At What Cost a Carrier?

Abstract : The queen of the American fleet, and the centerpiece of the most powerful Navy the world has ever seen, the aircraft carrier, is in danger of becoming like the battleships it was originally designed to support: big, expensive, vulnerable and surprisingly irrelevant to the conflicts of the time. This outcome has become more likely as the Navy continues to emphasize manned carrier aircraft at the expense of unmanned missiles and aircraft. If the fleet were designed today, with the technologies now available and the threats now emerging, it likely would look very different from the way it actually looks now and from what the United States is planning to buy. The national security establishment, the White House, the Department of Defense and Congress persist despite clear evidence that the carrier equipped with manned strike aircraft is an increasingly expensive way to deliver firepower and that carriers themselves may not be able to move close enough to targets to operate effectively or survive in an era of satellite imagery and long-range precision strike missiles. This report explores the evolution of the aircraft carrier, its utility, power, costs and vulnerabilities, and then suggests a different course for U.S. naval forces, one that emphasizes far greater use of unmanned aircraft generally described as UCAVs, for unmanned combat aerial vehicles as well as submarines in combination with long-range precision strike missiles. While the carrier s end may be in sight, its story is a long one, beginning a little more than 100 years ago, in the waters of Great Britain.