This is a discussion on A hypothetical carrier buy for the RAN? within the Navy & Maritime forum, part of the Global Defense & Military category; Originally Posted by Kirkzzy
I sorta agree with you here except for the fact that as a deterrent an Aussie ...
I sorta agree with you here except for the fact that as a deterrent an Aussie carrier wouldn't be that formidable as it would most likely only be a light carrier unfortunately.
true but, 12-18 aircraft, especially F-35 would be a formidable force to all but the most advanced militarys.
Imagine a conflict somewhere, not only in the pacific region where australian forces are deployed, and there hostiles forces waiting to attack facilities, convoys, patrolling forces, etc, then imagine an attack on something and:
-if you already have a couple of F35 in air in the moment of the attack, you send the jet over the hot zone, as it is already in air in a minute it will be over the hot zone, and identifies the elements in the attack, the jet is been
told what hostile vehicles left the attack and so identifies them and track them enough for ground forces and helos to be directed against them..etc.
-if you just have helos, you wont be in "a minute" over the hot zone, and maybe it wont arrive to identify the hostile vehicles and wont be possible to direct the ground forces.
Is it possible that difference between the jet and the helo? Yes compared speed of 200 kms/h with 1200 kms/h, compared the range of 200 kms with 600 kms for example, so that with an helo you can asisst just like 100 kms away from the ship because the helo has to return to refuel (+2 hours endurance) while the jet can assist at 400 kms away from the ship (and even with external tanks maybe 4 hours endurance). Will ever Australian or allied forces want to go further inland? Is potential.
-if you just have helos, you wont be in "a minute" over the hot zone, and maybe it wont arrive to identify the hostile vehicles and wont be possible to direct the ground forces.
a little bit of reality is needed here
fast jets DON'T do FAC
doctrine doesn't support jets doing battlefield C2 - thats the command assets role
all aircraft are under the command of the C2 asset in theatre - ie the fatship - if the C2 asset can't "see" them electronically then they can;t and won't be deployed beyond LOS - welcome to the current Tiger problems.
NOTE
this thread is seriously hitting the point where it needs administrative euthenasia.
it needs to pick up and get out of wally world real soon...
________________ A corollary of Finagle's Law, similar to Occam's Razor, says:
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"
doctrine doesn't support jets doing battlefield C2 - thats the command assets role
all aircraft are under the command of the C2 asset in theatre - ie the fatship - if the C2 asset can't "see" them electronically then they can;t and won't be deployed beyond LOS - welcome to the current Tiger problems.
NOTE
this thread is seriously hitting the point where it needs administrative euthenasia.
it needs to pick up and get out of wally world real soon...
Aussienscale asked for potential situations that could make the Ran change the doctrine to adopt jets.
I don´t understand the term "FAC", but i understand that you say jets don´t do C2 in battlefield, or that ranges are out of the electronics of the fatship. But F35 have satcom and of course radio comm and datalink, and the Awd has the Spy with 600 kms range. And is a jet specially for the conjunction of info and easy for the pilot. With external tanks probably 4 hours endurance almost twice an helo, which gives flexibility.
That battlefield can be a low med intensity scenarios anyway, and that is what i was seeking to say, actually in today´s deployement Ran´s perspective´some jets can help.
And for sea its the same, your helo won´t arrive to catch the pirate boat that is 400 kms away of the fatship, because is 200 kms/h speed, while the jet will do it and identify the pirates and with the 4 hour endurance even it will track it into land and photograph the people.
AEGIS only works out to the horizon, it also cannot see through mountains. So even if it can theoretically see out to 600km, at that range it could only spot targets at a fairly high altitude due to the curvature of the earth.
External tanks remove the advantage of Stealth. In addition, with only 8-12 Aircraft (which would reduce the helicopter and troop levels significantly) only probably 2 aircraft could be in the air at a time if you kept a 24/7 CAP up. This would also leave minimal ability to reinforce the airborne aircraft if required.
