How Super Are Our Supercarriers?
Through the haze of a June morning off Sicily, an F- 14A Tomcat fighter was already banking in low over America's wake, a couple of miles out and coming home to the Bird Farm. Air Boss looked down. Damn. Still no place to put the thing.
On the flight deck below, opposite Air Boss's perch in the control tower, an A-7E Corsair II bomber sat astride the No. 4 steam catapult amidships. By now, the A-7 should have been flying with the rest of the day's second mission. Nobody would be landing while it straddled America's only available
runway.
"What's taking 'em so long down there?" Air Boss growled. He had left his leather armchair in his glass booth in America's superstructure. He was standing up for a better look, which he always does when the flight deck crunch is on.
The ship's 79,724 tons suddenly shuddered. Steam billowed from No. 4. The A-7 had vanished, rudely flung out over the Mediterranean by the "cat stroke," like a rock from a slingshot. Finally.
"Launch complete, sir!" said Mini Boss, his assistant.
"Clear decks!" Air Boss boomed into the radio to his launch crews. It would be close, maybe too close. "Secure the waist cat! Prepare to recover aircraft! Hubba, hubba!"
The F-14 was closing at 150 miles per hour. A mile out now. On the deck, crews were frantically stowing launch gear. They had to seal the long slit down which the catapult arm - the "shuttle" - races as it yanks a plane along the deck and flips it heavenward. They had to shut hatches and make them flush with the deck. America had to become seamless for its bird.
"Commmme on, commmme on," said Air Boss. His eyes flitted from the looming F-14 to his crews working below. The plane's variable wings were swept wide for landing, 64 feet tip to tip. Its wheels were down, its twin tail jets were spewing heat waves. It was a pterodactyl about to prey on the carrier.
"We're not going to make it!" said Air Boss.
"We'll make it!" said Mini Boss.
Unless they made it, the F-14 would have to be waved off, sent around for another approach. In peacetime, that is not fatal. It costs fuel - 266 gallons a minute for an F-14, $1,100 an hour - but no more. In war, a carrier's ability to cycle its jets in seconds - to launch them, land them, rearm them, refuel them, launch them again - could mean victory or defeat. America is not at war now. But America trains as if it is.
"We're not going to make it!" Air Boss said again.
"We'll make it!" said Mini.
Catapult crews had almost finished. The F-14 was just off the stern and plunging, a long hook dangling from its belly that would, it was hoped, catch one of four cables laid across the rear flight deck to stop the plane cold. It was time to decide: Wave it off or land it. The last of the crew was scampering out of the landing area.
"They made it!" said Mini.
Over the stern, down, down.
Bam.
Fifty-six thousand pounds of F-14 slammed home. Simultaneously, the pilot pushed to full throttle. Heat blasted down the aft flight deck. If the hook missed all the cables, the pilot would simply keep going, over the now- dormant site of the No. 4 catapult, flying off and coming around again. But he was no "bolter." He snagged a wire for a clean trap. Time from the last launch to the first landing: 45 seconds.
Air Boss grinned.
Mini Boss grinned.
Hubba, hubba.
IT IS HARD NOT TO LOVE the dance of the carrier deck - the skill, beauty and sheer guts of men launching and landing warplanes on a 1,000-foot slab on the sea.
Seventy-five times on an average day, up to 400 times during crises such as Libya, America's crew members dodge sucking jet intakes and whirring props to hitch aircraft to the catapults and send them flying. That many times, they help them home and snare them and park them. They can launch planes a minute apart. They can launch and land at the same time. They can do it in the dark or in the rain. Their average age is 19 1/2.
Engines whine, then race - and a plane disappears from the deck in 2.5 seconds. Its exhaust heat bathes launch crews. The air reeks of jet fuel. Steam seeps from the catapult track. The next plane is already moving forward to take the "cat stroke," and there's another behind it. Noise overwhelms the deck. All the while, the carrier slices through the blue.
"There's no way to describe it," said an A-7 pilot aboard America. ''There's no way to see it in a movie. You've got to come out here and smell it and see it. It's too dynamic. The whole thing's like a ballet."
