Descriptive Essay - US Aircraft Carriers

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The Journal of Strategic Studies

ISSN: 0140-2390 (Print) 1743-937X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fjss20

Full circle: The US navy and its carriers, 1974–1993

John Pay

To cite this article: John Pay (1994) Full circle: The US navy and its carriers, 1974–1993, The Journal of Strategic Studies, 17:1, 124-147, DOI: 10.1080/01402399408437543

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402399408437543

Published online: 24 Jan 2008.

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Full Circle: The US Navy and Its Carriers, 1974-1993

JOHN PAY

The period from 1974 has seen vast changes in the world and Western foreign and defence policy. These shifts are also apparent in the evolution of US naval strategy in general and the debate about the role of the aircraft carrier in particular. Carriers have been the centre-piece of the US Navy since 1941 and their fortunes have ebbed and flowed with the priority attached to the Navy in overall defence policy. They have also been a primary instrument of foreign policy since 1945 - to the extent that the fortunes of the carrier fleet have mirrored the evolution of US foreign policy. At times, these relationships have been clear - at others, debate about the carrier force has been the tip of wider, sometimes largely un-noted, debates about defence policy. Above all, precisely because the carrier is so central to naval policy, so costly and such an important foreign policy tool, the carrier debate has been one which has involved major Presidential choices. The story of Presidential decisions on the carrier issue since 1974, therefore, offers one of the, potentially, better insights into individual Presidential priorities and their view of America's role in the world.

It is also a tale of recurring arguments, constant conflict between resources and commitments, and old enemies who never fade away. There are elements of technological and economic determinism in the story, but it is also one where individuals and their different perspectives have proved crucial.

Finally, it is, to date, a story where many players, starting from many perspectives, have all arrived at the same conclusion. Whether that conclusion will be sustained is one of the most important questions likely to shape the global system into the next century.

President Ford, 1974-1976

The first half of the 1970s might be considered as the lull before the storm in the late Cold War fortunes of the US Navy and its carriers.1

Defeat in Vietnam opened up a debate about the future of US defence

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policy but this was somewhat muted by the onset of a series of crises involving the Soviet Union and her allies and the beginnings of a re- newed emphasis on conventional deterrence as Secretary of Defense James D. Schlesinger sought to adjust US strategy to the new reality of nuclear parity. Vietnam-era carriers and aircraft were still available and suggestions about reducing carrier numbers were effectively vetoed by Henry Kissinger who required at least 12 to support his foreign policy. In October 1973 the Yom Kippur War crisis convincingly showed the utility of carriers and this experience was repeated with the fall of Saigon and the Mayaguez incident in April 1975.

There were, however, storms brewing. Vietnam had saved the Navy from a 1960s attack by the, newly-installed, Pentagon systems analysts who could measure the greater costs of carrier aircraft and carriers, but had found no way of measuring any advantage that carrier aircraft might offer over any alternative. The utility of carriers, had been demonstrated by their use off Vietnam. Nuclear carriers in particular, owed their survival to Vietnam War experience, after being attacked in the 1960s, as being more expensive platforms than conventionally powered ships. Even Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara had been converted into ordering three of the Nimitz class. Without its having a continuing containment war to fight, history suggested that challenges to the Navy would reemerge. This threat was exacerbated by the, somewhat mixed experience of 1973. There was a feeling that 1973 was a close-run thing, and the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., himself doubted the outcome if crisis had escalated into naval war. This may have reinforced Zumwalt's own preferences, perhaps reflecting his own background in surface combatants and riverine warfare, for a high-low mix instead of past concentration on carriers and cruisers. His suggested emphasis on frigates and sea-control ships (small Vertical and Take Off Landing, VTOL, carriers) not only threatened carrier funding, but it also witnessed uncertainty at the top of the US Navy as to whether its carriers could survive against the Soviet Navy.

These doubts grew in 1975 and 1976. The Navy itself began to talk of a future with VTOL aircraft and smaller carriers. Papers appeared stressing the utility of large-land-based-aircraft (including Jumbo jets armed with a range of air-to-air and stand-off air to surface missiles) compared to carrier-based aviation. Increasing doubts about detente were reflected in renewed interest in forward carrier deployment, but this led to a wider argument about the need to increase numbers of aircraft-carrying platforms rather than just justifying existing carriers. These issues were all simmering by the close of 1976. However, none

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seemed to be developing overwhelming momentum. Throughout most of 1976, it still looked as if the Ford administration was firmly supportive of the Navy's carriers and most assumed that it would go on to restart procurement of further Nimitz class ships either to increase the fleet, or to sustain it as older carriers reached the end of their lives.

It, came as something of a surprise, then, when President Gerald Ford's last budget, introduced in early 1977, proposed buying the first of at least two, smaller, 60,000-ton, conventionally-powered carriers. This was offered as a response to the need to deploy more carriers in more places at once. Vertical take-off aircraft would eventually increase the ship's capability. Why this policy reversal occurred remains unclear. On one hand, it seems that the argument for more, smaller, less capable, carriers had won over the President and Pentagon. On the other hand, there were suspicions that this was a political ploy, designed to deny President Carter the easy route to achieve his promised defence cuts by denying him a $2.5 billion nuclear-powered carrier (CVN) to cancel. Whatever the motive, President Ford's decision ensured that the questions that had been growing since the end of the Vietnam era would have to be addressed. It opened up most of the key issues and left President Carter to face the awkward choice between trying to cut the cost of the cheapest carrier option available, defending President Ford's carrier against Naval and Congressional opposition, or buying the CVN that President Ford himself might have ordered if he had not lost the election.

President Carter, 1977-1980

President Jimmy Carter, therefore, faced a difficult decision on the carrier issue. Yet his administration also brought with it a new context within which the carrier would have to find a place. By 1977 the shock- wave of Vietnam had run its course and had produced a new set of foreign policy ideas which manifested themselves, at last, in US policy. The result was a new orientation for US foreign policy and a new focus for defence policy. The new administration also brought a change in personalities at the Pentagon and increasing influence for critics of the US Navy among the systems analysts of the Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation. The result was a sustained attack on the US Navy in general and the carrier fleet in particular.2

The new administration reflected much of the critique of the Vietnam war developed since the early 1970s. It sought an alternative to the post-1950 strategy of containment - largely on the grounds that the

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strategy had failed in Vietnam and that it was now unsustainable. Instead, there was a new perspective, which sought both a more accurate analysis of change in the world and more effective policy instruments to shape that change. The new foreign policy was both less inclined to see communism as the root of all problems and confident that the United States had effective, but mainly non-military, means at its disposal to shape the world into a relatively benign environment for US interests.

