One Hundred Years of U.S. Navy Air Power (73 page)

These issues were not particularly contentious during the run-down of U.S. military strength after 1945. The Navy lived mainly off the massive wartime investment in ships and aircraft. By 1948, when rearmament began, new weapons, particularly aircraft, were coming into service, and new production was needed. For the Navy, among the first fruits of rearmament was approval to build the first of a new generation of very large carriers, USS
United States
. Meanwhile the political choice had been made to create a new U.S. Air Force and to achieve efficiency by unifying the (newly) three Services and parceling out their roles. The new Air Force wanted much what the Royal Air Force had achieved in 1918, a monopoly over aircraft. Because the Air Force emerged from the Army, it certainly achieved that in terms of Army aviation. The U.S. Navy, however, was well aware that carriers—and their aircraft—would be its core. It successfully resisted attempts to eliminate naval aviation, although there were extremely acute questions as to which Service would be responsible for which kinds of air operation. During the debate over Service unification, the U.S. Army tried to eliminate the Marine Corps as unnecessary duplication of effort (President Harry Truman, a former Army artillery officer, favored this move), but the Marines successfully resisted. That resistance preserved Marine aviation, with important consequences for Navy aviation (which included the Marines) as a whole.

Inter-Service arguments became crucial because the defense budget suffered in 1949. The necessary cut was so deep that no Service could avoid cutting core capabilities. The new U.S. Air Force decided to emphasize its nuclear role, which promised an affordable kind of defense. The new supercarrier USS
United States
had been conceived for nuclear attack. Many in the Air Force clearly saw it as a direct threat; if the only viable Air Force role was nuclear attack, only a monopoly would guarantee the Service's survival. Indeed, a monopoly would make the Air Force the dominant Service. In 1949 the two largest programs were the supercarrier (which would have been the first of four) and the Air Force's B-36 intercontinental bomber. Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson cancelled the carrier. To many in the Navy, he was reducing the Service to a subsidiary role, supplying forward bases (which might not even be
needed if the B-36 succeeded). The Secretary of the Navy resigned. The Navy forced a congressional debate—and lost. The Navy's fight was known as the “Revolt of the Admirals.” In effect the outbreak of war in Korea about a year later showed that the Navy had been right: nuclear deterrence was a limited weapon. Events after the outbreak showed that the problem had been budgetary: the Truman administration roughly tripled the defense budget, and it became possible to build balanced U.S. forces, including a new generation of aircraft carriers.

The Navy had always argued that the value of the carrier lay in its flexibility. That was dramatically demonstrated in June 1950, when U.S. and British carriers provided much of the critical air support when the North Koreans invaded South Korea, overrunning airfields. Later, jets operating from the U.S. carriers challenged the Russian-supplied (and often Russian-operated) MiG-15s supporting the Chinese and the North Koreans. It was crucial for U.S. carrier aviation that existing carriers were able to operate aircraft with performance entirely comparable to that of land-based fighters (and bombers).

Dwight D. Eisenhower became president in 1953. As the first Commander of NATO forces in Europe, he was acutely aware of the weakness of Western armies compared with those of the Soviet Union. As former Commander of Allied Armies beginning with D-day, he was also well aware of the value of sea-based forces. He remarked that Western Europe should be seen as a peninsula, with sea flanks on both sides that the defenders could and should exploit. He was also well aware that nuclear deterrence made the big war in Europe unlikely—but did not affect peripheral wars such as Korea. President Eisenhower saw American sea power as a way of forcing the Soviets and their clients to defend their entire periphery. For him, therefore, strike carriers armed with nuclear weapons were the only affordable way to deal with the sheer mass of Soviet and client land forces. This mass had recently been demonstrated by Chinese intervention in Korea.

U.S. Navy

Official 1948 sketch of the supercarrier
United States,
which was designed to carry heavy bombers
.

