Figure 1: 1993 Bottom Up Review Carrier Chart indicating the need for 15 carriers to achieve 1.0 carrier presence in three forward-deployed locations.
Several recent breaking news stories have bemoaned the gap in U.S. Navy aircraft carrier coverage in the Red Sea, where warships from multiple nations have battled Houthi missile and drone attacks. The response to this gap has generally been along the lines of “we have too few ships and need more” to solve the “carrier conundrum”, However, when considering questions of force design and multi-billion dollar procurement, specificity is essential to making the case for a bigger fleet.
Aircraft carrier math has been around for the last several decades and was first codified in successive versions of the 1980’s Maritime Strategy. That document recommended a force of fifteen carriers as the most economical way to provide constant carrier presence in three forward deployed locations (European waters, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific. The 1993 Bottom Up Review—a assessment conducted by the Clinton administration—acknowledged the fifteen carrier number as the correct one for continued forward presence, but made the conscious decision to maintain only twelve carriers as a post-Cold War cost-savings measure. While the Navy hoped to sustain operations with the smaller carrier force, repeated crises—especially in the Middle East—have seriously taxed the twelve– and later eleven–carrier fleet.
Physical geography does not change, and it has been clear for many years that persistent U.S. aircraft carrier presence in three forward-deployed regions requires fifteen carriers. Repeated attempts to cheat this number by decision-makers in Washington are directly responsible for the shortfall in U.S. carrier capacity that jeopardizes air superiority for U.S. forces confronting threats in the Levant, as well as potential threats from China in the Indo-Pacific, and Russia in the Atlantic and other locations. The U.S. has become an 11-carrier navy in a 15-carrier world.
Why Fifteen Carriers?
The requirement for the U.S. Navy to operate fifteen aircraft carriers was not born from a mad admiral’s desires or comparisons to the pre-World War Two battleship fleet of fifteen vessels. Analysis of routine, forward-deployed fleet requirements after the end of the Vietnam War informed the decision, along with a realization that the force figure of twenty-seven carriers (18 large and nine smaller flattops) submitted by the Navy as part of the late 1970s Joint Strategic Planning Document was neither politically nor financially feasible. Fifteen carriers was deemed the minimum number of flattops needed to provide five carriers each in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and four in the Mediterranean Sea in the event of war with the Soviet Union. The 1980’s Maritime Strategy amalgamatedthe Navy fleet commanders’ battle plans for war with the Soviets and explained how they would be used in both peace and war.
The Cold War’s End and the Declining Carrier Fleet
The Navy was able to successfully sortie six of its fifteen carriers to the Middle East for the First Gulf War. That force, however, was deemed too large to sustain in the post-Cold War world. The Navy was directed to revise its ship requirements for a new, post-Soviet world without a peer naval competitor. However, the service never got the chance to do even that as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Colin Powell’sbase Force review of 1991 pushed a one-third cut to all of the military services across the board. Powell was highly respected in Congress and the legislature seized on the opportunity to enact a peace dividend. The Navy was reduced from 15 carriers and 550 ships to 12 carriers and 450 vessels. The Clinton administration further reduced the size of the fleet to 10-11 carriers (one as a reserve ship,) and 346 other warships as part of the 1993 Bottom Up Review. Its analysis suggested that five carriers would be a sufficient force for what it called a “major theater conflict” like Desert Storm. The 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review, the first of a series of such documents required by Congress kept the carrier number at 11 (with one a reserve carrier) but the number of other ships was further reduced to just 305 vessels on the grounds that, “newer and more capable systems coming into the fleet” allowed for such a drastic cut in ship numbers.
The September 11, 2001 attacks forced major changes to the Navy readiness cycle to support the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Navy provided six carrier strike groups for the beginning months of the Afghan war, as it had done during Desert Storm a decade before. From October to December 2001, carrier-based aircraft flew 70 percent of the total sorties, often flying 30-40 combat missions a day at 700 nautical mile ranges. The experience of the two Gulf Wars and the Afghanistan conflict led the Navy to conclude that it had to be able to rapidly deploy upwards of six carrier strike groups at short notice to support national requirements. This ran contrary to opinions in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, such as those voiced by Undersecretary of Defense David Chu that, “there is in the Navy and Marine Corps a substantial portion of the structure that is unavailable to the president on short notice, short of heroic measures.”
To develop more ready forces at short notice, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Vern Clark and his staff devised the Fleet Response Plan (FRP), a major modification to the traditional fleet readiness cycle which had been in place since 1986. The existing cycle was built around an 18-month calendar with three, six-month periods: maintenance, workup and training, and deployment. The FRP fundamentally changed that system to 27-month cycle time with an extended period spent in readiness to deploy, either immediately or within 30 to 90 days. Admiral Clark sought to create a “culture of readiness” to go along with the deployment scheme to prepare the fleet for the disruption of the traditional deployment cycle.
