How can the most flexible of all the world’s airfields, which is also the easiest to notice, be located? Modern carrier operations are now based on that tension. Even today, U.S. Navy aircraft carriers transport on board a self-sufficient air wing to waters where access, basing, and permission can disappear overnight. However the image of the threat has become a volume game: drones costing less than a throwaway, low flying cruise missiles that compress response time, and ballistic or hypersonic missiles that reduce the size of a carrier to a liability. The carrier is not running in a vacuum environment-it is reliant on the strike group and the architecture in which it is encircled.
Such architecture begins way down the ship. Airborne surveillances dramatically alter geometry of engagement, particularly in the radio horizon-restricted sea-skimming threat. The radar of the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye has a greater than 300 nautical miles giving commanders early talks and time to deploy fighters, direct shipboard weapons, and emissions management. On the edge, combat air patrol fighters are trying to defeat the strike before it turns into a math problem in missile defense, and electronic warfare targets the connective tissue sensors, data links, and seekers, and not the missile body.
When the bad news gets through, the strike group puts pressure on Aegis-armed escorts and their vertical launch “magazines.” Here the awkward arithmetic presents itself: a carrier screen may be capable of carrying many interceptors, but not an infinite number, and not every launch cell is an air defense one. The mid-range level Standard Missiles and ESSM, has the ability to thin salvos, but saturation is the case situation that keeps the planners on their toes as the engagement problem is as much about inventory and reload facts as it is about raw performance.
There are close-in defenses that are on the cases where no one wants to test them. Phalanx and RAM/SeaRAM Systems are designed with decision windows of seconds, and the shape of SeaRAM on destroyers has been considered a quick-and-easy addition of an extra layer. One of such achievements was the inaugural live launch of a SeaRAM by an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, which highlights the historical application of “defense in depth” by the Navy to seal the gaps created by other layers falling behind.
The latest thrust is on the alteration of the cost and capacity curve. Directed energy is even being considered as a means of conserving limited interceptor stocks to those targets that actually require them. During Atlantic sea trials, the destroyer USS Preble deployed its HELIOS system to shoot down four drone attacks, and Navy commanders have publicly stated that they aim to make lasers the new close-in weapon of choice. The nonsense is straightforward: instead of the reload-at-sea problem, the magazine depth is a power-and-cooling problem. The limitations are also very tangible weather, distance and the fact that most of the time one laser has only one target at a time.
All this is influenced by the capability of an enemy to locate and constantly attack a moving ship. Anti-ship missiles of long-range missiles will not work as desired without continuous tracking and updating, and this is the reason why both parties are obsessed with sensors, lies, and emissions management. In the meantime, undersea layer is the least but most decisive threat band; submarines do not have to win a contest in the sky in terms of targeting, when they can sneak into the weapon range under it.
The carriers are not becoming “obsolete” in the same sense that battleships became obsolete. They are being pushed into a leaner working routine: remain out of the thickest dangerous zones, extend the reach of the air wing with unmanned refueling, thin raids early in the day, and hold back interceptors which are needed on the shots that count.
