The Amphibious ASW Screen:
A feature in the style of U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings — reframed third installment in a series on the edge-AI acoustics convergence, August 2026
Bottom Line Up Front
The Navy's post-2009 answer to organic anti-submarine warfare (ASW) — retire the carrier's S-3 Viking and let land-based maritime patrol aircraft cover the open ocean — collapses in the one theater that matters most. In a Western Pacific fight, the land-based patrol force (the P-8A Poseidon, successor to the P-3C Orion) cannot be relied upon to screen the carrier and amphibious groups, because the fixed airfields it flies from — Kadena, Andersen, and their like — sit inside China's anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) missile envelope, and its large, non-stealthy aircraft cannot loiter forward in contested airspace. The strike group's own organic ASW, meanwhile, has been reduced to a single short-legged helicopter. The author contends that the answer is to make the sea base itself hunt: turn the big-deck amphibious ship — the America-class LHA and Wasp-class LHD — into a mobile ASW aviation base, flying persistent unmanned aircraft that lay and tend edge-AI sonobuoy fields and relay finished tracks to the force. Unlike a runway, a big deck moves, disperses, and hides in the clutter-free-but-vast ocean; unlike the crewed P-8, an attritable unmanned aircraft can be risked forward. The enabling technologies — the MQ-9B STOL that flies from a flat deck without catapult or arresting gear, and the milliwatt acoustic inference that makes a smart, expendable buoy affordable — already exist or have been demonstrated. What is missing is the decision to resource the amphibious force as an ASW sea base, the processing to host the screen, and the sonobuoy magazine to sustain it.
The answer that doesn't survive contact with the theater
When the Navy retired the S-3B Viking, it did not so much replace the carrier air wing's ASW capability as redistribute it and bet on geography. Area ASW moved ashore to the P-3C and then the P-8A; close-in defense stayed with the embarked helicopter. The unstated assumption was that land-based maritime patrol, flying from established Pacific and allied airfields, would always be able to reach out and screen the fleet's operating areas. For three decades of uncontested access, that assumption held.
It does not hold against China. The People's Liberation Army built its A2/AD architecture precisely to keep U.S. airpower at arm's length in a fight over Taiwan or the South China Sea, and Chinese strategists identified the weak point plainly: America's forward air bases, and especially their runways, are vulnerable to missile attack. The open-source assessments are unsparing. Kadena Air Base in Okinawa is judged remarkably vulnerable to missile strike for want of hardening and active defense, and other regional bases are similarly unprepared to survive, defend against, or recover from such attacks. Guam — long treated as a sanctuary at roughly 3,000 kilometers from the Chinese coast — is moving inside the threat ring as the PLA fields longer-range cruise missiles on its bombers and deploys intermediate-range and anti-ship ballistic missiles such as the DF-26. A base that can be cratered, or whose fuel and maintenance can be disrupted, cannot generate the persistent maritime-patrol sorties the fleet's ASW plan silently depends on.
The aircraft itself compounds the problem. The P-8A is a superb sensor and weapons platform, but it is a large, non-stealthy militarized airliner that needs runways, tanking, and overflight permission, and the fleet is small and heavily tasked. Land-based patrol coverage exists where bases and clearances allow it — which, in the contested first and second island chains, may be exactly where and when it does not. There is a deeper asymmetry worth naming: reconnaissance and targeting work best against simple backgrounds, and the open sky and sea surface are far simpler backgrounds than cluttered land. That asymmetry favors the side hiding mobile missile launchers ashore against airborne and surface targets at sea — but it also rewards the side that keeps its own critical nodes moving rather than parked on a fixed, surveyed runway. A sea base exploits mobility; an airfield cannot.
The gap the fleet already carries
Layered on top of the A2/AD problem is the organic-ASW hole the carrier air wing has carried since 2009. With the Viking gone and no replacement fielded, the embarked helicopter — today the MH-60R — is the sole organic airborne ASW asset of the carrier and expeditionary strike groups, and it was never built for area search: it lacks the range, speed, and endurance to work the outer zone 150 to 200 nautical miles from the formation where a submarine launches its anti-ship missiles. The carrier can defend a small bubble organically and must otherwise borrow coverage from shore. In an uncontested sea that is an inconvenience. In a contested one, where the shore-based provider may itself be under attack or out of range, it is a war-losing dependency.
