News Story: Carriers Crucial In War With China – But Air Wing Is All Wrong - Hudson

USS Gerald R. Ford (Image: Wiki Commons)

By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.

WASHINGTON: At $4.7 billion over budget, Ford-class aircraft carriers have taken a beating in Congress. This morning, though, the House Seapower subcommittee chairman will roll out a report from the conservative Hudson Institute that’s a ringing defense of the carrier — but which also contains a stinging indictment of the aircraft that fly from it. The report calls for upgrading current multi-mission planes for longer range and building multiple new types of more specialized aircraft, potentially including two different models of UCLASS drone.

Nuclear-powered super-carriers are irreplaceable, co-author Bryan McGrath told me, and theFord is a good design. But, he said, “the air wing will have to be completely rethought…to win and deter the war we cannot lose.”

That’s also the war we often dare not name: a war with China. “What bothered me was the degree to which there was a self-evident, high-end argument that was not getting made by the Navy,” McGrath said. “So I, with my partners at Hudson, said, ‘we’re going to have to do this for them.'”

Read the full story at BreakingDefense