One Hundred Years of U.S. Navy Air Power

by Smith, Douglas V.

  The postwar carrier force was shaped by a combination of new (and changing) strategic conditions and rapidly changing technology, the latter occurring particularly in the years immediately after World War II. Another factor, until about 1970, was the large inventory of carriers remaining after World War II, comprising two classes of fleet carriers (Midway and Essex) and numerous smaller ones (particularly the wartime light carriers and the Commencement Bay–class escort carriers).

  The major new technologies were the atomic (and then hydrogen) bomb, jet aircraft, guided missiles, nuclear power for ships, and new kinds of submarines (first fast diesel-electric types and then nuclear submarines), electronics, navigation, and communications. All changed during the fifty postwar years to interact in various ways.

  NEW STRATEGIC CONDITIONS

  By the end of World War II, carriers were operating in two rather different roles. One was land attack, either strategic (the strikes on Tokyo) or tactical (direct support of troops, particularly as they landed) the other was anti-submarine warfare either in the hunter-killer role or in direct support of convoys.2 Which would be the dominant postwar role? It seemed unlikely that the struggle with the powerful Japanese surface fleet would be repeated. The Soviet Union, a dominant land power, would probably be the next enemy. The main naval component of Soviet power was a large submarine fleet. The Soviets also operated a large land-based naval air arm, but it seemed far less significant (at least to the U.S. Navy) than the submarines in the immediate postwar period.3

  From a strategic point of view, the United States was an island that would be supporting a war on the periphery of Eurasia. Throughout the Cold War, there were three opposing views of what that might mean. One view, the Navy’s, was that the sea gave U.S. forces enormous mobility. They might not match sheer Soviet numbers, but the threat of powerful attacks around the periphery could force the Soviets to split up their forces, denying them the superiority in any one place that might be fatal to the West. This was much the Western strategy of World War II. The opposing view was that peripheral attacks were pointless because only one land theater mattered: the Central Front along the inter-German border. In this view, the point of sea power was to guarantee re-supply of the Western force fighting in central Europe.

  A third view emerged from the successful bombing of Japan. Until 1949 the United States had a monopoly on nuclear weapons. The Truman administration hoped that the threat of such weapons, which at the time could be delivered only by heavy land-based bombers, might deter the Soviets even though the United States and other Western countries could not maintain sufficient land forces in Western Europe. The situation became particularly difficult in 1948–1950. U.S. rearmament (after the Soviets seized power in Czechoslovakia by a coup, and thus convinced doubters that there was indeed a Cold War in progress) stalled because funds were split between Marshall Plan aid to Europe and defense. The argument was that the Marshall Plan was in effect defense against the real possibility that Soviet-controlled Communist parties would simply seize power in weakened countries like France, Germany, and Italy. The outbreak of war in Korea in June 1950 effectively demonstrated the limits of nuclear deterrence.

  These alternatives had radically different consequences for the shape of the Navy and its carrier force. The Navy view was that the strike carrier capability developed during World War II and demonstrated so dramatically in the Pacific should be adapted to the new conditions. For example, if the Soviets decided to advance into Western Europe, a powerful naval force in the Mediterranean and the North Sea could land U.S. ground forces on their flanks, slowing or stopping them. Such a force, so employed, would be far more effective than it would be if simply placed in the path of an overwhelming Soviet Army in Germany.

  Strike carriers might also be the best way to deal with Soviet submarines. Although the Soviet submarines available in 1945 were obsolescent at best, the Soviets (like the Western Allies) had captured new German technology. Within a few years they would be building submarines that could probably defeat the anti-submarine measures that had won the Battle of the Atlantic. There was little chance that the Western navies would be able to build enough escorts to conduct a World War II–style convoy defense of their vital shipping. In that case the choices would be either to hunt down the submarines or to destroy them at their bases (“at source”).

  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.4

  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.5

  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.