Thirty-Three Disappointing Minutes

The HAC-D Chairman Goes to AEI

Last week at the Surface Navy Association Symposium, a colleague approached me with a concerned look on his face.

“Have you heard what Calvert said?”, he asked.

Taken by surprise and likely prompted by a quizzical look on my face, he continued, “Chairman Calvert, at AEI.”

Ah. That was more like it. My interlocutor was bringing my attention to something that the Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Defense Subcommittee, had said, but I was unaware and said so.

“He went after aircraft carriers”.

This concerned me. I am—after all—to the extent that I have any professional reputation—known in narrow defense circles to be a defender of the relevance, power, flexibility, and utility of large, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. Some of you may remember this oldie but goodie:

Or this perhaps this: “Sharpening the Spear: The Carrier, The Joint Force, and High-End Conflict”.

That the Republican Chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Sub-committee would go “after” aircraft carriers was indeed notable. When I asked about the nature of his remarks, my colleague indicated that it had to do with carrier survivability. I made a note to inquire further.

Which is what I did earlier today, when I pulled up the You Tube video of Mr. Calvert’s appearance at the American Enterprise Institute, where he was interviewed by respected scholar Mackenzie Eaglen. You can find that presentation below. I urge you to watch. It isn’t long, 33 minutes as has already been telegraphed.

I emerged from the viewing experience disappointed. Not just disappointed at his remarks about aircraft carriers, with which I will deal in greater detail below, but also in the degree to which Mr. Calvert seems to represent an underinformed, overconfident, and increasingly ascendant faction of “tech-bros” and “disrupters” who have decided that the defense industry, the defense budget, force development, and defense planning all need to be disrupted, mostly by tech-bros.

Calvert on Carriers

Here is a (produced by me) transcript of what Calvert said.

We ought to look at aircraft carriers. Um, my friends that are submarine captains on VIRGINIA Class submarines will say on the outside, an aircraft carrier will last a week on a peer adversary. Right now, it costs us, by the time we build an aircraft carrier, put its component F-35’s, all the electronics, 5000 souls that we put on that, we’re probably looking at well over twenty, twenty two, twenty-three billion dollars. Right now, as you know, in the FORD Class, we’ve got FORD out there, we’ll have the JFK out there pretty soon, and there’s a third aircraft carrier coming on line, and these are fifty year decisions, will an aircraft carrier be survivable in modern warfare?

When the Chinese right now have 1200 operational hypersonic missiles that can be clustered and move at Mach 6, Mach 7. And if you shoot 100 of them, at an aircraft carrier, will that aircraft carrier survive? You gotta ask that question. And so if they can’t, we ought to make some difficult decisions. And I bring that up now because I think we have to talk about this. And we shouldn’t…we made a decision to get rid of battleships a long time ago for good reason. We need to be smaller, mobile, faster, and invisible. This is the new change in modern warfare. But on every single legacy platform, this is the question we need to ask. Is this survivable? Is this a workable program in today’s war? If it isn’t, we should make a hard decision and move on to the technology of today and tomorrow.

Two short paragraphs, but a lot to unpack here.

Ok. So the first thing to deal with is cost. Let’s use his number, his largest number, $23B. I don’t support that number because I’m not sure of the analysis behind it, but for the purposes of our discussion, I’ll take it. He then refers to a “fifty year decision”, making reference to the planned lifespan of U.S. aircraft carriers. Public law requires us to maintain a force of 11 carriers, and again, for the purposes of this discussion, I’d like to propose a thought experiment. Let’s assume that the Navy decided to one for one replace its aircraft carrier force, lock stock and barrel, by acquiring 11 carriers at once. Using his number, that would amount to an acquisition cost of $253B, which amounts to a figure that is 98% of what the Biden Administration requested as the total Department of the Navy budget for 2025. Amortizing that $253B across a fifty year lifespan, we would be spending $5B in constant dollars annually across that fifty years to purchase that force. I get that there are a ton of costs associated with maintaining and operating aircraft carriers and their air wings, but we mostly in this debate fixate on the acquisition cost of the aircraft carrier. So for .6% of the amount that the United States spends on its defense across a 50 year span, the carrier force the law requires COULD be acquired (in this admittedly limited thought experiment). I get it. You’re saying “that’s a whole lot of history major math, McGrath, and it is meaningless.” I disagree. What does it mean? It means

• Yes, individual aircraft carriers are expensive.

• But they last for a long time.

• During that time, they are incredibly useful in combat and restive peace.

• And over time, their acquisition cost in and among the considerable amount spent on the defense of a nation with our national security objectives, is quite modest and rational.

“But”, you say, “Calvert is clearly making the point that because of the long life of a carrier, the real question is whether the FIRST dollar is wasted, not the $253billionth dollar”. This is a legitimate question, one I would answer this way.

There are PLENTY of people who feel that the aircraft carrier is already obsolete. Many of them spent the last four years in appointed office in the Biden defense department, entering with stated desire to rein in defense spending in no small measure by weening the Navy from its love affair with carriers (and other large ships that are equally useful, but that is for another day). And then, all of a sudden, the Biden people decided that aircraft carriers continued to have utility, so much so that since the horrible day of Hamas’ terror strike against Israel, they have been employing the carrier force as if they were modern-day Reaganites.