At the same time, nuclear-armed carrier aircraft were considered an important addition to the U.S. strategic deterrent. Because they operated around the edges of Eurasia, carriers could attack the Soviet Union from unexpected directions. The Soviets maintained a massive national air defense system. Just as in the case of ground forces, the U.S. ability to strike from the sea forced the Soviets to stretch out that system; that investment imposed other limits on Soviet military power.

In the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration assumed that nuclear weapons would be used in any war; it said that they should be treated just like any other weapon. The carriers thus combined tactical and strategic roles. When the Kennedy administration entered office, it reversed that policy, on the grounds that any use of nuclear weapons might quickly escalate into an unrestrained nuclear holocaust. This was much the view taken by later administrations during the Cold War. At about the same time, the Navy deterrent role shifted from carriers to strategic submarines. It seemed that Soviet strategy now favored supporting local wars of national liberation, which meant local insurgencies. Surely U.S. support of governments under threat would entail the use of local airfields, which could support large land-based air forces? It was no longer so obvious that a carrier, with a limited number of aircraft on board, was worthwhile.

The first (and only) U.S. war to stop local Communist insurgents was Vietnam. The insurgent army in South Vietnam was in effect an arm of the North Vietnamese army, and an important part of U.S. strategy was to convince the North Vietnamese to pull back by threatening North Vietnam itself, by air strikes. North Vietnam turned out to be a miniature version of the Soviet air defense situation. Land-based aircraft flew predictable routes to their targets. Strikes from the sea turned out to be quite useful, as they complicated the North Vietnamese air defense problem. It also turned out that carriers in the Tonkin Gulf could deliver similar amounts of ordnance to tactical aircraft in South Vietnam and Thailand. The carriers were well worthwhile. Among other surprises, the Viet Cong in South Vietnam managed to destroy many aircraft on the ground—carrier aircraft were immune to such strikes. Aircraft in safer places like Thailand incurred their own costs.

After the United States withdrew from Vietnam, attention shifted back to the Soviet threat to Western Europe. Again there was a question of whether strike carriers were worthwhile. It seemed to some that by the 1970s the Soviets had amassed so much anti-carrier striking power that any attempt to operate carriers near the
Soviet Union would be suicidal (an author wrote about the ritual “dance of death” represented by carrier exercises in the Norwegian Sea). In the late 1970s the Carter administration planned a “sea control” fleet emphasizing submarines, frigates, and patrol aircraft specifically to deal with the large Soviet submarine fleet.

The new thinking, which denigrated carriers, distinguished between a power projection capability (carriers and amphibious forces) usable mainly in the Third World, and a sea control capability to defeat enemy submarines. This view, popularized by CNO Admiral Elmo Zumwalt Jr., responded in part to the Defense Department practice of categorizing forces for distinct missions. Critics within the Navy pointed out that the distinction between sea control and power projection might be a lot less clear-cut than the admiral, a surface force sailor, imagined. His strategy of concentrating on sea control in effect gave the Soviets the initiative. Many in the policy community thought that Admiral Zumwalt's ideas, which were the first explicit expressions of naval strategy they had ever seen, were actually mainstream Navy thinking.
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Many U.S. Navy strategists saw things differently. A new maritime strategy, actually a classic naval strategy, was framed beginning with the Navy's Seaplan 2000 response to the Carter administration's request for a study of the appropriate future of the fleet. One key point was that the Soviet fleet had changed dramatically. It had always had a large naval air arm, but by the 1960s it was deploying jet bombers with stand-off missiles. A fleet designed to defeat submarines could not provide sea control anywhere near Western Europe, because it could not beat the bombers. Only carrier-based fighters could (the bombers could get to sea-lanes without encountering land-based NATO fighters). By the 1970s the U.S. Navy was beginning to acquire the solution to the bombers, in the form of F-14 Tomcat fighters armed with the Phoenix missile, backed by the Aegis surface anti-aircraft missile system. The problem had always been that anti-ship missiles were so deadly a threat that fleet fighters would concentrate on them, allowing the bombers to launch, return to base, and launch again. Aegis was so effective a backstop that, once it was in service, the fighters could concentrate on the bombers, attacking “the archer rather than the arrow.” Unless those archers were killed, they could easily destroy vital NATO shipping and also the surface ships intended to help fight Soviet submarines. Another factor in the change was the growing understanding that, while the Soviet view of land warfare was deeply offensive, the Soviets would start a war at sea on the defensive. An offensively oriented U.S. Fleet could keep them there.
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The strategists also emphasized the Soviets' flank problem. By 1969 the Soviet Union and China were bitter enemies. The Soviets began to move large forces to the Far East—to the detriment of those it could maintain facing Western Europe. In the late 1970s Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Thomas B. Hayward pointed out that his fleet contributed to the defense of Europe by maintaining a threat in the Far East,
in effect demonstrating to the Soviets that the United States would back China in a future global war. The alternative, which the Carter administration favored, was simply to swing the Pacific Fleet to the Atlantic to support the expected European war.

