ABOARD THE USS RONALD REAGAN IN THE PACIFIC — “Where are the carriers?”
When confronted by a geo-political crisis that is one of the first questions a U.S. president asks. The answer today is that there are flat tops patrolling waters off the Korean peninsula and in the Persian Gulf. Others are doing workup exercises along the Atlantic Seaboard and the Californian coast.
And the USS Ronald Reagan is slicing through seas to the south and southwest of the Hawaiian Islands where it has for several weeks been at the centre of the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercises, which are the largest naval war games ever held.
One of the chief reasons the world’s only superpower is still deeply envied by China and Russia is because of its blue water navy and especially its fleet of nuclear-powered carriers, which can project power almost anywhere in the world.
A U.S. navy F-18 Hornet grabs the arrestor cable during a carrier landing south of the Hawaiian Islands.
But these are difficult times for the U.S. Navy and the other branches of the military. Steep budget cuts have triggered a debate at the Pentagon and in Congress over whether to shrink the carrier fleet from 11 to 10 or to even fewer than that. The deliberations are also fed by concerns over whether potent new long-range anti-ship missiles being developed by Beijing could eventually push all U.S. surface warships out of the South China Sea and East China Sea. This would imperil Washington’s relations with South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam, which are all nervous over China’s deliberately provocative claim that it owns a vast sweep of the western Pacific that has long been considered part of the “global commons.”
With China rising economically, and at least half of its rapidly growing military budget going to build up its navy, the clock is ticking on America’s unchallenged supremacy of the High Seas. Along with stealing the stealth technologies of aircraft such as the F-35, Beijing’s top military priority is to acquire a fleet of air carriers that it can use as a political weapon much as the U.S. often does.
The People’s Liberation Army Navy already has a relatively small former Soviet aircraft carrier — once called the Riga, then the Varyag and now renamed the Liaoning — rescued from the scrap heap, retrofitted and undergoing sea trials in the South China Sea. It also plans to build two new carriers in its own shipyards over the next decade.
A U.S. navy F-18 Hornet prepares for takeoff during Rim of the Pacific exercise south of the Hawaiian Islands.
China accepted an invitation to send four warships to RIMPAC. But it also irritated its hosts by sending an uninvited spy ship to shadow the proceedings. Nevertheless, there is still a swagger in the U.S. step in the Pacific and on board the Reagan where the deafening roar of jets launched in a couple of seconds from zero to more than 200 kilometres per hour by catapults continues around the clock.
Nothing is more complicated for an aspiring superpower than to learn how to safely conduct fighter jet operations with dozens of warplanes operating from a heaving deck not much larger than a football field and crowded by hundreds of men and women wearing brightly coloured shirts which identify what their jobs are. For another 20 or 30 years or so no country will have the means to project power like Washington is still able to do with colossal grey-hulled 100,000 tonne leviathans such as the Reagan. Having long ago conquered the fantastic logistics of keeping 5,000 sailors at sea for as much as 10 months at a time, such floating airports can each launch more than 100 sorties a day.
Deck crew in blue shirts are jet handlers and drive vehicles on U.S. navy flat tops.
As part of U.S. President Barack Obama’s plan to try to maintain its huge military advantage in the Pacific, the Pentagon announced two years ago that it was shifting more than a dozen warships from the Atlantic. The Reagan is the most obvious evidence of the president’s Asian pivot. The vessel is to be based in Japan where it is to replace another forward-deployed carrier that is returning home for a billion-dollar midlife overhaul while the USS Theodore Roosevelt and several navy fighter wings are to be moved from Virginia to California. But political sensitivities in Europe, the Middle East and Asia are involved, so “pivot” is not the official term for what is happening.
“We call it the Asian rebalance because if it was referred to as a pivot it would imply we are turning our backs on somebody and we aren’t,” said Rear Admiral Pat Hall, commander of the Reagan strike group, in an interview in his spacious wardroom as aircraft launched metres away on the flight deck. “Clearly from the navy perspective we have moved ships out to the Pacific. We’ve also moved aircraft and a lot of our transitions to new aircraft we are doing first in the Pacific. Our CNO (chief of naval operations) sees the Pacific as the priority right now.”
Rear Admiral Pat Hall, commander of Carrier Strike Group 9, which is moving next year to its new base in Japan.
As well as RIMPAC, exercises involving the U.S., Japanese and Indian navies are now taking place near the Japanese archipelago. The U.S. Marines, which are part of the U.S. Navy, have also begun rotating 2,500 troops at a time through a base in northern Australia while the navy has been wondering about basing a carrier near Perth, Australia. Meanwhile, the U.S. Air Force has been slowly increasing its presence in Guam and the Mariana Islands and plans to base fifth generation F-35 jets in at least two airfields on or near the Pacific.
If every American taxpayer could witness a ship such as the Reagan operating at full tempo far out at sea, they would be in as great awe as the Chinese sailors and journalists who have witnessed the ship in action at RIMPAC. That is presumably why despite extreme pressures on the defence budget and doubts about how safe such capital ships will be in the future, the U.S. is building at least two new nuclear-powered aircraft carriers at a cost of $15 billion US each.
The view from the hangar deck of the US Navy aircraft carrier leading the Rim of the Pacific war games south of the Hawaiian Islands.
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