This is hardly true in the case of our overseas land bases. In such countries as Iran, Libya, Vietnam, and the Philippines to name just a few, we not only lost the airfields that the U.S. paid for, but also the costly infrastructure devoted to support, maintenance, and quality-of-life issues. There also is the fact that we pay a high monetary and often unacceptable political price for even restricted access to foreign military land and air bases. As recently as 1997, the U.S. was not allowed to place the desired number of USAF aircraft in Saudi Arabia, where the U.S. presence was already established. From this viewpoint, the aircraft carrier, which has a forty-five-year life cycle and remains free from such entanglements, is a relative bargain for our scarce defense dollars.
As a new crop of world economic and potential military superpowers emerge in the coming years, the value of aircraft carriers to U.S. foreign policy goals will dramatically increase. One of the unchallenged realities of modern warfare is that you cannot be victorious in any conflict on the ground or at sea without air/space superiority. In an era of sophisticated precision weapons, including cruise and ballistic missiles, this is the medium that enables our land and sea forces to operate with acceptable risk. Air superiority is even more essential for forward-deployed forces that are shaping the battlespace, trying to create stability and prevent conflict from occurring through their own forward presence. In more and more cases, this flexible combat power will have to be provided by forward-deployed carrier and amphibious groups. This is a reality since the world's surface is 70 % covered by water, and our free-market economy depends on open access to the sea lines of communication.
Naval forces are more than just ships, planes, and weapons. What I hope this book conveys is the quality and dedication of the people it takes to provide the nation the kind of flexibility and fighting punch packaged in our modem CVBGs. The carriers, Aegis cruisers, and destroyers, together with their aircraft and fast-attack submarines, would be nothing without the people who make them work. Operating a high-usage airport in day and night operations, while moving at thirty knots on the open seas, is one thing. However, to provide all the organic support to do this for extended periods of time at a great distance from a home base is another thing all together.
A modern Nimitz-class (CVN-68) carrier is the equivalent of a small American city packaged into just four-and-a-half acres. This city not only operates an airport on its roof, but also can move over seven hundred nautical miles in any given day. It also provides full medical support, machine shops, jet engine test cells, food service operations, computer support, electrical generation, and almost everything else that you can imagine.
Now picture the carrier as a business, a company that has a net worth of six to seven billion dollars and employs over six thousand people. The average age of the six thousand employees is less than twenty-one years. On top of this, the Chairman of the Board (Admiral and Staff), the President and Chief Operating Officer (Captain and Air Wing Commander), all the Vice Presidents (Department Heads), and every other employee rotates out of the company every two to three years. Common sense would dictate that you could never make a profit with any business under those conditions. Yet the U.S. Navy operates successfully under these very conditions, and the profit is freedom, and protection of our national interests.
This dedication of young Americans, the symphony of their teamwork, and the indomitable spirit of the American sailor make this all possible. We owe them our respect and gratitude, and must never take the service or sacrifices they and their families make for granted. It was my privilege to be a shipmate with these great Americans for over thirty-seven years. For this I salute the American Sailors, Marines, Soldiers, Airmen, and Coast Guards-men of every generation who have protected our freedom at home and around the world.
— Leon A. "Bud" Edney
Admiral, USN (Retired)
Former Commander, U.S. Atlantic Command & NATO Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic
Introduction
Presence, influence, and options. In these three words are the basic rationale for why politicians want carrier battle groups, and have been willing to spend over a trillion U.S. taxpayer dollars building a dozen for American use. That was hardly the original reason, though. Back in the years after the Great War, naval powers were trying to find loopholes in the first series of arms-control treaties (which had to do with naval forces). With the numbers and size of battleships and other vessels limited by the agreements, various nations began to consider what ships carrying aircraft might be able to contribute to navies. At first, the duties of these first carrier-borne aircraft were limited to spotting the fall of naval shells and providing a primitive fighter cover for the fleet. Within a few years, though, aircraft technologies began to undergo a revolutionary series of improvements. Metal aircraft structures, improved power plants and fuels, as well as the first of what we would call avionics began to find their way onto airplanes. By the outbreak of World War II, some naval analysts and leaders even suspected that carriers and their embarked aircraft might be capable of sinking the same battleships and other surface ships that they had originally been designed to cover.
The Second World War will be remembered by naval historians as a conflict dominated by two new classes of ships: fast carriers and submarines. The diesel-electric submarines were a highly efficient force able to deny navies and nations the use of the sea-lanes for commerce and warfare. Unfortunately, as the German Kriegsmarine and Grand Admiral Karl Donitz found, you do not win wars through simple denial of a battlespace like the Atlantic Ocean. Victory through seapower requires the ability to take the offensive on terms and at times of your choosing. This means being able to dominate vast volumes of air, ocean, and even near-earth space. Without a balanced force to project its power over the entire range of possibilities and situations, one-dimensional forces like the U-boat-dominated Kriegsmarine wound up being crushed in the crucible of war.
By contrast, the carriers and their escorts of World War II were able to project offensive power over the entire globe. From the North Cape to the islands of the Central Pacific, carrier-based aircraft dominated the greatest naval war in history. Along the way, they helped nullify the threat from Germany's U-boats and other enemy submarines, as well as sweeping the seas of enemy ships and aircraft. While the eventual Japanese surrender may have been signed aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay, it occurred in the shadow of a sky blackened by hundreds of carrier aircraft flying overhead in review. Called "Halsey's Folly," the flyover was the final proof of the real force that had ended the second global war of this century. Despite the claims of Air Force leaders who pronounced navies worthless in an era of nuclear-armed bombers, when the next shooting conflict erupted in Korea, it was carrier aircraft that covered the withdrawal to the Pusan Perimeter and the amphibious landings at Inchon. They then dropped into a role that would become common in the next half-century, acting as mobile air bases to project combat power ashore.