FIGHTING DMO, PT. 7: THE FUTURE OF THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER IN DISTRIBUTED WARFIGHTING
APRIL 17, 2023 DMITRY FILIPOFF 1 COMMENT
Read Part 1 on defining distributed maritime operations.
Read Part 2 on anti-ship firepower and U.S. shortfalls.
Read Part 3 on assembling massed fires and modern fleet tactics.
Read Part 4 on weapons depletion and last-ditch salvo dynamics.
Read Part 5 on salvo patterns and maximizing volume of fire.
Read Part 6 on platform advantages and combined arms roles.
By Dmitry Filipoff
Introduction
The aircraft carrier has been the main striking arm of the U.S. Navy for decades, but distributed warfighting demands something new. Anti-ship missile firepower is proliferating across the force structure of both friendly and competitor forces, creating larger demands for the tactical information required to leverage these long-range weapons. Massed fires heavily depend on information to work, and air superiority is a powerful enabler of information superiority. By focusing on a set of critical information functions and fleet air defense, the aircraft carrier can serve as a powerful enabler and force multiplier for distributed fleets and massed fires. These roles foreshadow how nations who engage in naval salvo warfare without naval aviation will be at a sore disadvantage.
Scouting and Cueing Fires
The ocean is vast and busy, presenting a complicated battlespace to make sense of. Sweeps across large ocean areas teeming with commercial shipping can precede anti-ship strikes as targets must be found and quality targeting information developed. As Captain Wayne Hughes emphasized in his classic work Fleet Tactics, “At sea better scouting – more than maneuver, as much as weapon range, and oftentimes as much as anything else – has determined who would attack not merely effectively, but who would attack decisively first.”1
The horizon not only constrains the ability of warships to defend themselves, it makes them almost completely dependent on outside sources of information to target their long-range anti-ship fires. Warships must be well-supported by other forces that can provide the awareness that allows those warships to accurately launch anti-ship fires to long ranges.
https://cimsec.org/fighting-dmo-pt-7-the-future-of-the-aircraft-carrier-in-distributed-warfighting/