My point here is that the carrier is CLEARLY NOT OBSOLETE in this moment and for the foreseeable future. And to repeat what I’ve said for many years now about carrier obsolescence, I do not know when that day will come, but I am certain of one thing. The day BEFORE carriers become obsolete, land based aircraft will have become obsolete. Because an airfield that can deploy airpower while moving from place to place will always have more combat utility than a fixed air base.

Mr. Calvert is worried about survivability, and here he suffers from the widespread analytical malady of “recency bias”, in that he seems to think that Chinese hypersonic missiles are the first time that some dastardly threat has achieved the status of “carrier killer”. The truth is that our adversaries have been planning to sink our carriers for eight decades, and for eight decades, the United States Navy has responded with changes in technology, capability, and tactics.

Are aircraft carriers vulnerable in what he calls this “…new change in modern warfare”? Of course they are. The ugly truth is that EVERYTHING on the modern battlefield is vulnerable. This levies increased responsibility on policy makers and force structure architects to ensure that the Navy we do acquire and operate is equally capable of keeping war from occurring (deterrence), as it is in conducting war.

This requirement isn’t something I’m making up, it is the law of the land, passed in the 29th year of Mr. Calvert’s 32 years in Congress, and I repeat it here for those who missed it:

The Navy shall be organized, trained, and equipped for the peacetime promotion of the national security interests and prosperity of the United States and for prompt and sustained combat incident to operations at sea. It is responsible for the preparation of naval forces necessary for the duties described in the preceding sentence except as otherwise assigned and, in accordance with integrated joint mobilization plans, for the expansion of the peacetime components of the Navy to meet the needs of war.

10 USC 8062

What that means is that the Navy (and the Congress with the Constitutional requirement to support it) cannot solely be devoted to what happens after the shooting starts. The Navy Mr. Calvert is responsible to “provide and maintain” is a Navy that spends most of its time influencing and persuading, and when those functions fail—as they inevitably will at times—is a Navy with unequalled firepower and flexibility. To that end, there is simply no weapon in the arsenal of the United States—across all services—that is as useful across the spectrum of conflict from peacetime to all-out war as is the aircraft carrier. There may come a day when this is not the case, but this is not that day and that day is not close.

There is a bit of sloppiness in Mr. Calvert’s analysis, and it is sloppiness that extends from the question of aircraft carriers to the future of tanks and armor for the land forces. His conclusions—like many others who simply get this wrong—flow largely from what we’ve seen in the Russia/Ukraine fight, and he, like so many others, are simply learning the wrong lessons. He alludes to tanks in the same manner he speaks of aircraft carriers; that they are vulnerable, and therefore should be de-emphasized. Putting aside for the moment my earlier suggestion that EVERYTHING is more vulnerable on the modern battlefield, EVERYTHING is EVEN MORE VULNERABLE when your concepts of operations and employment are as profoundly flawed as have been Russia’s. Tanks cannot and should not operate without adequate air cover. Adequate air cover is derived of localized airspace dominance. This sort of coordination is crucial to modern land warfare, and Russia simply has not accomplished it. Our land forces fight as a combined arms force, or a “system”. The Russians are not fighting as a system. The vulnerability of Ukrainian armor is more a function of not having the wherewithal for combined arms approaches, so they do what they can.

Carriers are like tanks in this regard. We do not zorch aircraft carriers into the teeth of an armed peer adversary, there to be pummeled by whatever wizardry he might throw at them. The fleet fights as a system, and within the larger joint system, to gain and maintain temporal, local sea control in order to project power. Will we lose aircraft carriers in a fight with a peer adversary. I think so. That’s the horror of war. Will that peer adversary risk a considerable portion of their navy and national treasure in this pursuit? Assuredly. I put it this way. If we fight China, we will lose a quarter of our Navy. And they will lose their entire Navy.

Further Disappointments

Mr. Calvert’s presentation disappointed on a few other fronts. These are more stream of consciousness than a coherent argument, so work with me.

• When he speaks of industry, he mentions Alex Karp of Palantir with reverence and provides a near hagiography of Elon Musk, even as he chuckles over mentions of leadership at some of the largest, most important traditional defense suppliers in the nation. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some Alex Karp. But the skilled blue-collar labor force issues that defense CEO’s are seeking Congressional help in alleviating are real, and just because there is laudable work going into shoring up the submarine industrial base does not mean the rest of the shipbuilding industry does not also require attention.

• Although he compared defense spending today as a function of GDP with that of the Eisenhower era, there was no sustained support for growing the defense budget. Quite the opposite, in fact, as it seemed more important to him to cut the civilian workforce and gain savings there than it is to increase the size and power of our Armed Forces. This is unusual behavior from a Republican appropriator.

• There was an interesting exchange around the 10:00 mark, in which Ms. Eaglen suggested or inferred that defense officials might benefit from Congressional action to create “more flexible funding”, to which he almost immediately responds “they don’t want oversight”. Minutes later, he unironically pivoted to the story of Hyman Rickover taking the idea of a nuclear powered submarine from conception to reality in three years, and then asks “could we do that today?” Well, no sir, not with the amount of strings attached and “oversight” that you jealously guard as a Congressional prerogative and which did not exist in Rickover’s day.