Pensacola
The staging is perfect. A raised dais with a formation of A-4 Skyhawks suspended overhead, in the signature colors and markings of the Navy’s Blue Angels. The venue is the National Naval Aviation Museum, which occupies space adjacent to Sherman Field on the naval air station in Pensacola—the birthplace of naval aviation and home of the Blue Angels.
The museum is not a busy, up-tempo military installation, so today’s event, its 30th annual symposium, qualifies as an exciting day. Past themes—with speakers ranging from former President George H. W. Bush to Secretaries of the Navy John Lehman and James Webb—have focused on the battles of Midway and Coral Sea, the stories of legendary squadrons like the Black Sheep, and overviews of entire conflicts: the Vietnam war, Operations Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom.
This year, however, the focus is on battles of the future, budget battles, that is. The assorted admirals, ensigns, and civilians have gathered to consider “Power Projection in the 21st Century” and more specifically, “the role of large deck air-capable warships.”
It is both a timely debate and one that never seems to end. Does the United States really need aircraft carriers? Can it afford them? The arguments against the carrier come down to cost and vulnerability as they always have, and they run hot and cold. These days, they are running very hot. Not quite so hot as they did in the days after World War II and before Korea, when the Truman administration canceled construction that was underway on a new super carrier and was busy mothballing the carriers that remained in the fleet just as thousands of soldiers poured across the 38th parallel. The Korean War made the need for carriers plain again.
Our fleet today might be said to descend from the first nuclear-powered carrier, the Enterprise, which was commissioned in 1961. Enterprise saw service around the globe, notably six deployments off Vietnam during that war, which was a busy one for carriers, and sailed until 2012. Retired Navy captain Sterling Gilliam, the museum’s director and impresario of this year’s symposium, was the same age as the Enterprise were the same age when he served as one of the squadron commanders in the ship’s air wing on 9/11. The Enterprise had been deployed in the Arabian Sea for seven months to enforce the no-fly zone over Iraq and was two days into its return trip. The carrier turned about and was joined by, its relief, the Carl Vinson to begin air operations against al Qaeda. Two carriers, on station, less than 48 hours after the 9/11 attack.
All this, and much more, was background for the day’s proceedings, which kicked off with the air group commander and his subordinate squadron commanders from the USS Eisenhower. And who better to talk about power projection? I recalled the old joke about the country boy being interviewed by a scholar researching his thesis on rural religious practices.
“Do you believe in baptism by immersion?” the college type asks the son of the soil.
“Believe in it?” comes the reply. “Believe in it? Hell, boy, I seen it done.”
The aviators on this first panel had personally and strenuously projected power for more than seven months in the eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Arabian Gulf. They flew, day and night, dropping bombs in the war on ISIS.
The aviators tended to speak in technical locutions and acronyms. But this was something a curious civilian could actually find reassuring. This wasn’t Tom Cruise playing Top Gun, though more than one of the panelists during the symposium would say he had been inspired to join the Navy and fly by that hit movie from the summer of 1986. These were professionals, and they talked the language of their profession—one that happens to require their leaving home for months at a time to go abroad and do dangerous things. The blandness of their presentations spoke to their mastery.
There was one moment that struck an emotional note. Commander Brendan Stickles introduced himself and told the audience that his small hometown outside of New York had lost eleven people during the 9/11 attacks, people who commuted to the city to jobs in the twin towers.
“That works out to one person every three blocks,” he said. So his deployment was an opportunity for him to “take the fight to the enemy.”
His air wing commander, Capt. Marc “Stem” Miguez, later described the enemy as “people who need to be eliminated from this earth,” and promised the audience that “Mosul will fall.”
So those were warriors up there on the dais even though, most of the time, they spoke softly of things like OFRP. (That would be the optimized fleet response plan.)
