happen that much in real life (thankfully!)
The classic roles for both the Army and Navy (is the Air Force old enough to have a classic role? Sure! Why not?) have been pretty obsolete lately. The military has been involved in over 25 years of combat in the last 70 years, and only 3 years of that was up against a major power (Chinese involvement in the Korean War) - and that was a limited war geographically against a power without much of a navy.
It’s not surprising that the Navy focuses on the types of wars it has spent generations fighting and not the type that no one’s seen in a average human lifespan.
Of much more concern to the current crop of admirals and civilians in the Dept. of the Navy is the sortie rate of air support missions aiding troops in some occupied Middle Eastern country than the loss rate of carriers against anti-ship ballistic missiles like the DF-21, merely because one situation is encountered much more frequently than the other.
Let’s hope disaster can be averted and the less common situation is not encountered anywhere in the near future. While we’re wishing, I also hope the more common situation is encountered less often in the future.
Actually, I think the military’s roles are the same as they’ve ever been, but the world’s changed such that current events and trends are causing traditionally secondary roles to become more primary ones, and vice-versa.
The Army’s always done some degree of counter-insurgent/asymmetrical war fighting, but traditionally it’s always been geared toward fighting conventional enemies. These days, most of the larger conventional forces are our friends or allies, and the ones that aren’t, are usually so far away that a land war wouldn’t be in our best interests. Same thing with the Navy- without any significant other navies to fight, they’re reduced to anti-pirate patrols and naval aviation rattling the saber at various lesser belligerent nations.
The USAF has it the worst, I think; it’s bombing and air support. The USMC oddly enough, has its role as a sort of large-scale rapid deployment force intact, and seems to get in on all the fighting in recent wars just because they happen to be there, not because fighting mobile wars in desert countries is really in their job description.
I’m not so sure about the AF. Yeah, their fighters are a bit aimless, but there’s still CSAR, transport, refueling, spec. ops C130s, nukes, and space command. I personally think they should just get rid of most of the fighters and give the money to the helo guys. But I’m biased.
The UKs experience against Argentina over the Falklands gives a prime example of why you just can’t compare naval size. They completely outclassed the Argentine navy. The problem was is that projecting power meant dealing with surface forces. The islands weren’t even close for support from mainland naval bases (around 300 miles offshore). Despite operating at long range they managed to take out 6 ships of the task force sent to reclaim the islands. They also had 13 hits where the bombs failed to explode due to fusing problems. Better fuses, or having more than 5 of the Exocets bought from France delivered, and Argentina had a shot of rebuffing one of the major NATO powers at the height of the Cold War despite the fight being over a little rock at a distance.
If you want to project power at a distance you need to consider not just the Navy but all the land based and air power that the possible opponents can bring to bear.
I guess I don’t understand the distinction between the two lists; the first is “places we’ve fought” the second “other uses of military force, but not necessarily wars”.
I think all the first list are actual declared wars with Congressional approval and/or involvement in UN/NATO actions (that includes Panama, which you seem unaware of) and the second list isn’t (although I’d think Somalia, at least, would qualify for the first list - it wasn’t functionally different from the Balkan stuff AFAICT, and did involve Navy troops)
Yes, because every other country on earth does not care anything about keeping the Sea Lanes open.
The answer is that the US Navy is legacy. A legacy of the 2nd World War (the Carriers) and the Cold War (the Submarine fleet). Institutional inertia keeps it as large as it is.
The CVN’s are quite the technical marvels, but how they actually survive a modern war with guided missiles (and nukes) is still up in the air. Many people say that Carrier defenses and escorts would defeat the threats. Thats a good point, but then some guy called Tom, once quite reasonably pointed out that a Battleships defences would be impossible for an aircraft to penetrate. He bet his life on it. He lost.
I’m sorry, I must be phrasing poorly - it looks like you’re saying exactly what I’m trying to say.
The distinction between the lists is pedantic and besides the point. The point being that set-piece wars like WWII are extremely uncommon, and the last 70 years of American military experience demonstrate (perhaps incorrectly) that it is both useful and safe to drive a multi-billion dollar airbase somewhere off the enemy’s coast and bomb from there. The two types of military experience - actual wars with plenty of fighting, or just deploying a bunch of troops who don’t have to do much fighting - is irrelevant as long as the people in charge saw the aircraft carriers as useful in the operation.
Even relatively small military actions like Grenada and 1994’s invasion/intervention in Haiti used aircraft carriers.
Sure, but their classic function has been strategic bombing and air superiority. Things like transport, refueling and CAS are decidedly unsexy missions that have traditionally got short shrift when compared to fighters and bombers.
And nowadays, they do a lot of airlifting, a lot of CAS, and not much else. Space command may become more prominent as time goes on, and the strategic forces have huge morale problems and a sort of malaise going on, since the threat of nuclear war has fallen off drastically with the dissolution of the USSR.
Part of the issue is that the USAF uses the label “fighter” for both air-to-air and air-to-ground ops. The Navy is a bit more intellectually honest, calling one “fighter” and the other “attack.”
Against an enemy *without *an effective air force, the “fighter” part of tactical aviation is mostly wasted. e.g. the recent unpleasantness in the ME.
