1/ What's this? My friend @JerryHendrixII has written an essay @NRO called "The Aircraft Carrier We Need"? https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/07/06/the-aircraft-carrier-we-need/#slide-1 Step away from the computer Bryan. Don't let him draw you in.

2/ You have a very busy Monday ahead of you and you cannot spend time on this subject AGAIN. Let someone on @HIIndustries payroll handle this. Damn. I can't do it. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Jerry and I gotta mix it up on carriers. So let's get down to it.

3/ Make yourselves comfortable, because this is going to be a long thread. Before I go on, I urge you to go back and click the link to Jerry's piece. Read the whole thing. There is a ton of wisdom in it, and he gets many things right.

4/ I'll focus here on what I think he gets less right or in some cases, plain wrong, but that shouldn't detract from the fact that he has written something that is important and informative. The next caveat is that I want everyone within the sound of my voice/reach of my…

5/ …electrons to know that I would be tickled pink to move away from large, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers as a building block of Integrated American Seapower if I had a sense that there were alternatives that would address the full scope of the things the carrier and its…

6/ …airwing do to the extent that they do them for the price that we pay for them. Carrier critics often try to steal a base when they decry the cost of the carrier and then do not properly or honestly account for the cost to replace it.

7/ Jerry is not guilty of that here, but many often do. In this piece, Jerry lays out the important distinction that must always be made when on this subject, and that is, the carrier is just a moving airport. Its weapon system is the airplanes that fly off of it.

8/ The fact that it moves around in the ocean at speeds in excess of 30 knots means that it is 1) more difficult to target and neutralize than a static, land-based airfield and 2) able to present an adversary with a fundamentally different threat axis from day-to-day.

9/ As long as tactical aviation is a desired capability in combat, the aircraft carrier will ALWAYS be superior to land-based means of providing it. It is known.

10/ Jerry has written eloquently here and elsewhere about how geostrategy caused the Navy in the post Cold-War era to focus on pummeling an adversary from sanctuary, and the concomitant "retreat from range" (his phrase, an excellent one) of the carrier airwing. The portion of…

11/ …this article devoted to what needs to happen to the carrier airwing now that the nation is to the extent possible in our short attention span society, focused on "great power competition", is superb, and few today write more intelligently on this subject than Jerry.

12/ I have no quibble with his suggestions. Where I deviate from him is on the airport itself, the platform that carries those airplanes and the virtues that should be valued. Therein.

13/ By way of making this case, I will cut and paste phrases and sentences from Jerry's piece that are particularly worthy of a second look. Let's start with this one. "The combination of dramatically enhanced maritime-domain awareness (enabled in large part by remote-sensing…

14/ …satellites) and land-, sea-, and air-launched anti-ship missiles now makes it possible for the PLA to hold U.S. aircraft carriers (and other surface combatants) at risk well over 1,000 miles from China’s shores".

15/ First, everything on the modern battlefield--at sea, in the air, in space, on land--is increasingly vulnerable. Carriers tend to get singled out for this vulnerability, but it applies everywhere.

16/ Second, as we'll see later in the piece, Jerry does a concept design for a follow-on carrier that will still be a huge chunk of real-estate whose radar cross section and detectability--while likely smaller than the FORD--will still be significant.

17/ Chopping 30,000 tons from a carrier will not make it disappear, but it may make it less of an asset.

18/ Next phrase: "Faced with this intensifying threat, the Navy has started shifting away from the land-attack mission in favor of less daunting sea-control and sea-denial missions." This is a quibble, but the Navy is not shifting away from the land-attack mission in favor of…

19/ …less "daunting" missions, it is perhaps assigning less of that mission to the carrier airwing and more to other assets (ships and submarines with long-range missiles, air lauched long range missiles, etc.). Next: "Put simply, the carrier should be designed around the air…

20/ …wing, and the air wing should be designed to implement the nation’s defense strategy." No assertion in this essay raises my red flags more completely than this one.

21/ One of the most important capabilities of the aircraft carrier over time has been the ability of the Navy to substantially change the mission and function of the aircraft carrier by changing the makeup of the airwing. Were we to design aircraft carriers around existing or…

22/ …even expected airplanes, carrier obsolescence would be a substantially larger problem than critics would have us understand today, as a desired airplane design could theoretically be incompatible with the carrier--hastening its retirement.

23/ Next: "Taken together, this proposed air wing amounts to approximately 65 aircraft, about the same size as today’s carrier air wing." Jerry's proposed airwing is as he says, about the same size as today's airwing.

24/ Later, he rightly cites the fact that the FORD was built to carry 85-90, but (my words) fiscal constraints have driven us to smaller airwings.

25/ The problem here is that Jerry uses this fiscally constrained airwing size as a primary sizing component for the carrier he later proposes, as if this were somehow the optimal size and not one driven by an unserious approach to resourcing national defense.