The approach adopted was entirely logical; indeed, both as an analysis and a strategy for the long term, President Carter's foreign policy had considerable merit. Starting from the principle that most turmoil in the world resulted from nationalist aspirations and internal power struggles, rather than communist intervention in furtherence of some master plan, the new strategy tended to conclude that much revolutionary change in the international system was both irresistible, and benign. Revolutionaries wanted economic progress and political change - ends which the US should encourage and shape rather than suppress. Doing so, would also allow the United States to compete effectively with the Soviet Union because effective action in the political and economic spheres would move the superpower competition to areas where the US was strong and the Soviet Union weak.

This policy shift had important implications for the US Navy and its carrier forces in particular. The Carter administration did see that there was a global competition with the Soviets, but believed that this should be fought using US strengths in the economic and political field. The Soviet Union would not be able to match US aid, investment, trading potential or expertise. Its political system would prove unattractive by comparison with the US system. The United States could, consequently, both win the competition with the competing superpower and win over new emerging revolutionary governments in their own right. Military power seemed to be largely irrelevant to this picture. Power projection from carriers could not reverse tides of history, but it could undermine global faith in the benign nature of the United States. Containment had been ineffective in Vietnam - damning evidence for a President whose foreign policy was later criticised for being based, almost solely, on the principle of 'no more Vietnams'. Military power, or so the Brookings Institution claimed in 1977, rarely achieved long-term political results.3

Nor did its use come easy to a new leadership that came to power on a call for greater morality in the conduct of US internal and external politics. Power projection simply did not fit either the strategy or the inclination of the new Presidency. As this had been the main function of the carrier fleet since 1950, questioning of the need for those carriers

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followed as the post-Vietnam storm clouds finally threatened to swamp the US Navy.

The second major problem for the Navy's carriers and their supporting rationale, apart from this intense questioning of their peacetime containment function, was the fact that the US Navy also had problems fitting into the Carter administration's defence priorities. The dilemma was not that Carter had no defence policy but, rather, the reverse, that he had one with a clear central focus. The focus broadened to bring greater requirements over time, but these still tended to exclude the Navy.

President Carter's focus was understandable given his background, interests and moral stance. His priorities were not unique - indeed they were replayed in Britain by the Nott defence review of 1981. President Carter was both antipathetic to nuclear weapons and in favour of closer links between the Trilateral Powers of the United States, Europe and Japan. These interests came together in 1977 as evidence mounted that the Soviet Union was mounting a renewed threat to NATO Europe, Soviet interest in improving the strategic nuclear balance seemed directed at deterring the United States from its nuclear commitments to Europe. At the same time, an emerging Soviet capability to mount a blitzkrieg-sty\e, short-warning, attack suggested NATO might become even more reliant on that, increasingly incredible, nuclear deterrent. Fear that the Soviet Union might come to believe that it had such an advantage or that allies might perceive that they were, indeed, insecure, had to be countered. The alternative might well be the self- neutralisation of Western Europe or a Soviet attack that might see Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (SACEUR) asking for nuclear release within two weeks.

This all left the US Navy exposed. The focus on a Central Front war that started with perhaps four days, rather than four weeks of warning, effectively challenged the Navy's role in prewar reinforcement. The nature of any European war, combined with the lack of any way of bridging the gap between NATO's 30-day ammunition stocks and hopes of eventually mobilised production, effectively removed much of the Navy's resupply mission because the war would be over before significant resupply became available. The Navy's timetable seemed to be out of step with the 10-30 day wars planned for by the US Army and Air Force. Talk of 'swinging' carriers between oceans, or even of wars going on for years, aroused a somewhat startled, and negative, reaction from those charged with developing a coherent defence policy. At the same time, some way had to be found of funding the new stocks required for prepositioning equipment in Europe so that it could be

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deployed in time and for buying the new technology that offered safety from the nuclear nightmare. The Navy, seemingly, a piece from another jigsaw, found itself the target of those seeking resources.

This all came to a head in the spring of 1978 with proposals from the Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation in the Pentagon that the US Navy be cut to 8-10 carriers and that these be used in a defensive mode. This challenged the existing consensus around 12 carriers and left the Navy with a role of defending Sea Lines Of Communications (SLOCs) which itself had dubious validity given NATO's inability to pursue a long war and the lack of equipment or munitions to reinforce Europe with. These proposals prompted a major debate in 1977 between the naval lobby and carrier opponents. One significant contribution to which was Seaplan 200(f which laid out for the first time precisely what size of navy could be bought for various budget levels and what the consequences would be. Such pro-carrier arguments, in the event, proved surprisingly effective. When it came, President Carter's decision was a triumph for the status quo as he opted to retain the 12 carrier objective. He effectively renounced one possible conclusion from his foreign and defence strategies in favour of the flexibility offered by a 12- carrier force level. The carrier force retained its utility in the view of the White House - indeed for a President who sought to build peace and one who found decisions on the use of force difficult, carriers may have actually seemed attractive. Peace in the Middle East required US guarantees and signs of commitment with adequate firepower, independent of European bases, in reverse. At the same time, the very mobility of carriers allowed the President to respond without total commitment - a virtue that fitted President Carter's needs and was reflected in the way he sometimes changed carrier orders en route.

This still left the problem of how to provide 12 carriers. The larger issue of how to replace all 8 of the ForrestallKittyhawk/Kennedy-class conventional carriers as they came up to the end of their 30-year design lives, was solved by deciding to put each carrier into a long Service Life Extension Programme (SLEP). This, however, created a new problem as the SLEP would mean one conventional carrier would be out of service for most of the next two decades as carrier followed carrier into the long refit. With four nuclear carriers and only seven conventional carriers available, there was a carrier short; attention, thus, swung to the issue of building one more carrier and the question of what that carrier should be.

This started a two year argument between President and Congress. The problem was that, although President Carter had decided to have 12 carriers his defence budgets were under pressure, were failing to meet

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US commitments to NATO to spend more and were trying to fund procurement for the Central Front and nuclear forces whilst developing a range of 'black' weapons that could bring a quantum jump in capability. Money was a primary consideration for the administration. Congress, however, tended to ask what the carrier could do and increasingly came to support the Navy's view that the last carrier anyone envisaged buying for many years, perhaps ever, ought to be capable enough to do the job. Congress, thus, took upon itself the duty, as laid down in the Constitution, of ensuring that the United States Navy was properly maintained. The result was a conflict over who controlled American defence policy - a struggle in which President Carter won the first battle in 1978 but was defeated resoundingly in 1979.

