Readiness, modernization, people top priorities for Naval aviation

Sea Power, Jun 2001

Time and again during the post-Cold War era, it has been demonstrated that a force of at least 12 carrier battle groups (CVBGs) offers the president a broad range of alternative courses of action during times of crisis. During Operation Desert Thunder in 1998, for example, the NCA ordered the Navy to deploy two CVBGs to the Persian Gulf to maintain a continuous presence for more than six months. The Navy met this requirement without exceeding its standards for deployment length and time between deployments, but the operation did strain its ability to meet other global commitments and presence requirements.

Navy officials are on record that a reduction to 10 carriers would adversely affect the Navy's ability to "surge" carrier battle groups in the interdeployment training cycle to reinforce the CVBGs already forward-deployed in times of major crisis. According to the Navy's spokesperson, "The Navy's current ability to surge up to nine carriers within 90 days out of a force of 12 would be reduced to just seven carriers with a force of 10."

The results of Rumsfeld's security, strategy, and force-structure reviews will be revealed later this summer. Even as those reviews are being finalized, Navy leaders are emphasizing that naval aviation has today a clear roadmap to meet the future uncertainties and complex national-security challenges of the 21st century.

That roadmap envisions not only continued reliance on improved big-- deck carriers, but also increasingly greater emphasis on a network-centric total force broadly centered on all platforms-air, surface, and submarine-in the CVBG.

New sensors and networked systems are being developed even as older variants are being modernized. The transition to "effects warfare" continues with the growth of an entire family of allweather precision-guided munitions. The firepower of a future battle force at sea will be so networked that its collective reach will extend across vast distances of the ocean and of adjoining land masses as well.

Standoff precision munitions are the norm in every Navy air wing today, and the result is increased lethality, greater accuracy in all weather conditions, and reduced risk to Navy aircrews.

The real challenge faced by naval aviation today, Navy leaders say, is to sustain current capabilities even as its truly revolutionary transformation continues into the 21 st century. They are in agreement, moreover, that aircraft procurement funding must be significantly -and immediately-increased so that production rates are raised to socalled "economic-order quantities" for replacement aircraft-even as next-generation recapitalization programs like the Joint Strike Fighter move forward.

The last 11 CVBGs to deploy overseas all have gone into combat during their deployments. That stark reality must certainly weigh heavily during the current DOD review of strategy and force structure.