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27-01-2009, 18:52
Holmes: USS George H.W. Bush: Passing of an era?
In the Spotlight
Athens Banner-Herald | Story updated at 6:28 pm on 1/23/2009
James Holmes
On Jan. 10, the U.S. Navy commissioned USS George H.W. Bush, the last of its Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. Thousands of spectators, including the former president, gathered in Norfolk, Va., to "bring the ship to life," in ceremonial parlance. Proclaimed Navy Secretary Donald Winter, "The impact of a carrier is global, for no other ship represents to the world the power of the United States the way this does."
In 1988, as a fresh-faced engineering officer, I took part in a similar ceremony bringing the battleship Wisconsin back to life after nearly three decades in mothballs. Language like Winter's greeted the reactivation of these World War II-vintage dreadnoughts, but their modern lives were short. The Missouri, best known of the battleships, now is berthed at Battleship Row in Oahu, a symbol of victory over Imperial Japan.
Despite its iconic status, the Missouri already was a relic in 1945, when Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Japanese emissaries assembled on its teak decks to formalize Japan's surrender.
The destruction of the Pacific Fleet's battleships at Pearl Harbor had forced the navy to improvise. At the behest of Adm. Chester Nimitz, new instruments of naval war - submarines and hastily organized aircraft-carrier task forces - charged across the Pacific toward the Japanese home islands.
While battlewagons still had a part to play in naval operations, defending carriers and bombarding enemy shores, the new operating environment relegated them to support status. Never again would they regain their place at the center of U.S. naval strategy.
My old ship, the Wisconsin, is a waterfront museum in downtown Norfolk. For me, its presence almost in sight of the Bush commissioning is a metaphor for the likely fate of big-deck flattops. Defensive technologies are rendering surface vessels acutely vulnerable to attack.
While the surface fleet still has its uses, its staying power in a fleet engagement in Asia - the most likely theater for a high-intensity fight - is increasingly in doubt.
Why the bleak prophecy? In the 1890s, Alfred Thayer Mahan, father of the modern U.S. Navy, described "capital ships" - those comprising the heart of the battle fleet - as "the vessels which, by due proportion of defensive and offensive powers, are capable of taking and giving hard knocks." Battleships were capital ships for Mahan. But, just as air power rendered battleships more or less moot, new technologies appear to be overtaking carriers like the Bush.
China's People's Liberation Army is assembling an arsenal of weaponry designed specifically to hold off U.S. carriers and their escorts. One example is a revolutionary, shore-based "antiship ballistic missile" reportedly able to target ships hundreds of miles away.
By my back-of-the-envelope calculations (and assuming the antiship ballistic missile pans out), PLA missile forces will soon be able to strike at U.S. ships at the extreme range of cruise missiles and carrier-based aircraft.
If so, Mahan's axiom suggests that surface ships will find their offensive power blunted, their ability to defend themselves likewise on the decline.
The bottom line: No longer can U.S. naval leaders blithely assume they can station carrier task forces off foreign shores in times of crisis, nor can they assume U.S. hardware and prowess simply will overpower future opponents.
Is this an elegy for American sea power? No.
It is a call to rethink the makeup of the U.S. Navy. To me, a robust undersea fleet founded on nuclear submarines meets Mahan's standard better than one founded on surface vessels. Missile- and torpedo-armed boats can mete out tremendous punishment. And while they are no more sturdily built than carriers, they can cruise underwater almost indefinitely, eluding seagoing adversaries.
For lesser missions like battling pirates, interdicting contraband or rendering humanitarian assistance, surface vessels likely will remain the implements of choice. They are bigger, can carry more cargo and can survive in less threatening surroundings.
But tomorrow's fleet ought to look quite different from today's - just as the fleet that defeated Japan in 1945 scarcely resembled the fleet afire at Pearl Harbor in 1941.
• James Holmes is an associate professor of strategy at the Naval War College and a senior research fellow at the University of Georgia's Center for International Trade and Security. The views voiced here are his alone.