In the light of day, some of the alternatives to carriers suggested in 1976 - the large-land-based aircraft and the VTOL aircraft - quickly melted away. The VTOL aircraft seemed unlikely to many to be able to match the performance of conventional aircraft and simply did not exist. It seemed even less likely to become a challenger as research funding on VTOL was cut. However, its demise took rather a long time to register on the fortunes of the smaller carrier, the CVV, offered by President Ford, which had been designed to operate it. Despite the loss of its planned aircraft and the collapse of the argument for more carriers when it became clear that only one more was to be built, the CVV proved harder to kill. It became the basis of President Carter's proposals until 1979, when the Pentagon indicated that they would be prepared to build a normal conventionally-powered carrier, a CV, like the John F. Kennedy, if Congress would accept that. The Congress, led by the Armed Services Committees (with Senate favouring a CV and House a CVN) argued that one C W would carry too few aircraft to defend itself (being intended to operate in low-threat areas or with other C W in a higher threat environment). Once one accepted that a small carrier could not do the job, Congress eventually found the advantages of a CVN outweighed its increased cost over a CV. The logic of the President's case was revealed when it became clear that the major saving from buying a cheap carrier lay in the saving in buying aircraft for it. Buying a small carrier, with perhaps only 40 combat aircraft, only made sense if one envisaged a limited role for it. Buying one which could not be used in high threat environments, within reach of the USSR, did not seem particularly logical.

The battle was fought in two stages. In 1978 the President offered a study and Congress added a CVN to their defence bills. The President counter-attacked with a presidential veto and, with Presidential power reinforced by the success of the Camp David talks, this veto was not overridden by Congress. In 1979 the President offered a CVV, Congress

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argued for a CVN. The President offered a larger CV and Congress put a CVN into their defence bills. This time the Presidency was weaker. The economy was poorly. President Carter faced a difficult re-election campaign. His foreign policy was under threat from uncontrollable revolutionary movements from Nicaragua to Iran; Afghanistan awaited invasion and Soviet nuclear forces seized the US public's imagination. In 1979 a weakened President was forced to concede. There would not be a second veto. The USN would get CVN-71.

This was a significant battle with a significant outcome. A President, with little confidence in the utility of military power, had decided to maintain the 12-carrier force level. By 1981 there was a widespread cross-party consensus and between the Pentagon and Congress that the 12-carrier force level was the minimum acceptable. The very name selected eventually for CVN-71, Theodore Roosevelt, suggested a new appreciation of the need to walk softly continuously and to carry a big stick. Congressional insistence on a CVN reflected an understanding that capability mattered, at least while the threat might be able to bring significant power, like that of the Soviet Navy, to bear. The experience of arguing its case acted as a catalyst to US Navy thinking about and agreement on, what its role should be in the future - the Maritime Strategy was condensing even as Jimmy Carter fought and lost. One could not envisage a more significant signal of Congressional insistance on stronger security than their adding to the defence budget the most expensive item available against the opposition of the President - nor many more humiliating defeats for that President.

Victory under President Carter, though, had a pyrrhic quality. President Carter by 1980 had accepted CVN-71, he had pledged to increase US security and to enlarge the defence budget. His foreign policy had adapted to the demands of Ayatollahs, revolutionaries and an imperial USSR. The Persian Gulf had been identified as a new area for commitment, yet he still showed no real inclination to spend more on defence. The 1982 budget, presented in 1981, proposed building only 6 combat ships.4 The level of funding provided could not sustain anything like 12 carriers into the future, the force was overstretched and short of spares. Its morale was dwindling alongside its fighting ability. The strategy had evolved to meet US interests, yet a mismatch between commitments, capability and funding loomed. Winning the case was only part of the story, winning the resources looked to be another part.

President Reagan, 1981-1988

The contrast between the Carter and Reagan administration's attitude towards seapower was marked. The Reagan administration was

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prepared to spend on defence to a degree which, whatever Carter's supporters might allege, the Carter administration had shown little inclination to match. The problem was now, perhaps, a lack of priorities and some tendency to spend money in all directions, rather than the previous attempt to prioritise in a defence budget that was too small to meet even the most important objective. Though the Reagan team were also forced to deal with the post-Vietnam agenda, and, indeed, in 1984 produced the Weinberger criteria for intervention, they did not suffer all of President Carter's moral qualms and general questioning of the utility of force. As a direct consequence, US carriers found themselves in action off Grenada, Libya and Iran. Power projection was back in the quiver of foreign policy instruments.

As well as displaying a greater propensity to be able to decide to use force as part of its foreign policy, the Reagan administration was both generally better disposed to naval power and developed a naval strategy that gave the US Navy specific missions to perform. This administration saw maritime superiority as a national requirement and established the goal of building a 600-ship navy to sustain it.5

More specifically, the administration sanctioned an explicitly aggressive, precise, wartime role for the US Navy in the form of The Maritime Strategy, publically announced in 1986. This reflected the US Navy's efforts since 1977 to develop a coherent strategy, codifying and justifying the roles of all naval forces in a superpower conflict. With an active Navy Secretary in John Lehman and a supportive administration, the US Navy in the 1980s actually had the capability to put its strategy into practice.

The Maritime Strategy was designed for several audiences and a variety of contrasting or complementary purposes.6 All saw carriers in an aggressive role, going forward, with 3-5 carriers operating together in a theatre, to project airpower into the Soviet Union. As a defensive strategy, forward deployment would force the opponent back to defend his homeland and reduce the pressure he could put on to the Atlantic SLOCs, Naval airpower would secure allies like Norway, Greece and Turkey, whilst forward deployment into the Norwegian Sea and off Japan would provide additional air defences for the key aircraft-carrying islands of the UK and Japan.