Of course if you did this the ship would be almost constantly alongside a replenishment ship unless alternate arrangements are made for fuel and weapons storage, arrangements that would further limit the already reduced troop carrying capacity of the ships.
Pretty soon you'll have ships that carry a small number of F-35's, a small number of troops and are incapable of carrying out the role they are being carried to fullfill.
Tanker and AEW&C supported landbased F-35 and F-18F should be able to provide any Aircover required by the RAN within our region. Outside of our region we do not and will not in the near future have the capacity to operate in a war without the outside aid of a major ally such as the united states. The purchase of a couple of dozen F-35B's would be unlikely to change the equation.
Using an F-35B to track pirates would be massive overkill. Using small unmanned long endurance UAV's launched from the Ski Jump would be much more likely.
In the big overall picture, Australia has a significant land-sea-air gap surrounding their island continent... The narrowest gap is with Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, the north... Australia's defense should and does concentrate on defending that land-sea-air gap... Probably the largest threat to that land-air-sea gap is the growth of long range ballistic missiles....
I don't see a few aircraft of the B version of the JSF as being of much use in defending a threat from long range ballistic missiles, much less the land-sea-air gap... Priorities lie elsewhere...
AEGIS only works out to the horizon, it also cannot see through mountains. So even if it can theoretically see out to 600km, at that range it could only spot targets at a fairly high altitude due to the curvature of the earth.
The same curvature applies for the radio comm, but not for the Satcom.
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External tanks remove the advantage of Stealth. In addition, with only 8-12 Aircraft (which would reduce the helicopter and troop levels significantly) only probably 2 aircraft could be in the air at a time if you kept a 24/7 CAP up. This would also leave minimal ability to reinforce the airborne aircraft if required.
Maybe you don´t need a 24/7 presence, but 12 hours out of 24 per day, or maybe just need to have a jet runway free permanently for inmediate launches when needed instead having it all the 12 or 24 hours in air.
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Of course if you did this the ship would be almost constantly alongside a replenishment ship unless alternate arrangements are made for fuel and weapons storage, arrangements that would further limit the already reduced troop carrying capacity of the ships.
Pretty soon you'll have ships that carry a small number of F-35's, a small number of troops and are incapable of carrying out the role they are being carried to fullfill.
Well the air complement crew for the Canberras in helo carrier mode it was like 170-200 people, together with the sailors that are like 250, and still have room for +900 soldiers, and some flag staff.
Those 170-200 air crew is distributed along what it carries, the more helos you carry the more crew, you´ve need crew for helos as you do for jets and probably in similar numbers or even more crew attached to the helos than jets need (more pilots, more asw/aew operators).
Important: If the hypothetical light aircraft carrier was to be a moded Canberra, it has room for spares, it has room for maintance upto level 2 (?!) and it has also the whole heavy deck to make the most of it in terms of spares, uavs, containarized bombs (like the Royal Navy did in Falklands) or vehicles or amphibious.
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Tanker and AEW&C supported landbased F-35 and F-18F should be able to provide any Aircover required by the RAN within our region. Outside of our region we do not and will not in the near future have the capacity to operate in a war without the outside aid of a major ally such as the united states. The purchase of a couple of dozen F-35B's would be unlikely to change the equation.
Using an F-35B to track pirates would be massive overkill. Using small unmanned long endurance UAV's launched from the Ski Jump would be much more likely
Don´t trust the tankers are going to be deployed far away risk free, as Saswanabe said they are easy targets, so in case of high intensity scenarios you migh think its safer to have jets from inside the Awd bubble. Many people here have already made comparisons stating that a carreir is more efective, is faster, more flexible, etc, i remember Weasel and Abraham, so their replies are somewhere in this thread.
They are sending militar frigates with the helos to try to hunt the pirates in Somalia. There quite a few frigates and Orions P3 in round Somalian coast etc.
