THE COLD WAR STRATEGY
By the time I had become CNO and was responsible for publicly articulating the U.S. Navy’s roles and missions within the national security guidelines, I had concluded that the military strategy that governed our military posture, weapons systems, and operations during the Cold War was remarkably straightforward and enduring. It was an elegantly simple and coherent concept, it went virtually unchanged during the entire course of the Cold War, and it was remarkably successful. It was by my definition a maritime strategy, and it was predicated on the geographical disposition of the United States, its allies, and its enemies. In the Western Hemisphere, North America is virtually an island. The United States shares the continent with Canada, Mexico, and Central America, and we have only two international borders, neither of which threatens our basic security. On the other hand, one of our fifty states, all of our territories, and forty of the forty-two nations with whom we had treaties or security arrangements were overseas.
The forward collective strategy used the oceans as barriers in our defense and as avenues for extending our influence abroad to support our allies and protect our commerce. In so doing, it exploited the principle that, if we had to fight a war, we intended to engage an enemy closer to his homeland than to ours. This strategy depended upon overseas allies and forward-based military forces with the mobility to respond to crises around the world and the firepower to resolve incipient threats to our vital security interests in our favor before these minor crises could become major conflicts.
As our de facto national strategy took form, it became clear to me that for this concept of a forward strategy to be workable, the United States had to have the ability and the willingness to carry out a full range of military options, including overt armed warfare, against any forces threatening our interests and those of our allies.
In retrospect it was evident that, from the earliest days of the Cold War, the Soviet Union, through its Communist surrogates, was creating incidents to which the United States, as the leader of the free world, was obliged to respond. It was U.S. strategy to keep heavily armed sea-based forces deployed around the globe and constantly on the alert to react to an incident in virtually any part of the world outside the Soviet Union and China and their satellites. These sea-based forces were carrier task forces and Marine expeditionary units embarked in amphibious assault ships. During the Cold War the United States maintained a force requirement for a minimum of two attack carriers in the Mediterranean and three in the western Pacific and Indian Ocean. These regions came to be known as the “contingency area.” The mission of these deployed forces was to respond to a crisis and resolve the issue in our favor, before it escalated into a general war. In most cases this tactical approach was successful within the overall strategy. But in Korea and Vietnam our early intervention did not produce a quick solution, and our national involvement in long, major wars ensued.
3
Korea
The Korean War is known as the “forgotten war” largely because, after the war, Americans didn’t want to remember the cruel toll the conflict took on the indigenous civilian population and our own military people. My personal experience as a carrier fighter pilot in Korea reflected the intensity of the war. I deployed in Air Task Group 1 as air group operations officer in the USS Valley Forge in the winter of 1951–52, attached to Fighter Squadron 111 (VF-111) flying F9F-2 Panthers. In the first week of operations, VF-111 lost its commanding officer, and VF-52, the other F9F-2 squadron in Air Task Group 1, in the course of the cruise lost four of its original seventeen deploying pilots, including the commanding officer. VF-653, a recalled Navy Reserve squadron flying F4U-4s, lost twelve of its twenty-eight pilots in five months of combat.
BECOMING A JET PILOT
In the spring of 1951, I was a lieutenant commander on the staff of the chief of naval air basic training in Pensacola, Florida, when I received orders transferring me to the Naval Air Force Pacific Fleet in San Diego, California, for further assignment. In accordance with the established career pattern for naval aviators in the unrestricted line, it would be my second squadron tour, and San Diego meant a carrier squadron bound for Korea. Because I had flown SB2C Helldiver dive bombers in my last squadron, I could expect to be assigned to a Douglas AD Skyraider squadron at best, or an F4U Corsair squadron, clearly second best. Of course I wanted to fly jet fighters. The F9F Panther was in the fleet, two squadrons per carrier, and the jet fighter jocks were considered the elite in naval aviation. Originally they were hand-picked on the basis of their reputation and experience — World War II fighter aces and post — World War II test pilots. The ensigns and jaygees being assigned to jet squadrons were those who stood at the top of their class in flight training. I didn’t qualify in any of those categories.
When I reported to the Naval Air Force, Pacific Fleet (AirPac), I was immediately picked off by the carrier air group plans officer, Capt. Lou Bauer, a former fighter squadron commander in Air Group 3 when I was executive officer (XO) of VB-3, a dive-bomber squadron. Captain Bauer wanted me to work for him temporarily on a priority project, finding a way to create additional air wings to fill out the decks of the carriers coming out of mothballs to join the operating forces. This assignment was only expected to take two weeks. The sticking point was that an air group was a commissioned unit just like a ship, and to create a new commissioned unit required authorization from Congress to increase force levels. This was considered much too time-consuming.
I suggested we finesse it by creating task groups that would not in themselves be commissioned units. A task group would be made up of existing squadrons, each squadron already being a commissioned unit authorized by Congress. There were a number of Navy Reserve squadrons that could be activated if planes could be found, as the pilots were already assigned. But four squadrons of Reserve pilots shared one squadron’s worth of planes. World War II F4U Corsairs were available in mothballs on the desert, and the Douglas Aircraft plant at Segundo, California, was at peak production of AD-1 Skyraiders. The problem was to come up with the jet fighters, two fourteen-plane squadrons per air task group with pilots. We found that these additional squadrons could be made available for the air task groups by reducing the present number of squadrons within an air group from five to four. One jet squadron per carrier air group would be transferred to an air task group. Initially the carriers were deploying with a Corsair squadron, a Skyraider squadron, and three Panther jet squadrons. But it so happened that the carriers in combat in Korea were experiencing difficulties supporting three jet squadrons. The main problem was fuel. The jets, compared to propeller planes, were voracious consumers of jet fuel. The aviation fuel tanks on the Essex-lass carrier — constructed before the jet age — couldn’t carry enough fuel to operate three jet squadrons at the wartime tempo.