All-Powerful Mystique
Aircraft carriers are surrounded by a mystique that often exceeds their actual roles in U.S. military doctrine, says Robert C. Rubel, dean of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies at the Naval War College in Rhode Island.
Indeed, while many lawmakers and defense experts deride those who suggest a reduced role for carriers, Rubel, a former F/A-18 pilot, points out that carriers already have receded from some jobs, while other tasks they once performed are obsolete.
Carriers once were the fleet’s eyes and a nuclear strike platform. Those roles are greatly diminished today. They also were seen as capital ships, designed mainly to defeat other ships at sea. That role has been downgraded with the rise of anti-ship missiles. Missiles also have reduced the carriers’ role as a sort of naval cavalry “galloping” at the enemy.
The Navy no longer risks running a carrier into hostile waters, as they once were used during World War II, Rubel says. He maintains, however, that they are both a mobile airfield at sea and a geopolitical tool. “When I look into the future, we need at least 11 carriers,” Greenert says. “That includes the presence of today, but also when a contingency arises, we can surge and consolidate in an area and build enough airpower.”
Rubel says that’s what sets carriers apart. Missile stores on submarines are quickly exhausted, but carriers can provide a level of work impossible to emulate with other platforms. But carriers can serve this role only when reasonably protected, he says. Indeed, Greenert acknowledges that he would not set up carrier operations within reach of an enemy’s missile defenses. “We are not going to sit underneath that umbrella where we would have ballistic missiles raining down,” he says. “We would have to adapt our strategy.”
Rubel says the proliferation of naval defenses could significantly reduce the areas and scenarios in which carriers can function as airfields at sea. When this happens, the carrier’s role as a geopolitical tool is diminished. In his paper “The Future of Aircraft Carriers,” published in the Naval War College Review in 2011, Rubel contended, “This is a key uncertainty about the future and a central difficulty in assessing the future value of aircraft carriers.”
In short, Rubel says carriers’ roles will change and, perhaps, diminish.
“Whereas the carrier has been the central pivot of the fleet since World War II, the arbiter and yardstick of naval supremacy and the keystone of the fleet architecture,” he wrote, “it will gradually become a more narrowly useful role player.”
Essentially, it is this intersection of its roles and risks, coupled with budget shortfalls, that has forced some to recalculate how many carriers the Navy needs.