In all, the United States' carriers number 14; no other nation has more than four. They are the largest engines of war; no one else's are half as big. They bear the names of battles won, Coral Sea, Midway and Saratoga; of leaders gone, Eisenhower, Forrestal, Kennedy, Nimitz and Vinson, and of Revolutionary War vessels, Constellation, Enterprise, Independence and Ranger. One evokes the place where man first flew, Kitty Hawk. And one is called America.
With their pride of escorts, the 14 carriers and 878 carrier-based fighters and bombers are the most tangible sign of U.S. power that most people around the world ever see. They are the heart of the nation's maritime defense, its glamour boys. They are the costliest items in the military budget, the price of one carrier and its escorts equaling the bill for 250 MX ballistic missiles.
Yet, for all their impressiveness and for all the importance the Pentagon attaches to the vessels, many congressmen and defense analysts argue that the supercarriers' day is history. The critics fear they are now unnecessary, too expensive and, worse, easy marks. Some of the doubters are even Navy men: Stansfield Turner, a retired admiral and the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency; Elmo Zumwalt, the retired Chief of Naval Operations, and Eugene J. Carroll Jr., a retired admiral who once commanded Nimitz.
"Like the battleship the carrier replaced, its magnificence cannot nullify basic changes in the nature of war at sea," Sen. Gary Hart, the Colorado Democrat, writes in a new book on U.S. defense, America Can Win. "The day of the large aircraft carrier . . . has passed."
Today, all surface ships are highly vulnerable to two things - missiles and submarines. A British frigate was sunk in the 1982 Falklands War by a single Exocet missile fired from an Argentine jet it never saw. The Soviet Union has 304 attack submarines, enough to dispatch 21 to hunt each U.S. aircraft carrier. By opting for 14 big carriers - a 15th, the 91,487-ton Theodore Roosevelt, will join the fleet soon - the United States could lose, perhaps fatally, a very large portion of naval power in a very short time from a very few Soviet missile and torpedo hits.
In short, it might have the wrong navy for the late 20th century. "When you concentrate your total offensive capability into 15 platforms, the targeting system of the adversary becomes very focused," said Carroll, the ex-carrier captain, who is now deputy director of the Center for Defense Information, a private Washington research group.
No one doubts that the United States ought to have carriers. They have uses. The answer to vulnerability, critics say, is to have more of them, to spread the risk. The big ones, however, cost big bucks. Roosevelt and two other new, huge, nuclear-powered carriers authorized by Congress, the Abraham Lincoln and the George Washington, will cost $3.5 billion apiece. Without planes. Add those and add the cruisers and frigates that must escort any carrier - the Navy concedes they need protection - and it costs $17 billion to
put a carrier group to sea. That is 10 times the 1986 Philadelphia city budget. The cost of the three carrier groups combined would be enough to pay for all city services - police, fire, sanitation, everything - for 30 years without any resident paying any taxes.
That is money that cannot be spent on other military items. And most of that money goes for "the purpose of protecting this goddamn carrier," said Robert Komer, who was an undersecretary of Defense for policy during the Carter administration. Even most of the carrier's planes are there to protect it.
Instead, many critics say, it's time to think small. Overhauling the big carriers at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard - Independence is there now, under the Service Life Extension Program - is merely fixing up the past. The nation should have smaller, cheaper carriers. They can do the job. And the nation could then afford more carriers, and more would cut the impact of losing any given one if war comes.
Of course, to speak of cutting losses in any war seems surreal. Only the Soviet Union could really challenge the U.S. Navy. But any sea battle with the Soviets would trigger nuclear war, many analysts say. In that case, it wouldn't much matter if the United States had 15 supercarriers or 30 medium ones. The game would be over. Still, the Pentagon plans for old-fashioned conflict. Its theory is that because nuclear war is final, no nation would start one. But the Soviets might be willing to start a regular war, so it's vital to have good conventional armed forces. In that context, debating what kind of navy to have does make sense.
And the U.S. Navy has no doubt that it wants big carriers. It would even like seven or eight more, up to 22 or 23. In fact, the Reagan administration, under Navy Secretary John F. Lehman Jr., has made big carriers the key to a strategy that would take them right into the teeth of Soviet defenses in wartime. That is how much confidence it has in carriers' ability to survive today. Critics, said Adm. Henry H. Mauz, commander of America's battle group, ''are well-meaning people, I'm sure. But they're wrong."
