Admiral Moorer gave me a warm welcome and got right to the point. He quickly laid out his plans. Just weeks earlier, during flight operations off Vietnam, a serious fire on board the USS Forrestal—the most recent in a series of conflagrations — had destroyed much of the ship’s air wing and severely damaged the large-deck carrier’s flight and hangar decks, together with most of the installed aircraft servicing equipment. There was considerable loss of life, both in the embarked squadrons and in the ship’s crew, in addition to the severe damage to the ship, which would take a year in the shipyard to repair. During that time, the U.S. Navy’s carrier force levels would be reduced by one. There were no replacements when a carrier was withdrawn from the fleet.
Of deep concern to Admiral Moorer and the Navy’s top leadership was the reaction in the press, which immediately asked, if the Forrestal could suffer such devastating damage from a noncombat accident, did that not reveal a carrier’s vulnerability to enemy action? And, further, did not the inherent vulnerability of the carrier to even noncombat incidents bring to question the advisability of investing billions of dollars and advanced technology and skilled manpower in such a fragile weapon system? Moorer considered that no less than the future of the aircraft carrier in the U.S. Navy was at stake.
Moorer had planned for me to form a study group of the best talent available to review the entire issue of safety in carriers and propose measures to reduce the vulnerability of carriers to catastrophic fires, such as had occurred in Forrestal. I would then serve as executive director of the study and produce a program of actions that would significantly improve carrier safety and minimize the potential sources of carrier fires and explosive accidents at sea. A three-month deadline was established for submitting a comprehensive report and set of recommendations to the CNO. To highlight the importance he attached to this carrier study, Moorer had recalled to active duty a retired four-star naval aviator, a highly respected former vice chief of naval operations and one-time chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, Adm. Jim Russell, who would be the honorary head of the study.
The chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force had turned up the burner under the whole issue of carrier vulnerability, and his criticism of the carriers was being echoed in the halls of Congress. The entire carrier building program, which included the John F. Kennedy, then under construction, and all of the follow-on carriers, were in jeopardy. Admiral Moorer was hoping the creation of a major study effort would defuse, at least initially, criticism of the Navy’s carrier force and eventually bring about changes that would substantively reduce the vulnerability of carriers to the explosive potential of the thousands of tons of volatile fuel and ammunition handled routinely on board.
The fact that a highly visible study effort was in progress, with a senior four-star flag officer visibly in charge, would demonstrate the Navy’s profound concern over the issue and the CNO’s intention to do something about it. Although Admiral Russell was the nominal head of the study, he had been retired for some time and was out of touch, so it would fall to me, as executive director, to form the study group, recruit members and set up the support staff, arrange the working spaces, and, of course, find parking spaces.
Admiral Moorer had released the priority message I had drafted tasking the various offices in OpNav and the technical bureaus to detail personnel to the study group in response to requests by the executive director. All of this sounds routine. The problem, as always, in these extra staffing requests was that the offices and bureaus tasked were not going to give up their most experienced and talented people for three months’ duty in a task force when their capabilities were very much needed in their permanent assignments. These facilities were staffed with just enough people to carry out assigned duties and there was little, if any, slack. As a consequence, the least-capable members of OpNav and technical bureau staffs would be sloughed off to the study group. This was simply a fact of life. At least the transfers to the group were done quickly. Within a week to ten days, the basic group had been assembled and organized in spaces made available in the offices of the Center for Naval Analyses.
Later, in a personal memo to Admiral Moorer, I was able to report that although there were no superstars among the officers detailed to the study group, all were good naval officers who rose to the occasion and did not shirk the hard work, long days, and weekend hours. The CNO could be proud of the quality of his officer corps as even average officers could rise to the occasion for above-average performance in critical situations.
There were half a dozen naval officers in the study group, mostly lieutenant commanders and commanders, and three or four civilian scientists and engineers from the Navy laboratories. The civilians were not in constant attendance but would always show up when summoned and were excellent conduits to the other talented people in their particular laboratories that could make a contribution. Moorer had assured Russell that his presence was not essential in Washington on a full-time basis. I laid out an organization for the study group and sketched out the plan of attack and assigned the various tasks that had to be accomplished. I felt comfortable in taking over this job because of my total immersion for the past two years in operations on board the Enterprise, which almost entirely involved aircraft operations with fuel-filled aircraft and explosive ordnance. There was, of course, much to be done. First, information on carrier accidents had to be collected and evaluated. Then the various munitions and refueling systems had to be analyzed for reliability and safety in every aspect of their employment on board ship. Next, necessary changes would have to be developed in the design, production, and delivery techniques that would eliminate most potentially dangerous sequences. Finally, we would have to determine whether the proposed safety measures would interfere with the mechanical functioning during the operational use of the weapon to the extent that the munitions or fueling systems would become ineffective for use in combat.
The week before the deadline date for the report to go to the CNO, the basic work was done and all that remained was to put the report in final draft and to provide, in response to a late request by the CNO, a list of actions the study group recommended be taken by the Navy, together with their approximate costs, and identify the congressional appropriations to which the projects or programs should be charged. The report of the study group was well received by Admiral Moorer, and the CNO instructed his staff to draft an endorsement to the secretary of the navy stating that the CNO agreed with all the group’s recommendations and intended to implement them for remedial action, through Congress if necessary, for immediate consideration. He would authorize reprogramming existing funds to support the actions he considered imperative to correct the vulnerability of carriers to disastrous fire.
The Navy’s technical bureaus and laboratories fully supported the rationale and findings of the study, largely because their people had participated in the effort and the CNO had seen fit to reprogram funds to carry out its recommendations rather than take the fixes out of the Naval Material Command’s budget. Admiral Moorer’s understanding of the technical aspects of the report, and his effective approach to rectifying the situation, was in no small part due to a two-year tour of duty he had at the Naval Aviation Ordnance Test Station at Chincoteague, Virginia, a billet in which I also served, six years after Tom Moorer’s tour.