Buying ships that cannot perform the missions asked of the Navy is a false economy, and the QEs as built cannot perform the missions the USN asks of its carriers. Just adding catapults is an extra couple of billion pounds.
If my memory serves me right, demonstrated flight tempo from LHAs is low twin digit sorties burst, single digit overtime. And doctrinal way to start generating sorties for marine air always was to drop off damn ship onto forward airstrip ASAP.
I won't insist, esp. since nothing prohibits placing catapults there(specific design in question was always meant for US cats).
What will he say when China's next carrier is bigger than Ford?
Also the CVNs don't have to have fuel bunkers to make the boat go. Enterprise had a lot more aviation fuel than the Kitty Hawks.
If the USN had actually built all 30something planned Zs, the AGS would have been affordable. LRLAP is essentially a rocket-boosted Excalibur, so I'd expect prices comparable to Excalibur and not exceeding double the cost of Excalibur. The base ammo buy for ~30 ships would be ~18,000 rounds, just to load the ships. Plus at least that much more for a single reload. Likely on the order of 3-4 full reloads per ship for the total buy. That's more than twice the original planned buy for Excalibur, with according impacts on per-shell price.
While true, the circumstances for "What makes a viable carrier" hasn't changed.
And the thing that really kills this idea? Three Flight-0 America class operating in the carrier role, still can't equal the combat capabilities of a single Ford. Their planes are shorter ranged, with smaller payloads, they can't operate AEW&C aircraft, and they lack the aviation stores storage capacity to sustain combat. Not to mention their sortie rate when operating as a full carrier is abysmal
Idea was to split 11+11 into something more like 8+8+11. Aka get way more ships via few relatively dumber(but still big enough) vessels. 11 delivers ~3 deployed ships at sea, which at conjunctions now results in just 1 guaranteed ship on station (and zero near China). Yes, normal deployment math produce higher numbers, but as we can see, shit happens.
If CVNs are too slow to build (or somebody doesn't fund them on time) a couple of CVVs might start making sense. Build them in South Korea lol.
Might not be happening while China dumping US Treasury Bonds...
But thats not whats happening. They are just selling and pressuring Chinese banks not to renew their US bond investments. So it qill soak upliquidity in Europe where the bond must be going.
Doubtful they Navy can actually handle the manpower demand of even more carriers, and doubtful the Navy gets the money for this. The US cannot even effectively keep 11 CVNs active these days, having such abysmal maintenance schedules and crew rotation that overstretching a deployment has become the new normal, rather than an exception. Trying to increase the Fleet to 15 Ford Class CVNs would ultimately break the US Navy in this day and age. A force that is already struggling with maintaining what they have, replacing what they have to retire and retaining the qualified personelle on and off their ships. In short, it's not feasible and the USN is most likely very aware of this.
How is adding a second class going to speed up the production of the first? If you don't have the money to build CVNs fast enough, where are you going to get the extra money for another class of carriers? Just dump whatever resources you would use for this imaginary class into the CVNs. THAT would speed up the process.
It's amusing how people seem to think budgets can't change. Compare the Carter years to the Reagan years.
It's amusing how people seem to think budgets can just increase, increase, increase, increase without consequences and that everyone, including in the government, just nods and goes along. There are many things the US (Navy) needs and can afford and operate. 15 CVNs is just unrealistic, borderline unreasonable even. A country with very limited ship building, a country where nuclear reactors are a bottleneck for systems that are powered by them, a country and Navy that has barely enough qualified people right now, having trouble to keep these people within the Navy.
Yeah, we didn't even get 15 as part of Lehman's 600-ship navy plan during the Reagan years. 12 is doable though. The rest of that can be changed.
An increase from 11 to 12 can be done, totally agreed. As for the rest being able to change, in theory yes. But I currently don't see the USN on a trajectory that facilitates that necessary change. And, which is kinda what I was alluding towards the whole time, it may be more reasonable to adapt to the current situation and procure accordingly, than hoping for a miracle change with regards to US shipbuilding, personelle retention and enlistment to facilitate this. I think you have a lot of optimism and believe in the competence of the Navy, I'm on the other hand rather pessimistic about it when I look at how bad it got even during my limited lifetime. So you're not conceptually wrong, I just don't see it happening any time soon.
Yeah, the rot is far deeper than just hiring more people. It will take a generation of effort to fix. (And I have NO confidence in the Navy at the moment.)
No RCOH is a couple billion less lifetime just to start. We know how much more expensive nuclear reactors are compared to gas turbines. And the operational cost gap was nearly $30 million a year per carrier back in the steam days and would be assuredly less now that we don't have to deal with steam. The numbers are all out there and publicly available.
Guess what the USN decided. Twice.
CVN-77 is going to be operating till ~2060 so at minimum the maintenance know-how and parts supply is being maintained somewhere. So it becomes a question of building new steam catapults... given that an EMALS shipset costs over $1B there's ample opportunity to pay someone to restart production, especially since NAVSEA owns the C-13 catapult technology.
Pretty much! When people with a lot more experience and better analytical tools say what the answer is, I tend to listen. I just think it's a lot more of a debate than smaller carriers.
That can be addressed, and in fact is in process. Chasing out a thousand places where there's a billion dollars in fraud, waste, and abuse happening in the government finances means there's a trillion dollars "more" than can be spent on the required infrastructure and personnel. (how much FW&A did DOGE find? only 215bn so far?)