Lehman even said in testimony before Congress last fall that to build small is communistic, to build big is American. "Should carriers be bigger or smaller? There is no absolute answer to that question," he said. ''. . . (But) our tremendous edge in technology is a permanent edge built into the nature of our culture and economic system, compared to the Soviets. It is to that advantage we must always build, not to go to cheaper, smaller, less capable ships in large numbers. That is an area in which a totalitarian, centralized, planned economy excels."
Big is beautiful.
AMERICA'S CREW SOMEtimes gets lost. There are so many decks and passageways that sailors don't know where they are. "I get fouled-up all the time," said an officer who was consulting a deck plan on a bulkhead.
Crew members can ask someone for help, though it'll often be a stranger. With 4,950 men - there is not one woman - who work different hours on different decks, most don't know each other, even after spending six months at sea on the same ship. Usually they learn about a fellow crew member by reading about him in the ship's daily newspaper or seeing him on one of two television stations that beam live news and old movies and TV shows. (The most popular fare is a raunchy movie about a riot in a women's prison, one aired repeatedly and so bad that the crew says it's great.)
Many days, there is no sensation of being at sea. Unless they stand on the flight deck or work in the "island" - the starboard-side command structure that rises above the flight deck - crew members can't see the ocean. There are no portholes. And America is so massive, it is often unaffected by the water's roll. Being belowdecks can feel like being in a building.
When it left Norfolk, Va., on March 10 for a Mediterranean patrol, America took $9 million in cash because at sea it becomes its own economy. The crew gets paid. The crew buys things at the ship's stores. The proceeds are then used to pay the crew. Eighteen thousand meals are fixed a day, 280,000 gallons of sea water is distilled. The Navy loves to boast that there is a barber shop, a bakery, a photo lab, a post office, a printing plant, a tailor, and a public relations staff. In other words, much of the crew has nothing to do with weapons or war. They are service-sector Navy.
The bigness does have an objective, of course: to fly a lot of planes and carry fuel and bombs for them. A U.S. carrier has 80 to 90 planes, more than all four Soviet mini-carriers combined. America has eight types of planes, more types than either the three British or two French carriers can hold.
Besides 24 F-14s and 34 A-6 and A-7 bombers, America has four planes to refuel its planes in the air, four to detect enemy planes, four to jam enemy electronic equipment, 10 to hunt for submarines, and six helicopters to find downed pilots and to hunt for submarines. All told, there are 86 aircraft, which together can deliver 480,000 pounds of bombs, as much as 10 World War II-era aircraft carriers. When they're not flying, the planes can be stored and repaired on the hangar deck, which runs almost from bow to stern below the flight deck.
The aircraft fly off a deck that is 1,047.5 feet long, not the biggest in the Navy, an honor that belongs to Enterprise at about 1,100 feet. But if stood on end, America's flight deck would be almost twice as high as William Penn's hat on City Hall. It is 252 feet wide. All told, the deck covers 4.6 acres, an expanse coated with black, course, non-skid paint. The crew has plenty of straightaway to jog in the hot sun when the planes aren't flying. Five lengths is a mile.
The flight deck is so big, America can launch four planes almost at once, two from bow catapults and two from catapults amidships, on an extention of the flight deck that angles left. That angle enables the ship to launch and land simultaneously in some cases. While a plane is launched forward, another lands on the angle. If it misses all the arresting cables, it keeps going left, thereby avoiding the bow catapults.
Despite its weight, America, which is 22 years old, can glide through the water at 30 knots. The power is not nuclear but conventional boilers that drive four 22-foot-high propellers. In fuel for the ship and planes, in crew pay and in food and supplies, each hour of patrol costs taxpayers $22,917. That is $550,000 a day. That is $99 million for the normal six-month cruise - not counting the bills that its escorts run up.
Overall, America exudes seductive and expensive power, a sense magnified by the stateroom of Capt. Richard C. Allen. There, in the bowels of a ship designed for war, is an elegant living room with coffee table, sofa and wing chairs. The carpeting is bulkhead-to-bulkhead. The dining table can seat at least 10. Several lamps lend a soft light to the room.
