Aircraft carriers

Also known as: Carriers, flattops

Definition: Large naval warships whose purpose is to project a nation’s air force by sea into virtually any other part of the world. To that purpose, carriers are distinguished by their flat landing and takeoff decks and their complement, carried on deck and in internal hangar spaces, of fighter, attack, reconnaissance, antisubmarine, electronic warfare, and other aircraft essential to the mission of the carrier.

Significance: Aircraft carriers are the most important and complex ships in a modern navy. Their air power allows them to project a nation’s presence, influence, and power almost anywhere in the world. Aircraft carriers are powerful instruments of technology, combat, and diplomacy around the world. A carrier sent to a trouble spot in the world focuses attention and power on that spot.

Description

The first prototype aircraft carriers entered the British Navy during World War I but were first used significantly in battle in World War II by the British, American, and Japanese navies. Aircraft carriers have essentially two components: the ship and its systems and the air wing or complement of aircraft it carries. Aircraft carriers are the largest military ships in the world; a modern US carrier displaces more than 97,000 tons of water, travels at a speed in excess of 30 knots, and carries a complement of more than 5,000 Navy and Marine personnel. A navy captain usually commands the ship while another captain on board commands the air wing.

Aircraft carriers are extremely expensive, large, and potentially vulnerable to attack. They operate at sea as part of a carrier battle group, which also includes guided missile cruisers, guided missile destroyers, frigates, attack submarines, and replenishment/resupply ships. These combatant ships have antisubmarine, antiair, and antiship roles. The carrier, when on active patrol, also operates a combat air patrol of its own fighter aircraft. The carrier’s only other armaments are missile launchers and radar-guided cannons for antiaircraft and antimissile defense. It carries a wide array of sophisticated intelligence-gathering equipment, radar, sonar, countermeasures, and other electronic systems. The US Nimitz-class aircraft carriers have nuclear propulsion capable of carrying them many times around the world without refueling.

The aircraft of a modern carrier are many and diverse. A US Nimitz-class carrier in 2001 carried one-half dozen different types of aircraft, including the supersonic swept-wing F-14 Tomcat, an air superiority, strike, and fleet defense fighter aircraft that carries both missiles and cannons. The F/A-18 Hornet (C/D models) and F/A-18 Super Hornet (E/F models) are all-weather fighter and attack aircraft. These supersonic aircraft carry both missiles and cannon. The EA-6B electronic warfare and countermeasures aircraft are subsonic, achieving speeds of more than 500 knots per hour. They carry countermeasures equipment and antiradar missiles. The subsonic S-3 Viking antisubmarine plane carries missiles, rockets, mines, torpedoes, and depth charges. The propeller-driven E-2C Hawkeye airborne early warning and command plane is unarmed. The SH-60 Seahawk antisubmarine, search-and-rescue, and special operations helicopter carries machine guns, missiles, and torpedoes. In 2006, the F-14 Tomcat was retired in favor of the F/A-18 Hornet and its iterations. The carrier-compatible Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II entered service in 2019 becoming the main fighter aircraft of both the US Navy and the rest of the US military. The jet plays multiple roles in its abilities to participate in electronic warfare, provide intelligence, and perform surveillance and reconnaissance.

Early History

The first instance of a heavier-than-air craft taking off from a warship was the flight of a Curtiss airplane from a ramp mounted on the US cruiser Birmingham in 1910. The first landing on a warship was on the USS Pennsylvania in 1911. Several other experiments of this type continued in the United States and Great Britain around this time. Seaplane carriers, which simply carried seaplanes in their hulls, launched them on catapults and then winched them aboard after they had made a water landing, were developed in the first twenty years of the 1900s as well. The first true aircraft carrier, which enabled aircraft to take off and land, was the HMS Furious in 1917.