As an offensive strategy, the Maritime Strategy offered both deterrent and warfighting advantages. The idea of horizontal escalation, with US attacks on enemy targets at places of American choosing in response to any localised enemy attack, was designed to increase deterrence by denying the enemy hopes of a limited war. In the short term, naval aviation, plus sea-launched cruise missiles (SLCMs), could

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pose a threat to the USSR in the same timescale as SACEUR envisaged losing the conventional war on the Central Front. Soviet leaders would be faced with the possibility of having to use nuclear weapons to remove the conventional threat posed by the carriers - which would negate any hopes that they might have that their conventional and nuclear superiority would undermine NATO's nuclear deterrent. If this deterrent effect failed to stop a war starting, naval success might give some useful options or negotiating leverage. If this failed, and (continental?) Europe was lost, some US officials looked to the Navy and its carriers to hold the ring while the US mobilised its industrial power to confront the USSR with a competition it could not win.7

At the time, this strategy enjoyed much success and rather a lot of, generally unconvincing, criticism. It needs to be seen in the light of the strategic situation that the administration found themselves in and several technological changes that had occurred since the 1970s. There were no safe options in the context of war with the Soviet Union. Technological changes with the introduction of a whole new generation of aircraft, radars, Electronic Countermeasures (ECM) and surface combatants, however, offered some hope that the Navy could succeed. The carrier air wing, with its F-14 Tomcat AIM54 missile combination, EA6B jammers and modernised E2C Airborne Early Warning and Control System (AEWCS) aircraft, was more capable in its own right, but additional confidence in the ability of carrier task forces to survive was based on the arrival of the new AEGIS system on the Ticonderoga- class cruisers and forthcoming Burke-dass destroyers, AEGIS, with its ability to control the battle at long range and to engage 4-6 times the number of targets at once as previous air defence systems, offered a new level of capability. It brought a renewed belief that the US Navy could survive the air and missile threat and fight in forward areas. This left the primary threat to carriers as the submarine, and, against this threat, the carrier would have its escorts, nuclear attack submarines (SSN), ASW aircraft and helicopters and its own survivability which was itself growing as successive Nimitz-class carriers introduced new protective features.

Nor was it envisaged that carriers would steam against the Soviet Union on their own, or forever using the technology of the 1970s. The Reagan administration's naval strategy was actually part of a wider picture of evolving warplans and planned procurements (many 'black') stretching well into the future. Carriers would operate with allied air forces and supporting, synergistic, SLCM strikes. The carrier's capability in a strike role would expand enormously as the Navy deployed 20, 1,000-mile range, A-12 stealth-attack aircraft on each of its carriers

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from 1995. Introduction later of a stealthy fighter, to replace the F-14, would ensure air superiority and it would be supplemented by a new, long-range, Advanced Air-to-Air Missile. An ability to conduct a wider, joint, protracted, conventional war against the Soviet Union also seemed to be developing with Air Force programmes to equip US bombers, and some tactical fighters, with conventional air-launched cruise missile (ALCM), shorter-ranged TSSAM missiles and other precision-guided munitions (PGM). In addition there were naval proposals to buy similar stand-off bombs and missiles and 2,000-10,000- mile ranged, next-generation, Excalibur cruise missiles.

A long defence suppression campaign was suggested by the Classic Rainbow programme for 20,000 anti-radar drones whilst new surveillance systems, including the new ROTHR, Over The Horizon, radars, offered the potential to look deep into Soviet air and sea space and maintain the initiative. The carrier was but a part of a whole and that whole, potentially, looked remarkably effective.

The Reagan years thus looked good for the carrier and the US Navy as a whole. Congress might start to erode defence budgets from 1985 onwards, but from 1981 to 1988 carriers seemed to have both peacetime utility and a wartime mission. As a consequence, the administration found it easy to accept the idea that more carriers should be ordered, to reach and sustain the 15 carrier target and decided to order two at a time to enjoy the benefits of lower costs and earlier deliveries. The USS Washington and USS Lincoln were, accordingly, ordered in 1982 and the United States and Stennis in 1987. The last two names were indicative of the times. The United States had been the subject of the lost carrier debate of the 1940s, Senator Stennis had been one of the Navy's supporters against the threat of President Carter in 1977-80. Times, however, change, and as the CVN-71 joined the Fleet and CVN-72-75 were ordered, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact threatened to open another new chapter.

President Bush, 1989-1992

The Bush administration faced the task of reshaping the US armed service for the post-Cold War world. Change was gradual as the Warsaw Pact threat dissolved, followed in due course by the Soviet Union and much of her naval and military capability. By 1992, however, the threat had reduced to the possibility that the US might at some time, once again, face the threat of another emerging power. The Soviet threat was dead and the new world order was announced. What, precisely, the new world order entailed was still unclear by 1992, but US action in Kuwait

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and Somalia suggested that President Bush saw some role maintaining some order in the international system - a goal based perhaps on his own concept of duty as well as national interest.

The fortunes of the US Navy and its carriers largely followed this evolution. Sizing criteria for the carrier force changed from the need to be able to fight a global war against the Soviet Union to the requirements of peacetime presence. Leaks of the 1992 defence planning guidance still envisaged scenarios where six carriers would assist in operations to support the Baltic States, but such scenarios looked increasingly incredible.8 The carrier also acquired a new capability as a cornerstone of US ability to reconstitute forces as one, unremarked, by-product of the retirement of American conventionally- powered carriers and their inherent longevity was the ability - with adequate preservation for retired ships - to face any new threat with a fleet of 17-20 carriers. Reconstitution, however, attracted little attention by 1992. Instead, attention swung away from Russia towards peacetime foreign policy needs. Instead of determining carrier numbers by the wartime need for multiple carrier groups to operate against the Soviet Union, the focus moved to the numbers needed to sustain single carriers deployed forward in each of the Mediterranean, Gulf/Indian Ocean and North-east Pacific areas as the idea was accepted that these were the key hubs of instability in the world where US interests were threatened. Allowing for time required to reach deployment areas, and keeping within agreed harmony rules, designed to give crews an acceptable amount of home-time, produced a requirement for 7.6 carriers to sustain one in the Indian Ocean, 5 to keep one in the Mediterranean and 1.7 to provide an average of 1.2 in the Western Pacific.y Reducing the total to allow for the one carrier in SLEP produced a requirement for 13.3 deployable carriers and, if anything, this may have been a conservative assessment if one allowed for planned carrier overhauls over the next decade.

This arithmetic attracted some adverse comment as it seemed, somewhat fortuitously, to justify both existing force levels and a carrier force almost the same size as that formerly required to fight the Soviet Union. It did, however, have an undeniable logic which drew on a wider argument that the US Navy began to deploy in 1990. This began to stress the consequences of alternative force levels, not now in terms of ability to match a superpower foe, as Seaplan 2000 had in 1977, but in terms of America's ability to maintain her global interests. Navy presentations began to note the difference between a reactive and a presence posture and the implications of the choice. A presence navy would allow forward deployment on a regular basis with the deterrent impact this

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might convey.10 A reactive navy would react to, rather than attempt to shape, events and would deploy to trouble spots to solve problems once they occurred. The reactive fleet could be much smaller because it would not have to sustain forward deployments and could be less combat ready as it could respond at a time of its choosing - because the response would always be delayed, the amount of the delay would be a matter of degree only.