Its occupant is a serious man who was born 46 years ago in Wisconsin and flew carrier jets until his eyes went bad. He wears wire-rims now; they give his soft and narrow face the look of a teacher. Allen, who has commanded America since July 1985, seemed perplexed by a suggestion that his ship might be at risk or should be anything but the size it is.
Two carriers half as big, for example, would mean two of everything, Allen said, two engine rooms, two sets of catapults, two bridges. Thus, two small carriers would be more than the cost of one big one. But neither would be as stable in rough seas, hampering flight operations, and neither would have so many planes able to do so many things. Even with the advances in missile and submarine warfare, he would much rather command a carrier now than during World War II. Besides, because America is big, it can take many bomb hits. And it is much harder to find than an airfield ashore.
"It's mobile, it's moving, it's never in the same place," the captain said. "Like right now. You're on it. Do you know exactly where we are? I'll share with you: We're southwest of Sicily. Tonight, we'll go north of Malta. This morning, we were east of Sardinia. The carrier moves. As a result, the targeting problem against a carrier is very complex. . . .
"It's extremely remote a carrier would ever be totally put out of - I mean, sunk. I think it's just something beyond imagination as I see it, by any threat that we see today or in the near future. This is a very capable piece of machinery."
LIBYA. THEY WERE ACTUALLY GOING TO hit Libya. Night had fallen. It was April 14, 1986. Allen looked down from the bridge at a dimly lighted flight deck jammed with aircraft, bombs and bullets bound for Benghazi. It was no drill. "I don't believe we're really doing this," he thought. "It's just unbelievable."
The crew had manned battle stations in record time. "All you have to do is tell somebody, 'We're going to go kill something,' and the level of interest goes up logarithmically. I mean, people become - they're motivated."
Thirty-eight planes from America would go. Somewhere in the darkness of the Mediterranean, the scene was being repeated on the Coral Sea. One by one, planes roared away. The most beautiful were the F-14s because, in order to get extra lift, they always flipped on their afterburners just before the ''cat stroke," sending twin cones of flame 20 feet down the flight deck and lighting up the dark sea.
He was proud, Allen said, "to watch the complexity of the carrier pull together and to watch the thing take shape, until boom, there you are at night, and the cats start firing, and things happen just as they were planned."
And in the early hours of April 15, as the planes began coming back, crew members belowdecks watched the closed-circuit television shot of the flight deck to see whether the bombers had bombs under their wings. They didn't. And all 38 planes returned. The crew cheered wildly. (Fearing terrorist reprisals against the crew's families in the United States because of the carrier's role in the raid, the Navy requested that no crew member's name be used in this article, except Allen's, and it told crew members not to discuss Libya.)
"I just never thought the national decision would be to engage," Allen said. "I'm extremely proud of the President for having had the guts to do what he did."
Whatever its merit or morality, the U.S. raid on Libya to counter terrorism showed what carriers do best. They can sail to remote places and deal with Third World crises. They can, as the Navy puts it, "project power." Virtually every day of 1985, four U.S. carriers were somewhere at sea on patrol. Not the same four, of course, but a rotation that enables crews to avoid prolonged periods away from home. No other nation can deliver so much airpower wherever it wants. It is this ability to pop up anywhere swiftly that even critics of big carriers say makes carriers worth having.
It was carrier planes that forced down the civilian jet bearing the four hijackers of the cruise ship Achille Lauro. Carriers stood off Grenada and Lebanon during land operations in 1983. It is carriers that would be called on to reopen the Strait of Hormuz should Iran ever carry out its threat to cut oil lanes in its war with Iraq. Often, the mere arrival of the carrier is enough; none of its jets has to fire a shot.
"The carrier is an enormous politico-military capability," said Rear Adm. Jeremy J. Black, assistant chief of the Royal Navy Staff. "It is evident power. As you approach the thing, it emanates power. And wherever it will be, it will be a symbol of American power. That in itself is so significant."
"The aircraft carrier," said Norman Polmar, a noted U.S. defense analyst, ''has demonstrated that it can move to the troubled area. It can remain offshore, in international waters, for days or weeks or months. . . . You're going to see many more low-level conflicts and confrontations, and aircraft will be necessary for us to observe, deter and, if necessary, fight."
