What homemade roadside bombs could do to Army and Marine ground vehicles was the ugly surprise of the last decade. What sophisticated long-range missiles could do to Navy aircraft carriers could be the ugly surprise of the next. "I think it would almost follow like the night to the day," Rep. Randy Forbes told me in a recent interview. "The last decade... we asked a disproportionate sacrifice from the Army and Marine Corps," he went on. "The next decade's going to be the decade of seapower and projection forces, [and] some of those ugly surprises we see bits and pieces of already."
As chairman of the House Armed Services seapower and projection forces subcommittee, Forbes wants to refocus fellow legislators, the Pentagon, and, for that matter, the media from a narrow debate over the troubled F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program to a wider look at all the capabilities that a carrier can support. That includes not just traditional manned fighters like the F-35, but also unmanned drones like the X-47B and the future UCLASS (Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike System), electronic warfare aircraft like the EA-18G Growler, and even cyber attacks.
The Navy's top admiral seems to appreciate Forbes's approach. The congressman is trying "to look at the whole package together," and that's helpful, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert said after a recent Senate hearing. "He's saying, 'we've got to think about all of this, are you?' And I was telling him, 'yeah.'"
The Navy is committed -- albeit without great enthusiasm -- to its variant of the Joint Strike Fighter for decades to come. But the sea service looks at the aircraft in context of what the Navy and Air Force are calling "AirSea Battle." The prospective adversary, of which China is the archetype, would field an "anti-access/area denial" network, a layered defense of long-range sensors and missiles, potentially backed by manned aircraft and cyberattacks. In this fight, the F-35C provides stealthy manned strike against ground targets and air-to-air defense against enemy aircraft, as well as some cyber and electronic warfare capabilities, to complement the older and unstealthy F/A-18E/F Super Hornet. What those two manned fighters don't bring to the carrier air wing's table, however, is range. And as land-based missiles proliferate, both aircraft carriers and aerial refueling tankers will have to distance themselves ever further from the enemy.
"It's not just the Chinese," Forbes told me. North Korea, Iran, and Syria are putting in place some sophisticated anti-aircraft and anti-ship systems, he argued. Even the Lebanese militia group, Hezbollah, managed to cripple an Israeli corvette with a Chinese-built cruise missile in the 2006 war. (Admittedly, the corvette had turned its anti-missile defenses off). "The next decade is going to see a lot of countries with these weapons," he said. "We should at least have a discussion and a debate about the assumptions we've always made that our carriers can operate pretty much wherever they wanted to."
That presents a problem for the short-ranged fighters that the US spends most of its aircraft budget on. "F-18, F-35 are great platforms," Forbes said, but studies from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments predict that if future Navy carriers rely on those two aircraft alone, Forbes said, "we can only cover about a third of Iran and we can't even get to China's shore."
"This is certainly not just an issue for the Navy," said CSBA's Mark Gunzinger, who's written several studies on the subject. "It's important for the Air Force to invest in new penetrating and long-range standoff," i.e. bombers and long-range missiles. "It's all about being prepared to operate in these higher-threat environments, which may early on in the conflict require increased range, increased persistence, increased survivability."
Forbes was so struck by Gunzinger and company's analysis that he had an aide hand out CSBA slides (the same ones in this article) at a recent hearing, otherwise dominated by the impacts of the sequester, where he asked Greenert about the range problem.