The Navy
will christen its newest amphibious warfare ship in Pascagoula, Miss. on Oct.
20th. The boldly-named, $3 billion America is a major departure from past
designs -- and, quietly, the Navy has decided not to build many more like it in
the future.
The
Chief of Naval Operations himself, Adm. Jonathan Greenert, has said that
getting more amphibs in the fleet is his "biggest shipbuilding
concern." But the Navy is only building two vessels to the LHA-6
blueprint, America itself and LHA-7 Tripoli, for which shipbuilder
Huntington-Ingalls recently received a fixed-price contract. Subsequent LHAs
will revert to a more traditional design.
At issue
is LHA-6's and -7's lack of what's called a "well deck." Most amphibs
have a large compartment they can flood partway with water, with a door in the
stern of the ship that can be lowered to let smaller vessels in and out. That
makes for easy loading and unloading of the amphibious armored vehicles,
hovercraft, and other landing craft that carry Marines and their heavy gear
ashore. Otherwise such small craft have to tie up alongside the big ships while
equipment is lowered by cranes and troops climb down rope ladders, a slow,
laborious, and dangerous process, as the military learned in World War II.
Since then, well decks have become a defining feature of the amphibious fleet
-- but they take up a lot of room.
Meanwhile,
aircraft have become ever more important to Marine Corps operations. Older
ships were designed to carry conventional helicopters like the CH-46 and the
Marine Corps's Harrier "jump jet," but their successors -- the V-22
Osprey tilt-rotor and the F-35B version of the Joint Strike Fighter -- are much
larger machines that take up much more space. So when the Navy looked at
replacing its aging LHA-1 Tarawa class ships, it decided to sacrifice the well
deck to better accommodate aircraft.
The
result is what any other navy would simply call an aircraft carrier. At 844
feet long and 45,000 tons displacement, LHA-6 America is only slightly smaller
than the Russian-made Varyag now in Chinese service and significantly larger
than the French carrier Charles de Gaulle (neither of which has a well deck,
either). Only the US Navy, with its 1,000-foot-long, 100,000-ton Nimitz class,
would consider the America a small carrier.
Ships of
LHA-6's size have proven useful in all sorts of operations, notably last year's
intervention in Libya, when the amphibious ship USS Kearsage led US air operations
in the absence of a Nimitz-class ship. Kearsage, designated LHD-3, is a
traditional amphib design with a large well deck, which was idle in the
air-only operations against Gaddhafi. In the same scenario, LHA-6 could provide
more airpower in an equivalently sized package.
The
problem is, of course, that not all or even most future operations will be like
Libya in 2011. The whole point of having a Marine Corps is so they can go
ashore. Modern Marine tactics de-emphasize storming the beach in landing craft
a la Tarawa in World War II and instead focus on bypassing enemy defenses by
flying forces deep inland. (That mission drove the V-22's unique design). But
landing craft are still essential, less for the first wave ashore than to
sustain the operation with bulk supplies and heavy equipment -- trucks,
artillery, tanks -- that aircraft can carry only in small amounts or not at
all. And if landing craft are essential, then so is the well deck.
So this
February, after months of study, the Marine Corps Commandant and the Chief of
Naval Operations signed an official memorandum of agreement that restores the
well deck to LHA-8 and subsequent ships. A modification of the LHA-6 America
design, LHA-8 will have a slightly smaller hanger than the America and a slightly
smaller well deck than past amphibs like the Kearsage. (A redesign of the
"island" structure will free up more room on LHA-8's flight deck to
do maintenance on V-22s, compensating for some of the hanger space lost inside
the ship).
Four
years ago this September, before the keel was even laid for LHA-6, a former
Marine named Bob Work -- now undersecretary of the Navy -- said there were big
questions about the design. "Will it become the standard, or will it
become only a niche capability?" Work said to National Defense magazine.
The answer is now clearly, "niche." LHA-6 might count as a carrier in
any other navy, but in the US fleet, it is a highly specialized and not
entirely happy compromise between the massive airpower of the Nimitz class and
the flexibility of the traditional Marine amphibious ship.
No comments:
Post a Comment