Used this way, carriers are not at much risk. Grenada or Libya do not have the military skill to mount a serious threat. Or so the Navy thinks. Carriers stood off North Vietnam for years, launching air strikes but never taking one in return. The Navy has plans for big carriers, however, that would put them at risk.
Imagine: On May 30, 1987, Soviet tanks and infantry swarm across central Europe. For the moment, the conflict is conventional. The European Allies are barely holding on, and they need troops from the United States. Convoys are pieced together, civilian 747s commandeered. And carriers flood the Atlantic to baby these sea and air fleets across to Europe. They are to sink submarines and shoot planes. They are to sweep Soviet surface ships out of the sea lanes linking Old World and New.
That has been part of U.S. strategy for years. Navy Secretary Lehman has added a twist, however. After carriers make the oceans safe for passage, he wants to send them on aggressive forays close to the Soviet Union to finish off the Soviet navy and then bomb land targets. Carriers would sail near the Kola Peninsula, off the Soviet Union's far north coast. They would sweep into the Baltic Sea. They would cruise off the Soviet's Pacific coast. By crushing the Soviets on their flanks with carrier power, Lehman argues, the United States would take pressure off the war in central Europe.
This "forward strategy" fuels a push by Lehman for a 600-ship Navy. The number of warships had slipped to 479 after Vietnam, and the Carter administration had decided not to build carriers to succeed the aging Coral Sea and Midway, which were both due to be retired. It thought big ships were too vulnerable and expensive. The number of carriers was set at 12.
But Lehman sought - and got - congressional approval during the first Reagan term for three giant nuclear-powered carriers and all their escorts, which together will consume 41 percent of Navy construction costs from now to the year 2000 - $60 billion. Two of the carriers will replace Midway and Coral Sea, and the third will represent a net gain. So, the number of big carriers will actually rise to 15.
Lehman says the fleet expansion centered on big carriers is crucial to the ''forward strategy." The United States must get the enemy in his lair, and only big carriers can do it. But it's not the same enemy as it used to be.
"CAPTAIN SAID TO TELL YOU WE got a Udaloy coming in."
Churning on an opposite course in the twilight, the sleek visitor whipped past on America's port side, swerved across its wake and pulled up off the starboard side about 1,000 yards away. Its speed and course now matched the carrier's. From the flight deck, a few crew members gave a look, but they had seen one before.
The Udaloy is a new class of Soviet destroyer. Each has 64 surface-to-air missiles, eight torpedo tubes, eight antisubmarine missiles and two helicopters. The ships steam at 32 knots. America's crew calls them ''tattletales."
Soviet destroyers and frigates routinely weave in and out among U.S. battle groups. The high seas belong to no one; the Soviets have every right to sail wherever they want. The encounters are always courteous. Both sides follow the rules of the road. What the Soviets are doing is taking notes. They watch the pattern of flight operations and the types of exercises. They see how the task force moves. They watch how different planes perform.
"The Soviets? Oh yeah, they'll come right off the quarter, 1,000 yards, 500 yards, follow us around, back and forth," Allen said the next day as the Udaloy hovered. "Whatever we do, they do. If we turn, they turn. . . . They take pictures. They pick up garbage. They do weird things. Usually they just follow you around."
Such open-ocean presence reflects the new Soviet navy. Russia had never been a sea power, under the czars or under communism. Just 20 years ago, Soviet ships spent a fleet total of 5,700 days at sea, according to U.S. estimates. Last year, they spent 57,000. The Soviets now have the world's largest navy, with 283 major surface ships and 381 submarines, split between 77 ballistic missile-launching submarines (for delivering nuclear warheads to the United States) and 304 attack submarines (for sinking ships, such as U.S. ballistic missile-firing submarines or the carriers). That is 664 warships, compared to the 541 the United States has at the moment. That is three times the total of U.S. attack submarines, the kind needed to find Soviet attack submarines before they find U.S. carriers.
Assigned to the Soviet navy are 1,625 aircraft, mainly operating from land. Their job, too, is to sink U.S. ships. Most formidable, perhaps, is the new Backfire bomber, which can fly at 1,100 knots for 3,400 miles without refueling, bearing big air-to-surface missiles. At the end of 1985, there were 120 Backfires, with more being added each year.