Originally published in the Athens Banner-Herald on Saturday, January 24, 2009
Given he helped bring "my" battleship back into service (BB 64), well he has to know of what he speaks! No BIAS here....! Sobering thoughts tho.... DFO :D
In the Spotlight
Athens Banner-Herald | Story updated at 6:28 pm on 1/23/2009
James Holmes
On Jan. 10, the U.S. Navy commissioned USS George H.W. Bush, the last of its Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. Thousands of spectators, including the former president, gathered in Norfolk, Va., to "bring the ship to life," in ceremonial parlance. Proclaimed Navy Secretary Donald Winter, "The impact of a carrier is global, for no other ship represents to the world the power of the United States the way this does."
In 1988, as a fresh-faced engineering officer, I took part in a similar ceremony bringing the battleship Wisconsin back to life after nearly three decades in mothballs. Language like Winter's greeted the reactivation of these World War II-vintage dreadnoughts, but their modern lives were short. The Missouri, best known of the battleships, now is berthed at Battleship Row in Oahu, a symbol of victory over Imperial Japan.
Despite its iconic status, the Missouri already was a relic in 1945, when Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Japanese emissaries assembled on its teak decks to formalize Japan's surrender.
The destruction of the Pacific Fleet's battleships at Pearl Harbor had forced the navy to improvise. At the behest of Adm. Chester Nimitz, new instruments of naval war - submarines and hastily organized aircraft-carrier task forces - charged across the Pacific toward the Japanese home islands.
While battlewagons still had a part to play in naval operations, defending carriers and bombarding enemy shores, the new operating environment relegated them to support status. Never again would they regain their place at the center of U.S. naval strategy.
My old ship, the Wisconsin, is a waterfront museum in downtown Norfolk. For me, its presence almost in sight of the Bush commissioning is a metaphor for the likely fate of big-deck flattops. Defensive technologies are rendering surface vessels acutely vulnerable to attack.
While the surface fleet still has its uses, its staying power in a fleet engagement in Asia - the most likely theater for a high-intensity fight - is increasingly in doubt.
Why the bleak prophecy? In the 1890s, Alfred Thayer Mahan, father of the modern U.S. Navy, described "capital ships" - those comprising the heart of the battle fleet - as "the vessels which, by due proportion of defensive and offensive powers, are capable of taking and giving hard knocks." Battleships were capital ships for Mahan. But, just as air power rendered battleships more or less moot, new technologies appear to be overtaking carriers like the Bush.
China's People's Liberation Army is assembling an arsenal of weaponry designed specifically to hold off U.S. carriers and their escorts. One example is a revolutionary, shore-based "antiship ballistic missile" reportedly able to target ships hundreds of miles away.
By my back-of-the-envelope calculations (and assuming the antiship ballistic missile pans out), PLA missile forces will soon be able to strike at U.S. ships at the extreme range of cruise missiles and carrier-based aircraft.
If so, Mahan's axiom suggests that surface ships will find their offensive power blunted, their ability to defend themselves likewise on the decline.
The bottom line: No longer can U.S. naval leaders blithely assume they can station carrier task forces off foreign shores in times of crisis, nor can they assume U.S. hardware and prowess simply will overpower future opponents.
Is this an elegy for American sea power? No.
It is a call to rethink the makeup of the U.S. Navy. To me, a robust undersea fleet founded on nuclear submarines meets Mahan's standard better than one founded on surface vessels. Missile- and torpedo-armed boats can mete out tremendous punishment. And while they are no more sturdily built than carriers, they can cruise underwater almost indefinitely, eluding seagoing adversaries.
For lesser missions like battling pirates, interdicting contraband or rendering humanitarian assistance, surface vessels likely will remain the implements of choice. They are bigger, can carry more cargo and can survive in less threatening surroundings.
But tomorrow's fleet ought to look quite different from today's - just as the fleet that defeated Japan in 1945 scarcely resembled the fleet afire at Pearl Harbor in 1941.
• James Holmes is an associate professor of strategy at the Naval War College and a senior research fellow at the University of Georgia's Center for International Trade and Security. The views voiced here are his alone.
Originally published in the Athens Banner-Herald on Saturday, January 24, 2009
Given he helped bring "my" battleship back into service (BB 64), well he has to know of what he speaks! No BIAS here....! Sobering thoughts tho.... DFO :D