THE RETURN OF THE CVL: The Navy’s New Amphibious Assault Ship Is Now Rocking F-35 Stealth Fighters.

The Navy’s USS America amphibious assault ship, a first-in-class new generation amphib, traveled the seas armed with 13 F-35s during a previous deployment, senior Navy officials said. This brings an unprecedented measure of air attack and surveillance possibilities, to include the option to provide stealth air attack support to amphibious assaults. Amphibs could offer a smaller, more mobile type of aircraft carrier power projection capability, Vice. Adm. Rich Brown, Command, Naval Surfaces Forces, told an audience Jan. 14 at the 32nd Annual Surface Navy Association Symposium.

“A big deck with that many F-35s is beginning to look like an aircraft carrier to me,” Brown said.

Since potential adversaries now have longer-range weapons, better sensors, targeting technologies and computers with faster processing speeds, amphibious forces approaching the shore may need to disperse in order to make it harder for enemy forces to target them. Therefore, the notion of an air-powered, disaggregated, yet interwoven attack force, less vulnerable to enemy fire, could be launched to hit “multiple landing points” to exploit enemy defenses.

Execution of this new strategy is, depending upon the threat, heavily impacted by the arrival of 5th-generation aircraft, such as the F-35.

The Marines have also been putting mobile rocket launchers on the deck, turning ships like the America into combination amphibious-assault/land-attack/aircraft-carriers. Which is about as awesome as it sounds ridiculous.