Unmanned Carrier Aircraft (UCLASS)

The Navy is working to develop a carrier based, unmanned strike aircraft.  This Unmanned Carrier Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) aircraft would provide long range, stealthy strike capability for use in the Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) scenario.

Before I go any further, let me say this up front - I'm not against UCLASS, at all.  Potentially, they could be very useful.  However, the basic concept as applied to the Chinese A2/AD scenario has some serious challenges to overcome that deserve to be discussed in the face of the Navy’s typical rush to acquisition.  Just as with “littoral” and “AirSea Battle”, I fear that the Navy is latching onto “UCLASS” as another acquisition justification buzzword without adequately exploring the underlying concept. 



UCLASS - The Right Concept?



Let’s take a closer look at the underlying concept.  The Chinese A2/AD zone is visualized as being about 1000 nm out from the mainland.  So, assuming a launch from outside the zone against targets on or deep inside the mainland, an aircraft would need to be able to fly 1000-1500 nm.  Of course, the range of the weapon carried by the aircraft could extend the effective striking range of the UCLASS.  During the course of penetration, the UCLASS would have to pass through many radar zones, hundreds of patrolling aircraft, and hundreds of ground AAA and SAM installations. 



So, we can see that a UCLASS needs extraordinary range, something on the order of a combat radius of 1000-1500 nm.  It will also need highly effective stealth and/or great speed to avoid or outrun threats.  Finally, it would be nice if the payload were greater than one or two weapons.  Having flown many hundreds of miles and evaded hundreds of threats it would be silly to only be able to strike one or two targets.  The risk/reward balance just isn’t there without a much greater payload.  And, lest we’ve forgotten, the UCLASS has to be small enough to fit on a carrier.

The Navy’s current prototype UCLASS is the X-47B Pegasus.  Here’s some of the relevant specifications.

Range (one way) – 2100 nm

Combat Radius (estimated) – 500 nm

Weapons Load – 4500 lb

Speed – subsonic

Cruise – 0.45 mach

Wingspan – 62 ft (31 ft folded)

Comparing the X-47B specs to our desired performance, we can see that the prototype’s combat radius is half to one third of that needed.  Remember, that the A2/AD zone is, essentially, all water.  The targets of interest, aside from the occasional ship, are all on the mainland.  Penetrating half way accomplishes nothing.  Of course, this is a prototype so the range can be increased, right?  Well, yes, but longer range means bigger fuel storage which means a bigger, heavier aircraft and the bigger it is, the harder it’s going to be to operate and fit on a carrier.  The prototype is already larger than an F/A-18E/F Super Hornet (wingspan = 44 ft).  The largest aircraft currently on carriers is the E-2 Hawkeye with a wingspan of 80 ft. 

You may be observing that the range is 2100 nm and thinking that’s a 1050 nm round trip.  That should be plenty of range, right?  You’d be correct except that range is non-combat loaded and assumes a straight line course at the most economical speed and altitude profile.  Adding roundabout waypoints to avoid high threat areas, adding a combat weapons load, and performing evasive or high speed avoidance maneuvers seriously cuts into the range, hence, the estimate of a 500 nm combat radius.  If you don’t believe this, go check out the Hornet’s (or any plane’s) range versus combat radius figures.

Speed is the next obvious deficiency.  A subsonic aircraft (only about 350 kts cruising speed) is going to have a hard time penetrating a thousand mile A2/AD zone and escaping threats along the way.  Let’s be blunt – it can’t.  Unfortunately, there’s a Catch-22 at work, here.  The only way to make the aircraft faster is to increase fuel consumption which decreases the combat radius which leads us right back to having to make a significantly bigger aircraft to carry much more fuel.

Finally, weapons load is extremely light.  The current F/A-18E/F has a weapons capacity of 17,500 lbs which is way bigger than the X-47B’s 4500 lbs.  Again, the only way to increase the payload is to make the aircraft bigger. 

Do you see the trend, here?  The only way to meet the notional requirements for a useful UCLASS is to make it much bigger.  I guess there’s a reason why the B-1 and B-2 deep penetration bombers are so big.

Of course, bigger creates its own set of problems.  The bigger the aircraft, the easier it is to detect.  The bigger the aircraft, the fewer can fit on a carrier.  The bigger the aircraft, the more expensive it is.

Have we left any issues out?  Yes, we have!  How about remote control communications?  Our ability to control UAVs at any distance is currently suspect and at the 1000 + nm ranges that a UCLASS would have to operate, maintaining reliable control communications becomes highly problematic.  In a war, communications satellites and relay nodes will likely be destroyed and heavy jamming will be the norm.  A successful UCLASS will have to overcome those communication challenges.

Closely related to communications is the issue of location awareness.  How will the UCLASS know where it is if GPS satellites go down at the start of conflict as everyone assumes they will?  To be fair, this problem is not unique to the UCLASS but affects every weapon and platform in the US military.  Still, there’s no point penetrating an A2/AD zone if you don’t know precisely where you are. 

I could go on but this serves to illustrate that the basic concept of a long range UCLASS is suspect under the current operating concept and technological capabilities.  A viable UCLASS would need closer to 2000 nm combat radius, much greater stealth or much greater speed to avoid detection/destruction, larger weapons carrying capacity, and reliable control communications over thousands of miles.

Can the Navy get from the initial data point of the X-47B to the desired aircraft?  Possibly, though the challenges are great.  The purpose of this discussion is to point out the magnitude of the challenges and suggest that the Navy not leap into this without addressing the problems and thinking them through.  Failure to do so is what led to the LCS and no one wants to see the flying version of the LCS!

