Will UAVs making Naval Air Obsolete?

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Subject: Will UAVs making Naval Air Obsolete?
HeavyD 12/6/2010 3:25:09 PM

Thesis: The most expensive way to deliver a bomb/payload by air is via a carrier-based jet. This budgetary fact, combined with the advances in UAVs will certainly combine to threaten the number of carrier groups in the next decade or two. To further complicate matters for the Navy are advances in anti-ship ballistic missiles by China (and assumably, Russia as well). Carriers will only get more vulnerable and more expensive to protect. The Navy will be the last to admit this, and Naval Aviators last of all, but the age of a dozen supercarriers is passing. For the capital cost as well as the care and feeding of an entire carrier battle group the US can field literally thousands of UAVs with FASTER response time and far greater strike capability. Case in point: Recently North Korea got belligerent again. It took how long for the Geo. Washington to arrive on the scene? How long to get 3-4 carriers in place if needed? If immediate action were required the NAvy would have launched cruise missiles, not FA18s. Sorry Flyboys. Now fast forward 10 years. The US mothballed 4 carriers and spent the funds on over 1000 stealth UAVs (think mini-B2's) with global range and unlimited (refuelled) loiter time, and global response time measured in hours, not days. North Korea launches an attack that requires a massive and immediate response, and 18 hours later said thousand UAVs are dropping more simultaneous precision strikes than the entire combined Naval Air Fleet. Yes it will be a day before they can all sortie again, but remember the Geo. Washington is still a couple days away, and the other carriers a week or three. A fleet of UAVs is always ready: it is never in port, never in retrofit, never more than a day away from the action and can sortie over North Korea one day and Afghanistan the next. There is no pilot fatigue, the requirements for operator training is a fraction of training a Naval Aviator, and the UAV operator will never be captured, paraded through the street and put on trial. UAV aircraft are cheaper to build and maintain, and can be designed with more extremes in maneuverability, etc. Now I know this is an extremely unpopular perspective, even inflammatory. And OF COURSE THERE ARE MISSIONS, such as obtaining/maintaining air superiority where UAV development is a generation away from being competitive. And yes, the saber-rattling show of force of a Carrier Group is impressive. But so is a radar-screen filled with 800 bogeys lurking in nearby international airspace for 36 hours straight. It's a budgetary reality, a geopolitical reality and a technological reality. WHEN, my friends, not IF. We'll have carriers for the next 50 years, just fewer, certainly never more than now.

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WarNerd 12/7/2010 5:52:51 PM

Basic problems with your assumptions:

You need to look at the entire cost of the system, including the logistical requirements.

1. UAVs are NOT always ready and do NOT have unlimited loiter time. Aircraft require regular maintenance after even a few hours of flight, overhauls after a couple hundred hours, and an engine rebuild after 1000 hours or so. Availability will be about 80%, less the fraction of time spent going to and from the loiter point, assuming that they are airborne only 8 hours per day. The larger the percentage of time they spend airborne the less time for maintenance, and the lower the availability. If they are spending 16 hours a day in the air expect availability to be less than 50%. Figure 2-4 man-hours maintenance per hour of flight time.

Carriers can deploy aircraft as needed, most of the loiter time is spent on the deck.

2. Where is the fuel coming from for refueling? How many refueling aircraft are needed, and how much fuel does it take to deliver the fuel to the UAVs? How long does it take to get those assets into position? Where does the fuel come from (location)? This is the bottleneck for any aerial deployment. Include any additional aerial tanker requirement in your base cost.

Carriers can transport aircraft into the operations are without using tanker aircraft.

