Questioning the Carrier. Opportunities in Fleet Design for the United States Navy. By Jeff Vandenengel. Naval Institute Press. Annapolis, 2023. ISBN 978-1-68247-870-7
Reviewed by David Hobbs
The author, Jeff Vandenengel, is a US naval officer who specialised as a submariner with numerous tours of duty in SSNs. In 2019 he won the Admiral Willis Lent Award for being the most tactically proficient submarine department head in the Pacific Fleet. He has served in three boats in the Pacific and was serving in another in the Atlantic at the time of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Vandenengel’s source notes fill 40 pages, his bibliography a further 20 and the text brings out his firmly held belief that nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, CVN, represent too great a concentration of the fleet’s power in a small number of hulls that are increasingly vulnerable to submarine and mine threats. The CVN has, he believes, become too expensive and too much of a national symbol to risk in a hostile environment. The loss of only one would significantly reduce the USN’s striking power as well as being a devastating blow to national pride.
To illustrate what he considers to be a viable alternative, he puts forward the idea of a gradual change towards a larger, distributed, fleet of individually less capable ships by 2049, a force he calls the ‘Flex Fleet’. He identifies new classes within that fleet as differing alloys, using the analogy that alloys are stronger than their constituent metals on their own. Thus a new class of light aircraft carrier, CVL, is identified as ‘Bronze’; new Corvettes as ‘Steel’ and unmanned missile arsenal ships as ‘Brass’. He postulates building 16 CVLs, 100 corvettes and 28 unmanned missile arsenal ships by 2049.
In my opinion, however, he does not adequately explain the capabilities the existing fleet is expected to perform from peacetime power projection, through grey operations and limited conflict against failed states to full-scale war against a peer opponent. Without doing so it is difficult to decide whether his hypothetical ‘Flex Fleet’ offers significant advantages or disadvantages throughout the spectrum. He comments that air defence is what carrier aircraft do best but makes no mention of existing developments such as the USN’s Next Generation Air Dominance, NGAD, programme and how this would need to be modified to fit the growing number of CVLs and decreasing number of CVNs. Would he cancel the F/A-XX fighter project? Would the 16 CVLs provide an adequate number of AEW, electronic warfare fixed wing aircraft and anti-submarine helicopters?
The author does not differentiate between LHDs and other types of amphibious warship in his ‘Flex Fleet’ but they are, in effect, CVLs capable of operating a significant number of F-35Bs. Should AEW and EW capabilities be added to both these ships and the CVLs using STOL unmanned air vehicle technology? How would CVLs and LHDs integrate in a future, widely-distributed, fleet. Vandenengel’s proposed ‘Flex Fleet’ adds over 150 hulls to the extant US fleet but there is no mention of how and where they would be built or what form of propulsion system they would have. If they are all to have diesels and/or gas turbines that represents a huge increase in the USN’s carbon ‘footprint’. Will supplies of that amount of fossil fuel be available in 2049? What alternatives are there? Returning to the book’s central theme would the replacement of essentially ‘green’ CVNs with 16 fossil-fuelled CVLs be politically acceptable? An additional 150 warships would require a significant increase in the USN’s fuel and other logistical support requirements and these would come at a cost, as would the creation of an industrial base capable of building those ships in addition to those already projected and the dockyard facilities required to maintain them into the infinite future. Vandenengel believes that the USN should fully embrace the missile age and make greater use of missiles in both strike and anti-surface ship warfare; his proposed 28 ‘Brass’ class unmanned missile arsenal ships emphasise this concept but all 150 of the new ships would need missile systems if they are to be viable in the sort of war against a sophisticated opponent that he postulates. I understand that US industry is stretched at present replacing the weapons that have been sent from war stocks to Ukraine. Does the US missile industry have the capacity to cope with the extra demands the ‘Flex Fleet’ would place on it?
In a recent article published on the ANI website, the Rand Corporation’s Dr Bradley Martin, Director for Supply Chain Security, makes several relevant and important points. The USN is suffering inadequate warship readiness due to a lack of sufficient industrial capacity to maintain them. The early withdrawal of Ticonderoga class cruisers is a symptom of the shortcoming and Martin believes that to do better, the ship repair requirement needs to be fully understood, funded and rectified. This is neither glamorous nor will it be inexpensive and expanding the active fleet by 33% can only make it worse. With regard to missiles he believes that the demand for them may already be beyond industries’ ability to produce sufficient quantities and the USN must confirm that suppliers have the capacity to meet demand. Again the ‘Flex Fleet’ has the potential to make this situation far worse without massive investment in industry and support infrastructure. The Navy’s combat logistics force ships are already facing issues of age and capacity; their replacement and expansion would be expensive and may also be beyond current US industrial capacity. All of this may not be possible within a peace-time defence budget.
In chapter 4 the author looks at lessons from the recent past that could inform the arguments for or against CVNs. The South Atlantic War of 1982 is lightly covered but there is no mention of the brief 1956 Suez Campaign in which 7 British and French aircraft carriers destroyed an Egyptian Air Force within 24 hours that, on paper at least, posed a considerable threat with modern Soviet aircraft. Nor does Vandenengel include comment on the latent power of British strike carriers to prevent the Indonesian Navy from putting to sea during the 1960s Confrontation with Malaysia. I mention these to illustrate the point that does not discuss the importance of graduated response. He admits that CVNs are ‘unmatched’ in their ability to project power from a benign sea environment; this scenario still exists in the Middle East and is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. At what point does that unmatched power transform into something that is too dangerous to contemplate? When questioning the carrier this is something that must be covered in detail and I don’t think the author quite does so. I believe that he would have benefitted from reading A Historical Appreciation of theContribution of Naval Air Power, Papers in Australian Maritime Affairs #26 published by the Sea Power Centre – Australia in 2008 which gives an excellent description of the graded responses aircraft carriers are capable of delivering. Aircraft carriers and their aircraft are not ends in themselves, they are tools to deliver effects that the fleet needs and that, until now, cannot be delivered in any other way that is as flexible or proven.
In summary, Jeff Vandenengel has certainly succeeded in making me question the carrier. However, he does so from the perspective of potential vulnerabilities against threats from enemies equipped with SSNs and mines in a very specific scenario. He has used an alternative ‘Flex Fleet’ idea as a comparison and his description of its possible use in a conflict in set in 2029 is compelling but his arguments fall short of explaining the wider issues the reader must take into account before deciding whether transforming the fleet into something like his ‘Flex Fleet’ would be a viable option. The development of naval aviation in projects such as NGAD has already begun and must be taken into consideration if there is to be any change in its deployment. After an appreciation of the ‘Flex Fleet’s value compared with the existing fleet, an analysis of the scale of industrial development needed to underpin a 33% expansion of the surface fleet and an even greater expansion of its weapon stocks, there must be a study of the logistics required to sustain a larger, distributed, fleet. The issue of massively expanding the USN’s requirement for fossil fuel also has to be considered. I had thought that augmenting the CVNs with a new class of CVLs was an idea with merit but having read this book my thinking has changed, somewhat. I am not sure that centralising the construction of a steady stream of CVNs and their refits within one industrial complex might not be such a bad idea; without a transformation into a war economy they might actually represent the best value for many for the taxpayer after all. This has been a thought-provoking read that will, I hope, stimulate other authors to examine the wider issues that surround the USN’s reliance on CVNs. With little to say about industrial expansion and no discussion of amphibious warfare it does not go nearly far enough and I cannot say that I agree with all the author’s views but I do recommend it as an honest look at part of a very big subject that has considerable relevance for the Pacific.
