New Jeep Aircraft Carriers?

If the USN was interersted in building affordable ships then it would have done so, even the so called affordable ship project; LCS is gold plated and massively over budget.

Agreed and I am not personally a fan of the project…….

With the greatest of respect that is just your opinion, and let’s be honest this is just an exercise in Fantasy Fleets done for your own amusement without any actual real world need.

Clearly, I don’t see such a project happening. Yet, I do believe there is a need.

The truth of the matter is that the USN has a carrier fleet that is many, many times the size of the rest of the worlds combined, and unless there is some sort of escalation of rivalry with a peer then there is no need to reverse the reductions that have been made since the end of the Cold War.

The USN/USMC is the biggest in the world no doubt. Yet, even so many scenario it could still come up short.

Yet, it would cost more than a similar sized Merchant Ship

Odd statement. “Merchant Ship” doesn’t really exist as that. You have container ships, bulk carriers(cheapo), VLCCs (90-100million), LNG carriers (200-300 million), Cruise ships at any price up to 500 million and more etc. and of course RoRos and other types, all at the size of an LPD/LHD and bigger. Depending on construction suitability “cheap” is still relative, above prices are from Chinese and Korean yards, if you’d want to build them in US, they’ll cost considerably more. All in all and it has been mentioned before about LCS, you’re likely to end up with something not nearly as cheap/affordable (affordable is anyway very relative) as you wanted, yet a lot less capable than a decent carrier. As mentioned by Kev as well, USN has plenty of decent carriers, if they are about to do a landing, there will be at least one real carrier around.

Oh, I guess you haven’t been reading the budget short falls projected for the next few years.

If the USN was interersted in building affordable ships then it would have done so, even the so called affordable ship project; LCS is gold plated and massively over budget.

Your wrong……..

With the greatest of respect that is just your opinion, and let’s be honest this is just an exercise in Fantasy Fleets done for your own amusement without any actual real world need.

The truth of the matter is that the USN has a carrier fleet that is many, many times the size of the rest of the worlds combined, and unless there is some sort of escalation of rivalry with a peer then there is no need to reverse the reductions that have been made since the end of the Cold War.

That isn’t strictly true though is it, they only NORMALLY operate with 6 Harriers, they have operated in a sea control configuration with considerably more than that.

That is true but it hard to support many more than 6 for any period except for the brand new USS America.

Do you mean you “wouldn’t say cheap”?

I mean it wouldn’t cost anything close to a New LHA/LHD. Yet, it would cost more than a similar sized Merchant Ship.

While the USN may pay lip service to the word affordable I’d say deep down it isn’t really one of their primary concerns.

Oh, I guess you haven’t been reading the budget short falls projected for the next few years.

Right so, this is an exercise in providing more airpower for the only navy in the world with a significant fleet of aircraft carriers and LPDs, for what purpose? the USN doesn’t need them.

Your wrong……..

The USN Navy only operate 6 Harriers or F-35B’s from its LHA/LHD’s and only part of that fleet would be available at any given time. So, with a fleet of 340 F-35B’s in USMC Service numbers is hardly a problem.

That isn’t strictly true though is it, they only NORMALLY operate with 6 Harriers, they have operated in a sea control configuration with considerably more than that.

I would say “cheap” more like affordable!

Do you mean you “wouldn’t say cheap”?

While the USN may pay lip service to the word affordable I’d say deep down it isn’t really one of their primary concerns.

It would likely be only operated my the USN. Yet, Allied F-35B’s could operate from it to support Allied Operations.

Right so, this is an exercise in providing more airpower for the only navy in the world with a significant fleet of aircraft carriers and LPDs, for what purpose? the USN doesn’t need them.

Putting expensive aircraft on a cheap ship sounds more than a bit daft, especially as no navy in the world apart from the US seems to have an excess of them, they have enough to fill their existing carriers and that’s about it.

The USN Navy only operate 6 Harriers or F-35B’s from its LHA/LHD’s and only part of that fleet would be available at any given time. So, with a fleet of 340 F-35B’s in USMC Service numbers is hardly a problem.

If a country was involved in a long drawn out industrial war (like WWII) then I could see the point in this but certainly not otherwise.

