Light Carrier Studies Already Underway As Navy Considers Role for CVLs in Future Fleet - USNI...

The Navy’s engineering community has already started conducting light carrier design and engineering studies, even as the Navy and the joint force still consider whether they’d even want to invest in a CVL to supplement supercarriers to bring more distributed capability to the fleet for less cost.

The idea of a light carrier resurfaced last summer as a Pentagon-led Future Naval Force Study was nearing its completion. The idea hadn’t appeared in Navy and Marine Corps plans, but then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper had a growing interest in the topic as he sought ways to keep future shipbuilding and sustainment costs down and as he worried about the Navy’s ability to conduct maintenance on its nuclear-powered aircraft carriers at Navy-run public shipyards.

The FNFS and the plan it produced, Battle Force 2045, ultimately recommended between zero and six light carriers and noted much more study would need to be done.

That work is already happening at Naval Sea Systems Command within the engineering and logistics directorate (SEA 05).