Against an enemy *with *an effective air force, the “fighter” part of tactical aviation is totally essential to the survival of your ground forces and your Navy. e.g. any war that really, *really *matters to US interests.
What happened to Hussein’s ground forces on the “highway of death” is exactly what will happen to US ground forces if they lack fighter air cover and the enemy has effective tacair.
As to the “attack” part of tacair, in wars against small countries it’s effectively strategic in nature, able to roam the entire enemy country & attack at will. And with the great number of aircraft, able to deliver far more tonnage with much greater survivability than the B-52 / B-1. Survivability of B-2s depends on the scenario, but either way tacair has them beat tonnage-wise by 10 or 20x.
Against larger countries tacair is the only thing that effectively degrades the enemy’s immediate war-fighting capability. It’s what takes out their airfields, ports, army rear areas, HQs, depots, etc. US will not successfully fight any near-peer enemy on more or less their own turf without being able to significantly attrit those enemy assets, and do it quickly; in days not months.
The term “tacair” encompasses both USAF and USN assets. But 70% of the tactical aircraft count and 80% of the sortie generation capability belongs to USAF. In the opening hours of a surprise war USN *might *be more conveniently located. Or might not, depending on where the surprise appears. e.g. USAF is by far the preponderance of force available short notice to Europe or NK/SK, whereas USN is the preponderance of immediate force available in Southeast Asia.
But no matter where it is, let the war last longer than a week or two and USAF will be *the *major contributor to the total tacair effort. In effect USN aviation has the same relationship to total tacair as USMC infantry has to total US ground forces. USN tacair is an essential feature for its niche role that the larger service simply can’t do, and is a small but valuable adjunct once the larger service can be brought fully to bear.
Few in number, proud in attitude, and very very loud in PR applies to both USMC in general and USN tcair in particular.
Ships (and people) cannot stay on deployment indefinitely. Ships need to receive repairs and refits to a zillion different systems in order to perform at acceptable levels of efficiency. Some of these repairs cannot be done in the field, they’ll need weeks, if not months, of pier-side time (or even dry dock time) to accomplish. A lot of this maintenance and repairs are contracted out to shipyard workers. The crew may not have all the tools or training to do these refits themselves. You are not going to fly (and pay per-diem for) a couple hundred contractors to do all of this the work overseas.
Anywho, the crews themselves need a break (I think current USN deployments are 9 months or so). They may have spouses and kids they want to see again. Refresher training needs to be done.
Some other ship and crew will need to be rotated out to take their place. You may also feel that you need to have a “strategic reserve” to send somewhere, responding to an unexpected crisis or natural disaster.
This means that you need to have a surplus of ships and crews, compared to the number of missions you currently have ongoing. (1/3 deployed, 1/3 repair/refit, 1/3 training and strategic reserve.)
Bottom line: As long as our elected leaders continue to send our military out on numerous combat and humanitarian aid missions, we need to maintain the military in the numbers required to meet those commitments.
It is somewhat imperial, which is both bad and good - the bad is measured in lives lost and shattered, the good in terms of some interventions that are very non-imperial and result in improved lives and decreased oppression for people (Kuwait, Kosovo.) The world has changed much for the better since 19th/20th century imperialism, and I’d much rather have the U.S. Navy bombing Serbian tanks than the Chinese Navy preventing international support from reaching people in Kosovo in some alternate world where China has 10 aircraft carriers and the U.S. has 1.
That said, there’s also a lot the U.S. does that is horribly wrongheaded and results in a worse world as well, like the bombing campaign in Yemen that seems to drop an awful lot of missiles on groups of young men who carry rifles, without a great deal of knowledge regarding whether any of those young men are actually terrorists or not.
Also, should I mention missiles and submarine-based missiles? Isn’t that a little off-topic from your OP?
I would have thought it tangental but I have no idea why, in any given circumstance, a military would prefer carrier-based aircraft to ship-based missiles, or vice versa?
I know that mrAru’s sub launched cruise missiles in at least one combat situation. I know which one but I really do not want to discuss it. Let us just say he was on a 637 class and 2 different 688I class submarines between 1983 and 2003.
One being inertia - you’ve already bought all these planes and trained pilots, and people will ask questions if you bomb a lot without ever using them. There have been a few instances where only bombardment with cruise missiles sufficed - Al-Shifa.
Another being that pilots can fly some kinds of missions that cruise missiles can’t - for example, Close Air Support missions where you can’t use a cruise missile because you might no’t know where or what the targets are when you take off - targets might be moving, unsuitable for use of a cruise missile, need to be identified.
A third is that pilots can be recalled, while cruise missiles can’t. If you decide not to bomb that target, I’m not sure you can tell cruise missiles to turn around an ditch in an unused part of the ocean - if you could, it seems like that would be a security vulnerability.
A fourth is when you need the judgement of a pilot to decide whether that target actually is a target, or to tell the difference between combatants and civilians. Cruise missiles don’t have a good record of doing that.
In all, I expect the future will see a lot of substitution of cruise missiles and drones for manned bombers and fighters. The US Navy is such a large organization - in terms of people, it’s the size of Hewlett-Packard, Kroger, Target, or UPS - so it takes a while to make changes. I think a bit too long - it’s likely that the delay in substituting robots and drones for manned aircraft will cost people their lives.