World War II

During the interwar years, the United States, Japan, France, and Great Britain built large fleet aircraft carriers. Earlier carriers were built on the hulls of former cruisers, battleships, or battlecruisers; later, ships were built from the keel up as aircraft carriers. In World War II, these aircraft carriers came into their own and proved their worth as offensive and defensive strike weapons, primarily with the navies of the United States, Great Britain, and Japan. Germany had begun the construction of at least two aircraft carriers before World War II. Only one came near completion; named Graf Zeppelin, it was never finished, scuttled at the end of the war, and later sunk. Fleet aircraft carriers effectively spelled the end of then-conventional surface warfare, wherein capital ships attempted to destroy each other with long-range gunnery in World War II. The British Royal Navy carrier raids on the Italian port of Taranto and the 1941 Japanese carrier attack on Pearl Harbor, based in part on the Taranto raid, showed conclusively that carrier-based aircraft could, under the right conditions, destroy capital ships in port. The battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, in May and June 1942, definitively demonstrated that carrier battle groups were capable of searching out and sinking each other while hundreds of miles apart. At Coral Sea, the American carrier force, though losing a carrier, stopped the Japanese approach to Australia; at Midway, some weeks later, the American force destroyed all four Japanese carriers and effectively turned the tide of the Pacific war. In the 1944 battle known as the Marianas Turkey Shoot, American fighter planes destroyed most of what was left of the Japanese carrier air component.

In addition, smaller carriers, called escort carriers or jeep carriers, did important service in the war by performing much-needed convoy escort protection in the Atlantic Ocean, as well as performing antisubmarine duty and support of amphibious landings, as well as strikes against land targets.

Modern Carriers

After World War II, the aircraft carrier moved from a largely battlefleet role to a variety of roles in both peacetime and war. Technical innovations in carriers included the embarkation of jet aircraft, nuclear weapons capability, steam catapults which made jet operations possible, and angled flight decks allowing the simultaneous takeoff and recovery of multiple airplanes. In Korea, navy planes launched from carriers flew combat sorties and search-and-rescue missions; the same was true for carriers positioned in “Yankee Station” in the South China Sea during the Vietnam conflict. Carriers were used to retrieve the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts from their space missions in the 1960s and 1970s.

Several aircraft carriers of World War II and later eras have been permanently docked and serve as museums, including the Hornet in Alameda, California, Intrepid in the New York City harbor, Lexington in Corpus Christi, Texas, and the carrier Yorktown in Charleston, South Carolina.

After World War II, the United States embarked on the idea of the “supercarrier,” a ship that would be larger and more powerful than previous ships. The original supercarrier, the United States, was canceled before being built. However, the concept of the supercarrier was finally made a reality upon the design and introduction of the Nimitz-class in 1975.

Modern Supercarriers

The United States has historically been the largest operator of aircraft carriers in the world and commissioned ten nuclear-powered Nimitz-class carriers alone between 1975 and 2009. These are the George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Harry S. Truman, John C. Stennis, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Carl Vinson, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Nimitz. In comparison, the only other country that commissioned and operated a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in that same period of time was France when the Charles de Gaulle entered service in 2001.

In 2017, the US Navy commissioned the USS Gerald R. Ford, the lead ship in the next generation of nuclear-powered supercarriers of the same name designed to replace the Nimitz-class of carriers. With a number of design enhancements compared to the previous generation of carriers, the Gerald R. Ford-class boasts improvements to its flight deck, a suite of technology and sensors, nuclear reactors, and defense systems. Additional design enhancements to the operation of the ship allow the Gerald R. Ford-class of ships to function with a smaller crew compared to the Nimitz-class. The US Navy has ordered a total of ten Gerald R. Ford carriers to replace the existing ten Nimitz-class carriers on a one-to-one basis. The US Navy also began the long process of deactivating Nimitz carriers with nuclear capabilities as they are replaced by the new class of carriers.

In addition to aircraft carriers, several other types of warships conduct air operations, largely with helicopters; these are used by several nations. The US Navy operates several amphibious warfare ships, sometimes called helicopter carriers, whose flat decks are for the purpose of embarking and debarking troop concentrations, such as Marine Expeditionary Units (MEUs).

American aircraft carriers are ships with multiple roles. Apart from their immediately obvious tactical military role, they are often used as strategic tools of diplomacy and national will when needed. American carriers have been sent to “show the flag” and project American power in world trouble spots since the 1950s. American carriers were sent to the Persian Gulf to safeguard shipping during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, and during the Desert Shield campaign of 1990 and 1991. In the twenty-first century, the US Navy has used its fleet of aircraft carriers to project its power across the globe.

Future

Despite initial comments from critics that aircraft carriers are too expensive (costing billions of dollars) and too vulnerable to either military or terrorist attack, the service record of the US Navy's aircraft carriers has established them as vital to upholding America’s commitment to the concept of ensuring that the US military can operate at anytime, anywhere. The advanced capabilities of the Gerald R. Ford class of ships are intended to ensure that the US military can project air and naval superiority to any part of the world for decades to come.

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