Defense-Industry P.R. Flack Doesn’t Want the U.S. Navy to Worry About Carrier Vulnerability
Wonder why
by DAVID AXE
A consultant who works on behalf of the U.S. defense industry doesn’t want the U.S. Navy to worry about the possibility that the fleet’s biggest and most powerful warships might be vulnerable to Chinese attack.
“Critics of U.S. aircraft carriers have been arguing for decades that the survival of the world’s biggest warships will increasingly be at risk in an era of long-range, precision-guided anti-ship missiles,” Loren Thompson wrote in a column for Forbes. “In recent years, China has typically been identified as the military power most likely to drive U.S. carriers from the sea.”
But don’t worry, admirals. “The bottom line is that China is nowhere near overcoming the hurdles required for successful attacks against U.S. aircraft carriers,” Thompson wrote.
It’s worth noting that Thompson is the head of the non-profit Lexington Institute think-tank in Virginia. He’s also a for-profit consultant. Thompson and the organizations he works through have received millions of dollars from leading arms-manufacturers including Boeing and Lockheed Martin, among others.
It’s unclear whether Huntington-Ingalls, the United States’ only builder of large aircraft carriers, counts Thompson as a public-relations client. “The Lexington Institute receives funding from many of the nation’s leading defense contractors,” Thompson has disclosed in some of his Forbes columns.
Thompson once wrote a column praising Huntington-Ingalls as possibly “the safest bet in the defense sector.” Whether or not Thompson was paid for his current opinion on carrier-vulnerability, his argument is this:
[L]et’s back up for a moment and consider the multiple hurdles that Chinese attackers would need to overcome to successfully target a carrier. First, they would have to find the carrier; then they would have to fix its location; then they would have to establish a continuous track of its movements; then they would have to actually target the carrier with specific weapons; then they would have to penetrate the carrier’s multi-layered defenses to reach the target; and finally they would need to assess whether the resulting damage was sufficient to disable the carrier.
The Navy refers to this process as a “kill chain,” and the metaphor is instructive. Because each step must be accomplished sequentially, if any “link” in the chain fails the whole process breaks down. The Navy and its partners in the joint force have plans for disrupting potential attackers at each step in the process.
Of course, independent analysts who aren’t on industry’s payroll generally hold an entirely different view of carriers’ vulnerability.
“Carriers cannot ignore emerging technologies,” Navy lieutenant Douglas Cantwell wrote in Proceedings, the professional journal of the U.S. Naval Institute. “Advances in the speed, range, coordination and accuracy of anti-ship weapons could turn them into modern equivalents of dreadnought battleships: invincible one day, seemingly obsolete the next.”
Cantwell advised the Navy to convert its oldest carrier, the 47-year-old USS Nimitz, into a test ship once the flattop decommissions in 2025. As an experimental vessel, the carrier could test out new tactics and defenses for countering increasingly sophisticated Chinese and Russian efforts to sink American flattops.
While fleet force-planning constantly changes, at present the Navy expects to maintain at least eight and as many as a dozen large nuclear carriers, or CVNs, for the foreseeable future. The sailing branch in early 2019 awarded shipbuilders a $15-billion contract for two new Ford-class CVNs.
Increasingly, the Navy’s big-deck amphibious assault ship with their Harrier and F-35B jump jets act as light carriers, complementing the larger CVNs. The Navy in its current round of force-structure analysis could decide to reduce the number of CVNs in favor of light carriers.
Thompson, however, wants the Navy to continue spending big on the biggest carriers. While we don’t know whether, or how much, Huntington-Ingalls has paid Thompson, we safely can assert that, in general, huge shipbuilding contracts benefit big shipbuilders and the public-relations professionals who write columns on their behalf.
“Whether those carriers are engaged in projecting air power ashore or maintaining control of sea lanes, Beijing will be hard-pressed to impede their operation in wartime,” Thompson assured his readers.
“And it’s a safe bet that whatever assets China may have for executing such a mission on the first day of war will be quickly reduced by the combined efforts of the U.S. joint force, whether they be deployed on land, at sea or in orbit.”
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