I recall in the Yugoslavian context, as far i remember it has been the only time where the Principe de Asturias had to do real job sorties for gathering info, it didn´t release any bomb i think. Imagine a blockade of some zone in the world, Ran could contribute massively with the jets.
I don't think you understand the present realities in American politics... The tea party republicans have won the new Congress... There will be more defense cuts coming this year, the tea cups are not finished with their knife by any means... The following link reveals how much long standing defense hawks are worried...
Presently, the largest defense program which will draw the most interest is the JSF... The tea party republicans promised $100 billion in cuts this year in the overall budget, and they haven't reached that number yet... Any program facing significant delays and budget increases have a sharp hill to climb to survive...
When the present Speaker of the House can't deliver bacon to his own home district with a major defense program, the GE F-136 jet engine, don't expect other defense programs to survive uncut...
As one of those Tea Party supporters I think it is necessary add little clarification. To the members of the board that are not US citizens you may not realize that within our federal system, most of the services that most people relay upon from their government (normal government) and the laws the we live by, day by day, are in our system provided by the various States and not by the federal government. This is not true in most countries which have far more centralized control of these functions than is found in the USA. The problem with our Federal budget is structural and they are as a direct result of the Federal government trying to do things on the social welfare front which are not part of its primary duties. The federal government needs to do (to concentrate) what only the federal government can only do, things like Defense as just one example and get out of the social engineering business.
To get our finances under control will require a paring back of the federal government which can only be done if everybody takes a hit. Something which we can afford to do right now for we have sufficient power at the moment as long as it is only temporary. Even in defense for a while, so we can fix the long term problems and restructure the balance of power and responsibilities between the federal government and the States to where they belong. Afterward we can then give the military the resource that it needs. If we don’t, long term we will go broke that is far worse.
Well the air complement crew for the Canberras in helo carrier mode it was like 170-200 people, together with the sailors that are like 250, and still have room for +900 soldiers, and some flag staff.
Those 170-200 air crew is distributed along what it carries, the more helos you carry the more crew, you´ve need crew for helos as you do for jets and probably in similar numbers or even more crew attached to the helos than jets need (more pilots, more asw/aew operators).
Important: If the hypothetical light aircraft carrier was to be a moded Canberra, it has room for spares, it has room for maintance upto level 2 (?!) and it has also the whole heavy deck to make the most of it in terms of spares, uavs, containarized bombs (like the Royal Navy did in Falklands) or vehicles or amphibious.
Jaimito, we are well past the Canberra debate, it is not suitable and would need all but a total re-design to become an effective STOVL carrier. Although this is a hypothetical thread, we are trying to keep it within the actual realm of possibility, while everyone is free to put forward their own point of view (within reason) this type of talk is going to result in the closing of the thread !
In the big overall picture, Australia has a significant land-sea-air gap surrounding their island continent... The narrowest gap is with Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, the north... Australia's defense should and does concentrate on defending that land-sea-air gap... Probably the largest threat to that land-air-sea gap is the growth of long range ballistic missiles....
This is NOT Australia’s defence strategy. It was briefly during the 1980s and 1990s for rather unrealistic reasons. The defence strategy of Australia is laid out in our White Paper documents and is like most countries without direct threats of invasion (like the USA) about maintaining global security. In our case this global security role is focused on our immediate region (South East Asia and the South West Pacific) and contiguous zones of high sensitivity (Middle East and East Asia).
The role of the Navy is to provide expeditionary task groups for sea and littoral control, to support amphibious landings and deploy strategic effects via submarines. The Navy is not there to DEFEND the sea borders of Australia but it does play a major role in POLICING these borders (a big difference).
In order to improve the lethality and survivability of these surface task groups the Navy has programs underway to acquire missile based maritime strike and extended range air defence. These are roles that are usually the domain of a naval aircraft carrier and its air wing. While the missiles (TLAM, SM6, etc) can provide these roles in limited capacity a carrier would be more effective but of course more expensive. The case for a carrier is caught up in cost-benefit analysis of the threat level and the ability to spend money on weapons acquisitions.