Put the two problems together and the conclusion writes itself: the fleet needs organic, sea-based, mobile ASW that does not depend on a runway anyone can hold at risk.
The big deck as the new ASW base
The platform to host it is already in the fleet, and it is not the aircraft carrier. It is the big-deck amphibious ship. GA-ASI designed the MQ-9B STOL — a short-takeoff-and-landing variant of the SeaGuardian, built with a Mojave-derived folding wing and enlarged tail — specifically to operate from America-class LHAs and Wasp-class LHDs without a catapult or a ski jump, launching over the bow and recovering on the same 250-odd-meter flat decks those ships already possess. It trades some range for that flexibility but retains roughly thirty hours of endurance, and — the essential point — it carries and dispenses the same sonobuoys as the land-based SeaGuardian. GA-ASI's own framing is that the STOL kit enables organic ASW and fleet defense without returning to a land-based airfield to refuel and rearm. That is the whole argument in one sentence.
This is not pure PowerPoint. A Mojave STOL demonstrator flew to and from the British carrier HMS Prince of Wales in November 2023 — the first remotely piloted aircraft of its size to operate from a carrier outside the United States — and repeated the feat from the Republic of Korea Navy's ROKS Dokdo in November 2024. And the amphibious force has already been reconceived as a flexible aviation base through the Marine Corps' "Lightning carrier" experiments, loading an America-class ship with F-35Bs to act as a distributed strike platform. Adding a persistent unmanned ASW screen to that repertoire extends a logic the Navy and Marine Corps are already exercising: the L-class ship as a distributable, multi-mission sea base rather than a single-purpose amphibious transport.
The operational picture that results is the distributed heir to the Viking's outer screen — but launched from a moving deck instead of a fixed runway. An amphibious ship, or several dispersed across the operating area, keeps one or more MQ-9B STOLs continuously aloft, seeding a volume of ocean with a multistatic sonobuoy field, monitoring it, and relaying finished contact tracks over datalink to the escorts, the helicopters, and any P-8 that can reach the fight. The sea base provides the persistence and the magazine; the escorts and helicopters prosecute; the whole screen moves with the force.
Why the intelligence has to live forward
This is where the reframed concept meets the thread that runs through the whole series. The sonobuoy field is only as survivable as the radio-frequency links that tie it together, and in a contested electromagnetic environment those links are the seam an adversary attacks first. Today the acoustic processing sits on the aircraft, and the buoy-to-air path carries conditioned acoustics; the aircraft-to-ship path carries the picture back to the sea base. Both are emitters, and the unmanned relay is a single, jammable node.
The commercial edge-AI revolution — the milliwatt, always-on neural inference that turned a consumer earbud into a regulated hearing aid — is what lets the Navy push classification forward, into the buoy and the pod, so the contested links carry a track or a classified contact rather than a firehose of raw hydrophone data. That collapses the required bandwidth, shrinks the field's emitting signature, and makes the whole screen more survivable and more scalable from a single sea base with finite datalink capacity. Multistatic geometry compounds the gain: an active source in a field of passive receivers covers more ocean with fewer buoys, and "fewer buoys, each smarter" is exactly what a magazine-limited amphibious ship needs. The affordable, partly autonomous, throwaway buoy exists only because consumer-driven "AI-per-watt" silicon drove the cost and power of onboard inference down to where an expendable can carry it.
The honest constraints
A reframing this ambitious owes the reader its qualifications, and there are several.
First, the flat-deck capability is demonstrated, not yet operational. The Prince of Wales and Dokdo events used a Mojave demonstrator, and the deck-length margins on U.S. amphibious ships are real; fielding a fully-loaded MQ-9B STOL with buoys and fuel from an LHA or LHD in Sea State and crosswind is an integration program, not a fait accompli.