This choice was fundamental and was reflected in the debate of the day. One option was to reduce carrier forces to the 6-10 level favoured by carrier oponents since the early 1970s. Another was to cut the carrier force in line with the average reduction in other forces - this might mean cutting to 9-10 carriers. At the other end of the spectrum, lay the US Navy's case for 13 or 14. The Bush administration's choice, as part of its 1990 Base Force proposal for shaping the US armed forces, was for 12 carriers, with the USS Forrestal used as an additional training carrier but available in extremis.,"

By going for 12 carriers, the Bush administration failed to give the US Navy all of the resources needed to maintain permanent deployments near to all likely trouble spots, but it set the objective of having a carrier constantly within 7 days of each potential area of interest within each of hubs of crisis - with gaps in deployments to be filled by other carriers within 7 days sailing and other forces. The fundamental choice, however, was made, again, that the United States did have overseas interests to protect - with ready, forward-deployed, naval forces. The 12-carrier force level was the same as that decided upon by President Carter and there seemed some logic that the Bush administration, facing increasing demands for a presence in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere, had not reduced the levels set by the Carter presidency with its defence priorities and foreign policy inclinations.

No sooner was the Base Force level announced, than the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990, seemed to provide its justification. The USS Eisenhower and Independence between them provided the only immediate capability to respond to the invasion and to deter further incursions into Saudi Arabia. Air Force assets were deployed under the umbrella of naval air cover. An effective, but still small, land- based air offensive capability with limited sustainability was only available in theatre after about three weeks with the bedding-down of sufficient F-llls, F-117 Stealth fighters, F-15Es and F-16s. When the air war commenced, naval aircraft flying from carriers contributed fighter and strike sorties to the coalition effort and provided a significant proportion of Allied defence suppression and reconnaissance capability. The war also raised a series of hypothetical questions which suggested

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that, against a more astute foe, carriers would have been even more essential. Had Saddam Hussein continued his advance south, started combat before the Allied forces were fully deployed, challenged Allied sea communications, or mounted an attack on Allied airbases, seaports and army logistic bases, or, indeed, if the ally to be defended had been unable to offer the infrastructure available in Saudi Arabia, air assault from the sea could have been the only effective option open to Allied leaders. The 1991 Gulf War showed both the dangers of the new world order and the advantages conveyed by the aircraft carrier. With carriers also soon deployed off Bosnia and Somalia, it seemed that there was sound reason for supporting the 12-carrier objective.

There were, however, questions. The 'Desert Shield' phase showed the need for effective deterrence and rapid response, but it left a range of difficult issues. The case for deterrent presence was probably strengthened by the Gulf War, but this left a series of difficult questions about how to make the deterrent more effective than in 1990. Perhaps the answer lay in, closer, more obvious, deployments or in the ability to put troops on the ground in warning time - this might demand more forces than the Base Force allowed. Should the carrier try to deter through an ability to target enemy leaders or strategic infrastructures or by stressing the ability to defeat enemy ground forces should they cross the border? Was the future of carrier aviation in deep penetration to heavily defended targets, or did the future lie with shorter range aircraft and renewed interest in anti-armour munitions?

Even more significantly, the 1991 Gulf War raised again the question of the relative cost-effectiveness of carrier aviation.12 Compared to land- based aircraft, carrier aircraft contributed fewer sorties per aircraft and the multi-role carrier air wing was seen to have only a limited strike capability with its relatively few, F-18 Hornets and A-6E Intruders. Lack of effective video-recording equipment left many naval successes unrecorded and the Navy's lack of investment in air-to-ground munitions restricted its ability to conduct precision attacks. This, however, needed to be put in context. Naval sortie rates were similar to those offered by other more sophisticated aircraft like the land-based F-llls, F-117s, Tornadoes (British and Italian) and F-15Es. Air force stocks of 1970s laser-guided bombs were large, but the Navy was actually ahead of the Air Force in introducing modern stand-off weapons. Air Force sortie rates were, on average, higher, but many sorties using unsophisticated F-16 fighters, flying at 10,000 feet, proved ineffective, precisely because the US Air Force also had not yet introduced the necessary technology to make them more effective in such a role. In both services, new systems were becoming available

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which would solve many of the problems if they received sustained funding. The essential argument remained whether the additional flexibility of carriers, and their availability when land bases were not available, made up for the greater cost of the carrier and its aircraft and the limitations imposed by carrier operating cycles - on this issue the carrier advocates probably gained on balance from the war.

The war did, however, stir once again another variant of the land versus sea-based airpower argument. The ghost of General Billy Mitchell rode again as a debate broke out once more between the Air Force and Navy about whether carriers and strategic bombers were the best means of policing the 'new world order'.13 Fought in a series of policy papers, congressional testimony and by protagonists in the defence media, the debate continued into the Clinton administration. The Air Forced used the experience of the B-52 and F-117 in the war to make the case for both a Jarge bomber force capable of making a significant and permanently on-station contribution to dealing with any aggression and for the B-2, as a stealthy precision bomber, to deter war and take out vital targets with precision-guided munitions should it occur. The logic of a world policed from Missouri - with stealth bombers flying out to punish malefactors and future dictators learning the lesson of the smart weapons that destroyed their last colleague - was offered as a cheaper, already purchased, alternative to the more active form of global policing offered by the carrier.

More generally, the decrease in US defence budgets in real terms portended difficulties to come. The collapse of the Warsaw Pact brought inevitable, increasing, demands for cuts. The demise of the Soviet carrier programme itself removed one argument for US carrier force levels. Technological failure and programme mismanagement also combined to make one sweeping change that would probably have the greatest long-term impact on the carrier's future role. The collapse of the A-12 programme effectively denied the US Navy a stealthy long- range attack platform at precisely the stage when the Air Force was mounting its case for the strategic bomber. Although the carrier was to be successful both in this battle and the wider missions debate in the early 1990s, the changes brought under the Bush administration would, therefore, have a profound effect on just what its future was likely to be under succeeding administrations.

President Clinton, 1993 -

The Clinton administration inherited a changing world with new domestic priorities. It also brought with it a set of foreign policy

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attitudes which differed from those of previous leaders and generations. The difference with the Carter administration was that this time there seemed to be no rigid structure to guide any carrier decision - critics commented on the lack of coherent vision rather than its content. Just what will finally emerge from a range of, often contradictory, influences remains to be seen. An instinct to do what is right conflicts with both an instinct to do what is safe and prudent and a determination to focus on domestic weaknesses. Public opinion does not support losses or costs or failure. The administration seems to suffer some of the organisational problems that beset President Carter, and the jury remains undecided on the President's ability to lead or set directions for others to follow. In such circumstances, a further debate on US defence policy was inevitable and the carrier was almost certain to come under attack once again as its opponents saw their opportunity to shape a new president's defence policy, or, even, guide the US to isolationism.