A2/AD Works Both Ways

There has been much hand-wringing and doom-saying lately about potential Chinese (and Iranian and North Korean, to a lesser extent) anti-access / area denial (AA/AD or A2/AD) capabilities.  Supposedly, our carriers have been rendered mere floating targets (odd, though, isn’t it, that China is desperately trying to build a carrier fleet? – hmmm… someone should think about the deeper meaning of that – but, I digress) and the Navy, in general has no hope of approaching Chinese shores.  It certainly seems as if A2/AD will be the decisive military concept of the future and one that the U.S. has little hope of beating. 

Wouldn’t it be something, though, if somehow the tables could be turned and China had to face A2/AD instead of us?  Then they’d have no hope and it would be their carriers that were floating targets.

[I assume you all recognize the sarcasm in the preceeding paragraphs!]





A2/AD Possibilities



Other than invading neighboring countries overland, and that’s certainly possible, China would have to move out from the mainland in order to gain territory (kind of the point of war, generally) such as Taiwan, Philippines, Spratleys, Korea, Japan, Malaysia, etc.  However, examination of a map shows that all of those areas lend themselves to an effective A2/AD defense.  There are many possible chokepoints and restricted operating areas far from the Chinese mainland that Chinese forces would have to pass through in order to occupy any of those lands.  Taiwan, of course, would be the most difficult to apply an A2/AD defense to but the rest would lend themselves quite nicely to it.  Relatively safe bases further away in Korea, Japan, Philippines, New Guinea, and Indonesia would provide anchor points for an A2/AD defense.  Of course, some diplomatic maneuvering would have to be applied to obtain effective basing in some of those areas but it would be worth the effort.

Certainly, the U.S. must give serious thought to dealing with a Chinese A2/AD system.  And while a war can’t be fought on a purely defensive basis, creating a credible A2/AD system throughout the South and East China Seas could be a good way to prevent a war by making the cost too high relative to the potential gains.

AirSea Battle Failings



AirSea Battle Report from the CSBA

Much has been made about the AirSea Battle document produced by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.  For those of you who are only casually familiar with it, the AirSea Battle (ASB) describes the scope and impact of Chinese Anti-Access/Area Denial (AA/AD) capabilities and attempts to provide a battle strategy for countering it.  The document does a fairly nice job of the former by providing a fairly explicit description of Chinese capabilities, objectives, and methods and for this reason alone the ASB is worth reading.  Unfortunately, the ASB fails to deliver on the latter.  The battle strategy is deficient on two counts, one practical and one conceptual. 

Again, for those less familiar with it, the ASB’s strategy envisions a two stage process whereby the Chinese capabilities are sequentially countered and then methodically rolled back during a period of prolonged combat.  The rollback will allow the Navy to operate closer and closer to China (the location of most of the U.S. military objectives, of course) over time.  The rollback phase is deemed necessary since the U.S. military, and Navy in particular, have only limited range weapons and must achieve a certain level of “closeness” in order to employ their weapons.  This is, essentially a war of attrition.

Thus, the ASB’s first failing becomes apparent.  In a war of attrition, the side with the most, wins.  Setting aside the adverse public reaction to a war of attrition and the resulting lack of support, the U.S. military does not have sufficient numbers of planes, ships, weapons, or people to successfully engage in a war of attrition.  While the U.S. may maintain a technological superiority enabling it to achieve a favorable kill ratio, the end result will be depletion of U.S. forces to a point where “victory” becomes impossible. 

The U.S. military has recognized since WWII that mutual attrition is not a desirable strategy.  Every battle doctrine and strategy since then has emphasized selective concentration of forces, maneuver, stand-off engagement, and so forth for the express purpose of achieving victory without mutual attrition.  To return to a strategy of attrition, especially against a numerically superior enemy is both simplistic and impractical.

Besides, what’s the point?  Is the purpose of a rollback strategy of attrition to kill every person in China?  Of course not.  But what, then, is the point of the rollback strategy?  This question reveals the second and most serious failing of the ASB.  It does not define what victory is.  What end result or set of conditions constitutes victory?  A certain number of people killed?  A certain level of degradation of Chinese military capability?  A level of destruction of industrial capability sufficient to ensure that the Chinese military can’t be rebuilt within a given time frame?  A simple return to pre-war boundaries?  What? 

ASB itself seems to recognize its own failing to certain degree with the statement, “As a doctrine for the operational level of war, AirSea Battle should not be seen as a “war-winning” concept in itself.”  Fair enough but if the authors don’t see their own strategy as “war-winning” then what is its purpose?

Without a definition of victory the suggested strategy has no frame of reference against which to measure its value.  This is analogous to describing how to throw a baseball.  Interesting in and of itself but without knowing the context the value is limited.  Is the throwing for the purpose of playing catch in the backyard?  Playing professional baseball?  The answer will determine the intensity of the effort, the amount of time that should be spent learning the skill, and the ultimate degree of skill required.

So, too, with a strategy of rollback.  To what purpose is it being applied?  To what degree and level of completion must it be taken?  If we know the victory conditions we can begin to make assessments of the amount and type of weapons that will be needed.  Without the victory conditions we can only describe vague generalities about warfare – and that is exactly what the ASB winds up doing. 

Now, having criticized the ASB, let me turn around and briefly praise it for what it does well.  It presents a though-provoking description of Chinese objectives, strategies, and weapons.  It’s a good start for a further, serious discussion of the issue.  To be fair to the authors, the title itself recognizes this, “AirSea Battle, A Point-of-Departure Operational Concept”.  Unfortunately, too many people within the Navy seem to believe that ASB is a complete and finished work of strategy.  It’s not and I’m waiting for someone to take the next step and define victory and begin matching strategy and force structure to the victory conditions.  Hmmm…..  sounds like another post about to happen!

For those interested, here's the link to the actual AirSea Battle document.