You have a right to your opinion. I disagree….respectfully

This just sounds like an excercise in making aircraft carriers as cheap as possible, which seems pointless, aircraft carriers are capital ships and they are expensive for a reason.

I would say “cheap” more like affordable!

All in all it sounds like what you’re after would be an existing (non-US) LPD/LPH design with a ski-jump on it, but the US wouldn’t be interested in such a cheap and cheerful ship and non of the other Navies have got a large enough pool of aircraft to warrant it.

It would likely be only operated my the USN. Yet, Allied F-35B’s could operate from it to support Allied Operations.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think Ocean isn’t even capable of operating Harriers. That probably has a reason that her deck isn’t up to that. Which means that if you were to build a ship like her, capable of Harrier/F-35B operation, your looking at a serious extra cost (and perhaps stability issue).

HMS Ocean has been quoted as being able to carry Harriers in the ‘ferry role’, from that I suspect it can carry then but isn’t really up to the job of operating them effectively.

Wiki gives this: Prior to their retirement, Ocean could transport up to 15 fixed wing Harrier[4] aircraft of Joint Force Harrier in the ferry role, but was unable to operate as a fixed wing aircraft carrier due to her lack of the ‘ski jump’ that is needed to launch a fully loaded Harrier.

The Jeep Carrier would be with the Amphibious Groups and would share the same protection. As for the design it would like something similar to the HMS Ocean. Which, really would a combined Commercial/Military Design.

HMS Ocean cost around 360million USD, hardly cheap and certainly not suited for pre positioning without crew. She was not at all Commercial. The only commercial element is that she was built to Classification Society Rules, but these are not commercial rules, they were specially developped for the military. They chose to involve Classification Societies since that’s where experience is kept, while real warship designing capabilities are generally lost nowadays due to the long survival of existing classes aka shortage of new orders and designs.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think Ocean isn’t even capable of operating Harriers. That probably has a reason that her deck isn’t up to that. Which means that if you were to build a ship like her, capable of Harrier/F-35B operation, your looking at a serious extra cost (and perhaps stability issue).

Designing from the ground up is automatically expensive. Buy 1 container ship from the 1 million built in South Korea or China and it’ll be cheap. Buy 1 container ship out of 1 million and ask for a different radar and some additional sensors and it becomes a lot more expensive (if allowed at all, sometimes it’s even better to get it delivered with original fit, then immediately put it in the next available dry dock or yard and change it there).
Same counts for US, when in Europe or US you change something it means more man hours in redesigning and as you and me know, these are expensive man hours. So any ship designed from bottom up, will be expensive. It’s not the steel, it’s the design.

As for the Cavour and/or Juan Carlos being better I think your missing the point. As my proposed Jeep Carrier would be far less expensive to own and operate.

Not missing the point, I know they are a lot more expensive, they are also (hopefully 😉 ) more capable. That’s what I meant with my point. If you can afford to own any of these ships, which are truly military, you’d send those as air support in a conflict and you wouldn’t spend additional money, no matter how much, on spare ships for lay-up in some port. I believe that money would be better spent on more aircraft then.

As its loss had more to do with the lack of adequate protect from its escorts. Which, by the way suffered the same fate. Even being designed as Warships! So, that argument is very weak to say the least.

Not really, you have to take in account that your escorts can fail. Following your logic, a CVN is untouchable since it has a bunch of escorts around it. In reality there wouldn’t be so much fuss around it if it was like that. Agree for USN it’s easy, they can beef up the number of escorts if necessary. That still doesn’t guarantee that no missile will get through and if that happens, I’m pretty sure any carrier will have a larger chance of survival/retained operations than the Jeep Carrier. That is what Conveyor proved. If escorts don’t make it, something like the Conveyor is a very vulnerable ship.
As for its escort, a larger ship has more spare buoyancy and if properly compartmentalised it is therefore more survivable than any small escort ship (or vice versa as is the case here)

All in all I’m pretty sure some navies with small or declining budgets (like RN) have gone through this exercise and I’m pretty sure they came to the same conclusion. If HMS Ocean was feasable as a carrier, for the same or a similar price, I’m pretty sure they would have built more of them and canceled the QE class. But they didn’t… And that brings us to Jonesy’s topic I guess.