Stickles and I talked a little after the panel. He is a jet jockey, certainly, but that is not the end of it. He is a graduate of the Naval Academy with an MBA in international business from the University of North Carolina and another advanced degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He is good at his work, obviously, or he would not be a squadron commander, flying the EA-18G “Growler,” which is described in the literature as an “advanced airborne electronic attack platform.” (Professionals, at ease with acronyms, shorten this to “AEA platform.”) Stickles describes his mission in this concise fashion: “For us, every antenna is a target. And there are a lot of antennas out there.”
Stickles thinks and writes seriously about the future of his profession. His article in the U.S. Naval Institute’s April 2016 Proceedings journal, under the title “The Twilight of Manned Flight?” examined the arrival of unmanned aircraft and what they portend for the carrier fleet and its mission. In short, the day seems to be coming when aviators as we know them will be obsolete.
But, then again, maybe not. In the present, the case for the carrier can be made by reading from the logbook. In a late morning panel, Captain Paul Spedero, commanding officer of the USS Eisenhower, sums up his ship’s recent deployment in relief of the Harry S. Truman.
- The ship was deployed for 241 days and spent 21 days “underway” between its home port at Norfolk and the Mediterranean.
- Its aircraft flew 12,831 sorties.
- Of these, 2,054 were combat sorties.
- These resulted in 1,423 “kinetic events” with 1,598 weapons delivered.
Leading one to ask, “If we don’t need big carriers, why are we working them so hard?” Why the long deployments with the constant resupplies at sea so that the crews will be eating well, which is a big thing when you are working 16-hour days in close spaces or on a dangerous, noisy flight deck? (There was, Spedero tells his audience, one near-crisis in this regard when there was no fresh lettuce for the admiral’s salads for several days.)
Even as the role of the carrier was being dissected at the symposium in Pensacola, the USS George H. W. Bush was carrying on the work of the Eisenhower and the Truman. And in the Pacific, the Stennis was making its presence felt off Korea while the Reagan was conducting training operations off Japan.
Another obvious question: If the carrier is obsolete—vulnerable and too expensive—why are so many nations so eager to acquire them? China, India, Russia, the U.K.
Whatever its distant future, the aircraft carrier is plainly not on any list of endangered weapons systems and the proof lies in what they are doing, every day, around the globe.
The newest of the U.S. Navy’s carriers is the Gerald Ford. It has been completed but still needs to go through more tests before joining the fleet, sometime later this year at the soonest and at least three years beyond the date originally estimated. Three years and billions of dollars.
Nobody, of course, is happy about the delays. But, for perspective: The Enterprise, the first nuclear carrier, went over budget by so much that some of the weapons systems that were designed into the ship had to be left off as a way of saving some money. And as with any big project, whether a weapons system or not, the real test comes when it is operational. If it performs over time, then the delays in getting it into service are forgotten and the costs that ran beyond budget are amortized. The people at the symposium believe the Ford will easily prove to have been worth the price. Certainly this is true of its first commanding officer, Rear Admiral John “Oscar” Meier, who speaks with me after lunch and again, in the evening, over a cocktail.
Meier speaks softly and deliberately but can’t conceal the pride he feels in his new ship. There is nothing about the Ford that doesn’t rivet his attention and admiration. This, he says, is an entirely new carrier. New design, new technology, all the way down to the catapults that the president seems to think are, somehow, too digital.
“This ship is designed for growth,” says Meier, who waxes rhapsodic even about the “plasma arc waste destruction system,” which incinerates the ship’s garbage into fine ash. And don’t forget the air-conditioning. All that machinery and steel tends to make ships hot. The forward portion of an aircraft carrier has always been an especially hot part of the ship. But not on the Ford, says Admiral Meier. To which someone in the audience says, “Next you’ll be telling us your sailors are volunteering for the special sea and anchor detail.” A little Navy humor.
The essence of Meier’s feeling for the ship and its future is in something he says about the men and women in the crew and their enthusiasm for their mission and the Ford. “It is going to last for 50 years,” he says. “For the life of the ship.”
I suppose my expression asked the question for me. How does he know?
“It is baked,” he says, “into the steel.”
The debate over the carrier is not going away and will, no doubt, intensify. Count on the carrier itself and its advocates to mount a very strong defense.
Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