Second, the amphibious ship is itself a high-value unit inside the same A2/AD envelope — threatened by the same anti-ship ballistic and cruise missiles — and it carries a primary amphibious mission and an embarked Marine air combat element. Deck spots, hangar volume, ordnance handling, and sortie generation are finite, and an ASW screen competes with all of it. There is a certain irony in a ship that needs its own ASW protection also serving as the ASW base; the answer is dispersion and teaming, not treating any single deck as indispensable.
Third, the L-class ships were not built to be aviation command nodes. The recurring Lightning-carrier critique — that the embarked aircraft are more capable than the ship's command, control, and data systems — applies double to a networked, machine-generated ASW picture. Hosting an edge-AI buoy field may require the processing and datalink fit that the more sophisticated LPD-class command systems, or a dedicated afloat processing suite, would supply.
Fourth, the magazine remains the binding constraint carried over from the wider concept: U.S. sonobuoy production has narrowed to a single domestic source, and a screen that consumes expendables across a wide area at wartime rates cannot rest on a sole-source base.
The clock, and four recommendations
The urgency is the peer competitor's undersea buildup in the very waters where U.S. land-based patrol is least able to help. The instrumented sea, launched from a mobile amphibious deck, is one of the few affordable ways to buy back organic outer-zone ASW for a force that can no longer count on the shore. To make it real:
Resource the big-deck amphib as an ASW sea base. Fund MQ-9B STOL integration on the LHA and LHD, and treat organic, sea-based ASW as a designed mission of the amphibious force — not a bolt-on to be improvised in crisis.
Give the sea base the brains. Push edge-AI classification forward into the buoy and aircraft so the contested links carry tracks, and fit the ship (or an afloat processing node) with the command-and-control to fuse a multistatic field. The picture must compose aboard a moving deck, under jamming, without a shore reachback.
Fix the magazine before scaling the screen. Fund surge capacity and a second sonobuoy source and drive down expendable cost. Mobility and autonomy are wasted if the buoy runs out.
Protect and disperse the base. Plan the amphibious ASW screen as a distributed set of decks, deconflicted with the amphibious and Marine-aviation mission, each protected and none indispensable — because the sea base is a target too.
The Navy spent the last thirty years assuming the land bases would always be there to hunt for the fleet. In the Western Pacific that assumption is gone. The hearing aid proved the silicon; the unmanned submarine proved the endurance; and the amphibious ship — mobile, distributable, and already in the fleet — is where the two can restore to the sea base the organic submarine-hunting capability it surrendered in 2009. It is a screen, not a silver bullet, and it will be only as good as the decks that fly it and the buoys that feed it. But it does not need a runway the enemy can crater — and in this theater, that is the whole point.
Sources
The carrier ASW gap and the land-based dependency
National Security Journal. "The S-3 Viking Was Built To Kill Russian Submarines From Aircraft Carriers — And It Was Retired Just Before the U.S. Navy Needed It Again." 17 May 2026. https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/the-s-3-viking-was-built-to-kill-russian-submarines-from-aircraft-carriers-and-it-was-retired-just-before-the-u-s-navy-needed-it-again/
Center for International Maritime Security (CIMSEC). "Close the Gaps! Airborne ASW Yesterday and Tomorrow." 2 Jun 2021. https://cimsec.org/close-the-gaps-airborne-asw-yesterday-and-tomorrow/
The War Zone. "Reviving The Use Of Navy Tactical Jets As Submarine-Hunters." 23 Feb 2023. https://www.twz.com/reviving-the-use-of-navy-tactical-jets-as-submarine-hunters
Chinese A2/AD and the vulnerability of land bases
