5. Uses the freedom of international waters for the transit of naval forces and military logistics and to provide naval and air operating areas in the vicinity of potentially hostile situations without the need to request the penetration of the territory, or territorial waters, of another nation. Two-thirds of the surface of the earth is covered by international waters, and 90 percent of the world’s population lives within the radius of tactical aircraft from carriers operating in international waters.
The United States’ recent history of modern warfare clearly demonstrates the capabilities of our aircraft carriers through their record of achievement, ever since their emergence as the principal force in our Navy.
WORLD WAR II, KOREA, AND VIETNAM
In 1942 it was the fast carrier striking forces that led the Allied forces across the Pacific, defeating the Japanese in the Battle of Midway and in every subsequent engagement involving carriers. It was these victories, in which the surface combatants of the two navies never engaged one another, that provided the environment of air and naval supremacy to allow the amphibious seizure of the network of fortified islands upon which the Japanese had based their defense of the homeland.
The forward strategy of the Cold War proved its effectiveness, as the first significant air support for beleaguered U.S. and South Korean forces was provided by U.S. Navy carriers during the initial days of the North Korean invasion, when all of the friendly, tactical airfields in South Korea were overrun by the enemy. In the course of the war, Navy and Marine aircraft flew almost 40 percent of the ground support missions—275,912 of the total 737,436 sorties in support of the ground forces. Of these, 106,494 were flown from the carriers in TF 77. Military historians are in overall agreement that allied air power could not alone have won the war in Korea, but without the almost total air superiority provided by U.S. tactical aircraft, the conflict would have been lost to the Chinese. The evacuation of the 1st Marine Division from the Chosin Reservoir could not have been possible without tactical air support. Most of that support came from naval aircraft of TF 77 off the East Coast and Marines from escort carriers of TG 98.6 off the west coast of Korea.
In 1964 the initial strikes against military targets in North Vietnam were by aircraft from U.S. carriers, which had been routinely deployed in theater in accordance with the forward strategy of the Cold War. These were the only U.S. tactical aircraft available to carry out the retaliatory attacks directed by President Johnson in response to the Tonkin Gulf incident. After 1972, when the president decided to take all U.S. combatant ground troops, except for advisors, out of Vietnam, the only U.S. military forces in combat in Southeast Asia were Navy and Marine aviation and the U.S. Air Force. It was the overpowering, round-the-clock air assault against previously proscribed targets in the Hanoi-Haiphong area in Operation Linebacker II, the “Christmas Bombing,” that forced the Communists to sue for peace and sign the Paris Accords to end America’s war in Southeast Asia. Over the eight years of that conflict, naval carrier aircraft flew more than half of all the strike sorties against targets in North Vietnam.
LIBYA
Operation El Dorado Canyon, the U.S. air strike against terrorism-related targets in Gaddafi’s Libyan dictatorship on 15 April 1986, was a textbook example of the effectiveness of the U.S. strategic policy of routinely deploying aircraft carriers to international waters around the world in the vicinity of potential trouble spots. Since the end of World War II, it had been a key element of our Defense Planning Guidance to maintain two aircraft carriers on station in the Mediterranean Sea. As a retaliatory preemptive attack in response to a blatant act of state sponsored terrorism, Operation El Dorado Canyon had to be prompt, powerful, and directed at the core of the Libyan leadership. Given this presidential concept of operations, El Dorado Canyon could only be implemented with the immediate availability of aircraft carriers in the objective area. Only carriers had the full complement of all-weather attack aircraft, air superiority fighters, antimissile attack planes, electronic warfare planes, airborne radar command and control aircraft, and combat SAR helicopters, all of which were required for a major strike operation against a variety of well-defended and dispersed target sets. Air Force F-111s based in the United Kingdom joined the carrier planes in the mission. When the government of France denied overflight clearances for the UK-based F-111s, their ingress path required the Air Force component to fly down the English Channel, access the Bay of Biscay, through the Straits of Gibraltar, and along the Mediterranean littoral before turning south to Libya. This added thirteen hundred additional miles to the F-111 track and about four hours additional flight time and required a total of 28 KC-10 and KC-135 tankers. The carrier aircraft had a distance of less than two hundred miles to their targets. The operation was executed as planned. The time over target was less than twelve minutes to deliver sixty tons of munitions. No Navy planes were lost. In Washington, Operation El Dorado Canyon was considered a complete success.
OPERATION DESERT STORM
Since the Cold War, carriers have been prominent in their contributions to U.S. combat operations in the Middle East. Operation Desert Shield began on 2 August 1990, when Saddam Hussein sent three divisions of his elite Republican Guard across the border to invade Kuwait; two U.S. carrier strike groups were on routine forward deployment in the vicinity, one in the Mediterranean Sea and another in the Indian Ocean. Three days later the Independence was in position to launch her air wing against the Iraqi combat division in Kuwait and moved unopposed into range of Iraqi dispositions threatening Saudi Arabia. On 7 August, when President Bush committed U.S. forces to the protection of Saudi Arabia, the effective U.S. combat presence in the theater consisted of two carrier battle groups with more than one hundred fighter and attack aircraft, fully ready to launch an armed strike against the Iraqi air and ground forces. The two air wings were, in themselves, capable of gaining air superiority over Kuwait. The movement of land-based aircraft into theater had begun immediately, with two squadrons of Air Force F-15 Eagles ferried from the U.S. directly to Saudi Arabia supported by Air Force tankers. The initial readiness of these units was delayed by the limited availability of air and sealift to bring logistics and ground support personnel into the Saudi airfields. On 6 August, Saddam paused at the Kuwaiti border, although the Saudi opposition would not be much more than the Iraqis had experienced in Kuwait. Hussein was probably deterred by the implied threat of opposition from the United States, with its two carrier battle groups in the area.
Desert Storm was the offensive military campaign of the coalition forces. During the campaign, the Iraqis were driven out of Kuwait and allied forces then entered Iraq to defeat the Iraqi army and force Saddam’s surrender. The Desert Shield phase of the operation was the buildup of coalition forces in theater to levels of “overpowering military force.” The air campaign preceding Desert Storm has been given much credit for the relatively easy victories on the ground and the minimum number of friendly casualties. Navy and Marine Corps aviators flew from carriers and amphibious ships in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf for the entire forty-three-day period of the war. A total of six carriers were engaged, four in the Persian Gulf and two in the Red Sea. Carrier planes struck targets up to seven hundred miles distant. Navy and Marine Corps planes flew more than thirty thousand of the ninety-four thousand U.S. sorties in the overall campaign, or about 35 percent, which closely matched the percentage of Navy and Marine aircraft in the combat forces participating in Desert Storm. This clearly established the capability of carriers to generate combat sorties at the same rate as land-based air, in addition to an ability to attain maximum sortie generation rates immediately upon arrival in the theater. From the beginning, the Navy concept of force multiplying through the concept of the F/A-18 strike fighter began to pay off. On “D day” of Operation Desert Storm, four Navy Hornets from VFA-81, embarked in the Saratoga, were on a bombing mission against an Iraqi airfield when they detected two Iraqi MiG-21s seven miles away. They switched their F/A-18 strike fighters from bombing profile to air-to-air and downed both Iraqi aircraft using Sidewinder missiles. They then continued their mission and scored direct hits on the enemy airfield. That encounter demonstrated the versatile Hornet’s dual-role capabilities.