Against this background, the resultant defence debate in the Clinton administration seemed to have avoided many of the more radical black- holes it might have fallen into. Secretary of Defense Les Aspin seems to have been left a relatively free, if personally unsuccessful, hand in shaping defence policy - although the President's budgetary objectives, tardiness in filling potential appointments in the Pentagon and early activity on homosexual rights in the military posed problems. Defence policy, if anything, was moderated by a strategic and political concern about the industrial base - an argument which has emerged as a vital feature in the future of both the US Navy's submarine and carrier forces. President Clinton's 'bottom-up' defence review, consequently, was not as radical as some would have wished or many feared. Debate, however, there was and the presence of many Carter administration officials in the new administration and an influx of 1960s systems analysts, including Les Aspin himself, into the Pentagon, suggested that the carrier's opponents might try again to achieve what they had argued for in 1972 and 1978.

On its side of the debate, the US Navy has continued its policy of protecting its carriers and amphibious forces by accepting, proportionately larger, cuts in its bases, submarines and surface combatants. Frigates and older, less capable, manpower intensive cruisers and battleships have been sacrificed to protect a power projection fleet based on carriers, amphibious ships and cruise-missile- armed surface combatants. New combinations of forces have been explored to cover gaps in carrier coverage and the carriers themselves have moved to more flexible operating patterns. Under the From the SeaH strategy, the Navy's focus has been directed towards its role in

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joint operations and as a means of providing presence and rapid intervention forces. The roles of the US services have been rationalised, with the aim of defining complementary roles for the US Marine Corps and Army and the Air Force and Navy. One result has been a decision to allow the USAF to assume the long-range strike capability. The Navy, which once envisaged a continuing mission, for the A-6 and then A-12, against targets deep in the USSR, will now operate against targets within a few hundred miles from the sea.

Further impetus in this direction has come as reduced funding has eliminated all successors to the A-12 and any remaining possibility of procuring a long-range strike aircraft. Proposals for a successor for both the A-6 and F-14 in the form of the A/FX - a shorter ranged (700 mile) replacement - finally foundered in both Congress and the Pentagon in 1993. The result is a future where US Navy missions will be limited by the technology available and the Fleet will become increasingly reliant on the F-18, and its development: the F-18E/F. The future will depend on what emerges from the common Joint Strike Technology Program which will look at the Air Force's need for a multi-role fighter and the Navy's requirement for an A/FX replacement.15

The agreed shape of the Navy to operate these aircraft had to await the outcome of the 'Bottom-Up' Review of defence policy, conducted by Secretary Aspin. One of the prime issues to be resolved was how to treat the evidence of the 1991 Gulf War. The Navy, particularly, faced a logic that suggested that anything beyond the force levels required to defeat Iraq was superfluous as Iraq represented the maximum level of threat conceivable in the new world. The 'Bottom-Up' Review rejected the simple version of this case. Instead, it accepted two arguments. First, it was decided that the US Navy should continue to provide a global presence - with deployments around each of the hubs of crisis. Decisions on the size of the carrier force and, especially, the decision to increase the planned size of the USMC above the levels proposed in the Bush Base Force, reflected the importance of this mission. Second, the review did take on board the idea that US forces should be sized to meet conceivable threats, but it identified the need to be able to fight two wars against an opponent of Iraq's size at once, rather than just one as in 1991. The administration not only rejected proposals for such a one-war capability but it also, nominally, rejected the idea of being able to fight and win in one theatre whilst holding another attacker. Force-levels would be based on the, not unlikely, possibility that a hostile power like North Korea might use a war in the Gulf as an opportunity to launch another attack. The opposing force levels envisaged did, however, allow for a greater level of opposing naval capability, including up to 50

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submarines. Whereas 8 carriers were felt to be enough to deal with a single threat and the rejected, 'win-hold', strategy had called for 10, and 'win-win' option called for 11 aircraft carriers operational with one more, used in peacetime as a reserve and training ship with partial reserve manning, available in war.16

This raised interesting issues. One problem was that the methodology used, by explicitly identifying warfighting requirements, produced smaller force levels than the peacetime presence mission might have demanded - a paradoxical result of winning the Gulf War and thinking about warfighting was that attention shifted from the peacetime presence criteria that had been prominent in the Bush era. Another problem was that the Navy still had to find its share of the cuts in an environment where force level reductions below the levels agreed by President Bush were inevitable. One simply could not cut the defence budget by the 40 per cent proposed over the decade from 1986, and keep force level cuts to the 25 per cent proposed by President Bush. The result seems to have been another widening of the margin between capability and commitments. The Clinton administration had rejected calls for the US to retreat from a global presence - presumably on the grounds that it shared the belief of previous administrations that that presence did protect important US interests. It also seems to have accepted that, with fewer, forward-deployed, ground and air forces, even with more USAF, small, rotational, deployments from the US, and more US Army interest in prepositioning equipment, carrier airpower had become relatively even more valuable. In spite of this, even if the reserve carrier could be used in wartime, the numbers of carriers available to sustain those commitments was still to be reduced below the 12-carrier force level thought minimal by every other presidency since World War II - at a time when peacetime commitments showed no sign of decreasing. The carriers had done extremely well compared to other forces, but the logic of defence cuts still meant that they, too, were being cut to lower numbers. A peace dividend was, in effect, still being demanded of the power projection forces that had been fully occupied since 1945 covering every contingency but the, now vanished, Cold War conflict.

There was also ambiguity about the new force-sizing criteria. It was not clear how any protracted war could be fought if all active forces were deployed to fight in the two contingencies - one could, after all, only fight for so long. Reserve forces might provide some capability, but, against an enemy who fought better than Iraq, there was room to doubt how the US could take and replace losses. In short, the strategy of being able to win in two campaigns at once ('win-win') would have to be

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accomplished with forces that in practice left holding on in one theatre whilst winning in another (the rejected 'win-hold-win', strategy) the only available option. This may have made the carriers even more valuable. Carrier numbers might themselves be inadequate to deal safely with multiple threats, but, their mobility suggested that they could play an important role in a world of scarce forces switching from one theatre to the other. Indeed, if North Korea had attacked the South after US ground and air forces had been committed to Saudi Arabia in late 1990, it seems likely that it would have been carrier airpower and the few remaining US-based fighters and bombers, which would have been swung back to the North Pacific. In any such holding role, with inadequate forces to control events, and in a hostile operating environment, secure air bases, in the form of carriers, might actually be the preferred instrument. The carrier force thus emerged with mixed fortunes from the 'Bottom-Up' Review - its reward for doing well was that it was likely to face increased overstretch in peacetime, whilst its relative success left it as an even more important component in the overall force structure - one that might have to deal with major problems until reinforcements arrived from the US, or whatever war they had just won.