Some Soviet planes are even at sea. Four modest aircraft carriers have been built, and each has 13 planes and 19 helicopters. Like British "jump jets," the planes take off and land by moving vertically. Last year, the Soviet Union launched an American-size carrier of at least 65,000 tons and designed for 60 planes and helicopters. It will not be operational for several years, however, because the Soviets must first master the dance of launching and landing so many aircraft.
Though the Soviet navy is large, there is disagreement about how much of a threat it is, at least away from its coastal waters. In a study last year, the Center for Defense Information said that 145 of the Soviets' surface ships were too small, less than 2,000 tons, to venture into the open sea for long. It said the Soviets have a limited ability to resupply ships at sea, which America does very well. (It has to: A battle group gulps 10,000 barrels of fuel a day.) Nor do the Soviets have as many anchorages in other countries as the United States has. And while the Soviets now have carriers, no one argues that the vessels are any match for U.S. carriers.
Nonetheless, Lehman and other Navy officials tout the Soviets as a huge, aggressive force, plying waters they never did before with power they never had before. They point to the Gulf of Mexico, where major Soviet naval forces sailed twice last year. "In many areas of the world, the Hammer and Sickle now overshadows the Stars and Stripes," the unabashedly pro-Navy magazine Sea Power intoned last fall.
Much of this gloom-and-doom, of course, is to justify the need for 600 very expensive ships: The Pentagon must face a worthy foe. And even the Center for Defense Information, in its study, said the Soviets would be very tough adversaries close to home if Lehman's "forward strategy" were ever tried. And farther out to sea, Soviet attack submarines and Backfire bombers could, indeed, threaten convoys and their carrier escorts.
Yet even while highlighting Soviet power, the Navy says, in effect, no problem. It's got a system.
MUCH OF THE TIME, America seems alone in the Mediterranean, free of Soviet tattletales and steaming toward an empty horizon. Not even fishermen chug by. But the Small Boys are never far away.
There are 10 sprinkled in a circle around America, two cruisers, four destroyers and four frigates, sometimes moving in close, sometimes sailing out of sight. One or two U.S. attack submarines are often there as well, but
because they are underwater, it's hard to be sure; Allen said only that they are not there all the time.
America never leaves home without the Small Boys, whose crews say that they are the true sailors and that the carrier is just the Bird Farm. Battle groups are the key to what the Navy calls defense-in-depth. The idea is to keep the $3.5 billion airfield at the center from being sunk.
The first sentry is not a ship, however. It is a plane, one that does not carry any weapons and cannot fly fast. The E-2C Hawkeye looks like a small AWACs plane, the Air Force's Airborne Warning and Control aircraft that seem to have a giant mushroom on their backs. The mushroom has radar.
Often the first plane to leave the carrier during launches, the E-2's job is to park in the sky and see what else is up there. Its radar can scan 100,000 feet up and in an arc 250 miles around America. If it identified enemy planes, the E-2 would call in what deck crews call the Super Hot Fighter Pilots, only they use a more descriptive word than super.
The men who fly the $38.7 million F-14 fighters are just about as smug and smooth as Top Gun portrays them. America's pilots haven't seen the movie
because they have been at sea. But they've seen the Kenny Loggins video clip, featuring shots of twisting, blasting F-14s. It was flown out to the ship. They love it.
"Yeah, that's us," said a 28-year-old pilot from Drexel Hill. "We're cool. We're fighter pilots."
Most are in their late 20s or early 30s. Handsomeness seems to be a job requirement. Catapulting off a carrier, which subjects them to a jolt seven or eight times the force of gravity, "is a lifetime E-ticket at Disneyland," said the Drexel Hill pilot.
"To be sitting in that machine and to know that 300 feet later you'll be going 200 miles per hour and the whole thing takes 2 1/2 seconds - well, the level of concentration in sports or whatever has never reached that adrenaline high," said a 42-year-old pilot from Philadelphia, who has done it 1,250 times.
Their job is to hunt down enemy planes and destroy them before they can launch missiles at America. Or, as Adm. Mauz, the battle group commander, put it, "We want to shoot the archer rather than the arrow."
