China Would Be Hard-Pressed To Target A U.S. Aircraft Carrier

Large-deck, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers are the signature expression of American military power. With unlimited range and speed sufficient to outrun most submarines, the Navy’s 11 supercarriers are able to deploy dominant air power in places where no land bases are available.

A typical carrier air wing, consisting of 75 or more aircraft, can precisely destroy hundreds of targets in a hostile nation every day for weeks at a time, while providing air cover for the fleet and friendly ground forces.

The latest version of American aircraft carriers, designated the Ford class, incorporates dozens of technological innovations that collectively allow each vessel to support evolving air wings with fewer personnel, reducing the life-cycle cost of each vessel over than of the previous Nimitz class.

And while the cost of each supercarrier is nobody’s idea of cheap, in the context of a $6.5 trillion federal budget it is not much. At current levels of federal spending ($18 billion per day), the pricetag for constructing a Ford-class carrier amounts to less than one day’s worth of government outlays. The total cost of ownership over a 50-year service life equates to roughly three days of federal spending.

HII, the nation’s sole producer of aircraft carriers, contributes to my think tank. Political opposition to the company’s best known product is muted at best, but there is one issue that won’t go away: survivability.

Critics contend that concentrating so much firepower on a handful of warships creates an especially “lucrative” target set for adversaries, and that it would be too risky to deploy such an asset near China in a future Pacific war.

The concern about survivability seems warranted. Each supercarrier is over a thousand feet long and 25 decks high—about as tall as a 20-story building. With roughly 5,000 sailors onboard operating the ship and supporting the air wing, the loss of even one carrier would be a big blow to the joint force.

However, the Navy has been thinking through the survival challenge for decades, and believes that despite Chinese efforts to mount an anti-access/area-denial posture in its littoral regions, U.S. carriers are actually becoming more survivable over time. Some of the details are classified, but enough is publicly known to suggest the danger to U.S. carriers is exaggerated by critics.

To begin with, each carrier is designed with hundreds of watertight compartments and redundant conduits for electrical and other services. The ships are heavily armored and probably could not be sunk with anything less than a tactical nuclear weapon. Crews are trained to work around damage incurred in combat.

Because carriers are constantly moving when deployed, it is difficult to fix their location. With a top speed of 35 miles per hour, they can be anywhere in a 700-square-mile area within 30 minutes after being detected. That area grows to over 6,000 square miles after 90 minutes, and the Western Pacific provides abundant space in which to hide before antiship weapons arrive.

For instance, the South China Sea, comprising a fraction of the area that China would need to monitor in a conflict, consists of over 1.4 million square miles of ocean.

Under the Navy’s emerging concept of Distributed Maritime Operations, the captain commanding a carrier can expect to have diverse defensive assets stationed within reach of his or her constantly moving vessel—Aegis air-defense destroyers, Virginia-class attack subs, overhead assets, etc.—all networked together into a layered defensive system that detects any approaching threats.

Once identified, each threat is assigned the optimum sensors and weapons to assure early interception, even if they are on different warships scattered across the ocean. In some cases the carrier air wing will provide the necessary defensive firepower, supported by its integral airborne early-warning aircraft that is equipped to manage aerial engagements.

In other cases the outer layer of defense will be provided by Standard missiles fired from surface warships, many of which are being equipped with super-capable SPY
PY

SPY
-6 radars and an advanced version of the Aegis combat system—the most lethal air defense system in the world.

If the threat is from undersea warships, the carrier can rely on Virginia-class submarines that greatly outclass their Chinese counterparts, plus antisubmarine sensors and rotorcraft deployed on both destroyers and the carrier itself.

The architecture of the defensive perimeter dictates that if an enemy penetrates one layer of protection, it will then face another, and another. So even if the adversary can find a carrier in the vastness of the Western Pacific, the likelihood its weapons will reach the carrier and do serious damage is not great. The likelihood the carrier could actually be sunk is minimal, given its design features.

The key to U.S. Navy planning for a future war with China resides in what is called the “kill chain,” the intricate series of steps an enemy must execute in order to actually engage a supercarrier. These steps are often simplified into the phrase “find, fix, track, target, engage, assess,” but in practice each step breaks down into a series of subsidiary measures that must be accomplished and take time.

During that time the carrier is continuously moving, and the decision cycle supporting the kill chain will inevitably delay moving to the next step. The metaphor of a kill “chain” is especially apt, because if any link is broken in this complex process, the whole process collapses. The Navy thus has numerous options for disrupting an attack on its carriers.

Left unsaid in the Navy’s public discussion of fleet protection is steps the joint force might take to disable parts of the Chinese attack complex. For example, Beijing has launched half a dozen electronic intelligence satellites into low earth orbit this year to track U.S. carriers. The U.S. could degrade such satellites using both kinetic and non-kinetic means.

The U.S. Navy and its sister services will concentrate their own reconnaissance assets in the region if war with China breaks out. Indeed, they are already there, stretching from low earth orbit to the seabed, and would be quickly thickened in the event of conflict. Despite China’s geographic advantages in any such conflict, the U.S. has reason to suspect that China will not be able to defeat carriers deployed to the region.

It is worth noting that China is expected to add to its own modest carrier fleet in the near future, which suggests Beijing is not excessively concerned with carrier vulnerability.

As noted above, aircraft carrier builder HII contributes to my think tank.