To this end, the newly installed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Henry Shelton, sent the word down the chain of command: "Send in the carriers." Within days, the carrier battle groups (CVBGs) based around the aircraft carriers Nimitz (CVN-68) and George Washington (CVN-73) were sailing for the Persian Gulf, where they could quickly mount air and cruise-missile strikes against Iraqi targets should these be required. As the CVBGs rattled sabers, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan carefully constructed a diplomatic effort to persuade Saddam that further intransigence would lead to falling bombs. The persuasion-eventually-worked, and the inspectors were able to return to their jobs.
Meanwhile, the two battle groups spent almost six months on station in the Gulf, until they were relieved of their vigil in the spring of 1998 by two more CVBGs, centered around the carriers Independence (CV-62) and John C. Stennis (CVN-74). The U.S. kept two carrier groups in the Persian Gulf until late May 1998, by which time tensions in the region had relaxed. Back home in America, most of us gave little thought to the thousands of men and women on these ships. Even though we may have worried a great deal about the Iraqi crisis itself, they were out there, doing a vital and dangerous job for us, and generally making it look easy. This last is a significant point: Making it look easy is hard work. It takes practice, training, intense education, constant drilling.
The process of preparing a CVBG for an overseas deployment begins months before it deploys, and it takes the efforts of every person assigned to the group, as well as thousands of others who do not leave American waters. Let's look at part of that effort, as the GW (George Washington) group ratcheted up its combat skills in the summer of 1997.
Getting the Group Ready: Joint Training
You fight like you train!
This statement dates from the spring of 1972, soon after then-Lieutenant Cunningham and his valiant backseater, Lieutenant, J.G. "Willie" Driscoll, shot down five North Vietnamese MiG fighters and became America's first confirmed Vietnam fighter aces. Cunningham and Driscoll's success did not come out of the blue; their generation of naval aviators had been the first to be given a new kind of pre-combat schooling, called "force-on-force" training. Simply put, force-on-force training involves training units and personnel against role-players who simulate enemy units at the peak of their game. The first of these programs was the famous "TOPGUN" school, then located at NAS Miramar near San Diego, California. While the tools and curriculum were rudimentary by today's standards, the results were spectacular. The Navy's air-to-air kill ratio in Vietnam, the measure of aerial fighter performance, improved by an amazing 650 %. Not surprisingly, the other services took notice.
Today, every branch of the U.S. military has multiple force-on-force training programs and facilities, and each of these has been validated by the outstanding combat performance of their graduates.[73] CVBGs, like fighter pilots, do best when they have been tuned up by means of intense force-on-force training-a tune-up that's considerably complicated by the variety and multiplicity of roles a CVBG might be required to undertake. Today's CVBG is more than a group of ships designed to protect the flattop. When properly deployed and utilized by the National Command Authorities (NCAs), a CVBG's mission can range from "cooling off" a crisis to spearheading the initial phases of a major invasion or intervention.
Meanwhile, preparing a war machine as large and complex as a CVBG for a six-month overseas cruise is a huge undertaking. In fact, the various components of the group spend twice as much time recovering from the last cruise and getting ready for the next as they actually spend out on deployment. And all of this has grown more complicated in the last decade as a result of the changes in the NCA command structure stemming from the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act. Back in the 1980s, and before Goldwater-Nichols, the Navy was the sole owner and trainer of carrier groups before they were sent overseas. Today, that ownership has moved to another organization, the U.S. Atlantic Command (USACOM) based in Norfolk, Virginia.
Led by Admiral Harold W. Gehman, Jr., USACOM is a mammoth organization-in fact, the most powerful military organization in the world today. USACOM essentially "owns" every Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine unit based in the continental United States. Its job is to organize, train, package, and deliver military forces for the commanders of the other unified Commanders in Chiefs (CINCs)-the heads of the various regional commands responsible for conducting military operations around the globe. Whenever the NCAs need to send an American military force somewhere in the world, the phone usually rings first in Norfolk at USACOM headquarters.
Goldwater-Nichols has also brought practical changes to the U.S. military. For instance, CVBGs now no longer operate independently of other units-or indeed of other services. So an air strike from a carrier may receive aerial tanking and fighter protection from U.S. Air Force units, and electronic warfare support from a U.S. Marine Corps EA-6B Prowler squadron, and have the target located and designated by an Army Special Forces team. This, in essence, is what is meant by "joint" warfare, and it's far removed from Cold War practices that gave the Navy few responsibilities other than the killing of the ships, aircraft, and submarines of the former Soviet Union. Needless to say, joint war fighting skills don't just happen. They must be taught and practiced before a crisis breaks out. The CVBG must practice not only "Naval" skills, but also "joint" skills with other services and nations.
This job falls to the joint training office (J-7) of USACOM, which lays out the training regimes for units being "packaged" for missions in what are normally known as JTFs or Joint Task Forces. Getting a particular unit ready for duty in a JTF is a three-phased program, which is supervised by individual groups of subject-matter experts. For example, on each coast a Carrier Group (CARGRU) composed of a rear admiral and a full training staff is assigned to prepare CVBGs for deployment. On the Pacific Coast, this is done by CARGRU One, while CARGRU Four does the same job for the Atlantic Fleet. The training CARGRUs supervise the various elements of the CVBGs through their three-phase workups. These break down this way:
• Category I Training-Service-specific/mandated training that focuses on the tactical unit level. Examples include everything from carrier qualifications to missile and ACM training at the ship/squadron/CVW level.
• Category II Training-This is joint field training, in which the various pieces of the CVBG come together in what are known as Capabilities Exercises (CAPEXs) and Joint Task Force Exercises (JTFEXs).
• Category III Training-This is a purely academic training phase, which takes place just prior to the JTF deploying. Composed of a series of seminars, briefings, and computer war games, it is designed to give the unit commanders a maximum of up-to-the-minute information about the areas where they will likely be operating and the possible contingencies that they may face.
73
Though there are literally dozens of such programs (ranging from staff-level exercises to war games involving tens of thousands of participants), the best known are at the Army's National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, and at the Air Force's Operation Red Flag at Nellis AFB, Nevada.