Putting expensive aircraft on a cheap ship sounds more than a bit daft, especially as no navy in the world apart from the US seems to have an excess of them, they have enought to fill their existing carriers and that’s about it.

If a country was involved in a long drawn out industrial war (like WWII) then I could see the point in this but certainly not otherwise.

This just sounds like an excercise in making aircraft carriers as cheap as possible, which seems pointless, aircraft carriers are capital ships and they are expensive for a reason.

All in all it sounds like what you’re after would be an existing (non-US) LPD/LPH design with a ski-jump on it, but the US wouldn’t be interested in such a cheap and cheerful ship and non of the other Navies have got a large enough pool of aircraft to warrant it.

The Jeep Carrier would be with the Amphibious Groups and would share the same protection. As for the design it would like something similar to the HMS Ocean. Which, really would a combined Commercial/Military Design.

As for the Cavour and/or Juan Carlos being better I think your missing the point. As my proposed Jeep Carrier would be far less expensive to own and operate. Plus, its loss would be as nearly as critical. Also, as you long as you included HMS Ocean. My Jeep Carrier could be very similar. It would of course be designed with a large single hanger deck to accommodate anything from F-35B’s to CH-53’s.

It would not likely be a conversion of an existing commercial ship. It would be new ground up. Plus, the Conveyor is hardly a good example. As its loss had more to do with the lack of adequate protect from its escorts. Which, by the way suffered the same fate. Even being designed as Warships! So, that argument is very weak to say the least.

True the ship is not very well protected. Yet, in any likely scenario it would have very powerful escorts nearby. Plus, don’t forget the Aircraft it would carry would also provide a far amount of protection. As a matter of fact the HMS Ocean and FNS Mistral aren’t heavily armed. So, I don’t see what the big issue is with my proposed “Jeep Carrier” ???

Ok, you have escorts nearby, but during transfer are you going to stick your escort(s) with the JC? It’s going to take up some escorts which would have better use being with your amphibious group.
The aircraft are giving protection, but that only counts when you have enough of them. In addition, if you want to keep the ship cheap, it won’t have catapults, which means vertical take-off and therefor loss in range. Putting a higher number of planes onboard again brings the question whether you want to risk putting many expensive planes on a weak target.
Ocean and Mistral are lightly armed, yet they have a much higher constructional integrity/compartmentalisation than any commercial design.
The design you are looking for is either a RoRo or a Container ship hull, both of these are cheap, yet empty boxes and very vulnerable to damage and stability issues. Adapting those hulls for aircraft ops will be costly.

So in my opinion, for what it’s worth, is that you better go with something like Ocean/Cavour/Juan Carlos or slightly larger. It’s more costly, but for any Navy engaged in a conflict which necessitates an Amphibious landing on a hostile shore, it will justify and pay-off sending in their main carrier rather than keeping that carrier at home and sending some pre-positioned ship (actually apart from US, almost no navy has a place to pre-position ships).
The unlikeliness of such events (where a smaller, say European, Navy would have to land on a rather strongly defended beach), doesn’t really justify the spending of money into such an idea.

And although I kept it out of the discussion, the Atlantic Conveyor story sort of shows what happens to converted merchant ships when they are hit. Of course I do see your point that your conversion would be much more extensive and have the JC operate more planes than the old Conveyor.

And which ones would those be? So you mean they have jeep carriers around? Never heard of that…
Anyway, “similar ships sail the seven seas every day”, do you follow the news about merchant ships? Have you seen how many problems they are experiencing, just by looking at the cruiseships that break down you can see they have a serious reliability issue and that is just the tip of the iceberg.

