主题：【原创】美航母的攻击阵位 -- 拿不准

Sitting backwards in a plane with no windows, strapped in a 4-point harness, head encased in a helmet, eyes covered by goggles, your brain can’t process the acceleration. As the C-2 A Greyhound is hurled off an aircraft carrier into the air via a catapult, your body is thrown forward in the air, until a few seconds later, hundreds of feet above the carrier now at 150 miles per hour you yell, “Holy sh*t!” And no one can hear you through the noise, helmet, and ear protectors.

I just spent two days a hundred miles off the coast of Mexico as a guest of the U.S.S. Carl Vinsonwith Pete Newell (my fellow instructor in the Hacking for Defense class) and 11 other Stanford faculty from CISAC and the Hoover Institution. It’s hard to spend time on a carrier and not be impressed with the Navy and the dedicated people who man the carrier and serve their country.

I learned quite a bit about the physical layout of a carrier, how the air crew operates, and how the carrier functions in context of the other ships around it (the strike group). But the biggest lesson I took from our visit was the realization that disruption is not just happening to companies, it’s also happening in the Navy. The lean innovation tools we’ve developed to deal with disruption and create continuous innovation for large commercial organizations are equally relevant to the U.S. Navy.

While there has been a fierce debate over the future of the aircraft carrier, I have a different take. From what I have seen, both of the following statements are true:

1.The aircraft carrier is viable for another 30 years.

2.The aircraft carrier is obsolete.

How can that be?

Well-defended targets?

Among the primary roles of the 44 F/A-18 strike fighters that form the core of the carrier’s air wing is to control the air and drop bombs on enemy targets. For targets over uncontested airspace, that’s pretty easy. The problem is that countries with more capable militaries have developed advanced air defense systems such as the Russian S–300 and S-400 and the Chinese HQ-9 . These formidable systems are extremely effective at shooting down aircraft, including those flown by the U.S. military. They have been selling these systems to other countries, including adversaries like Iran and Syria. While the role of an aircraft carrier’s EA-18G Growlers is to jam and confuse the radar of these missiles, the sophistication and range of these surface-to-air missiles have been evolving faster than the jamming countermeasures on the EA-18G Growlers (and the hacks to shut the radars down).

This means that the odds of a carrier-based F/A-18 strike fighter successfully reaching a target defended by these modern surface-to-air missiles is diminishing yearly. Unless the U.S. military can first take out these systems with missiles, drones, cyber attacks, and other means, skilled pilots are not enough. Given the F/A-18’s are manned aircraft, American political leaders may find the risk of high losses of pilots politically unacceptable.

Vulnerable Carriers

If you want to kill a carrier, first you must find it and then you have to track it. In World War II,knowing where the enemy fleet was located posed was a big — and critical — question. Today, photo imaging satellites, satellites that track electronic emissions (radio, radar, etc.) and satellites with synthetic aperture radar that can see through clouds and at night are able to pinpoint the strike group and carrier 24/7. In the 20th century, only the Soviet Union had this capability. Today, China can do this in the Pacific. To a more limited extent, Iran in has the capability in the Persian Gulf. Soon there will be enough commercial satellite coverage of the Earth using the same sensors, that virtually anyone able to pay for the data will be able to track the ships.

During the Cold War, the primary threat to carriers was from the air — from strike/fighters dropping bombs/torpedoes or from cruise missiles (launched from ships and planes). While the Soviets had attack submarines, our anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) capabilities (along with very noisy Soviet subs pre-Walker spy ring) made subs a secondary threat to carriers.

In the 20th century, the war plan for a carrier strike group used the F/A-18 aircraft and Tomahawks to destroy enemy radar, surface-to-air missiles, aircraft, and communications (including satellite downlinks). As those threats are eliminated, the carrier strike can move closer to land without fear of attack. This allows the aircraft to loiter longer over targets or extend their reach over enemy territory.