3. Where is your logistics support located? Or are these going to just be fancy one shot cruise missiles
Flying back to the USA between missions would give you a mission cycle of 44 hours (18 hours each way plus 8 hours on ground for maintenance) + mission time. Probably 48 hours if you want to only run night ops.
In theatre (<700 km) logistics would permit 2 missions per night. This would require ground bases (plural, unless you want all your eggs in one basket). We only have a few overseas bases. How long do you think it will take to set new ones up? How long can the UAVs operate without them? Answers: Months and hours.
The bases will require airfields, C3I, revetments or hangers for the UAVs, maintenance shelters, ammo bunkers, tank farms for POL, spare parts, substantial air defenses and security, and everything needed to support all of those. Figure a minimum total of 10 people per UAV, probably closer to 20. Building ones from scratch would take an engineering battalion a couple of months for each. Cost will be close to that of a carrier, but much less than the battle group. Add that to the deployment cost, and TIME.
Prepositioned supplies can help, but setting them also up needs to be included in the initial budget. You need to include ALL the pieces.
I would suggest you check the logistics problems the Army encountered with the deployment of a squadron of Apache helicopters to Macedonia in 1998 for operations against Serbia. It took them over a month.

A carrier is a mobile base.

4. How far can you realistically deploy from existing bases without international, local support, and over flight privileges? North Korea is easy, but what about Somalia? The Falkland Islands? Pakistan? Iceland? Cape Town? Tierra del Fuego?

Summary: You have 1000 UAVs, but can only maintain about 160 on station at any given time in Korea. The logistical requirements have been totaling ignored. You have failed to address a critical shortage of aerial tanker capacity.
A single carrier can supply about ¼ the capability.

Other items -- The carrier that went to South Korea was for previously scheduled wargames set up months earlier. Deployment was not sped up, the administration just took credit for it.

Suggestions:

1. Revise your basic estimates for costs to include logistics costs.

2. Carriers can also deploy UAVs, but from within the theatre. How does that effect their cost relative to USA based UAVs?

3. Look for potential synergies from deploying UAVs through aircraft carriers, where the UAVs fly to the carrier carrying additional fuel, then on to their targets with weapons, and then back to the carrier to have the fuel tanks reinstalled for the trip home. Also look at the carriers utility for supplying aerial tanker support.

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VelocityVector DOA Issue 12/7/2010 6:07:29 PM

Since the early 2000's we have absolutely known how to replace human aircraft pilots with machines that do not require any human involvement to accomplish traditional piloting missions even against the most modern counterthreats A2A. This is a fact that within ten years even the most ardent proponent of human piloting will be forced to acknowledge. The way forward will be driven politically, not technically. Bye bye scarf -- exception sensitive missions which though counterintuitive may be undertaken by a natural person just because... 0.02

v^2

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Phaid 12/7/2010 6:42:19 PM

Pretty much what WarNerd said. The future is that UAVs will make carriers better, not cause them to go away. UAVs will increase the striking power of carriers by providing them a VLO strike solution that is both long-ranged and affordable. They will increase their sea control capability by providing long endurance sensors that are, again, long ranged and affordable.

HeavyD, you are really omitting a lot of logistics in your equation there. Under your scenario your UAVs still need to rearm, and since there is no carrier in the vicinity they have to fly a whole lot farther to do so. So you're not really going to wind up saving very much relative to a carrier which brings its own logistics You also need comms infrastructure and, yes, you do need personnel to operate these things. And unlike manned fighters they are still basically helpless in the face of fighter opposition, so they aren't really a 1:1 replacement for manned strikers yet.

The best use of these two types of systems is as a complement to one another, not a replacement.

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HeavyD 12/7/2010 8:19:50 PM

The threat title was a bit deceptive - I agree that the 'political' reality as well as current infrastructure will dictate that naval air as it exists will continue for at least another generation. But I also believe that carrier-based UAVs will be interesting, even if only carrier launched.

Re: supply chain - look at what is required per sortie of a carrier-launch: Not just the carrier but the entire battle group!(Yes they have other capabilities as well...). I believe the fully-loaded cost per sortie easily favors UAVs, especially when economies of scale are included.