I mean the USN has a number of ships currently in its prepositioned fleets. With a number of them could be use as a bases for the ship I am talking about.

http://www.msc.navy.mil/mpstwo/

Not entirely sure if I’m following you here. What would be your starting point? USN? Or generic? (not offensively meant, just asking 😉 )
As for USN, once you are involved in an Amphibious landing, that means you have a serious conflict, that means you’ll send or divert a real CVN group to cover your ops. If not, why do they keep all those CVNs around? Once it gets really hot, they are sent in just to be sure.
For Navies that don’t have a CVN, they are most likely to operate something of a carrier, some European Navies come to mind like Spain and Italy, they do have something to cover such an operation and I’m sure they would be involved. Those ships, Cavour or Juan Carlos are military and hence a lot more expensive than a jeep carrier.
True, in the latter scenario a Jeep carrier (although it can only be called like that in a construction related context, not a task-related one), would come in handy to augment forces, under the umbrella of other ships. However these smaller navies are cash-strapped and hence the budget for keeping such ships around would be much more difficult to have than for US. In US a couple of million dollars is not a problem, for many navies it is.
It does still bring the consequence of being a soft target. In any USN operation, the carrier would be the main target, in this case it will be of course the amphibious ships, but also the Jeep carrier and I think a CVN is a lot more up to that task than any Jeep Carrier, if a determined attack is occuring.
‘Cheap’ has never worked in a war and I doubt it’ll work anytime soon. If you look at what happened to some Jeep Carriers in WWII..

True the ship is not very well protected. Yet, in any likely scenario it would have very powerful escorts nearby. Plus, don’t forget the Aircraft it would carry would also provide a far amount of protection. As a matter of fact the HMS Ocean and FNS Mistral aren’t heavily armed. So, I don’t see what the big issue is with my proposed “Jeep Carrier” ???

Nonetheless, let’s review my concept in case you aren’t getting what I am proposing. I am saying for the USN (or other Navies) to construct a simple Light Carrier (Jeep) based on an existing Commercial or Naval Transport Design. Such a shipper would incorporate the basic hull and power plant. Such a ship doesn’t need to be fast (~20 knot) nor heavily armed.

Funny, the USN has a whole fleet of very similar ships prepositioned everyday. So, clearly its nor breaking the budget nor of little value. In addition the ship would be highly reliable because of its simple design. Simliar ships sail the seven sea every day.

And which ones would those be? So you mean they have jeep carriers around? Never heard of that…
Anyway, “similar ships sail the seven seas every day”, do you follow the news about merchant ships? Have you seen how many problems they are experiencing, just by looking at the cruiseships that break down you can see they have a serious reliability issue and that is just the tip of the iceberg.

The ship would be very flexible and could operate in a number of roles. Yet, my guess such a ship would be best suited to provide additional air support to Amphibious Action Groups. During which they could provide F-35’s, Ospreys, and Helicopters to supplement such types operating from LHA’s, LHD’s, and LPD’s. The vast size of the ships could also carry a large selection of munitions. Which, would be highly valuable as Amphisious Ships are somewhat limited. As much space in needed for the vast number of troops they carry.

Not entirely sure if I’m following you here. What would be your starting point? USN? Or generic? (not offensively meant, just asking 😉 )
As for USN, once you are involved in an Amphibious landing, that means you have a serious conflict, that means you’ll send or divert a real CVN group to cover your ops. If not, why do they keep all those CVNs around? Once it gets really hot, they are sent in just to be sure.
For Navies that don’t have a CVN, they are most likely to operate something of a carrier, some European Navies come to mind like Spain and Italy, they do have something to cover such an operation and I’m sure they would be involved. Those ships, Cavour or Juan Carlos are military and hence a lot more expensive than a jeep carrier.
True, in the latter scenario a Jeep carrier (although it can only be called like that in a construction related context, not a task-related one), would come in handy to augment forces, under the umbrella of other ships. However these smaller navies are cash-strapped and hence the budget for keeping such ships around would be much more difficult to have than for US. In US a couple of million dollars is not a problem, for many navies it is.
It does still bring the consequence of being a soft target. In any USN operation, the carrier would be the main target, in this case it will be of course the amphibious ships, but also the Jeep carrier and I think a CVN is a lot more up to that task than any Jeep Carrier, if a determined attack is occuring.
‘Cheap’ has never worked in a war and I doubt it’ll work anytime soon. If you look at what happened to some Jeep Carriers in WWII…

The USN’s Littoral Combat Ship started as a cheap ship based on commercial construction practices. But those at NAVSEA who originally agreed to the concept rotated out to other assignments and their replacements would have none of it. The LCS had to be built to full-blown USN ship building standards, causing extensive redesign, cost overruns and schedule slips. Congress was aghast when the price doubled. Of course, NAVSEA blamed both contractor teams instead of admitting to massive requirements creep.

