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/.../”
“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.
“The carrier air wing, Mr. Forbes, in my mind, is balanced,” the admiral answered. “We need range, we need payload, we need electronic warfare capability…and we need stealth.”