Re: airborne refueling: Yep, we need-a-bunch-of-tankers, or design requirements that include abundant fuel capacity. Fortunately there aren't many places that we care about where there isn't an in-theater air base. Some but that is the exception at this point.

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WarNerd 12/8/2010 5:27:23 AM

You are still looking only at the hardware. The real killer is fuel.

On a per sortie basis the largest cost element for a carrier aircraft are extendibles (fuel + ammo), maintenance, the aircraft itself, and then the cost of the battle group. A carrier can remain operational to 50 years, but the escort are only good for 30 years. That spreads their cost over a LOT of sorties.

Your proposed UAV strategy based in the USA eliminates the carrier group, but probably increases the fuel requirements 20 fold (x10 for the UAV range + x10 for the fuel used by the tanker in staging to get the fuel to them). Even without adding the amortized cost of all the additional tankers that would be required, this would easily offset any savings from the elimination of the carrier battle groups.

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HeavyD 12/8/2010 12:21:21 PM

Fuel is an expensive but variable cost. The surface vessels of a carrier group, the ports and facilities AND the training, care and feeding, and lifetime retirement and healthcare costs of the ship and shore crews, air wing personnel, etc. is a fixed cost. We pay to maintain capability and readiness whether the assets are actively required or not.

By any measure the cost of acquiring, training and maintaining even a large number of UAVs (and supporting assets like air tankers) across several (existing) airbases is a fraction of the cost of a carrier group and all required support, regardless of operational tempo.

This is all about budgetary footprint for a given capability. It the requirement is the ability to conduct 10,000 air strike sorties within the first two weeks of a conflict, anywhere in the world starting 48 hours from 'Go', in each of 2 different theaters simultaneously for example I believe that a combination of UAVs and Carrier Groups is superior in terms of both capability and cost than carrier groups alone.

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VelocityVector 12/8/2010 5:51:48 PM

"Hapless" is close air like Su-25 when picked up by F-35. (Hapless as in toast.) Manned F-35 or unmanned. Any BVR-capable plaform can effectively be set to execute on an aerial target without human intervention. The same data preprocessed and presented to a human pilot can be acted upon by the machine itself. With F-35 DATS/EOTS technologies and related processing the machine alone can carry the day. A2A. SEAD. Strike. As you will witness very soon, I am not exactly the lone voice convinced. We are going there now and opponents will fail. 0.02

v^2

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WarNerd 12/9/2010 3:52:41 AM

Fuel is an expensive but variable cost.

Correct. But the fact that a major line item is a variable cost does not mean that it can be ignored because it is inconvenient to your preferred concept.

The surface vessels of a carrier group, the ports and facilities AND the training, care and feeding, and lifetime retirement and healthcare costs of the ship and shore crews, air wing personnel, etc. is a fixed cost. We pay to maintain capability and readiness whether the assets are actively required or not

Are you maintaining that with UAVs that there will be none of these costs? And no similar costs either? (i.e. Are you stating the UAVs do not require maintenance, support facilities, training, or personnel?)

And if you are going to require the cost of a carrier group to include the full cost of building any existing facilities it shares, why not the same for UAVs?

Then you will not mind supplying details on your assumptions and the calculation of the costs for both a carrier group and the "large number of UAVs (and supporting assets like air tankers) across several (existing) airbases".

The rest of us would appreciate the education.

This is all about budgetary footprint for a given capability.

Please define a "budgetary footprint". Otherwise we are going to be wasting out time talking past each other.

Does it represent an operational capability, or only select hardware acquisition?

It the requirement is the ability to conduct 10,000 air strike sorties within the first two weeks of a conflict, anywhere in the world starting 48 hours from 'Go', in each of 2 different theaters simultaneously for example I believe that a combination of UAVs and Carrier Groups is superior in terms of both capability and cost than carrier groups alone.

That's a new baseline scenario.

How many UAVs will you be assuming for this new estimate? Your original proposal could only deliver 7,000 air strike sorties in that period.