Stimson Center. "Cratering Effects: Chinese Missile Threats to US Air Bases in the Indo-Pacific." Dec 2024. https://www.stimson.org/2024/cratering-effects-chinese-missile-threats-to-us-air-bases-in-the-indo-pacific/
Mastro, O. S., & Easton, I. "Risk and Resiliency: China's Emerging Air Base Strike Threat." Project 2049 Institute. https://indopacificsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/P2049_Mastro_Easton_China_Emerging_Airbase_Strike_Threat_110817.pdf
RAND Corporation. "Chinese Attacks on Air Bases in Asia" (research brief). https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_briefs/RB9800/RB9858z2/RAND_RB9858z2.pdf
Montgomery, E. B. "Future Warfare in the Western Pacific: Chinese Antiaccess/Area Denial…" International Security 41(1), 2016. https://direct.mit.edu/isec/article/41/1/7/12133/
Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance. "China's Anti-Access Area Denial." https://www.missiledefenseadvocacy.org/missile-threat-and-proliferation/todays-missile-threat/china/china-anti-access-area-denial/
The amphibious ship as ASW aviation base (MQ-9B STOL)
GA-ASI. "MQ-9B STOL" (organic ASW and fleet defense from big-deck amphibious vessels). https://www.ga-asi.com/remotely-piloted-aircraft/mq-9b-stol
Naval News. "General Atomics unveils MQ-9B STOL for small Flat Tops" (America-class LHA / Wasp-class LHD; ~30-hr endurance; sonobuoy dispensing). 10 May 2022. https://www.navalnews.com/event-news/indo-pacific-2022/2022/05/general-atomics-unveils-mq-9b-stol-for-small-flat-tops/
GA-ASI. "GA-ASI Demonstrates Short Takeoff/Landing of UAS on UK Carrier" (Mojave aboard HMS Prince of Wales, Nov 2023). 17 Nov 2023. https://www.ga.com/ga-asi-demonstrates-short-takeoff-landing-of-uas-on-uk-carrier
Naval News (via forum archive). "ROK Navy tests Mojave drone aboard ROKS Dokdo." 13 Nov 2024. https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2024/11/rok-navy-tests-mojave-drone-aboard-roks-dokdo/
The War Zone. "New Kit Will Allow MQ-9 Reaper To Fly From Navy Flattops." 11 May 2022. https://www.twz.com/new-kit-will-allow-mq-9-reaper-to-fly-from-navy-flattops
USNI News. "Marines Test 'Lightning Carrier' Concept, Control 13 F-35Bs from Multiple Amphibs." 23 Oct 2019. https://news.usni.org/2019/10/23/marines-test-lightning-carrier-concept-control-13-f-35bs-from-multiple-amphibs
Sonobuoy screen mechanics, multistatic buoys, and industrial base (see companion piece)
Army Recognition. "U.S. Navy Expands MQ-9B SeaGuardian Sonobuoy Payload…" 20 Jan 2026. https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/aerospace-news/2026/u-s-navy-expands-mq-9b-seaguardian-sonobuoy-payload-to-extend-unmanned-anti-submarine-warfare
The Aviationist. "MQ-9B SeaGuardian Becomes First UAV to Drop MAC Sonobuoys." 15 Jan 2026. https://theaviationist.com/2026/01/15/mq-9b-seaguardian-mac-sonobuoys/
The Defense News. "U.S. Navy Awards Ultra Maritime LRIP Contract for Next-Gen AN/SSQ-125B Sonobuoys." 7 Apr 2026. https://www.thedefensenews.com/news-details/US-Navy-Awards-Ultra-Maritime-LRIP-Contract-for-Next-Gen-ANSSQ-125B-Sonobuoys/
Edge-AI silicon baseline (documented fully in the companion articles)
Edge AI and Vision Alliance. "AI at the Edge: Low Power, High Stakes." 20 Nov 2025. https://www.edge-ai-vision.com/2025/11/ai-at-the-edge-low-power-high-stakes/
Editorial notes: (1) MQ-9B STOL flat-deck operation has been shown with Mojave demonstrators aboard HMS Prince of Wales and ROKS Dokdo; operational integration aboard U.S. America- and Wasp-class ships, with a full ASW load, remains a development effort, and deck-margin and environmental limits are real. (2) SeaGuardian sonobuoy capacity and onboard-processing figures are GA-ASI's stated specifications, not independently verified fleet performance. (3) "Court filings" are not implicated; the governing official record is Navy/NAVAIR release, procurement contracting, and think-tank and CRS analysis, cited above. (4) This is the reframed third installment of a series; the edge-AI silicon and undersea-autonomy arguments are documented more fully in the two companion pieces.