Unfortunately, the Fleet Response Plan could not keep place with the demands of operational commanders for carrier deployments in multiple theaters. By 2014, the Navy conceded that FRP was insufficient and instituted a successor in the Optimized Fleet Response Plan (ORFP) that provided for a lengthened, 36-month readiness cycle.
Today, unplanned carrier deployments and extensions to those missions continue to tax the Navy’s entire force structure, but especially the carrier fleet. The extended deployments in the Red Sea are just the latest manifestation of this phenomenon. The USS Harry S. Trumanis not ready to deploy to the Red Sea in time to relieve the departing USS Dwight Eisenhower, so the Pacific-based USS Theodore Rooseveltwas rushed to the Red Sea as a temporary fix. That move in turn disrupts planning for maintenance and training of the entire carrier force by upending an already delicate schedule. Snap changes such as this across the last three decades have proven a significant challenge to maintaining the eleven-carrier force.
The Indispensable Flattop
The aircraft carrier remains the indispensable centerpiece of U.S. naval power and naval aviation remains essential to sea control and power projection, especially where land-based aviation is remote, or non-persistent enough to achieve air superiority. While not always the foremost strike platform, the carrier’s maneuverability, command and control facilities, and overall survivability make it the “quarterback” in the naval football game even when the submarine or the surface warship may score the touchdown. In future, a medium carrier with three strike fighter squadrons may provide extra numbers at lower cost to deal with contingencies where a full-sized, four squadron carrier is not needed.
People question the carrier in terms of cost, but no fleet can operate without the air superiority that carrier aviation provides. The problem of the last 35 years is not that the carrier is obsolete, it is that the United States has not maintained enough carriers to conduct the kind of persistent global operations that have been the norm over those decades. Trying to cheat the carrier math has resulted in a run-down carrier force with new challenges appearing on a regular basis as the result of overworking a force that is too small. The only carrier “conundrum” is that the U.S. Navy is an 11-carrier navy in a 15-carrier world. Naval aviation is as good as its leaders say, but they also need to make a stronger case for more carriers.
Dr. Steve Wills, Navalist
The views expressed in this piece are the sole opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for Maritime Strategy or other institutions listed.
Center for Maritime Strategy
By Dr. Steven Wills
Several recent breaking news stories have bemoaned the gap in U.S. Navy aircraft carrier coverage in the Red Sea, where warships from multiple nations have battled Houthi missile and drone attacks. The response to this gap has generally been along the lines of “we have too few ships and need more” to solve the “carrier conundrum”, However, when considering questions of force design and multi-billion dollar procurement, specificity is essential to making the case for a bigger fleet.
Aircraft carrier math has been around for the last several decades and was first codified in successive versions of the 1980’s Maritime Strategy. That document recommended a force of fifteen carriers as the most economical way to provide constant carrier presence in three forward deployed locations (European waters, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific. The 1993 Bottom Up Review—a assessment conducted by the Clinton administration—acknowledged the fifteen carrier number as the correct one for continued forward presence, but made the conscious decision to maintain only twelve carriers as a post-Cold War cost-savings measure. While the Navy hoped to sustain operations with the smaller carrier force, repeated crises—especially in the Middle East—have seriously taxed the twelve– and later eleven– carrier fleet.
Physical geography does not change, and it has been clear for many years that persistent U.S. aircraft carrier presence in three forward-deployed regions requires fifteen carriers. Repeated attempts to cheat this number by decision-makers in Washington are directly responsible for the shortfall in U.S. carrier capacity that jeopardizes air superiority for U.S. forces confronting threats in the Levant, as well as potential threats from China in the Indo-Pacific, and Russia in the Atlantic and other locations. The U.S. has become an 11-carrier navy in a 15-carrier world.
Why Fifteen Carriers?
The requirement for the U.S. Navy to operate fifteen aircraft carriers was not born from a mad admiral’s desires or comparisons to the pre-World War Two battleship fleet of fifteen vessels. Analysis of routine, forward-deployed fleet requirements after the end of the Vietnam War informed the decision, along with a realization that the force figure of twenty-seven carriers (18 large and nine smaller flattops) submitted by the Navy as part of the late 1970s Joint Strategic Planning Document was neither politically nor financially feasible. Fifteen carriers was deemed the minimum number of flattops needed to provide five carriers each in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and four in the Mediterranean Sea in the event of war with the Soviet Union. The 1980’s Maritime Strategy amalgamatedthe Navy fleet commanders’ battle plans for war with the Soviets and explained how they would be used in both peace and war.
