Drone Carriers?
Or escort carriers with better marketing
Turkey's TCG Anadolu sailed in a July parade with the Bayraktar TB-3 and Bayraktar KIZILELMA drones on deck.Emin Sansar/Anadolu via Getty Images
Are Iran and Turkey building drone "carriers". I'm not sure that's accurate. But could the idea be useful for the Navy?
Turkey and Iran say they're building navies capable of projecting power far from their shores, and at the center of these ambitions are motherships for aerial drones.
These regional powers are betting they can build an expendable air force without the massive costs of aircraft carriers, fighter jets and pilots trained to fly them.
As the article notes, Turkey's original plan was for their ship to be more like America, using F-35Bs and helicopters. And while America was criticized for being compromised as a carrier and as an amphibious warfare ship, I disagreed:
America is not both. So calling the design compromised in both missions is wrong. She is optimized for aerial delivery of Marines to the shore because of the proliferation of cheap precision anti-ship missiles makes it too dangerous to approach a shore to deliver ashore by more traditional means.
America can stand over the horizon and launch an assault using helicopters and the new Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft.
That's a rational response to the threat. So it is not compromised as an amphibious ship. It is a different type of amphibious ship.
Nor is the ship compromised as a carrier since that wrongly presumes the ship was designed to be an aircraft carrier like our large Nimitz and new Ford class vessels. America is not a carrier.
America simply has a secondary mission of being a small and greatly inferior carrier if needed by virtue of being an air-centric amphibious vessel.
It would be inefficient to actually build a carrier specifically designed to carry 20 F-35Bs as its main offensive arm.
So this line of attack on the ship is wrong. The America design surely represents a stealth carrier fleet, But it could not and should not replace the large super carriers designed for power projection and sea control missions.
But Turkey’s leader, Erdogan, blew that option.
Indeed (back to the initial article), Turkey's drone carrier plans are an interim step until Turkey develops a plane to operate from the ship along with larger reusable drones:
Turkey developed the Bayraktar TB3 naval drone for the Anadolu and claims the unmanned Kizilelma fighter jet it is developing could also operate from it. Ankara has plans for a second, larger vessel like the Anadolu, which it claims will have even more domestic components.
That is, an escort carrier.
Iran's plan is different and their ships are looking like escort carriers/small boat motherships:
Unlike the Anadolu, which was a purpose-built warship from the start, the Shahid Bagheri is a modified container ship with an angled flight deck added for launching drones. It can also carry helicopters and small fast attack boats.
This is more like our traditional amphibious warfare ships with both a flight deck for aircraft and a well deck for launching and recovering smaller vessels.
Iran doesn’t have plans to put traditional aircraft on the ship. But despite modifying a container ship to build this ship, Iran did not go full AFRICOM Queen, as I wrote about in Military Review for a U.S. power projection platform for AFRICOM by making their ship's capabilities modularized.
I think we could build a lot of ship like that using containers ships as the platform for modularized auxiliary cruisers:
Our Navy defends our nation within the incompatible and unforgiving boundaries formed by the tyrannies of distance and numbers. We struggle to build enough ships both capable of deploying globally and powerful enough for fighting first-rate opponents. Operating within a network-centric Navy, auxiliary cruisers could once again play a valuable role in projecting naval power. Using modular systems installed on civilian hulls, auxiliary cruisers could handle many peacetime roles; free scarce warships for more demanding environments; add combat power within a networked force; and promote the global maritime partnership.
But we’d have to prepare ahead of time and stockpile/surge production of systems in shipping containers as well as identify sailors to operate the ships.
I think that if the the usefulness of this type of ship is based on helicopters and suicide drones you could have ships that look more like the Soviet Union’s old aviation cruisers that combined missiles and aircraft. A modern escort carrier could have a deck for helicopters and reusable drones; plus a lot of traditional missiles and suicide drones in shipping containers.
But for Neptune’s sake, resist the urge to go big and actually recreate the Soviet aviation carrier behemoths. I’m talking a smaller and cheaper version.