Carrier (1999) (2 page)

The following year saw the latest in a series of crises with Iraq over Saddam Hussein’s refusal to meet United Nations inspection criteria over his weapons of mass destruction. This was responded to by sending two more CVBGs to the Persian Gulf, this time to prepare for possible strikes on Iraqi targets had that been necessary.

Clearly, the flexibility, mobility, and independence of these versatile and forward-deployed assets will keep them center stage as our nation leads the world in the transition to a free-market system of democracies.

The rapid development and growth of airpower as the primary enabling capability for military operations represents one of the true military revolutions of the 20th century. At the close of this century, with manned space exploration and earth-orbiting satellites commonplace, it is hard to conceive that just ninety-five years ago, the Wright brothers made their first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. That historic first effort traveled less distance than the wingspan of a modern jumbo jet. However, things began to rapidly progress with the coming of the First World War. With the start of the Great War visionaries around the world realized the potential significance of aviation capabilities on military operations. By 1914, then-Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels had announced “that the point has been reached where aircraft must form a large part of our naval forces for offensive and defensive operations.” It was an insightful thought.

The ensuing twenty-five years before our entry into World War II saw the United States developing the assets and vision to take airpower to sea in a way unmatched by any other nation. As a maritime nation dependent on the sea lines of communications for its economic and national security interests, the United States would need the edge provided by Naval aviation to win the greatest over-water military campaigns ever conducted. The history of the Second World War in the Pacific documents the great debt of gratitude our nation owes to the early pioneers of naval aviation. These were legendary men like Glenn Curtis, Eugene Ely, Theodore Ellyson, John Towers, John Rogers, Washington Chambers, Henry Mustin, and many more too numerous to mention.

However, it was at Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, with the war cry of
“Tora ... Tora ... Tora!”
and our own lax state of readiness, that Japan brought home to the world the impact of carrier aviation.
¹
The fact that none of our three Pacific-based aircraft carriers were in port that fateful morning may have been the single most significant factor in our eventual victory during the Great Pacific War. At the time of our entry into World War II, the U.S. Navy had just seven big-deck aircraft carriers in commission:
Saratoga, Lexington, Ranger, Yorktown, Enterprise, Wasp, and Hornet.
These “seven sisters” would take the war to our enemies from Casablanca and Malta to Midway and Guadalcanal.

Clearly, Admiral Yamamoto knew that Japan had awakened a “sleeping giant,” and he believed a prolonged war would go in favor of the United States. He knew the potential productivity of American industry and its people, something that he had witnessed personally while on naval attaché duty in Washington. Thus it was that Japan, needing a quick decisive victory over the U.S. Navy in the Pacific, set in motion the great sea battle off Midway Island in mid-1942.
²
Yamamoto mustered an overwhelming naval armada, designed to take Midway and hand the U.S. Navy and their carrier groups a crushing defeat. However, when the Battle of Midway was over, the tide had turned in the Pacific, though not in the favor of Japan. Thanks to the raw courage and aggressive tactics of the U.S. carrier pilots as well as superb intelligence, four Japanese carriers and a cruiser were sunk. In the process, Japan’s ability to project naval air power throughout the vast Pacific was crippled forever.

The U.S. carrier groups and their courageous aviators had, on paper, no right to win. But win they did. The cost was not insignificant; fifteen of fifteen aircraft and twenty-nine of thirty aircrew in Torpedo Squadron 8 alone were lost. Along with scores of American aircraft and their crews, the USN lost the
Yorktown
and a destroyer.
³
However, finding a way to win in the face of adversity is a naval aviation tradition.

Today, U.S. carrier aviation is inextricably tied to the concept of United States forward presence and power projection; the “From the Sea” doctrine. Since the end of the East/West conflict, the United States military has withdrawn from the majority of its overseas bases. Consequently, America’s ability to exercise a forward military presence and provide military forces depends on a combination of naval power and power projection from the continental United States. This means that in the complex post-Cold War world, where the majority of the world’s major population centers are within two hundred miles of the open ocean, naval forces are increasingly relevant, and able to influence all manner of events that shape regional stability. The fact that this can be done with little or no land-based support and with no host nation support is a tremendous advantage for our national interests.