The Cold War’s End and the Declining Carrier Fleet
The Navy was able to successfully sortie six of its fifteen carriers to the Middle East for the First Gulf War. That force, however, was deemed too large to sustain in the post-Cold War world. The Navy was directed to revise its ship requirements for a new, post-Soviet world without a peer naval competitor. However, the service never got the chance to do even that as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Colin Powell’sbase Force review of 1991 pushed a one-third cut to all of the military services across the board. Powell was highly respected in Congress and the legislature seized on the opportunity to enact a peace dividend. The Navy was reduced from 15 carriers and 550 ships to 12 carriers and 450 vessels. The Clinton administration further reduced the size of the fleet to 10-11 carriers (one as a reserve ship,) and 346 other warships as part of the 1993 Bottom Up Review. Its analysis suggested that five carriers would be a sufficient force for what it called a “major theater conflict” like Desert Storm. The 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review, the first of a series of such documents required by Congress kept the carrier number at 11 (with one a reserve carrier) but the number of other ships was further reduced to just 305 vessels on the grounds that, “newer and more capable systems coming into the fleet” allowed for such a drastic cut in ship numbers.
The September 11, 2001 attacks forced major changes to the Navy readiness cycle to support the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Navy provided six carrier strike groups for the beginning months of the Afghan war, as it had done during Desert Storm a decade before. From October to December 2001, carrier-based aircraft flew 70 percent of the total sorties, often flying 30-40 combat missions a day at 700 nautical mile ranges. The experience of the two Gulf Wars and the Afghanistan conflict led the Navy to conclude that it had to be able to rapidly deploy upwards of six carrier strike groups at short notice to support national requirements. This ran contrary to opinions in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, such as those voiced by Undersecretary of Defense David Chu that, “there is in the Navy and Marine Corps a substantial portion of the structure that is unavailable to the president on short notice, short of heroic measures.”
To develop more ready forces at short notice, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Vern Clark and his staff devised the Fleet Response Plan (FRP), a major modification to the traditional fleet readiness cycle which had been in place since 1986. The existing cycle was built around an 18-month calendar with three, six-month periods: maintenance, workup and training, and deployment. The FRP fundamentally changed that system to 27-month cycle time with an extended period spent in readiness to deploy, either immediately or within 30 to 90 days. Admiral Clark sought to create a “culture of readiness” to go along with the deployment scheme to prepare the fleet for the disruption of the traditional deployment cycle.
Unfortunately, the Fleet Response Plan could not keep place with the demands of operational commanders for carrier deployments in multiple theaters. By 2014, the Navy conceded that FRP was insufficient and instituted a successor in the Optimized Fleet Response Plan (ORFP) that provided for a lengthened, 36-month readiness cycle.
Today, unplanned carrier deployments and extensions to those missions continue to tax the Navy’s entire force structure, but especially the carrier fleet. The extended deployments in the Red Sea are just the latest manifestation of this phenomenon. The USS Harry S. Truman is not ready to deploy to the Red Sea in time to relieve the departing USS Dwight Eisenhower, so the Pacific-based USS Theodore Roosevelt was rushed to the Red Sea as a temporary fix. That move in turn disrupts planning for maintenance and training of the entire carrier force by upending an already delicate schedule. Snap changes such as this across the last three decades have proven a significant challenge to maintaining the eleven-carrier force.
The Indispensable Flattop
The aircraft carrier remains the indispensable centerpiece of U.S. naval power and naval aviation remains essential to sea control and power projection, especially where land-based aviation is remote, or non-persistent enough to achieve air superiority. While not always the foremost strike platform, the carrier’s maneuverability, command and control facilities, and overall survivability make it the “quarterback” in the naval football game even when the submarine or the surface warship may score the touchdown. In future, a medium carrier with three strike fighter squadrons may provide extra numbers at lower cost to deal with contingencies where a full-sized, four squadron carrier is not needed.
People question the carrier in terms of cost, but no fleet can operate without the air superiority that carrier aviation provides. The problem of the last 35 years is not that the carrier is obsolete, it is that the United States has not maintained enough carriers to conduct the kind of persistent global operations that have been the norm over those decades. Trying to cheat the carrier math has resulted in a run-down carrier force with new challenges appearing on a regular basis as the result of overworking a force that is too small. The only carrier “conundrum” is that the U.S. Navy is an 11-carrier navy in a 15-carrier world. Naval aviation is as good as its leaders say, but they also need to make a stronger case for more carriers.
Dr. Steve Wills, Navalist
The views expressed in this piece are the sole opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for Maritime Strategy or other institutions listed.