The bottom line, no jeep carrier will be cheap when NAVSEA is involved.

That is your opinion…….

And you think that because it has “commercial” on it, that it’ll be cheap? Perhaps cheap compared to upkeep of military vessels but that’s mainly because military vessels have huge crews. If you’d toss them alongside without any crew onboard, they’d be equally cheap.
Anyway you simply can’t put ships alongside and store them there. No maintenance needed is simply a dream, I don’t think that current merchant ships are required to move their lifeboats from stowed position, test the Emergency generator, alarms and so and so on every week because it’s for fun… No, it’s because it’s necessary in order to see if it’s working and do maintenance when needed. Building a couple of cheap ships and putting them alongside in some port is a dream because there is very little guarantee that they’ll actually work when needed.
And the moment you start testing and maintaining it’ll end up being costly again.
The original Jeep Carriers were an emergency measure, they weren’t meant for long term storage and spare capacity when needed.

This however is not a major point as it’s just money not practical thinking from a military point of view (and I do think that that is your original question).

From a military point of view I stay with my point that they’re not survivable and would become a target. In the past, with some 8 Swordfish and 6 or so Martlets/Wildcats they were expendable, since there were 1,000s of these planes built and in operation. In today’s environment it’s pretty unlikely that there will be 1,000s of F-35s etc. around. Putting them on a soft target (merchant standard means a survivability with the two largest adjacent compartments flooded, anything more is very risky) is not a good plan. Losing even 10 of these planes means a serious dent, certainly for any Navy other than USN.
Mission killing something built to commercial standard will even be easier. Reliability is also low with a single prop and rudder.
Agreed you can make more compartments to make it more survivable, but then again it becomes more expensive and the need for it (when you already operate Nimitz/Ford) is limited. Still the question where you’ll get the crew for them too, they do have to stay trained on these specific ships too.

So I guess in some context the idea could be useful, but I’m pretty sure that the context is that limited that it’s not worth the investment.

Funny, the USN has a whole fleet of very similar ships prepositioned everyday. So, clearly its nor breaking the budget nor of little value. In addition the ship would be highly reliable because of its simple design. Simliar ships sail the seven sea every day.

The ship would be very flexible and could operate in a number of roles. Yet, my guess such a ship would be best suited to provide additional air support to Amphibious Action Groups. During which they could provide F-35’s, Ospreys, and Helicopters to supplement such types operating from LHA’s, LHD’s, and LPD’s. The vast size of the ships could also carry a large selection of munitions. Which, would be highly valuable as Amphisious Ships are somewhat limited. As much space in needed for the vast number of troops they carry.

As for the ship itself. It would be armed with point defense weapons like the CIWS and/or SeaRAM. As the overall defense would come from supporting Surface Ships. Which, would likely include Aegis Destroyers and LCS’s.

The USN’s Littoral Combat Ship started as a cheap ship based on commercial construction practices. But those at NAVSEA who originally agreed to the concept rotated out to other assignments and their replacements would have none of it. The LCS had to be built to full-blown USN ship building standards, causing extensive redesign, cost overruns and schedule slips. Congress was aghast when the price doubled. Of course, NAVSEA blamed both contractor teams instead of admitting to massive requirements creep.

The bottom line, no jeep carrier will be cheap when NAVSEA is involved.

And you think that because it has “commercial” on it, that it’ll be cheap? Perhaps cheap compared to upkeep of military vessels but that’s mainly because military vessels have huge crews. If you’d toss them alongside without any crew onboard, they’d be equally cheap.
Anyway you simply can’t put ships alongside and store them there. No maintenance needed is simply a dream, I don’t think that current merchant ships are required to move their lifeboats from stowed position, test the Emergency generator, alarms and so and so on every week because it’s for fun… No, it’s because it’s necessary in order to see if it’s working and do maintenance when needed. Building a couple of cheap ships and putting them alongside in some port is a dream because there is very little guarantee that they’ll actually work when needed.
And the moment you start testing and maintaining it’ll end up being costly again.
The original Jeep Carriers were an emergency measure, they weren’t meant for long term storage and spare capacity when needed.

