Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
The Internet is literally chock full of click-bait. I like to think I’ve gotten a bit more hip at the interwebs, despite my age, and I rarely take the bait anymore from the goofy, pseudo-news sites that are like this one, only much worse. I don’t expect to see those sort of misleading headlines on pieces published by the Old Gray Lady, yet, this very morning dear readers, I was hornswoggled.
The headline of the NYT piece asked “who’s got a carrier to rival the US Navy? (Hint: not Russia).”
Well, who does, indeed, I thought. Perhaps the Chinese have sorted out the carrier they bought from Russia and were going to launch it, so I clicked the link. Not so much.
Instead containing an actual warning about a threat to America’s long-standing global naval supremacy, the piece introduced us to an adorable little warship floated by the French Navy, the Charles de Gaulle. Patrick J. Lyons described the de Gaulle as the “flagship and pride” of the French navy. While deployed in support of Western airstrikes against ISIS, the US Navy awarded the ship and its crew a Meritorious Unit Commendation in June of this year. French President François Hollande said the ship would be sent back to the region this fall to aid in the fight against ISIS.
In talking up the ship, Lyons couldn’t help but provide some perspective as he was just reporting facts. The de Gaulle, like any proper naval capital ship is nuclear powered, but the similarities between it, and, the ten Nimitz-Class supercarriers the US Navy operates ends there. The de Gaulle, which Lyons says is classified as a medium fleet carrier, carries a total complement of 28-40 aircraft, based on the mix of larger reconnaissance planes to smaller multirole jets. A Nimitz-Class supercarrier, on the other hand, carries 85-90 aircraft.
To be fair, the de Gaulle is the most capable aircraft carrier not built by the United States, and the only non-American carrier that can operate US-designed F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet attack jets and C-2 Greyhound cargo planes. Compared to the “pocket carriers” and helicopter carriers most navies not called the United States Navy operate, the de Gaulle is in a class all by itself.
All of this, to me, begs the question: why do we need all this stuff again?
The entire idea of the supercarrier was conceived of after the utility of aircraft carriers became evident in World War II, and in anticipation of an eventual armed conflict with the Soviet Union. They are, by design, weapons to be used against other major nation states to erode and degrade their capabilities in the air, at sea and on the ground. They are, by design and necessity, fabulously expensive to operate. They are, by design, not very helpful in the war against Islamic terror at home and abroad.
If you need to bring a large complement of aircraft to bear on an area where you don’t have a ground base, the aircraft carrier is an incredible weapon. Where on Earth does the US not have, if not a base of its own, one they have full access to? Not many places. And whose air and naval capabilities are we trying to degrade nowadays? No one’s. The self-styled Islamic State doesn’t have an air force or a navy, our air-to-air capable multirole jets have nothing to shoot down and precious little on the ground to drop bombs on most of the time. We’re using state-of-the-art warbirds to destroy Toyota pickups with rusty Russian surplus machineguns bolted to them.
The actual real countries that might look like our rivals on the world stage are little better off than ISIS when it comes to naval power, it turns out. Russia’s carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, “has been plagued with mechanical problems and doesn’t leave port often,” Lyons wrote, adding that its partially-completed sister ship was sold to China and has yet to complete trials.
In short, when it comes to naval airpower, the USA stands alone atop the world in technological and numerical dominance. This isn’t an entirely regrettable thing in the world today; there is a certain advantage in being prohibitively powerful to tangle with militarily, as any seasoned Sid Meier’s Civilization player will tell you. I’m not suggesting the US military give up its massive lead in capability; I’m just saying we could afford to pump the brakes a bit and allow the lead to shorten some, particularly when those gaining fastest on us are our NATO allies and not potential rivals. No one outside the West is laying the keel for new carriers anytime soon. Great Britain is planning on getting back into the carrier game when construction begins on a design that is to be larger than the de Gaulle next year. Brazil is refitting a 50-year-old French-built fleet carrier called the Sao Paulo and India operates an older Russian design that doesn’t leave port often, according to Lyons. That’s about it in terms of global naval capability as expressed in aircraft carriers: Some countries have one, most have none, and no one has anything like a Nimitz-class but us; and we have ten of them.
Maybe it’s time to consider taking a few out of service at a time – not scrapping them, not quite mothballing them, but not operating them either. Obama has more than doubled the national debt, which now sits at some $19T. As much noise as Republicans make, Obamacare isn’t going anywhere in any meaningful way anytime soon, and the costs are just going to continue to skyrocket. The government won’t, of course, make any of the actual spending cuts needed to reign in our runaway debt; instead there will just be a continual tax increase, particularly after Clinton wins the White House.
The idea of ever raising taxes is truly unconscionable when the federal budget is so replete with low-hanging fruit that can be cut. Entire federal agencies and departments, even cabinet level, could be cut without anyone even noticing – save for the useless federal workers who would have to try to go get a private sector job in the aftermath. The Pentagon’s budget needs to be pared back dramatically as well, and not just on supercarriers. There was never a need to develop the F-22 Raptor, or F-35 Lightning II – two high-tech multirole jets that cost an arm and a leg and are only really marginally better than the US-designed jets they’re replacing; aircraft that had almost no rival already around the world.
We as Americans need to wise up and realize that all this “federal spending” is our damn money and about 90 cents of every dollar is wasted on something pointless, corrupt or unnecessary.
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