David Axe has an excellent post up on the Aviation Week blog about the size of the U.S. fleet. I’ll quibble with a few points Axe makes, but by and large, he is correct to assert that the size of the U.S. fleet is not the sole criterion for determining U.S. Naval power. The thurst of Axe’s argument:
Axe illustrates the point with a link to this neat, though slightly out of date graphic from globalsecurity.org (the British only have two active carriers, and the U.S. has 11 rather than 12 large carriers in service at the moment). I spoke to Robert Work at length a few weeks ago, and he painted a similar picture of U.S. Naval dominance at the time (you can read what he had to say here). According to Axe, not only can American carriers “launch several times more sorties hitting ten times more targets per day than carriers from just a few years ago,” but the U.S. Navy can also deploy carriers more quickly and in greater numbers than they once could. All this adds up to the ability to put an overwhelming amount of firepower on target and on time. Axe says that “assuming you’ve got eight carriers on station plus half the amphibs–pretty much the maximum–that’s a thousand sorties hauling at least two precision-guided bombs apiece, for a grand total of around 2,000 aimpoints.” When I spoke with Work, I came away with a significantly higher figure, though my post wasn’t confined solely to the Navy’s air power. If the Navy can hit 2,000 aimpoints a day from the air, it can hit more than twice as many with missiles. Work told me the Navy could probably hit something like 10,000 aimpoints in a given day if cruisers, destroyers, and subs were to employ their massive arsenal of cruise missiles. In any case, Axe makes a legitimate point, which is that there is no nation on the planet that can challenge America’s naval supremacy–not now, and not for a very long time. And though Axe minimizes the importance of overall ship numbers in comparison to the number of aimpoints those ships can hit, the fact is, by the more traditional metric of fleet size, the United States Navy has more ships than the next 17 navies combined. Work told me that during Pax Britannia, the Royal Navy understood supremacy to be a fleet larger than the next two largest navies combined. Still, the U.S. Navy has set a target of a 313-ship fleet. That number now stands at 276. If the Navy can reign in costs on the LCS, which will comprise a substantial portion of that target number, then it makes sense to keep building. If, on the other hand, the Navy is unable to control costs on the LCS and its other major shipbuilding program, the DDG 1000, then it might make sense to reevaluate in light of the Navy’s already dominant position relative to its potential competitors.
In this picture you can see four carriers, at the top is the USS John C. Stennis and at the bottom is the soon-to-be decommissioned USS John F. Kennedy. Sandwiched between the two massive carriers are the smaller French carrier Charles De Gaulle, and behind it the HMS Ocean, which is based on the British Invincible-class carrier design, but is slightly smaller and can’t launch fixed-wing aircraft.