The independence, sustainability, and staying power of naval units often makes them the forces of choice for our National Command Authorities. This includes protecting the sea-lanes for a global free-market economy, reinforcing and supporting American embassies, and executing non-combatant evacuations of American citizens overseas. These and many other missions are ideally suited to our forward-deployed naval forces. This has been continuously demonstrated in places like the Taiwan Straits, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, Albania, the Central African Republic, Liberia, Zaire, and Sierra Leone. America is an island nation, dependent upon the seas for our economic prosperity and security. There was good reason why our founding fathers determined the need for the nation to maintain naval forces and raise an army. We should occasionally remind ourselves of this reality, since it is the geopolitics, not the geography of the world, that has changed over time.

Unfortunately, aircraft carriers and naval forces in general have often been seen as both provocative and vulnerable. Many critics who do not understand the science of modern naval operations have claimed that advances in space systems and missile technology make the carrier/naval forces excessively vulnerable to air and missile attacks. Certainly technology has increased the threat from these systems, but far less so than that faced by fixed land bases and ground forces from terrorism and ballistic missile attacks.

For starters, there is the challenge to any would-be enemy who would try to find a CVBG in the open ocean. Naval units are highly mobile and the world’s oceans are a big, dynamic place. Trying to coordinate sophisti-catedlong-range targeting solutions onto a target that can move thirty nautical miles in any direction in just one hour, or up to seven hundred nautical miles in a day, is a tough business. Clearly, a CVBG is not an easy target. The inherent mobility, together with sophisticated CVBG electronic-warfare-deception packages (radar “blip” enhancers, target decoys, etc.), combined with the air defenses provided by our Aegis-equipped escorts
(Ticonderoga-
class [CG-47] cruisers and
Arleigh Burke-class
destroyers [DDG-51]) as well as the CVN’s own organic aircraft, make the vulnerability quite manageable.

The threat of theater ballistic and cruise missiles is also a matter of concern for the CVBG, and work is rapidly progressing to increase our defenses against these classes of weapons. The Aegis combat system is being improved and extended to be able to provide theater-wide defense from the sea, for both land and sea forces. Survivability from these threats will always be greater from a mobile bastion at sea than a fixed base on land. Arriving along with this new capability are new aircraft, ships, and even new carrier designs, which will help keep the CVBG credible long after the last manned-aircraft designs are retired. However, one does not have such naval forces for purely defensive purposes.

The real strength of CVBGs is offensive, making them a threat to the very despots and enemies that might themselves wish ill to the carrier group. Able to generate hundreds of air and missile attack sorties day and night, the modern CVBG is a powerful tool that requires no permission of ally or foe to do its job. Today, when the challenge is to get the most return for our limited defense dollars, it is significant to note that since the end of World War II, we have not lost
any
carriers to enemy action or geopolitical changes.

This is hardly true in the case of our overseas land bases. In such countries as Iran, Libya, Vietnam, and the Philippines to name just a few, we not only lost the airfields that the U.S. paid for, but also the costly infrastructure devoted to support, maintenance, and quality-of-life issues. There also is the fact that we pay a high monetary and often unacceptable political price for even restricted access to foreign military land and air bases. As recently as 1997, the U.S. was not allowed to place the desired number of USAF aircraft in Saudi Arabia, where the U.S. presence was already established. From this viewpoint, the aircraft carrier, which has a forty-five-year life cycle and remains free from such entanglements, is a relative bargain for our scarce defense dollars.