The Future

Although the confirmation of the requirement for 11 carriers in 1993 represented a significant success for the US Navy, issues remain.17

Carrier numbers will remain problematic both in the short and long term. Unless a real effort is made, by retaining some of the Forrestal and Kittyhawk classes long enough to cover any gaps in force-levels, numbers of available carriers from 1995 onwards could be reduced by the need for each of the nuclear carriers to undergo major refits and refuelling. In the longer term, carrier force levels will require continued support for CVN-76 and future commitment to CVN-77, CVN-78 and possibly a CVN-79, before 2007, to replace conventional carriers (and perhaps, eventually, the Enterprise) and to allow perhaps for future long refits to the Nimitz class. This will be expensive and will require a series of carrier procurement decisions from future Presidents. It may be, though, that buying a new carrier every 4-5 years will prove acceptable - precisely because this would allow Newport News to continue a reduced carrier programme throughout the next couple of decades, thereby avoiding the immense social and procurement costs of allowing carrier building to lapse. The real challenge to the carrier may come in the distant future. The USS Nimitz will reach her 45th birthday in 2020-

US NAVY AND ITS CARRIERS, 1974-1993 143

leaving a future President with the question of whether to start yet again.18

Even with 11 operational carriers, however, presence can no longer be continuous, although recent imaginative deployment scheduling between commitments and fleets may help. This is a matter of degree; even 15 carriers were inadequate to meet all commitments continuously, but 12 carriers can obviously do more than 11. Whether 11 can meet more relaxed, commitments to be within sailing distance of crisis areas, rather than always on station, with acceptable implications for deployment rates, ship states and subsequent crew morale and retention remains to be seen. Cruise-missile armed cruisers, destroyers, nuclear attack submarines and amphibious readiness groups may be able to cover some commitments - just as the carrier, with embarked marines or special forces, may be able to cover some contingencies otherwise needing amphibious units. There do seem to be limits here though. Doubts have been expressed about the capability of carrier-based marine units and their impact on carrier operations. Amphibious platforms like the LHA/D (Landing Ship Helicopter Assault/Dock) could, indeed, perform more of the missions entrusted to carriers using USMC AV-8B Harrier VSTOL aircraft, but this may be impracticable when amphibious platforms are themselves in short supply and needed in their primary role. Similarly, even express declarations that other ships can perform missions in the absence of carriers have not long endured the sound of battle. Carrier deployments to Somalia, to provide adequate firepower againt local ganglords, suggests that the new world order will place continual demands on the carrier fleet to respond to a whole new range of small-scale but dangerous situations.

Aircraft may be another problem. Current US Navy budgets are buying few combat aircraft (36 F-18 in 1994), yet smaller budgets in the next century will have to fund replacement of the A-6E, F14 and eventually the F-18A-D. Current plans limit the total number of carriers that could be put to sea by providing for only 11 active and reserve air wings. Even this will be difficult to maintain. The shift to shorter range, in many respects less-capable, fighters has also already promoted much anxiety and twenty-first century threats may demand a stealthier, more capable, aircraft. US Marine aircraft may fill some deck spaces, but the scope for this is limited by the US Marines' own requirement for dedicated aircraft. In the longer term, like all of the US services, the US Navy seems to be once again facing the position of 1981 where defence budgets will become simply inadequate for acknowledged needs. By one estimate, proposed funding levels may only sustain about half of the agreed force structure into the next century.19 The future, if nothing

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changes, could well be the reactive one with only 6 carriers. At some stage, budgets are just going to have to go up to meet the needs of even a minimal world role.

In the interim, carrier air wings are getting smaller and smaller. Gone are the 66 F-4/A-6/A-7 wings of the early 1970s, the 66 F-14/A-6/F-18 wing of the late 1970s and the 60 F-14/A-6/F-18 notional wing of the 1980s. Even the, truncated, wing of the 1990s with 50 F-14/A-6/F-18 is now giving way to a wing of 20 F-18,14 A-6E and 14 F-14 and a USMC helicopter detachment.20 Ahead, lies the elimination of the A-6 and the F-14, with additional F-18s in lieu. Whether this will prove enough against an enemy with any real capability remains to be seen. Nor may the only threat come from enemy powers. Smaller aircraft numbers per carrier will provide more ammunition to those who think it useful to weigh numbers against platform costs. Nor will it be so easy to defend the large carrier when the argument for its larger air wing is itself undermined by the fact that it now carries so relatively few planes.

What this will all produce is difficult to predict. Continuing support for large nuclear carriers has emerged from all major studies ordered by the US Navy and Congress since 1976. All Presidents since 1973 have found themselves using carriers, however clearly their foreign policy seemed not to need them or, indeed, however unclear their foreign policy appeared. The nuclear carrier's speed, sustainability and ability to carry a large air wing may be even more important in a fluid world disorder, whilst the flexibility of such a large platform is only now being explored with integral amphibious forces and mission-optimised air wings. Yet one can see the old debates of the 1970s regathering their strength again. The US Navy did deploy the LHA (Landing Ship Helicopter Assault) Nassau with 20 AV-8B in the Gulf War, to some effect - providing 40 per cent of a carrier air wing's fighter numbers at less than 25 per cent of the cost.21 Smaller carriers, with smaller air wings, might command some support again, particularly after 2010 if the F-18E replacement proves to be an ASTOVL variant of the Joint Strike Technology Program - and can match the performance of current fleet aircraft. Individual aircraft do now have more capability with current and projected precision-guided munitions, thereby reducing, to an extent, the need for numbers. Conversely, carrier crew sizes may emerge as a major factor in this argument, alongside platform cost.

The bomber versus carrier argument may also come back as the USAF faces growing pressure to replace the B-52/B-1B force with more B-2s or some other platform. In 1990-93 the option of policing the world with bombers was paradoxically weakened by the fact that most of the bombers already existed. An either or choice between allowing the

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bomber force to decline to 16 operational B-2s (fewer as they crash) and sustaining future carrier production may not be so easy. It may even be that the next debate will pitch the carrier against some form of exotic hypersonic delivery system - against which, the carrier could appear a rather old solution by comparison.