Carriers were designed to be most effective launching a high number of sorties from about 225 miles away from the target. This allows us to, for example cruise offshore of potential adversaries (Iraq and Syria) who can’t get to our carriers. Carriers can standoff farther or can reach further inland, but they have to launch refueling tankers to extend the mission range. For example, missions into Afghanistan are six to eight hours versus normal mission times of two to three hours.

Confronting better equipped adversaries, carriers face multiple threats before they can launch an initial strike. These threats include much quieter submarines, long-range, sea-skimming cruise missiles, and — in the Pacific — a potential disruptive game changer: ICBMs armed with non-nuclear maneuverable warheads that can hit a carrier deck (DF-21d and the longer range DF-26). In the Persian Gulf the carriers face another threat — Fast Inshore Attack Craft (FIAC) and speedboats with anti-ship cruise missiles that can be launched from shore.

The sum of all these threats — to the carrier-based aircraft and the carriers themselves — are called anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities.

Eventually the cost and probability of defending the carrier as a manned aircraft platform becomes untenable in highly defended A2/AD environments like the western Pacific or the Persian Gulf. (This seems to be exactly the problem the manned bomber folks are facing in multiple regions.) But if not a carrier, what will the United States use to project power? While the carrier might become obsolete, the mission certainly has not.

So how does/should the Navy solve these problems?

Three Horizons of Innovation?

One useful way to think about innovation in the face of increasing disruption/competition is called the “Three Horizons of Innovation.” It suggests that an organization should think about innovation across three categories called “Horizons.”

?Horizon 1 activities support executing theexisting, core mission with ever increasing efficiency.

?Horizon 2 is focused on extendingthe core mission.

?Horizon 3 is focused on searching for and creatingbrand new missions.

Horizon 1 is the Navy’s core mission. Here the Navy executes against a set of known mission requirements (known beneficiaries, known ships and planes, known adversaries, deployment, supply chain, etc.). It uses existing capabilities and has comparatively low risk to get the next improvement out the door.

In a well-run organization like the Navy, innovation and improvement occurcontinuously in Horizon 1. Branches of the Navy innovate on new equipment, new tactics, new procurement processes, new procedures, etc. As pilots want more capable manned aircraft and carrier captains want better carriers, it’s not a surprise that Horizon 1 innovations are upgrades — the next generationFord Class carrier and next generation F-35C aircraft. As a failure here can impact the Navy’s current mission, Horizon 1 uses traditional product management tools to minimize risk and assure execution. And yes, like any complex project they still manage to be over budget and miss their delivery schedule.

Because failure here is unacceptable, Navy Horizon 1 programs and people are managed by building repeatable and scalable processes, procedures, incentives, and promotions to execute and the mission.

In Horizon 2, the Navy extends its core mission. Here it looks for new opportunities within its existing mission (trying new technology on the same platform, using the same technology with new missions, etc.). Horizon 2 uses mostly existing capabilities (the carrier as an aircraft platform, aircraft to deliver munitions) and has moderate risk in building or securing new capabilities to get the product out the door.

An example of potential Naval Horizon 2 innovations is unmanned drones flying off carriers to serve as as airborne tankers and ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance). However, getting the tanker and ISR functions onto drones only delays the inevitable shift to drones for strike and then for fighters.

The problem of strike fighters’ increasing difficulty in penetrating heavily defended targets isn’t going to get better with the new F-35C. In fact, it will get worse. Regardless of the bravery and skill of the pilots, they will face air defense systems evolving at a faster rate than the systems on the aircraft. It’s not at all clear in a low-intensity conflict (think Bosnia or the fight against jihadist groups in Syria) that civilian leadership will want to risk captured or killed pilots and losing expensive planes like the F-35C.

Management in Horizon 2 works by pattern recognition and experimentation inside the current mission model. Ironically, institutional inertia keeps the Navy from deploying unmanned assets on carriers. Drones in carrier tanker and ISR roles should have been deployed several years ago. And, by now, experience with them on a carrier deck could have led to first, autonomous wingmen and eventually autonomous missions. Instead the system appears to have fallen into the “real men fly planes and command air wings and get promoted by others who do” mindset.