5. Bases on foreign soil are extremely vulnerable to both military and political actions. Our extensive airbase structure in Southeast Asia — Cam-Rahn Bay, Tonsonut, and Da Nang — is today being used by the Vietnamese and is available to the Russian Pacific Fleet. Wheelus Air Force Base, which during the 1950s and 1960s was our major SAC base in North Africa, is now a Libyan air force base. Even if facilities are not seized outright by unilateral action by the host nation, they can be temporarily denied for political reasons.
6. It is a normal assumption that naval vessels are especially vulnerable in a nuclear war. That is true. No ship can survive a direct hit by a nuclear warhead. However, ships at sea are probably the least vulnerable units in the array of military and economic targets because they are moveable. The most vulnerable targets are our fixed command structures, such as the Pentagon, Offutt Air Force Base, the Norfolk Naval Station, the SAC air bases, and our industrial potential throughout the major cities of the United States. All of these could be targeted by ballistic missiles, and currently there is no way to protect fixed targets from ballistic missile attacks once the missile has left its silo. On the other hand, there does not currently exist any method of providing terminal guidance to an ICBM that would enable it to home in on a moving target. A carrier can move twelve miles during the time of flight of an ICBM, far enough so that the carrier would escape destruction.
7. Today the principal concern about the aircraft carrier’s vulnerability centers on antiship missiles other than the ballistic variety. Carriers are certainly vulnerable to antiship missiles, as are all surface ships. The Navy considers that antiship guided missiles, whether submarine-, surface ship-, or aircraft-launched, will constitute the principal threat to the carrier into the foreseeable future. So current fleet doctrine depends principally upon the aircraft carrier to defeat the cruise missile threat through the ability of the carrier’s aircraft to intercept the enemy launching platforms before they reach their missile release points. These launching platforms would be enemy aircraft or hostile surface ships. In both cases the F/A-18 would use highly effective guided weapons for the destruction of both air and surface ship missile launchers.
THE ANTICARRIER BIAS
Since their beginnings, aircraft carriers have attracted detractors as well as proponents, and their detractors are a diverse group of activists.
Ever since the Reorganization Act of 1946, which established the Air Force as the military service with primary responsibility for all military aviation, the Air Force has been uncomfortable with naval aviation, and the carrier was not only the symbol but the sine qua non of naval aviation. Naval aviation was a competitor with the Air Force tactical fighter wings for resources, and that has been reflected in much of the defense debate in the OSD.
Then there are the antiwar activists. They want to reduce both defense expenditures and the nation’s capacity to extend military influence, stances that, in fact, increase the chances of becoming involved in war. This group has been well represented in Congress, the White House, the media, and public organizations.
The carrier is a plump target. It is expensive, and that expense is represented in a single line item in the budget. By the extraction of that one carrier line item, billions of defense dollars can be excised in a single budget-cutting action. Antiwar activists point out that each carrier requires surface ship escorts. Originally it was four destroyers but today four destroyers, an Aegis cruiser, a nuclear submarine, and a fast combat store ship. The defense foes’ logic is that if carriers are eliminated, these other ships are no longer needed and should similarly be cancelled.
The most difficult anticarrier group to deal with, however, is the rebels in our own camp. These are officers of the Navy in all warfare communities, disaffected for a number of almost obscure reasons.
In the 1960s, the generation of World War II carrier pilots was reaching the point in their careers when they were eligible by seniority and experience for a carrier command. The idea of a year with Rickover to study nuclear physics and learn ships’ propulsion engineering was anathema to them. As one World War II ace told Vice Admiral Pirie, the DCNO (Air), “As a carrier skipper, I don’t care what kind of power plant the ship has. It could be propelled by rubber bands, just so long as when I call for full power, I get it. That is the Chief Engineer’s job.” The membership of the “I was turned down by Admiral Rickover Club” continued to grow with the addition of a number of respected and competent aviation captains. This was all right when there were plenty of non-nuclear carriers for them to command, but the attitude of these World War II heroes had been imparted to a younger generation of admiring aviators who were reluctant to give up the emphasis on flying for the drudgery of textbooks. Rickover’s irascible nature was legendary and many naval officers had, in one way or another, felt the lash of his tongue. Word got around. Rickover was unpopular to the point of being despised, especially by the old-school flag officers of the sixties. This dislike of Rickover, which extended to surface warfare officers, submariners, and aviators alike, translated into an animosity for the nuclear program itself. Then, of course, there was the interwarfare community rivalry, much of it stemming from the competition for dollars in the Navy budget.
Others disliked the idea of so much of the Navy being taken over by the “fly boys,” who weren’t really representative of the old Navy. And finally, there were those who simply did not understand why carriers had to be so big and planes so expensive. They promoted the idea of cheap, light, uncomplicated carriers. Money could be saved, they felt, by going the vertical/short takeoff and landing aircraft (V/STOL) route and eliminating catapults and arresting gear. There was little thought given to the lack of battleworthiness in a carrier without the speed, armor, protection, compartmentation, and redundancy required in a warship. Those are what make a carrier expensive.
The fact that the V/STOL tactical aircraft is by inherent design markedly inferior to its conventional contemporaries in combat operational capabilities — speed, range, bomb load, and safety — was neither realized nor considered. The expense, weight, and complexity have all been invested in the short takeoff capability. Today, for example, the V/STOL version of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) is 10 to 15 percent less capable than its conventional counterpart, although both use common parts and systems except those required for V/STOL operation. This 15 percent reduction in capability could be the difference between winning and losing air superiority.
On one occasion I was making a presentation to the secretary of the navy to justify a cost increase in the total price of the Nimitz due to the addition of an air control radar system, absolutely essential for all-weather and night air operations. The secretary had just approved the change and asked if any of his staff had comments. Graeme Bannerman, assistant secretary of the navy for installations and logistics, spoke up, saying, in effect, that the Nimitz was the wrong design from the keel up. Our error, he thought, was letting the uniformed naval aviators control the design. The ship was simply a reincarnation of all of the previous carriers. In his view, the Navy should have recruited a dozen recent Harvard School of Business graduates and let them design a carrier from a clean sheet of paper without interference from the aviators.
Feeling that I simply had to respond, I said it was hard to conceive of a carrier without a point at one end and propulsion devices at the other — and a flat place on top. Everything else on the Nimitz in fact — catapults, arresting gear, elevators, radars, a hangar deck — were there for two reasons: they were evolutionary products of what had been proven best from various alternatives and they had been proven in combat or operational experience in some way, enabling the ship to be a better fighting machine. Carriers had been in every fight since Pearl Harbor. I was going to continue, but Bannerman had walked out.