Are America's Supercarriers the Weapon of the Future or a Throwback?

By Evan Thomas

Head on from the wave tops, it rises like a sleek steel Adonis, shoulders swelling massively from a taut waist. From high above, the jutting contours of its deck map the outlines of a miniature continent. The newest of America's 14 aircraft carriers, the 1,092-ft-long Carl Vinson, is the most powerful and expensive conventional weapon of war ever built. It is a symbol of the Reagan Administration's new globalism, in which the 19th century notion of gunboat diplomacy has been transformed into one of aircraft-carrier diplomacy. It is the pre-eminent weapon of an age in which America can no longer depend automatically on its 40-year-old system of alliances to project its power overseas. And it is at the heart of a heated debate that engages diplomatic strategists and Pentagon reformers alike: What is the role of the supercarrier in the military of America's future?

Aircraft carriers have been controversial ever since the U.S. Navy commissioned its first flattop, jury-rigging a converted collier by sticking a long black strip of tarmac over its deck in 1922. Battleship captains back then mocked the ungainly craft as a "covered wagon." More than half a century later, long after the carrier became the capital ship of the U.S. Navy, the doubters and true believers are still trading salvos in an engagement that has only heated up since ships of the Sixth Fleet sailed into harm's way in the Gulf of Sidra.

The aircraft carrier is Ronald Reagan's big stick. In an "era of violent peace," as Chief of Naval Operations Admiral James Watkins has dubbed this time of terrorism and global tension, American carriers can cruise the globe as island fortresses in troubled seas. Aimed at a Third World despot like Muammar Gaddafi, they can add an explosive exclamation point to presidential rhetoric. To John Lehman, Reagan's aggressive Navy Secretary, the carriers have an even more important strategic role. He believes they can safeguard vital sea-lanes during peacetime and could press close to Soviet shores in the early hours of a full-scale conventional war with the Soviet Union.

To some critics, however, the Navy's supercarriers are the Maginot Line of the late 20th century, monuments to military obsolescence. Would-be military reformers question whether enormously expensive supercarriers provide enough bang for the buck. If the U.S. tried to re-enact the Battle of Midway against the Soviet navy's modern cruise missiles and submarines, they warn, the American fleet would wind up like the Spanish Armada--on the ocean floor.

The Navy's 14 flattops range in age and size from the World War II-vintage Midway (64,000 tons) to the nuclear-powered Vinson (91,487 tons), commissioned in 1982. Each carrier can launch a mix of planes for self-defense and hitting enemy targets. The Vinson, for example, carries 24 F-14 fighters and 38 A-6E and A-7E attack planes, as well as four E-2C Hawkeyes to detect incoming enemy planes, four EA-6B Prowlers to jam enemy radar and radio, six SH-3 helicopters and ten S-3 Vikings for antisubmarine warfare. By 1991, Secretary Lehman is all but assured of having three new Nimitz-class nuclear carriers. Lehman makes clear that he wants a carrier force that can engage and defeat the Soviet navy. At the outbreak of a war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact in Europe, he would send carriers storming toward Norway to block the Soviet fleet from reaching the North Atlantic. Sinking the Soviet navy, Lehman argues, would turn the battle of Europe, just as the Battle of Trafalgar ended Napoleon's dream of conquering England and the Battle of Midway first turned the tide against Imperial Japan in World War II.

Critics warn that Lehman's so-called forward strategy would be as doomed as the Charge of the Light Brigade. "The carrier battle group is not going to do very well against the air defenses of a first-class power armed with cruise-missile-carrying submarines and surface ships, Backfire bombers and oceangoing surveillance," says Robert Komer, a former top Defense Department official who is now a consultant with the Rand Corporation in Washington. "The triumph of the carrier was in World War II. We made the same mistake back then when we concentrated on battleships at first. The Japanese proved us wrong at Pearl Harbor." Senator Gary Hart, founder of the congressional military-reform movement, argues that the submarine, not the carrier, is the capital ship of the future, and points out that the Soviets have 300 attack subs to the U.S. Navy's 100. In a nuclear conflict, he insists, the carrier fleet would be vaporized in a matter of minutes.

But the two recent engagements with Libya have highlighted another, and perhaps more important, role of carriers in an age of less than total war. The willingness of Reagan to go it alone--to use force unilaterally without the aid and approval of U.S. allies--has made the Navy's floating air bases almost indispensable. Carrier diplomacy is hardly a novel idea; in about half the 250-odd shows of force by the U.S. since World War II, carriers steamed to the scene. But in the past the U.S. has usually been able to rely on its allies to provide forward staging areas for projecting U.S. power. The unwillingness of the French and Spanish to let American F-111s pass through their airspace on the long flight to Libya puts the U.S. on notice that it can no longer routinely count on allied support for its military adventures. It is by no means certain that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, besieged at home for permitting the F-111s to fly from air bases in Britain, would be so accommodating a second time around. That would leave only U.S. carriers to back Reagan's words with force.

Even Lehman's critics concede, however, that the flattop can be useful for carrying the flag to distant trouble spots, from the Gulf of Sidra to the South China Sea. "The carrier has one great virtue," says Komer. "You can move it." The Navy is pleased with the carrier raid on Libyan airfields near Benghazi. "In one little strike with a few aircraft, we did away with a dozen of the best aircraft the Libyans had and gave a message. That's not bad for 30 minutes' work," says Lehman.

Nonetheless, critics are bothered that the two carriers involved in the operation launched only 14 A-6's and could have launched no more than 20, requiring reinforcements from the British-based Air Force F-llls. Perhaps because flattops are so vulnerable, nine-tenths of the estimated $17 billion cost of building a carrier task force goes to self-defense, says Komer. Some critics argue that spending $2.5 billion on a single 91,000-ton nuclear-powered Nimitz-class carrier puts too great a premium on size. "For the same money, you could certainly buy two 50,000-ton carriers to carry the same number of aircraft," says Naval Expert Norman Polmar.

The Navy contends that it could have mustered more planes for a daylight raid, but that would have put American pilots in greater danger. Yet the very risk of losing a pilot--or worse, having one captured and held hostage--underscores the inherent limitations of manned bombing sorties. In the view of Kenneth Hagan, an associate professor of naval history at the U.S. Naval Academy, the carrier has become the lowly gunboat of yesteryear, able to steam into sight with great fanfare but carrying little real punch. William Lind, Senator Hart's top adviser on military matters and co-author of his new book, America Can Win, argues that quickie air strikes without coordinated ground attacks merely enrages the enemy without truly wounding him. "It violates Machiavelli's wise rule: Never do an enemy a small injury."

Maybe so. But with the Reagan Administration committed to projecting power around the globe, carriers provide the only overseas air bases that it can count on controlling. Whether or not smaller carriers might be better for this job and less vulnerable in an all-out showdown with the Soviets, the keels for two new Nimitz-class carriers have already been laid. In planning for the future during a time of tight budgets, the U.S. will have to take a flinty look at exactly how many carriers of what size and sophistication are the most effective counter to the diverse challenges the nation might face. But at least for the next decade, supercarriers like the Carl Vinson, portrayed on these pages in a portfolio by TIME Photographer Neil Leifer, will be the Navy's capital ships and the nation's seafaring enforcer. --By Evan Thomas. Reported by Michael Duffy/Washington

With reporting by Michael Duffy/Washington