In this environment, there could be more radical changes. There may be some potential for deploying carriers to be sent on patrol with optimised air wings and for them to be topped-up with additional aircraft tailored to any emergency at hand. Reinforcements could include both additional naval aircraft and self-deploying Army, USMC and USAF helicopters and aircraft like the V-22. More of the naval air force structure might go into the reserves. The carrier may look ever more like the mobile, sovereign, well-protected, floating airfield wherein its real merit lies. At some stage, if no global threat with a substantial naval capability emerges, someone may even raise the issue of Air Force deployments on to carriers. Introduction of a common fighter to the USN/USAF/USMC might, just, allow non-naval/marine units to augument fighter numbers when needed - although the need for committed aircraft and proficiency in carrier operations would pose severe problems.

Ultimately, however, the choices about carrier numbers and capability will require a foreign policy decision between potential futures and corresponding funding. Even if the choice is avoided, declining budgets will make force levels untenable and, in turn, falling force levels are likely increasingly to force foreign policy to conform to capability. One outcome could be a de facto isolationist posture, with, ever declining, forces projecting an inadequate deterrent threat to foes and falling capability producing a corrosive effect on the will to use that capability. A second might see less involvement and presence, and, perhaps, less capable units with less deterrent effect - producing greater risk that key interests might be attacked by enemies in search of a fait accompli before US forces came upon the crime-scene. A third option would see a sustained effort to provide deterrent presence and obvious capability with the emphasis on trying to shape the world, or, at least, core areas of it, rather than responding to, or ignoring, it. Carriers would seem to have a continuing role in all of these futures, as the first, or only, means of response, as the option that remains when all has collapsed into anarchy ashore, or, if carrier numbers are maintained, as a primary means of providing a visible deterrent to those who threaten world order or lesser US interests. President Clinton, by giving priority to the carrier fleet, has recognised their significance for the US role in the world. Whether he has provided enough resources to meet his

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aspirations and how long his choices will be sustained into the future now lie for events and future administrations to decide.22

NOTES

1. There is a great deal of disparate material on the US Navy between 1974 and 1980. Little has been written on the whole period, however, see D. J. Pay, 'The Carrier Debate 1976-80', PhD Diss., Univ. College of Wales, Aberystwyth, 1985. On the Ford administration see DoD Annual Report FY 1978, pp.190-4, 214; and C. A. Robinson, 'Navy Plans Emphasis on V/STOL', Aviation Week and Space Technology (AWST), 1 March 1976, pp.12-16.

2. For a flavour of the 1977-79 debate, see L. E. Prina, 'New Defense Guidelines Postu- late Sidelines Status for Navy, Seapower, Feb. 1978, pp.35-6; Prina, 'The Great Debate of 1978 - The Navy Strikes Back', Seapower, March 1978, pp.11-16; 'Navy Protests Limitation Of Long Term Mission', New York Times, 14 March 1978, p.3; P. Towell, House Easily Sustains Carrier Veto, Congressional Quarterly Weekly Re- port, 9 Sept. 1978, pp.2415-17; P. Towell, 'Conferees Accept Nuclear Carrier Opposed by Carter', ibid., 6 Oct. 1979, pp.2193-6.

3. B. M. Blechman and S. S. Kaplan, Force Without War: US Armed Forces as a Politi- cal Instrument (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1975).

4. J. D. Hessman, 'Sea Plan 2000', Seapower, May 1978, pp.27-8. 5. See Secretary Weinberger, Hearings of the Senate Appropriations Committee Defense

Subcommittee, FY 1982, pt.1, p.29; Adm. Trost, Hearings of the Senate Armed Services Committee (hereafer SASC) FY 1983, pt.6, pp.3596-9.

6. See D. J. Pay, 'The US Navy and the Defence of Europe', Naval Forces No.1 and II, 1988.

7. F. J. West, 'Maritime Strategy and NATO Deterrence', Naval War College Review 38/4 (Sept./Oct. 1985), pp.13-15.

8. Washington Post, 20 Feb. 1922. 9. SASC, FY 1991. Pt.3, pp.119-20. 10. Ibid. 11. DOD Annual Report, FY 1993, USGPO, 1992; ibid., FY 1994, 1993; Seapower, May

1991. pp.23-5. 12. Armed Forces Journal 129/6 (Jan. 1992), pp.12-13; Seapower, Sept. 1991, pp.28-31;

Jane's Defence Weekly, 6 April 1991, pp.531, 538; Dept. of the Navy, The United States Navy in Desert Shield, Desert Storm, Washington, DC, 15 May 1991.

13. AWST. 6 April 1992, pp. 18-21; Jane's Defence Weekly, 25 July 1992, pp.22-5; J. D. Morocco, 'Modernization Funds to Bear Brunt of Pentagon Cutbacks, AWST, 7 June 1993, pp.42-3.

14. From the Sea released by the US Navy/USMC, 30 Sept. 1992. This built on the earlier The Way Ahead, US Naval Institute Proceedings (hereafter USNIP), April 1991, pp.36-47; J. S. Brecmer, "Naval Strategy is Dead . . ., USNIP, Feb. 1994, pp.49-53.

15. D. A. Fulghum, 'Pentagon to Kill A/FX, Retain F22', AWST, 14 June 1993, pp.26-7. There arc still considerable doubts whether any longer-range naval strike aircraft will ever emerge from the Joint Strike Technology Programme and whether the related ASTOVL programme will produce a ASTOVL variant for carrier and USMC use and a conventional F-16 replacement for the USAF. One could see convergence of USMC and US Navy procurement around a STOVL fighter without the capability of the abandoned A/FX with a separate non-carrier-capablc USAF fighter or a common USN/USAF force or the mix probably desired by the Navy with a longer-range strike fighter and a separate F-18 replacement in ASTOVL.

16. Jane's Defence Weekly, 18 Sept. 1993, p.19; International Defense Review, No.10, 1993, pp.756-7.

US NAVY AND ITS C A R R I E R S , 1974-1993 147

17. J. L. George, 'Where's the Admirals' Revolt', USNIP, May 1993, pp.66-91; T. W. Trotter, 'The Future of Carrier Aviation', Naval War College Review, Winter 1993, pp.22-58. Opposition to large carriers is becoming more common, see C. R. Girvin, 'Twilight of the Supercarriers', USNIP, July 1993, pp.41-5; L. J. Korb, B. Sweetman, D. Evans, 'Operation Cut-the-Defense Budget', Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 27 Dec-2 Jan. 1994, pp.8-9.

18. Navint, 3 Dec. 1993. 19. D. S. Zakheim, J. M. Ranney, 'Matching Defense Strategies to Resources, Chal-

lenges for the Clinton Administration', International Security 18/1 (Summer 1993), pp.51-78.

20. G. Kromhout, 'America in the Med', Aircraft Illustrated, Jan. 1994, pp.41-3. 21. International Defense Review, No.12, 1991, pp.1346-7. 22. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and should not be taken

necessarily to reflect official opinion in any way.