26/ Next: "Finally, given that there are no longer any large fossil-fuel steam-boiler manufacturers in the United States (and the U.S.

27/ Navy is unlikely to repeat the British Royal Navy’s mistake of powering a large carrier with gas-turbine engines), the Navy’s next carrier will almost certainly be nuclear-powered."

28/ Meh--Jerry backs into the choice of nuclear power almost as a by-product of other, better choices being eliminated for some reason. This is decidedly not the case.

29/ Putting aside the industrial base connotations of not having a US based large fossil-fuel steam boiler manufacturer, using fossil fuel steam boilers requires an aircraft carrier to travel around with a considerable amount of its volume taken up by....fossil fuel.

30/ In the case of a nuclear carrier, virtually EVERY DROP of that volume is devoted to the hungry weapons it carries--its aircraft--rather than feeding itself.

31/ Additionally, whether one burns those old dinosaurs to boil water to turn turbines or to fuel gas turbine airplane engines keyed to propulsion shafts, a HUGE amount of combustion air is required for those processes.

32/ This requires a huge amount of available volume being devoted to the movement of air. Nuclear carriers are not burdened with this requirement, and they turn that space into more useful purposes such as bomb and missile stowage. Not willing to give up on the idea of a…

33/ …fossil-fuel powered carrier, Jerry tantalizes us with the prospect of someday doing so: "The United States no longer has the capacity to build large conventional maritime steam turbines, but if it ever does, this option should be considered.

34/ Such a carrier should cost no more than $5.5 billion, about a third of the cost of the current Ford-class carrier. This effort would take, at a minimum, ten years to design and build." Goodness.

35/ Jerry's probably a lot better than I am at math (he did go to Purdue), but this figure strikes me as somewhat on the low end, and it at least APPEARS to compare such a platform in an apples to apples manner with the FORD. Smaller, able to carry fewer airplanes, and with…

36/ …considerably less endurance (driving the need for a more active logistics train and potentially creating the need for more of them to make up for the combat power harvested in cashiering the FORD class) it strikes me that you "get what you pay for". Jerry's a wily…

37/ …interlocutor, and he saw my criticisms coming: "Before arguing that this proposed carrier is too small, its catapults and arresting gear are too few, and its aviation-ordnance and fuel capacities are too slight, critics should pause and consider that the carrier…

38/ …parameters described above, with the exception of the two nuclear reactors, lie directly between those of the Midway-class carriers built during World War II and the Forrestal-class carriers built during the 1950s.

39/ Both served in the Navy until the mid 1990s and operated heavy, long-range, penetrating-strike air wings.

40/ The USS Midway (CV-41) served on the battle line in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm for 43 days alongside larger carriers and was able to maintain an average sortie-generation rate of 70 aircraft per day, second only to the Nimitz-class carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt."

41/ Both MIDWAY and FORRESTAL classes were fossil fueled, and we've discussed this.

42/ Both were--if decades of Navy analysis is to be believed--worth laying up in order to bring forward larger, nuclear powered carriers on the basis of the evolved threat and the state of technology available.

43/ Jerry and I are both political conservatives, and we conservatives are a sucker for the past--but pointing back at performance metrics gained decades ago against an adversary with little or no ability to contest them seems risky.

44/ And the fact that those carriers served well against the Soviets in the decades before is acknowledged, but so must be the conclusions reached that they were insufficient. It occurs to me that the size of the FORD class--which has become a draw-back--should be considered a…

45/ …virtue, in that while the current airwing is smaller than airwings in the past, in a conflict, off cycle airwings could be broken up and re-distributed to the on cycle carriers to round them out.

46/ Or--if this is too retro an idea for you, dozens if not scores of modestly sized scouting/attack UAV's could be added to the airwing at a modest cost and could justifiably occupy the additional space. This concludes the quibbling, so now I return to praising Jerry.

47/ We should ALWAYS be thinking about "what comes next", and this piece does just that--better than most. I have no information on this, but I dearly hope the Navy has money in its budget EVERY YEAR to think about the design and improvement of its carrier force.

48/ My idea is very different than others, and represents a dramatic departure from today's approach--I would begin to design a carrier that is optimized for unmanned launch and recover. There would be a small number of airplanes onboard that would be manned for airborne…

49/ …command and control, but most of the airwing would consist of unmanned aircraft that would return to the CVN, land, enter the "assembly line", be diagnosed and routed to maintenance bays for preventive or corrective maintenance, refueled, re-armed, re-greased,…

50/ …re-missioned, and then shot back off the front of the boat. Ok--that's all for now. I hope you've enjoyed this. Kudos to you @JerryHendrixII for some excellent thinking, and I look forward to future discussions.