The current goal of our Navy is making the vision of Distributed Fleet Architecture a reality. The more capable and numerous the air assets that we can deploy from smaller, more affordable, numerous ships, the less we are reliant on concentrated and expensive CV groups. They will still be foreseeably needed to provide a heavy punch, but much of the other capabilities that come from air power will soon be able to be deployed from other vessels, and dispersed across a larger area. Also, all the airborne assets will facilitate the networking needed to connect all these dispersed ships with greater ranged over-the-horizon linking. Smaller groups of ships will be able to operate autonomously, away from carriers. Smaller carriers will also become more practical and attractive.

Two General Atomics systems--one still embryonic, the other very much in use--are set to "converge", and could produce a new tool for our LHD/LHA platforms that would improve their usefulness as an auxiliary light carrier.

The first is the Mojave STOL system. If I am not mistaken, this is a Tier 4 (aka Group 4) drone, one size up from the Firescout :

https://www.ga-asi.com/remotely-piloted-aircraft/mojave

The second is the fairly well known Reaper, in use by the USMC as a land based system. That is Tier/Group 5:

https://www.navair.navy.mil/product/MQ-9A-Reaper

https://www.navair.navy.mil/news/Marine-Corps-MQ-9-Reapers-enhanced-advanced-payload-upgrade/Mon-03032025-1417

General Atomics has already developed a package with a STOL wing for the Reaper, which the Navy and Marines are very interested in:

https://www.ga-asi.com/remotely-piloted-aircraft/mq-9b-stol

Tier/Group 5 can be lightly armed, and have practical endurance and range. Light strikes, and strikes on vessels is within their abilities, along with the surveillance and data linking, etc which they would more routinely provide. This basically will give the USMC something approaching the AEW abilities aboard the "big deck" amphibs that it imagined many years ago with the proposed EV-22:

https://thediplomat.com/2016/06/why-the-us-gator-navy-needs-the-ev-22/

That contributes a good deal towards making the lighter carrier a practical reality.

What the Navy ultimately envisions is the naval equivalent of the current Ukraine battlefield, where drones swarm overhead providing info, and carrying out strikes. The US Navy would like to field fleets of small affordable ships with the ability to surround themselves with a swarm of drones, both in the sir and on/under the water, with multiple useful functions, and operating away from CVNs.

I love this video. Great music, and inspiring vision:




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