Questioning the Carrier: Opportunities in Fleet Design for the U.S. Navy
While you should never judge a book by its title, if Jeff Vandenengel had gone with Too Big to Sail, then you can imagine the book could have courted a wider audience. Indeed, despite the appearance of a very niche read that would only interest specialists—complete with a large chunk of references—Questioning the Carrier addresses macro questions of geopolitics that are of interest to many.
The essential argument the book makes is simple: America will shortly have 11 aircraft carriers and it should not build any new ones. Instead, it should look to change its fleet structure to meet the modern threats of Russia and particularly China through a more distributed, networked, and diversified fleet. The book is a balanced and well-argued case for this pivot, although there is a subtext that the author believes that the only way it will happen is once the aircraft carriers’ weaknesses are exposed in combat.
Vandenengel is an active service submariner by trade—a qualification that will instantly make his views seem biased perhaps by the 46% of US Naval personnel serving on or supporting carriers—and there is an entire chapter on how great submarines are. Yet submarines are not the key weapon of our era, argues the book, instead we are in the “age of missiles,” which combine speed, technology, and sensors to make the aircraft carrier vulnerable to being sunk, an unacceptable strategic loss to any American military or political leader. Why? The legacy of the aircraft carrier, vast ships of some 5,000 crew costing over $12 billion a vessel, was their ability to project power in the age of uncontested seas. This era is coming to an end and although the last major naval battle happened at Okinawa some 70 years ago the few examples since point to missiles posing too high a risk for what have become priceless capital ships.
Much of the aircraft carrier battlegroup is made up of ships whose role is to protect the aircraft carrier rather than pursue the enemy themselves. Vandenengel describes this as a strategy of “futilely attempting the impossible: a perfect defense for a priceless ship.” His baseball analogy is that the navy is relying on a handful of star players rather than building a better team. With a five-acre flight deck, large aircraft carriers are “exceptionally difficult to defend” and in the age of satellites very difficult to hide from near peer enemies like China.
The Falklands War showed how even a small number of missiles were able to take a heavy toll on British ships and that one British nuclear submarine was able to force the entire Argentinian Navy to retreat. “One hit ships” face high tech missiles, low tech mines, and hidden submarines that mean that a $20,000 weapon poses a huge risk of sinking or taking out of commission a $12bn carrier. Vandenengel uses a clever analogy of aircraft carriers fighting against a “archer” who they can choose to hide from, shoot, or shoot down their arrows—all increasingly that find the odds no longer in their favor.
The book proposes that instead of continuing to rely on large, expensive aircraft carriers that cannot be risked coming to harm, the Navy should use its same budget envelope to create a “Flex Fleet” made up of smaller, more agile corvettes, frigates and arsenal ships that would mean 42% more ships in total able to carry 16% more missiles, more aircraft, and a 58% larger anti-submarine capacity.
Where the author is less clear is to why this argument has not already been won and the strategy put in place for the next decades to come. There is a brief allusion to the challenge of vested interests from politicians, senior military figures, and the defense industry, but it still feels opaque as to why exactly there is more radical and fundamental change afoot in the Navy, considering the scale of technological change as well as geopolitical shifts that have occurred over the last decades.