The new maritime strategy shaped the naval program of the Reagan administration. Secretary of the Navy Dr. John Lehman was a reserve carrier aviator who appreciated the efficacy of carrier air power, and who understood that the Navy could make a strategic contribution in any future war against the Soviet Union. His senior commanders already understood the way the Navy should fight (Lehman knew their views from his own participation in Seaplan 2000). Lehman had them combine their outline war plans into a single explicit maritime strategy that showed how a fleet built around carriers could seize and exploit naval supremacy. Dr. Lehman's own background probably made him particularly aware of the air threat not only to carriers but to NATO shipping, hence supportive of the use of U.S. carriers and their fighters to destroy that threat. The emerging maritime strategy built on classic sea power thinking: the U.S. Navy would neutralize the Soviet fleet (mainly land-based missile bombers and submarines) by confronting it with the choice between fighting a losing decisive battle in the Norwegian Sea or surviving as a fleet in being. Carriers and their aircraft were key both to forcing the Soviet fleet to fight (by mounting a threat the Soviet fleet would feel compelled to counter) and to destroying its strike bombers. As for the submarines, it seemed that the anti-submarine force built around the fleet would be far more capable than anything escorting NATO convoys. Although the new maritime strategy was a revival of classic thinking, many outside and even inside the Navy thought it was new and dangerous, contrasting it with the much less aggressive ideas publicized by Admiral Zumwalt. In Zumwalt's terms, the maritime strategy would achieve sea control by projecting naval power into the Soviet Union. U.S. naval exercises were conducted to dramatize the ability of the carrier-oriented fleet to survive and to project power in the crucial Norwegian Sea; Dr. Lehman himself considered the success of such exercises (Northern Wedding) a decisive Cold War victory.

When the Cold War ended, the U.S. Navy differed from most NATO navies in its emphasis on carrier-based power projection. That turned out to be an excellent idea, because the wars that followed required the United States to deal with local land power. Land-based aircraft were certainly vital, but the limitations of land bases became more and more obvious. Many governments were reluctant to allow basing, at least of combat aircraft. When NATO fought in the former Yugoslavia, the use of land bases was restricted not so much by politics as simply by weather, so that the large numbers of land-based aircraft could not conduct as many sorties as could much smaller numbers of sea-based aircraft. In Afghanistan, political limits on land basing led to the use of bases much farther from the battle area, and that in turn badly fatigued pilots, sometimes causing them to make fatal attack errors.
Perhaps Saudi Arabia in 1990 was the most interesting case of all. When the Iraqis invaded Kuwait that year, they threatened to continue on into Saudi Arabia. The natural Saudi reaction would have been to invite American forces into the country. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein warned that to invite unbelievers onto sacred Saudi soil would undermine the legitimacy of the Saudi government, and he had friends in country to back up that threat. Carriers made it possible for the United States to provide a degree of support for Saudi Arabia without moving troops into the country. Given that ability, it was no longer worthwhile for Saddam Hussein to risk having his bluff called. The Saudi government felt comfortable bringing in the coalition force, which ultimately ejected Saddam from Kuwait.