F-14s, which can fly at more than twice the speed of sound, have Phoenix missiles with a range of 120 miles, as well as shorter-range Sidewinder and
Sparrow missiles. The F-14s would be helped by four EA-6B Prowlers from the carrier, planes whose task is to scramble the radar of attacking enemy planes and baffle their missile guidance systems. Needless to say, the fighter pilots don't think anyone will get past them. What a silly suggestion; without the carrier, they would get wet.
"This is home," said the air wing commander, 40, who is in charge of all the pilots of all the various types of planes. "This is where dinner is. This is where the stereo is."
If attacking planes did skirt the F-14s and fire missiles, the next line would take over, the Small Boys. They would rely on Aegis, a defensive system just entering service aboard a new line of cruisers and destroyers; America's battle group has one of the new ships, the cruiser Ticonderoga. The Aegis is designed to find and track dozens of hostile missiles at once - the exact number is classified - and launch shipboard missiles to destroy them. It can coordinate not only the cruiser's reply missiles, but also those of all the ships in the battle group, automatically. An attack would be swatted out of the skies. In theory.
If that fails, and missiles are still boring in, America has a modern Gatling gun called Phalanx. Mounted at three points on the edge of the flight deck, the computer-directed gun has six barrels that together fire 3,000 rounds a minute. That is supposed to shred any missiles. Judging by a test one day on America, the gun's noise alone might destroy them.
Soviet submarines would be found by America's 10 S-3A Viking planes. Their electronics can look down through the water and spot a submarine. The plane then drops a depth charge or torpedo. The battle group also scours with sonar and can fire an array of weapons at submarines.
Actually, Navy officials hate to talk about all this defense. They say outsiders spend too much time worrying about how vulnerable carriers are. The ships are for offense, first. "It's sort of like your house," said the air wing commander. "You take steps to protect it, but you don't go around protecting it all the time. I'm not worried every day my stereo's going to be stolen. I'd rather go bomb something."
IT CAME OUT OF THE WEST just after lunch, skimming 10 feet above the South Atlantic at 680 miles per hour. On the bridge of Sheffield, a British frigate,
Lts. Peter Walpole and Brian Leyshon had seen a puff of smoke on the horizon but didn't know what it meant and hadn't see the Argentine Super Etendard fighter. One mile out, they both recognized what was coming their way.
"My God," they said simultaneously, "it's a missile."
Four seconds later, the Exocet hit starboard amidships, above the water line, and veered down into the engine room, where its 363 pounds of high explosive detonated. In an instant, Sheffield lost electrical power and communications. Fires broke out. The edge of the hole in the ship's side glowed red from the blazes, but there was no water pressure to put them out. As flames crept toward the magazine, where ammunition is stored, the crew abandoned Sheffield.
A new, $50 million ship had been destroyed - and 20 of its crew killed - by a single, small, computer-guided missile costing one one-hundredth as much.
What happened that Tuesday, May 4, 1982, during the Falklands War was the most stunning example in history of the power of the anti-ship missile. These weapons can strike from much greater distances than naval guns and, unlike shells, can be guided to their targets. Photos of Sheffield, listing and burning, depict the critics' nightmare of what will happen to carriers.
There is little chance, certainly, that one, two or even three Exocets could sink a U.S. carrier. It is just too big. And the Navy accurately says that the British had less ability to detect, track and destroy enemy planes than a U.S. battle group has. Britain's two Falklands carriers had no planes like Hawkeyes to spot the Super Etendards. They had far fewer fighters to attack them. No British ship had Aegis. Polmar, the military analyst, says a U.S. carrier force would have destroyed the Argentine air force "in two days."
But there are missiles that could threaten a carrier - cruise missiles. They are flying torpedoes with large warheads, launched up to 350 miles from their targets and often moving at supersonic speed. Backfire bombers can carry them. About 30 Soviet surface ships carry them. And so do 62 Soviet submarines, including the new Oscar class. Each Oscar has 24 cruise missiles. Two are at sea now, with another joining the fleet every two years.
