“Senator,” I replied, “I can only repeat what I have consistently stated in my appearances before this committee for the past three years. I would without question prefer a new nuclear-powered carrier in this budget rather than a smaller, nonnuclear carrier some time in the indeterminate future.”
When the hearing adjourned, Secretary Brown asked me to ride back to the Pentagon with him. Although Harold Brown was a very positive and somewhat didactic person, he was also a gentleman and did not become unpleasant in the car. He merely said, “Jim, you did not support the president’s budget as we had intended you do.” I said, “Mr. Secretary, there is a requirement for a chief of service when testifying before the Congress, that he is not just privileged, but that he is obligated to provide his own professional view when so requested by the Congress.” Brown told me he had never heard of that before and would have to check with the General Counsel.
The following day, the Washington Post included the following article, which had been distributed by United Press International on 17 February 1977: “Defense Secretary Harold Brown said today the Administration endorses plans to end future construction of large deck aircraft carriers. He got cool backing from the nation’s top naval officer. Admiral James Holloway III, Chief of Naval Operations, told a House Appropriations Subcommittee that while he supported the Administration’s position, “I have to say my personal view is that I would rather see a nuclear carrier in this year’s budget rather than two smaller carriers sometime downstream.”
Secretary Brown never got back to me on the issue of the obligation of the uniformed head of service to express his own personal professional views before the Congress. I did, however, have the Navy’s judge advocate general call the General Counsel’s Office to reaffirm that this was the rule. The response was that I had been correct.
President Carter’s position on carriers held firm. He cancelled the carrier in the FY 78 budget he inherited from President Ford and would not include any kind of carrier in FY 79. But Congress on its own initiative added a nuclear carrier in the 1979 budget, and Carter vetoed the entire defense budget to get rid of the carrier. The next year, Congress put a large nuclear-powered carrier in the 1980 budget, and Carter again vetoed it. But this time, Congress passed the appropriations and authorization bills, overriding Carter’s veto, in order to include the nuclear-powered carrier. That ship became the Theodore Roosevelt, which in 2002 established an all-time record off Afghanistan for 241 consecutive operating days without a day in port.
In the final analysis it was a matter of personal integrity at stake. If after ten years of stating in my professional opinion that a large-deck nuclear carrier was the only acceptable carrier, what would the senators have thought of me as a professional officer if I suddenly said that a small, nonnuclear carrier was really better?
THE BATTLE GROUP ORGANIZATION
It was 1130 on Saturday, 14 September 1977, and I was in the CNO’s office in the Pentagon at my normal Saturday morning routine of clearing the incoming box of thorny issues that needed a final decision by the chief of service. I had finished my work for the day and was about to head for the squash court for my regular Saturday match when John Poindexter, later to be national security advisor to President Reagan, came to my office. John told me that there was one more piece of business that should be wrapped up: a long-outstanding paper, actually left over from the Zumwalt days. It was a proposal that all seagoing staffs be structured identically as described by the term “mirror-image.” In other words, a carrier division staff, responsible administratively and operationally for the control of two carriers and two air wings, would have the same structure as a destroyer squadron staff for eight destroyers. This would mean that because the carrier staff would be heavy with officers experienced in air warfare and air intelligence, these same positions and levels of skill would be reproduced on the destroyer staff. This was not a very commonsense solution. A carrier admiral then had a staff of thirty people on his carrier flagship, and the captain or rear admiral of a destroyer squadron or flotilla would have only a half dozen people, almost all of whom would be experts in destroyer operations. I had looked this over once before briefly, and it kept coming back. It needed to be settled once and for all time. I told John to put the folder in my briefcase and I would work on it over the weekend.
Sunday mornings I usually reserved some time to be available for original thought. So I started with a clean sheet of paper, and analyzed what we had in the way of operational staffs in the fleet now and what we really needed. Every time I pulled a thread, I found that the whole system tended to become unraveled. Our current fleet organization was patently outdated. It did not reflect the roles and missions to which the U.S. Navy was, by Title 10 of the U.S Code, committed to support: “to be prepared for prompt and sustained combat action at sea to gain and maintain maritime supremacy, and then to exploit this superiority by projecting power ashore in joint operations against the enemy.” Instead, our fleet was organizationally structured in 1977 to reflect the administration of the Navy by types of ship — that is carriers, major surface combatants (cruisers and destroyers), escorts, submarines, amphibious ships, and logistics support vessels, rather than by groups of ships constituted to carry out a strategic or tactical mission.
The principal operational component of the fleet was still the fast carrier task force, made up of an attack carrier plus four to six major surface combatants to “defend” the carrier. This was not a valid representation of the functions of the task force components. Realistically, the carriers’ aircraft, such as the F-14, were designed and deployed to defend the entire task force, including both the surface combatants and the carrier.
So I started with the National Strategy. We were then at the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The main mission of the Navy was to gain and maintain maritime superiority in order to have control of the sea in those areas that were essential to the security of the United States, for example, in the Tonkin Gulf during the Vietnam War and the Sea of Japan during Korea. Control of the sea was absolutely essential for the Navy to project power ashore by carrier aircraft striking groups and with our amphibious forces, as well as to provide security for the lines of communication for both the Air Force and the Army deployed overseas. Yet our current fleet organization was very little different from what we had arrived at by the end of World War II, when the threat from Japan and Germany to the U.S. control of the sea had been largely eliminated. Now, in the 1970s, we were faced by a Russian navy twice the size of our own in numbers, if not in capabilities, but constructed and organized specifically for contesting U.S. maritime superiority.
What we required was a true warfighting organization to counter the military and political threat of our Cold War adversary, the USSR and its allies. To accomplish this, the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets would be structured into battle forces. These battle forces would further be organized into battle groups. Each battle group would include an aircraft carrier, two cruisers, four destroyers, and a nuclear submarine. The mission of the battle group would be, first, offensive operations to gain and maintain control of specific areas of the sea as required by our national military strategy. Those same battle groups would then be used for projecting power ashore.
When I returned to the office on Monday morning, I had the draft of a message in hand, addressed to the fleet commanders, explaining the battle force organization and asking for their comments. I showed it only to John Poindexter, who simply recommended that it go out as written. It was in the hands of the fleet commanders before the end of working hours on Monday. By Wednesday the concept had been circulated among the senior flag officers and I had answers from both fleets. It was accepted as the new fleet organization without change and with a personal urging from the two fleet commanders that it be implemented as soon as possible.