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HeavyD 12/9/2010 5:25:13 PM

Nerd,

Clearly there is a maintenance and support cost to everything, but you really don't want to argue that ship-based assets are cheaper to deploy than than shore-based, do you? If that is the case why do we even bother to have USAF fighter squadrons? They should all be carrier-based, right? Please.

Fuel? I guess Burkes and Ticos are little Prius' driving around out there. A Supply-class sails with 2 million gallons of Marine Diesel, and the Burkes and Ticos leave port with their fuel bunkers full, and check into port how often?

Sorties: Not all sorties will be round trippers from CONUS. Some squadrons/groups will be based along side current USAF assets all over the world, with access to NATO and other facilities. 1000 birds was a SWAG, probably 500 with the strike capability of a F117 would easily replace several Carrier Air Wings for initial strike capabilities.

TO FURTHER THE DISCUSSION:

I have been focusing on initial strike capabilities. The Naval Air is also facing competition in the CAS arena from smaller UAVs already, as well as from USAF assets such as the sensor and strike packages that are simple bolt-ons for KC130's! Further the new 155mm Excaliber, the coming GPS guided 120mm mortar round and smaller precision munitions (Griffin, guided 70mm Hydra) are becomming preferable than dropping a stick of Mk82's because of lower collateral damage in many instances. And the ground-pounders in Afghanistan prefer A-10s for CAS than any other single-seat fast-mover (actually the A-10 isn't fast, which is part of the appeal).

I'm just saying that naval air is gonna take a necessary hit. 11 Carrier Strike Groups will eventually prove to be unsustainable and other assets, and I'm betting on a growing # of UAVs, will pick up the mission.

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USN-MID 12/9/2010 7:00:58 PM

Nerd,

Uh, utility? Considering the services have shared a similar piece of the budget pie, the USAF contributions, while not to be discounted, aren't exactly earth-shattering.

The USN manages to put up ~550 strike fighters, along with escorts packing TLAMs which have proven to be better than any aircraft for initial strikes, while also funding plenty of non aviation based assets like submarines and amphibs.

The USAF does offer tremendous quantity, 1000 light fighters, 250 heavy fighter bombers, 500 refuelers, 450 air to air fighters, 150 bombers. Impressive numbers, but let's then look at actual utility.

Availability - Manpower affects it as well. People hate being deployed 365 days/yr. Even if you increase manpower to compensate, ignore unit integrity and swap off crew/maintainers, you'll wear airframes out faster.

Logistics - Impressive numbers above again on quantity, but you never need that many aircraft on station. Quite frankly, 2 carrier air wings have enough of a hard time coming up with enough targets to service with every asset, every day. Why the hell do you need 500 aircraft in theater?

OK, believe it or not, ships, unlike aircraft, can shut down engines and FLOAT. We do it a lot in fact. I've spent way more time at 5 kts than at 20+.

Right...how are you going to get the logistical support for 500+ aircraft. Take a look at Afghanistan. Despite Afghanistan being a frigging landlocked country, first tactical air in was Navy/Marine.

Takes time to get diplomatic agreements worked out. In some cases, logistical support either does not exist or is inadequate. You want 100 "attack" UAVs on station? That's a lot of gas, maintenance guys that have to get flown in, basing rights negotiated.

This may have worked out well in armchair general land, but reality is a hell of a lot more complicated.

TO FURTHER THE DISCUSSION:

OK, again, initial strike, screw aircraft. Ships with TLAMs on station are much easier to get spun up. One radio message, and you can have missiles en route. Personally, I think intercontinental bombers tasked for conventional strike on targets in TLAM range (which historically has been damn near everything, is a waste of money.

Artillery has its place, but there are plenty of situations where air will be able to hit what arty or mortars cannot.

Screw UAV/UCAV doing CAS, I want a manned craft. That's for comm purposes. Ever tried working SATCOM from a handheld ground station? Yeah, probably

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