This however is not a major point as it’s just money not practical thinking from a military point of view (and I do think that that is your original question).

From a military point of view I stay with my point that they’re not survivable and would become a target. In the past, with some 8 Swordfish and 6 or so Martlets/Wildcats they were expendable, since there were 1,000s of these planes built and in operation. In today’s environment it’s pretty unlikely that there will be 1,000s of F-35s etc. around. Putting them on a soft target (merchant standard means a survivability with the two largest adjacent compartments flooded, anything more is very risky) is not a good plan. Losing even 10 of these planes means a serious dent, certainly for any Navy other than USN.
Mission killing something built to commercial standard will even be easier. Reliability is also low with a single prop and rudder.
Agreed you can make more compartments to make it more survivable, but then again it becomes more expensive and the need for it (when you already operate Nimitz/Ford) is limited. Still the question where you’ll get the crew for them too, they do have to stay trained on these specific ships too.

So I guess in some context the idea could be useful, but I’m pretty sure that the context is that limited that it’s not worth the investment.

I doubt they’d be anything useful.
They would be still dedicated to the task, therefore costly to maintain in peacetime while all together not really bringing much use.
Where would you build them? In US they’d be costly animals for their use, while if you’d outsource the quality would be a question as well as your ‘secrecy’.
Crewing will be costly as well as you’ll be doubling a lot of jobs which otherwise are done by just a couple of guys.

As for usefulness, in addition to bringing more aircraft they’d also bring more hazard. Putting F-35s on them would put some really expensive birds on a rather vulnerable platform. So either you’d have to protect them like a real carrier, sucking up valuable escorts, which nowadays support their own helicopters, or you risk losing some expensive and perhaps essential birds.

Making them slow isn’t exactly a good idea either.
Jeep Carriers in WWII were used to escort merchant ships, not really an intensive battlefield, something like that is less likely today. The merchant fleet is varied and much larger nowadays, speeds are very diverse and certain ships just won’t slow down to stay with the others, others simply can’t, arguably the protective umbralla of the new planes is much larger than before as well.

I see the advantages of it, but I doubt they weigh up against the disadvantages.

No, they wouldn’t be costly to maintain as they are simple ships built to commerial standards. As a matter of fact they would be unmanned most of the time and preposition along with other supply ships. As the US does in Diego Garcia. Which, is my point!

Then is times of crisis the crews and aircraft would fly out and meet the ship.

My understating is that Jeep carriers were one of the cheap, quick to build light carriers.

With the payoff of being slower and lacking in equipment.

If so then the most recent serious study has been the US arsenal ship.

I could see a role for getting lots of UAVs to sea with warships. Since they are going to be sending data and receiving instruction from other ‘nodes’ in the fleet the fact that their launch, recovery, refuel platform is taking its own sweet time (or even that it had to be sent in the approximate direction before everyone else left) or does not have many sensors of its own.

I doubt they’d be anything useful.
They would be still dedicated to the task, therefore costly to maintain in peacetime while all together not really bringing much use.
Where would you build them? In US they’d be costly animals for their use, while if you’d outsource the quality would be a question as well as your ‘secrecy’.
Crewing will be costly as well as you’ll be doubling a lot of jobs which otherwise are done by just a couple of guys.

As for usefulness, in addition to bringing more aircraft they’d also bring more hazard. Putting F-35s on them would put some really expensive birds on a rather vulnerable platform. So either you’d have to protect them like a real carrier, sucking up valuable escorts, which nowadays support their own helicopters, or you risk losing some expensive and perhaps essential birds.

Making them slow isn’t exactly a good idea either.
Jeep Carriers in WWII were used to escort merchant ships, not really an intensive battlefield, something like that is less likely today. The merchant fleet is varied and much larger nowadays, speeds are very diverse and certain ships just won’t slow down to stay with the others, others simply can’t, arguably the protective umbralla of the new planes is much larger than before as well.

I see the advantages of it, but I doubt they weigh up against the disadvantages.