USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20011116.1912 (On Screen): The contribution of the US Navy to the recent events in Afghanistan cannot be overstated. The ability to move three big-deck carriers (CVN) into the area rapidly gave the US the ability to achieve air supremacy rapidly, and to begin tactical and strategic bombing which lead directly to the collapse of the Taliban and the successful ground action by the Northern Alliance. Much bombing has been done by large land-based bombers (primarily B-52 and B-1 bombers flying from Oman and Diego Garcia) but the majority of the bombing has been done by jets flying from USS Enterprise, USS Theodore Roosevelt, and USS Carl Vinson. As it happened, the tactical needs of the theater didn't require more jets than were available on two CVNs, so when Roosevelt moved into the Arabian Sea it was to replace Enterprise which had overstayed its original mission and was due for relief. But if need be the US could have assigned as many as six CVNs to the theater. Without the CVNs, this campaign would have followed a drastically different course; it would have been necessary to develop local airbases in Pakistan and to deploy substantial Air Force fighters and bombers to them before the air campaign could have begun. That would, in this case, have been a substantially more difficult diplomatic problem to pull off; Pakistan was reluctant even to permit use of its airspace, and refused to permit use of its airbases in that way. But because we had the CVNs we didn't need any more than the use of an air corridor over southern Pakistan to permit jets through.

According to this news article (at the bottom) the EU is looking at the results of this campaign and realizing that if it had been a European city which had been attacked instead of American, that the EU would not have had the ability to respond as the US has because the EU doesn't actually have an army. NATO does, but NATO is not the EU, and in such a case the EU would have had to go beg the US for help. Given the reluctance with which the Europeans (except the UK) have provided military aid to the US in this, that prospect is profoundly embarassing. So they're talking about creating an EU rapid-reaction force of 60,000 men which, presumably, would be separate from NATO and not under its jurisdiction. That's probably wise, but the problem is that even if the EU had such a force now, then if the 9/11 attack had been on Europe it still would have had to beg the US for help.

That's because the EU doesn't have the ability to project air power because it doesn't have enough carriers, and all the ones it does have are under NATO control. Ignoring the NATO complication and assuming they could all be deployed, here's what you got:

Total is 140 jets. Compare that to the US CVNs:

Name	Displacement (tons)	# jets
Enterprise	75,700	66
Kitty Hawk John F Kennedy Constellation	81,700	66 ea
Nimitz Dwight D. Eisenhower Carl Vinson Theodore Roosevelt Abraham Lincoln George Washington John C. Stennis Harry S. Truman (Ronald Reagan)	80,000-90,000	66 ea

(All these figures are from Jane's. The actual number of jets carried by US CVNs is actually slightly higher than given here. USS Ronald Reagan is being built now.) In other words, deploying every single carrier that the Europeans own would provide just about as many jets as two American CVNs -- and it isn't practical to do that for an extended war. (I might mention that about half the combat jets that operate off the existing European carriers are Harriers. All of the US combat jets are Tomcats and Hornets. Harriers are not bad jets but they are not air-superiority jets; even a Hornet can outfly one, even though it's primarily a bomber.) Carriers cannot stay on station indefinitely; they need to be relieved, their crews need time off, and the planes and ships need service. Six months is just about the limit, and 3 months is better if it can be managed. After that the combat capability of the carrier will begin to decline precipitously due to equipment failure and crew fatigue. Stennis is moving to the Sea of Arabia now to replace Vinson, which deployed into the theater in late August, but the US has enough carriers so that it can keep three on station there indefinitely. And the needs for air cover in Afghanistan have been relatively light; we used four CVNs to support Desert Storm, and a hypothetical battle in future could require as many as six.

The British are building two new carriers at about 40,00