As a new crop of world economic and potential military superpowers emerge in the coming years, the value of aircraft carriers to U.S. foreign policy goals will dramatically increase. One of the unchallenged realities of modern warfare is that you cannot be victorious in any conflict on the ground or at sea without air/space superiority. In an era of sophisticated precision weapons, including cruise and ballistic missiles, this is the medium that enables our land and sea forces to operate with acceptable risk. Air superiority is even more essential for forward-deployed forces that are shaping the battlespace, trying to create stability and prevent conflict from occurring through their own forward presence. In more and more cases, this flexible combat power will have to be provided by forward-deployed carrier and amphibious groups. This is a reality since the world’s surface is 70% covered by water, and our free-market economy depends on open access to the sea lines of communication.

Naval forces are more than just ships, planes, and weapons. What I hope this book conveys is the quality and dedication of the people it takes to provide the nation the kind of flexibility and fighting punch packaged in our modem CVBGs. The carriers, Aegis cruisers, and destroyers, together with their aircraft and fast-attack submarines, would be nothing without the people who make them work. Operating a high-usage airport in day and night operations, while moving at thirty knots on the open seas, is one thing. However, to provide all the organic support to do this for extended periods of time at a great distance from a home base is another thing all together.

A modern
Nimitz-
class (CVN-68) carrier is the equivalent of a small American city packaged into just four-and-a-half acres. This city not only operates an airport on its roof, but also can move over seven hundred nautical miles in any given day. It also provides full medical support, machine shops, jet engine test cells, food service operations, computer support, electrical generation, and almost everything else that you can imagine.

Now picture the carrier as a business, a company that has a net worth of six to seven billion dollars and employs over six thousand people. The average age of the six thousand employees is less than twenty-one years. On top of this, the Chairman of the Board (Admiral and Staff), the President and Chief Operating Officer (Captain and Air Wing Commander), all the Vice Presidents (Department Heads), and every other employee rotates out of the company every two to three years. Common sense would dictate that you could never make a profit with
any
business under those conditions. Yet the U.S. Navy operates successfully under these very conditions, and the profit is freedom, and protection of our national interests.

This dedication of young Americans, the symphony of their teamwork, and the indomitable spirit of the American sailor make this all possible. We owe them our respect and gratitude, and must never take the service or sacrifices they and their families make for granted. It was my privilege to be a shipmate with these great Americans for over thirty-seven years. For this I salute the American Sailors, Marines, Soldiers, Airmen, and Coast Guards-men of every generation who have protected our freedom at home and around the world.

 

—Leon A. “Bud” Edney
Admiral, USN (Retired)
Former Commander, U.S. Atlantic Command &
NATO Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic

Introduction

P
resence, influence, and options. In these three words are the basic rationale for why politicians want carrier battle groups, and have been willing to spend over a trillion U.S. taxpayer dollars building a dozen for American use. That was hardly the original reason, though. Back in the years after the Great War, naval powers were trying to find loopholes in the first series of arms-control treaties (which had to do with naval forces). With the numbers and size of battleships and other vessels limited by the agreements, various nations began to consider what ships carrying aircraft might be able to contribute to navies. At first, the duties of these first carrier-borne aircraft were limited to spotting the fall of naval shells and providing a primitive fighter cover for the fleet. Within a few years, though, aircraft technologies began to undergo a revolutionary series of improvements. Metal aircraft structures, improved power plants and fuels, as well as the first of what we would call avionics began to find their way onto airplanes. By the outbreak of World War II, some naval analysts and leaders even suspected that carriers and their embarked aircraft might be capable of sinking the same battleships and other surface ships that they had originally been designed to cover.

 

The Second World War will be remembered by naval historians as a conflict dominated by two new classes of ships: fast carriers and submarines. The diesel-electric submarines were a highly efficient force able to deny navies and nations the use of the sea-lanes for commerce and warfare. Unfortunately, as the German Kriegsmarine and Grand Admiral Karl Donitz found, you do not win wars through simple denial of a battlespace like the Atlantic Ocean. Victory through seapower requires the ability to take the offensive on terms and at times of your choosing. This means being able to dominate vast volumes of air, ocean, and even near-earth space. Without a balanced force to project its power over the entire range of possibilities and situations, one-dimensional forces like the U-boat-dominated
Kriegsmarine
wound up being crushed in the crucible of war.