"We do not have an adequate defense for cruise missiles," said Adm. Carroll of the Center for Defense Information. "It's been the bete noire of naval strategy for some time now. We've made progress. We've got Phalanx and such. But I'll guarantee you that if you take those carriers in range of Soviet land-based aircraft and cruise missiles, there will be enough cruise missiles coming through the defense to hit the ships. I don't know how many will get through, but say it's one out of five. And if one out of five hits our ships? It's all over."
Aegis is supposed to deal with cruise missiles, but it's performance has not been flawless. Initially, it knocked down only four of 15 attacking missiles in tests. Later, that rose to 10 of 11, but doubts remain. Moreover, a missile doesn't have to sink a carrier to render it useless. Each carrier has four very weak points - its catapults. Without them, planes don't fly. The Navy thinks it is highly unlikely that any enemy will get so lucky as to put all four out of action at once. But then, naval history is replete with lucky moments.
A carrier's greatest foe, however, is not in the air. It is the enemy it never sees. Gary Hart calls them the kings of the sea. And the Soviets have more of them than anyone. In March 1984, a Soviet nuclear-powered attack submarine rose up under Kitty Hawk in the Sea of Japan, bumping it and damaging both ships. It was an accident, not an attack. But the battle group had not detected the sub, even though at least five Small Boys were around
Kitty Hawk.
Because it was peacetime, it was possible the escorts weren't "pinging" with sonar to find subs. The incident, however, illustrates how stealthy subs can be. They are a threat not only from their cruise missiles, but from their torpedoes. While the Navy believes its detection skills are good, they are not perfect. "We don't always know where they are," said Capt. Allen, "so we don't know whether we're being followed or not all the time."
Oddly, Allen has never been on a submarine at sea, despite being in the Navy for 27 years. Critics say that would be an excellent way for carrier captains to learn how their underwater adversaries work and think.
Given the air and sea threats to carriers, Lehman's "forward strategy" could end in the destruction of the heart of the Navy. It would be going right where the defenses are thickest. Stripped of even a few of its carriers, the Navy might then be unable to do its most important job, protecting the sea lanes. That, in turn, would jeopardize a war in central Europe.
"If we sail into battle against the Soviets depending on just 15 ships, we will, like the Spanish Armada, sail in expectation of a miracle," Hart writes in America Can Win. "Perhaps we will get one, although the precedent is not encouraging. Perhaps the opponent, despite numerous submarines and aircraft, will prove incompetent. But our survival, as a navy and a nation, would depend . . . on massive incompetence, not on our strength."
Even if the strategy worked and the carriers sank huge portions of the Soviet navy, the cornered Soviets might shift first to tactical and then strategic nuclear weapons to stave off surrender. In that case, the carriers'
size wouldn't matter.
ASTERN OF AMERICA, THEY formed a necklace of lights in the night sky, 15 planes strung out in a row. They had lined up to take their turns coming home. It was 11:30 p.m.
On a catwalk hanging over the side of the flight deck, four landing-signals officers stood peering into the dark. LSOs can tell, just by looking at wing
lights, if a returning pilot is on the right glide path, dropping 100 feet for each quarter mile to the ship.
"You're high, high," an LSO said softly into his radio to the first inbound plane. It was too dark to see what kind it was.
No task in all of aviation is more difficult than landing on a carrier at night. While modern jets can all but fly themselves and the carrier has runway
lights, pilots have none of the usual reference points, such as the lights of a city. The sky is black, the water is black. They cannot tell where one stops and the other starts. All they can see is a short line of light. They cannot even see the ship, let alone the deck. No matter what instruments can say and computers can do, that is frightening.
The first plane drew nearer. It crossed the stern. Sparks shot from the flight deck as the arresting hook hit first, searching for one of the four cables. It found one, yanking an A-7 to a halt in 350 feet, one-tenth of the distance a plane needs on land. The lights of the next plane grew larger.
"Foul deck! Foul deck!" said two LSOs.
Until the A-7 could be unhooked and moved aside, until the arresting cables were back in position, until deck crews had moved, the LSOs would keep telling the next pilot his runway was blocked. If necessary, they would wave him off. On this night, they would not have to; the crews were perfect.
Sparks flew, engines roared. In 16 minutes, all the planes were down. The ship grew quiet for the night, sailing on.
"Sometimes," said an LSO, "I can't believe what we do out here."